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2-1-2016
The Photographic Universe: Vilém Flusser’s
Theories of Photography, Media, and Digital
Culture
Martha Schwendener
Graduate Center, City University of New York
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THE PHOTOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE: VILÉM FLUSSER’S THEORIES OF
PHOTOGRAPHY, MEDIA, AND DIGITAL CULTURE
by
MARTHA SCHWENDENER
A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Art History in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New
York
2016
©2016
MARTHA SCHWENDENER
Some rights reserved.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 United States License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
ii
This manuscript has been read and accepted for the
Graduate Faculty in Art History in satisfaction of the
Dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
__________________
Date
________________________________________
Professor Anna Chave
Chair of Examining Committee
____________________
Date
________________________________________
Professor Rachel Kousser
Executive Officer
____________________________
Professor Maria Antonella Pelizzari
____________________________
Professor David Joselit
____________________________
Professor Alexander R. Galloway
THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
iii
ABSTRACT
THE PHOTOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE: VILÉM FLUSSER’S THEORIES OF
PHOTOGRAPHY, MEDIA, AND DIGITAL CULTURE
Adviser: Professor Anna Chave
Despite accelerated changes in the way we create, view, and experience photographs,
critics and scholars in North America continue to read and assign an accepted canon of
photography theory, often predicated on old concepts and technologies. This dissertation
seeks to remedy that situation. It focuses on the work of Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém
Flusser (1920-1991), author of such books as Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), Into the
Universe of Technical Images (1985), and Does Writing Have a Future? (1987), which develop a
theory of technical images that reaches beyond photography to include film, television,
video, computer, and satellite images. Rather than reading images textually, Flusser employed
philosophy and information theory to consider the apparatuses of image making and the
screens through which we communicate. Born in Prague in 1920 and forced to flee Europe
in 1939, Flusser spent thirty-two years in Brazil before returning to Europe. He was a
philosopher, yet practically an autodidact. His entire family was killed in the holocaust and
he became a proponent of migration and wrote in multiple languages: German, Portuguese,
French, and English. Moreover, Flusser was writing at a moment when digitization and
biotechnology and were both emerging and these overlap in books like Vampyroteuthis
infernalis (1983) and his “Curie’s Children” column for Artforum magazine (1986-1991). This
dissertation will examine Flusser’s thought from its roots in European thinkers like Husserl,
Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Kafka, to its place alongside contemporary theorists and media
philosophers such as Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio,
Donna Haraway, Alexander R. Galloway, and François Laruelle. Not only this does this
iv
dissertation introduce Flusser into the U.S. conversation on photography history and theory,
it coincides with renewed interest in other artists and theorists from the seventies and
eighties whose work, rather than becoming “obsolete,” like early versions of technology, aids
us in thinking about images and culture today.
v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to Professor Anna Chave who saw me through this process, even into
her own retirement. Her careful reading and astute editing and suggestions helped this
manuscript immeasurably and taught me a great deal about both writing and advising other
students. My dissertation committee, Professors Maria Antonella Pelizzari, David Joselit, and
Alexander R. Galloway, encouraged me to think of new ways to address this material.
Geoffrey Batchen has been an important influence, interlocutor, and mentor. I am also in
debt to everyone at the Vilém Flusser Archive in Berlin, particularly the Archive’s scientific
director, Daniel Irrgang.
I thank my friends, classmates, colleagues, students and particularly my siblings, Mary
Schwendener-Holt, Susan Schwendener, and John Schwendener for their love and solidarity.
Finally, I dedicate this dissertation to my parents, Ann and John Schwendener. Neither lived
to see its completion, but they encouraged me in myriad ways and their love and support –
emotional, intellectual, financial, and spiritual – have continued to sustain me.
vi
Table of Contents
Abstract ………………………..…………………………………...…………………….…….. iv
Acknowledgements ………………………………………………...…………………….…….. vi
Table of Contents ………………………………..………………………...……………..….… vii
Introduction ……………………………………………………………………….……….......... 1
Chapter 1: Flusser in Brazil …………………………………………….…………………….. 17
1.1
Education in Prague and the Flight to Brazil ….............................…………...
17
1.2
The Journey to Brazil .…………………….….……..…………….…………... 22
1.3
The Brazilian Language ….…………………………………………………..... 24
1.4
The “Philosophical Self-Portrait” and Becoming a “Brazilian Writer”…….….. 26
1.5
Manuscripts from the Fifties ……………………..…………………………... 31
1.6
The “Philosophical Self-Portrait”: João Guimarães Rosa .................................. 36
1.7
The “Philosophical Self-Portrait”: Vicente Ferreira da Silva and Philosophy in
Brazil ….….……….………………………………………...………...
42
1.8
Language and Reality ……….………….…….….…………………………...
47
1.9
The History of the Devil, “On Doubt,” and Of Religiosity ..……...…...….…...
52
1.10
Brazil and the 1964 Coup d’Etat …………………..……..…...…….………...
62
Chapter 2: Leaving Brazil and Flusser’s Writing in the Seventies …………….…….……….. 71
2.1
Flusser in the Art World: Brazilian Artists and the São Paulo Biennial……...
2.2
The Return to Europe and Writing in the Seventies ……………….……….... 85
2.3
The Force of the Everyday, The Codified World, and “Two Approaches
to the Phenomenon, Television”….….……………………….…….....
71
91
2.4
Natural:Mind …………………………………………………………………. 102
2.5
Post-History ……………………..………………………………………….... 106
Chapter 3: The Technical Image Writings and Other Texts ………………………………… 119
3.1
Photography Theory in the Seventies ……………………………………….. 119
vii 3.2
Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida ……………………………………………...... 127
3.3
Flusser’s Writings on Photography: The Technical Image Trilogy ….…......
3.4
Towards a Philosophy of Photography ………………………………………. 136
3.5
Into the Universe of Technical Images and Does Writing Have a Future? ...... 157
3.6
Flusser’s Other Writings ………………………….….………………....….... 169
133
3.6.a. Photography Texts ……………………………………….…......….... 169
3.7.b. Vampyroteuthis infernalis ………………………………..……..…..... 180
3.8.c. The “Curie’s Children” Column in Artforum …………….................. 191
3.9.d. Kommunicologie, The Shape of Things, and Other Texts ………….
201
Chapter 4: Flusser’s Reception and Context ………………………………………...……..
210
4.1
Flusser and Philosophy.................................................................................... 210
4.2.a. Wittgenstein, Husserl, and Heidegger ……………………………….. 210
4.3.b. Buber, Kafka, and Ortega y Gasset ...…….…………….……...…..... 217
4.4
Flusser and Information and Media Theory …………………………..……… 221
4.4.a
Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon …………...………………….... 221
4.4.b
Marshall McLuhan ………………………..…………………….…... 232
4.4.c. Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Jean Baudrillard ………………….. 238
4.4.d. Paul Virilio and Gilles Deleuze …………………………………….
251
4.4.e
262
German Media Theory and Friedrich Kittler .………………….…...
4.5
Donna Haraway and Technological Feminism ……………………….…….. 270
4.6
Flusser and Artists …………………………..…………...……………...…...
274
4.7
Flusser and the Current Moment ……………………………………......…...
296
4.7.a U.S. Media Theory: Lev Manovich, Alexander Galloway, and
Branden Hookway …………………………………...…….…….…. 299
4.8
Flusser and Contemporary Art ……………………………………….....…...
307
Conclusion ……………………………………………….………………………………….
312
Bibliography …………………………………………….…………………………………. 330
viii INTRODUCTION
What is photography today? Since the advent of the digital revolution, “photography” has
come to mean anything from a large scale print hanging on a gallery wall to a picture taken with
a cellphone camera and posted on social media, or an image captured by a drone and transmitted
halfway across the globe. Most people live in an image-saturated world. But despite accelerated
changes in the way we create, view, and experience photographs, critics and scholars continue to
read and assign the same photography theory, often predicated on old concepts and technologies.
This dissertation seeks to remedy that situation. It focuses on the work of Czech-Brazilian
philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920-1991), author of such books as Towards a Philosophy of
Photography (1983), Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985), and Does Writing Have a
Future? (1987), which develop a theory of technical images that reaches beyond photography to
include film, television, video, computer, and satellite images.1 Starting with the premise that the
term photography today encompasses all of digital media, and therefore requires a new kind of
theorization, this dissertation will argue that Flusser is an important, if insufficiently
acknowledged theorist, and that his writings offer an exemplary model for understanding the
contemporary state of photography. In addition to introducing Flusser to a broader U.S. audience
and arguing for his inclusion in the photography discourse, this dissertation questions the end of
1
Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Vilém Flusser (Göttingen:
European Photography, 1984), originally published as Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie
(Göttingen: European Photography, 1983); Into the Universe of Technical Images, trans. Nancy
Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), originally published as Ins
Universum der technischen Bilder (Göttingen: European Photography, 1985); and Does Writing
Have a Future? trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011), originally published as Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft? (Göttingen: European
Photography; Immatrix Publications, 1987).
1
photography putatively precipitated by the digital revolution and advocates the merger of
photography scholarship with media studies and the field of visual culture.2
Moreover, by highlighting the fact that different photography discourses predominate on
different continents, the example of Flusser challenges the notion of a universal photographic
theory. It raises the question of how and why particular theorists are adopted and canonized—or
ignored—in particular contexts. As the call is sounded for a more globally aware art history, how
do we account for the fact that, despite photography’s ubiquity, most photography theory has
been produced within Europe and the United States? Flusser’s peripatetic existence and
migratory approach to philosophy argue for methods not fixed in one language or location, and a
greater fluidity between mediums and ideas. Ultimately, I hope this dissertation can serve as a
vehicle for creating dialogue with other disciplines, fields of knowledge, and political subjects.
Discovering Flusser
I stumbled upon Vilém Flusser in 2007 when I was writing an essay for a museum
exhibition devoted to functional art objects.3 In the course of my research, I consulted a design
theory anthology and encountered a piece of writing that jumped off the page. Flusser, a writer I
had never heard of, wrote in a sly, clever way about objects, delving into etymologies and
turning arguments inside like Martin Heidegger, whom I would later learn was one of Flusser’s
greatest touchstones. When I learned about Flusser’s biography, I was even more intrigued. Born
in Prague in 1920 and forced to flee Europe in 1939, he received, beyond secondary schooling,
little formal education. He was a philosopher, yet practically an autodidact. Flusser's entire
2
Fred Ritchin, After Photography (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008).
3
See Martha Schwendener, “Notes on Function,” Return to Function (Madison, WI: Madison
Museum of Contemporary Art, 2009), 43-75.
2
family was killed in the holocaust: his father at Buchenwald and his mother and sister at
Auschwitz. And yet, although Auschwitz became a defining figure in his philosophy—the
prototypical example of a Western Enlightenment “apparatus” and of rational science gone
awry—it often served as the punch line for a very dark joke. In his essays, the Nazis “failed” at
design because they didn’t kill their victims efficiently enough or, in the technical image
writings, postwar apparatuses proliferated “like mushrooms after a Nazi rain, from the ground
that has become rotten.”4
I was intrigued by Flusser's deeply irreverent tone and his use of irony, which he
considered an important rhetorical device for addressing not just the Nazi past, but the equally
frightening future. I was impressed that this refugee and self-described migrant had persisted in
studying “philosophy at night,” mostly on his own or corresponding with a handful of friends,
while working as a bookkeeper during the day in a transistor factory owned by a relative in São
Paulo. In the late fifties and sixties, he contributed to Brazilian philosophy journals, taught
communications at the local university, and became a celebrated newspaper columnist. In 1972,
following the 1964 military coup, he relocated to Europe and entered art and communications
circles in France and Germany. Eventually, he became a sought after theorist and philosopher of
media and photography and published nearly twenty books, as well as articles, essays, and
reviews in magazines and journals ranging from European Photography and Camera Austria, to
the “Curie’s Children” column in Artforum, which ran from 1986 to 1991. Although he
forecasted the cultural impact of the Internet and digital photography, he died in 1991, in a car
accident on the way home from a lecture in Prague, before many of the technologies he imagined
had been implemented on a large scale.
4
Vilém Flusser, Post-History, trans. Rodrigo Maltez Novaes (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2013), 9.
3
Photography Theory in the Seventies and Eighties
Flusser’s technical image writings appeared at a crucial moment. Participating in what
Roland Barthes once called a “theoretical boom”5 in photography in the mid-seventies, Flusser
joined a growing group of artists, critics, and scholars—many of whom were not specialists in
the field—in writing about photography. Following artists, numerous of whom had embraced
photography as a mode of documenting performances or creating conceptual art works in the
sixties, photography entered the academy at virtually the same moment the digital revolution
commenced.6 The theories and methods adopted to study it within art history by a new
generation of scholars and critics such as Rosalind Krauss and other writers associated with the
October journal, or the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, which was founded in
1977 and published Afterimage, a journal devoted to photography, were generally couched in
ideas inherited from the sixties, from the neo-Marxism of the thirties, or a combination of the
two, and shaped in reaction to the positions of curators such as Beaumont Newhall and John
Szarkowski.7
Primary among the “new” theorists of this age were Walter Benjamin’s essays “A Little
History of Photography” (1931) and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproducibility” (1936), which were translated and disseminated in English in the late sixties
5
Quoted in Geoffrey Batchen, “Palinode,” Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland
Barthes’s Camera Lucida (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 17.
6
For changing ideas about photography among artists, see Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference’:
Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art,” Reconsidering the Object of Art, ed. Ann
Goldstein and Anne Rorimer (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art), 247-267.
7
For more on the history of the Visual Studies Workshop, see their website, accessed October
23, 2015, http://vsw.org/about.php.
4
and seventies.8 Benjamin wrote about photography as a potentially liberating technology that
would broadcast information and knowledge to larger masses of society,9 an argument that
appealed to a younger generation of critics and historians in the U.S. reacting to the formalism of
curators such as Newhall and Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art, as well as Clement
Greenberg’s “positivist” art criticism.10 The 1976 founding of the October journal in New York
was largely based on these anti-formalist principles; the editors’ mission statement, appearing in
the form of an editors’ note in the first issue, put technical images—experimental film,
photography, and video art—at the center of their program.11
The other giant of photography theory during this period, which will be discussed at
length in Chapter 3 of this dissertation, was Roland Barthes. In essays such as “Photography and
the Electoral Appeal” and “Shock-Photos”—both included in his Mythologies (1957)—as well as
“The Photographic Message” (1961) and “Rhetoric of the Image” (1964), Barthes drew from
structural linguistics, semiotics, and Brechtian Marxism to demonstrate how everyday images
function like sign systems and contain ideological messages that aren’t immediately apparent.
Barthes is best known within this context, however, for Camera Lucida: Reflections on
Photography (1981), a meditation on photography as a kind of death-premonition that was
8
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other
Writings on Media, trans. Edmund Jephcott, et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2008).
9
One could also include the proto-Frankfurt School figure Siegfried Kracauer and his essay
“Photography” (1929), as well as film critic and theorist André Bazin, whose essay “The
Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1945) was influential in both the film and photography
scholarship.
10
Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography: From 1939 to the Present, Fifth Edition
(New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002).
11
Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson (“The Editors”), “About October,” October 1 (Spring
1976): 3-5.
5
written a year after his mother’s death and a few weeks before Barthes’ own untimely demise.12
Barthes was translated occasionally by Susan Sontag, whose On Photography (1977), a
collection of essays originally published in The New York Review of Books, is another germinal
text from this period.13 Sontag’s work, however, is more in keeping with the French sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu’s Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (1990).14 Like Bourdieu, Sontag looked at
the social configuration of photography, but her conclusions, written shortly after the Vietnam
War and Watergate, reflect the pessimism of that period. Meanwhile, building from Benjamin
and Barthes, October critics and scholars such as Rosalind Krauss—a former protégé of
Greenberg—drew on the semiotics of C.S. Peirce to formulate a theory of the “index” in which
the logic of photography, read semiotically, became the model for much of contemporary art.15
Flusser’s writing came from a different lineage and trajectory, which may partially
explain why it wasn’t adopted in U.S. art history. Although his best known book was titled
Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Flusser wasn’t married to photography as a technology
or a medium. Instead, the concept of “technical images,” described in books such as Post-History
(1980) and Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985), opened the field up to many other
types of imaging. More important, Flusser focused less on photographic images than on the
apparatus of the camera and the interface between technology and humans. What really sets
12
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1981). Originally published as La chambre claire: note sur la
photographie (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, Gallimard, Seuil, 1980).
13
Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977).
14
Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Cambridge, UK:
Polity Press, 1990). Originally published as Un art moyen (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1965).
15
See Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” October 3 (Spring,
1977): 68-81.
6
Flusser apart from other photography theorists of this moment is his emphasis on a future of
images rather than an end of photography, and an insistence on present and future images as
electromagnetic. Advancing the concept of “The Photographic Universe”—the condition in
which we experience, know and evaluate the world as a consequence of photographs—he
provided a model for marrying the fields of communications, media studies, and art history. It
should be pointed out that there are U.S. art historians endeavoring to forge these connections:
Christiane Paul, David Joselit, Branden Joseph and the Grey Room journal—picking up from
October—have been instrumental in looking at electronic and digital art and fostering a crossdisciplinary discourse.16 However, Flusser has not been included in these conversations.
Reading Flusser on my own, I was, like many readers, initially perplexed. The primary
terms he proposes in Towards a Philosophy of Photography are “image,” “apparatus,”
“program,” and “information.” But in what I would discover to be true Flusserian fashion, he
only defines these as the primary concepts in the last essay in the book and in a somewhat cryptic
“lexicon” of terms that appears after that. In order to understand his writing as a theory of
photography, one must overturn some of one’s assumptions about what photography is and
follow Flusser in speculating on what it might become. This means reading photography through
information theory and philosophy, in which the dematerialization and digitization of images sets
16
See David Joselit, Feedback: Television Against Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2007) and “No Exit: Video and the Readymade,” October 119 (Winter 2007): 37-45; Branden
W. Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage (a minor
history) (New York: Zone Books; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); and Christiane Paul,
Digital Art (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2015). The journal Grey Room,
founded in 2000 by Branden Joseph, Reinhold Martin, and Felicity Scott, describes itself as
bringing together “scholarly and theoretical articles from the fields of architecture, art, media,
and politics to forge a cross-disciplinary discourse uniquely relevant to contemporary concerns.”
See “About Grey Room” at MIT Press Journals, accessed January 7, 2016,
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/page/about/grey. However, although Grey Room has published
writing by peers of Flusser who will be discussed in this dissertation, such as Friedrich Kittler
and Paul Virilio, it has not published any articles on or writings by Flusser.
7
up an epistemological problem in a world where people have become active makers and
transmitters of photography rather than merely passive receivers.
To take on Flusser as a dissertation subject was a speculative venture. For while Towards
a Philosophy of Photography became integral to the theoretical canon in Europe, where figures
such as Andreas Müller-Pohle, Friedrich Kittler, and Peter Weibel, served as advocates for his
work,17 Flusser’s name remained virtually absent from U.S. photography scholarship.18 Towards
a Philosophy of Photography was originally published in German and Flusser translated it into
English and Müller-Pohle published that version in 1984—although it was largely ignored in the
U.S. until a 2000 translation was published by the British press Reaktion.19 When I started
reading Flusser, however, I didn't know anyone who had read him—or anyone who had even
heard of him.
Flusser’s writings took the form of very short essays; often only four to six pages. Klaus
Sander counted approximately 406 essays in German, 352 in Portuguese, 90 in English, and 60
in French, as well as a small number of essays in other languages—although these numbers have
shifted a bit as the Archive has grown and developed over time.20 Many of Flusser’s early
17
See Andreas Müller-Pohle, “Vilém Flusser: Visualismus/Dokumentarismus laut MüllerPohle,” Standpunkte. Texte zur Fotographie (Göttingen: European Photography, 1982); MüllerPohle, “Vilém Flusser: Prospektive,” Was ich nicht sehe, fotografier ich. Was ich nicht
fotograhiere, sehe ich (Cottbus: Brandenburgische Kunstsammlungen, 1991).
18
For example, Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson, eds., The Meaning of Photography
(Williamstown, MA: Clark Art Institute, 2008). In a blurb for a book by Anke Finger, Rainer
Guldin, and Gustavo Bernadro—Vilém Flusser: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2011)—U.S. media theorist Alexander Galloway describes Flusser as “one of
our lost gems.”
19
Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Anthony Matthews (London:
Reaktion Books, 2000).
20
Klaus Sander, Flusser-Quellen: Eine kommentierte Bibliographie Vilém Flussers von 19602000 (unpublished; cited in Finger, et al., Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, xviii).
8
essays—particularly those from the 1960s—were written in a format Flusser called “science
fiction philosophy.” Moreover, from a language standpoint, the task of writing a dissertation on
Flusser looked exceptionally arduous: like Kafka and other Jewish intellectuals from Prague,
Flusser initially wrote in German. But as he migrated around the Western Hemisphere, he
learned Portuguese and wrote and published in that language, as well as in French and English.
Most of his texts had not been translated into English when I first encountered Flusser, and one
of the key elements of his process is that he often translated his essays himself, arguing that there
was no fixed meaning in his work; instead, paralleling the arguments of Jacques Derrida, he saw
meaning as created in the process of translation.
The secondary literature on Flusser in English is not extensive, particularly within art
history. Isolated articles exist,21 but a special section devoted to his writing on photography
appeared only in 2012 in the relatively new journal Philosophy of Photography.22 A small group
of international scholars devoted to translating his writings into English has centered around
Anke Finger, a professor of German studies and comparative literature at the University of
Connecticut.23 My courage was bolstered, however, by tiny encouragements: the French
photography scholar Michel Frizot mentioning that he was influenced by the “radical thoughts”
21
Sjoukje Van der Meulen, “Between Benjamin and McLuhan: Vilém Flusser's Media Theory,”
New German Critique 110 (Summer 2010): 180-207; John Roberts, “Photography after the
Photograph: Event, Archive, and the Non-Symbolic,” Oxford Art Journal 32, no. 2 (2009): 281,
283-298; Elizabeth Wilson and Andreas Ströhl, “Vilém Flusser,” The Yale Journal of Criticism
6, no. 2 (1993): 285 – 288.
22
Philosophy of Photography 2 (Bristol, UK: Intellect Publishing, Spring 2012).
23
I participated in “ReMEDIAting Flusser,” a conference organized by Anke Finger, November
1-3, 2013 at University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut. The paper I presented, “The
Photographic Universe,” was later published as “Vilém Flusser’s Theories of Photography and
Technical Images in a U.S. Art Historical Context” in Flusser Studies 18 (2014): 1-19.
9
of Flusser;24 perusing German photography theory surveys in which Flusser was amply
represented;25 asking every German art history graduate student I met if he or she had ever read
Flusser. The answer, inevitably, was an indignant “Of course!” (After several such exchanges, it
became clear that this was an insulting question: tantamount to asking a North American
graduate student if she had read Roland Barthes.)
At the same moment I was discovering Flusser, other people were, too. Artists, often
ahead of the curve in the realm of visionary ideas, were mentioning him in their writings,26 and
during the course of researching and writing this dissertation, more than half a dozen of his texts
have been translated into English and published or reissued.27 The Brazilian translator Rodrigo
Maltez Novaes, an artist and former student of Siegfried Zielinski, the German media theorist
who is the director of the Flusser Archive in Berlin, has translated a number of Flusser texts
written originally in Portuguese, such as The History of the Devil, On Doubt, Natural:Mind, and
Post-History, all of which have been published in the last five years.28 In the same way Richard
24
Michel Frizot, “Who’s Afraid of Photons,” Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins (New York:
Routledge, 2006), 274.
25
See Hubertus von Amelunxen and Wolfgang Kemp, eds., Theorie der Fotografie IV, 19801995 (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2000); Michel Frizot in Photography Theory, edited by James
Elkins (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2007): 274.
26
See John Miller, “Double or Nothing: John Miller on the Art of Douglas Huebler,” Artforum
(April 2006), accessed January 9, 2015, https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=200604&id=10617;
Walead Beshty, “Abstracting Photography,” Words Without Pictures (Los Angeles: LACMA,
2009), 292-315.
27
See Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, trans. Nancy Ann Roth
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Does Writing Have a Future? trans. Nancy
Ann Roth (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); and Gestures, trans.
Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
28
See Vilém Flusser, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, trans. Rodrigo Maltez Novaes (New York and
Dresden: Atropos Press, 2011); Natural:Mind, trans. Rodrigo Maltez Novaes (Minneapolis:
Univocal, 2013); Post-History, trans. Rodrigo Maltez Novaes (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2013);
10
Howard aided a generation of scholars with his translations of Roland Barthes, Maltez Novaes
has been an enormous boon to Anglophone Flusser scholars. Current media scholars such as
Alexander Galloway, Steven Shaviro, and Mark Poster have cited Flusser’s work,29 and there is a
respectable body of secondary literature on Flusser in both Portuguese and German.30 Artforum
has republished essays and appreciations of Flusser’s work, as well.31 Clearly, I am not alone in
feeling that Flusser has something to say to our moment, and renewed interest in other artists and
theorists from the seventies and eighties has shown that many critics and scholars feel that art
and theory forged in the early days of the digital revolution, rather than becoming, like early
versions of the technology itself, “obsolete,” might aid us in thinking about images and culture
today. (A similar, if earlier example of such a phenomenon, has often been pointed out Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels: writing at the dawn of industrial capitalism, they forged a theory for
a phenomenon that was only emerging, and yet those writings are still considered vital today.)
The History of the Devil, trans. Rodrigo Maltz Novaes (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014); and On
Doubt, trans. Rodrigo Maltez Novaes (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014). Maltez Novaes has also
translated Flusser’s Language and Reality, but it has yet to be published. Also see
metafluxpublishing.com, accessed September 1, 2015. Maltez Novaes he has also recently
started a new press in São Paulo, Metaflux, where he will publish a book collection of Flusser’s
Artforum essays for which I will write an introduction.
29
See flusserstudies.net
30
Key texts include Oliver Bidlo, Vilém Flusser (Essen: Oldib, 2008); Rainer Guldin,
Philosophieren zwischen den Sprachen. Vilém Flussers Werk (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2005);
Rainer Guldin, Anke Finger, and Gustavo Bernardo, Vilém Flusser (Paderborn, Germany:
Wilhelm Fink, 2009); Kai Hochscheid, “Vilém Flusser: Kommunikation und menschliche
Existenz,” Kultur. Theorien der Gegenwart (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften,
2006); Georg Imdahl, “Unser elektronisches Dorf soll schöner werden. Vilém Flusser fordert
eine Revolutionierung der menschlichen Denkstruktur,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich, March
15, 1994): 11; issue devoted to “Vilém Flusser: Kunst und Forum,” Kunstforum International,
no. 117 (Cologne, 1992); Andreas Ströhl, Vilém Flusser, http://www.goethe.de (November
2007).
31
See Vilém Flusser, “Cows,” Artforum (September 2013): 375-377 and “John Rajchman on
Vilém Flusser’s ‘Curie’s Children’ (1986-1992),” Artforum (September 2012), accessed January
16, 2015, https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201207&id=32019.
11
Structure
While Flusser’s technical image writings serve as the backbone of this dissertation, I will
consider his entire oeuvre, from his emergence in philosophy circles in São Paulo in the early
sixties to his writings on photography and the developing fields of digital imaging and
biotechnology. Chapter 1 describes Flusser’s early education and the intellectual climate in the
new Czechoslovak Republic in the 1920s and 1930s, tracking his flight with the Barth family
(his future wife, Edith, and parents-in-law) from Prague to London and finally to Brazil. In
addition to focusing on early works such as Language and Reality (1963), The History of the
Devil (1965), and “On Doubt” (1965), the chapter discusses how European literature and
philosophy, from Kafka and Rilke to Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Martin Buber shaped
his thinking. Wittgenstein plays a special role in these early writings, since his Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus (1921), with its numbered propositions, served a structuring-model for both
Language and Reality and The History of the Devil. The importance of Brazilians such as fiction
author João Guimarães Rosa and the philosopher Vincent Ferreira da Silva is considered, as well
as Flusser’s career as a journalist for publications such as O Estado de São Paulo and Folha de
São Paulo and the German newspapers Merkur and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Chapter 2 begins with Flusser’s engagement with the Brazilian art world, including his
friendships with artists such as Samson Flexor and Mira Schendel and his brief role as technical
director of the São Paulo Biennial, following an international boycott in 1969, after the 1964
military coup. Flusser’s return to Europe in 1972 and his writing thereafter is discussed,
including Force of the Everyday (1972), The Codified World (1974), Natural:Mind (1978) and
12
Post-History (1980).32 Here his focus turns away from language, towards mass media and
communications and the nature-culture dialectic. The chapter also discusses his participation in
“Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television” (1974), held at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Flusser delivered the paper “Two Approaches to
the Phenomenon, Television”33 and his engagement with thinkers such as Milton Vargas,
Abraham Moles, and Marshall McLuhan.
Chapter 3 describes the state of photography theory in the years leading up to the 1983
publication of Towards a Philosophy of Photography, then delves into Flusser’s technical image
trilogy and related photography texts. The influence of Heidegger—rarely mentioned in the U.S.
photography canon—and texts such as “The Age of the World Picture” (1938), “The Turning”
(1949), and “The Question Concerning Technology” (1955) is explored, as well as Flusser’s use
of the word “magic,” which has proliferated recently among contemporary artists.34 This chapter
further includes discussions of: Flusser’s “parabiology” essay Vampyroteuthis infernalis (1983);
his essays for the U.S. journal Leonardo; his “Curie’s Children” column in Artforum; and his
posthumously published books.
Flusser’s context and reception are the subjects of Chapter 4. The chapter looks back to
his origins in Europe, examining how philosophies of language, phenomenology, history, and
32
Vilém Flusser, La force du quotidien, trans. Jean Mesrie and Barbara Niceall (Paris: Mame,
1973). The book, which was translated from English essays, includes a preface by Abraham
Moles. See also Vilém Flusser, Le Monde codifié (Paris: Institute de l’Environment, 1974) and
“Die Kodifizierte Welt,” Merkur 359 (April 1978): 374-379. The essay also appears as “The
Codified World” in Flusser’s Writings, 35-41.
33
The essay was also reprinted in German as “Für eine Phänomenologie des Fernsehens” (1974)
in Lob der Oberflächlichkeit, Schriften Bd. 1, 2 (Mannheim, Germany: Bollmann, 1995), 180200, and in Medienkultur (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2008), 103-123.
34
All of these are included in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and
Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Perennial, 1977).
13
technology impacted Flusser’s thinking, before moving to midcentury U.S. information theorists
such as Norbert Weiner and Claude Shannon. Marshall McLuhan is discussed, as well as
Flusser’s contemporaries such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and
Gilles Deleuze, before Flusser is examined in relation to German media theory and to
contemporary artists internationally such as Joan Fontcuberta, Harun Farocki, Peter Weibel,
Eduardo Kac, Christopher Williams, and the so-called Düsseldorf School photographers.35 The
chapter ends by recounting some of the ways in which Flusser has been revived by younger
artists working with photography. A conclusion reexamines Flusser’s work as affording an
exemplary model for understanding photography in its current state, by pointing up the social,
political, and cultural implications and resonance of his writing in the present day.
Finally, as I write this introduction in the late summer of 2015, migrants from Africa and
the Middle East are streaming across the borders of Europe and dying in the Mediterranean Sea.
I am moved by their plight and struck by the similarities with Flusser, who was uprooted in his
youth, lost his entire family in the holocaust, and ultimately wrote an autobiography titled
Bodenlos (1992) [groundless, rootless] and a book of essays titled Freedom of the Migrant:
Objections to Nationalism (1994).36 In the latter book, Flusser pointed out that being “settled”
was a relatively new condition for humans: a condition only about 10,000 years old, although his
35
Alexander Galloway, Interface Effect (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2012).
36
Vilém Flusser, Bodenlos: Eine philosophische Autobiographie (Bensheim and Düsseldorf:
Bollmann, 1992) and Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism, trans. Kenneth
Kronenberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), originally published as
Von der Freiheit des Migranten. Einsprüche gegen den Nationalismus (Bensheim: Bollmann,
April 1994). Bodenlos has been published in German, Portuguese, and Czech, but it has not yet
been translated into English.
14
own Jewish ancestors appeared to have lived in Prague for more than a thousand years.37 And
yet, Flusser argued, we as a species are leaving the condition of settled-ness and moving into a
new period in which migrants are in the vanguard of a new mobility. Flusser acknowledged that
migration often comes with suffering, particularly if one is expelled from one’s country of origin.
But while his early dislocations were painful, he probably could not have left his then current
home in Robion, in the South of France, without that sort of rupture. Flusser argued that migrants
should no longer be considered “pitiable victims whom we need help to regain their lost heimats
[homeland, home, origin] but rather models whom we should emulate, if we have the requisite
courage.”38 Being a migrant opened up new horizons, a new “field of potentiality” leading to
“Exile and Creativity,” as one of the essays in Freedom of the Migrant is titled.39
In a way, Flusser’s attitude towards migration mirrors his approach to technical images.
Rather than mourning the demise of chemical photography, he saw digitization as offering
unprecedented opportunities. The photographic universe is a shifting field of images, a
permanently changing environment in which one “redundant” image replaces another. But it is
also a field of potentiality. “Don’t underestimate technology!” Flusser wrote. “We have the
technological means to open ourselves to others and to talk to people all over the world in order
to give meaning to our lives! I think that for the first time we now have the technical ability to
overcome geography and history and to relate to each other based on competence and not on
37
Vilém Flusser, Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism, trans. Kenneth
Kronenberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 1.
38
Ibid., 3.
39
Interesting comparisons might be drawn between Flusser’s writings on marginality and those
of thinkers such as Homi K. Bhabba, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and bell
hooks. See Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, et al.
(Cambridge, MA and New York: MIT Press and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990).
15
what one has received.”40 As numerous Europeans reach out to migrants on social media,
motivated largely by images proliferating on the Internet, and defying their governments’
immigration laws to offer money, transportation, shelter, and support, Flusser’s writings, which
defied the confines of language and disciplinary borders, feel more pertinent than ever.
40
Flusser, Freedom of the Migrant, 106.
16
Chapter 1: Flusser in Brazil
Education in Prague and the Flight to Brazil
Vilém Flusser’s journey to writing Toward a Philosophy of Photography and the texts
that form the core of his philosophy of media and technical images, was a circuitous one. Born in
Prague on May 12, 1920, he grew up in the manner of many assimilated Jewish intellectuals,
speaking both Czech and German.41 His mother, Melitta Basch, was a “dutiful daughter,” a
former singer married off in 1919 by her wealthy family to a man twelve years her senior.
Vilém’s father, Gustav Flusser, studied philosophy, mathematics, and physics in Vienna—with
Albert Einstein, among others. Gustav Flusser translated the books of Tomáš Garrigue Marsaryk
into German, and became a member of parliament for the social democrats in 1918.42 However,
by 1924 he had left politics and become a mathematics instructor and the director of the Prague
Handelsakademie, a business (or “commercial”) school based on a Viennese model. Vilém
Flusser described his parents’ marriage as that of “the haughty ‘thinker’ and the much younger,
cultivated fille rangée. But I think, too, that it was a good marriage: my father ‘educated’ my
mother, and she ‘cultivated’ my father.”43 The Flussers had two children, Vilém, and his sister,
Ludovika, who was born in 1922.
41
Andreas Ströhl, “Introduction,” in Vilém Flusser’s Writings (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xi.
42
Tomáš Garrigue Marsaryk, a Austrian-Czech sociologist and philosopher and President of the
first Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938). See Ines Koeltzsch, “Gustav Flusser. Biographische
Spuren eines deutschen Juden in Prag vor dem zweiten Weltkrieg (Gustav Flusser: Biographical
Traces of a German Jew in Prague before the Second World War),” Flusser Studies 5 (2007),
accessed May 31, 2014
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/gustavflusser.pdf.
43
Koeltzsch, “Gustav Flusser,” 4-5.
17
Prague itself was crucial to Flusser’s education.44 A vital, multiethnic center, it set the
stage for Flusser’s writings across the fields of language, philosophy, photography,
communications, and design.45 Peter Demetz has written about Prague as a city built over many
centuries by Czechs, Germans, Jews, and Italians—but also as the site of a long history of
religious and ethnic cleansing that “invariably dirtied the hands of the ‘cleansed.’”46 Flusser’s
Prague was the result of a recent “cleansing”: in the mid-1880s Prague’s Old Town underwent a
modern “sanitation,” in which most of the old Jewish quarter was razed; Prague’s physical
geography was reconfigured to construct new cultural monuments like the National Theater
(1881-83), the Rudolfinum concert hall (1884), the School of Applied Arts (1884), the new
National Museum (1885-90), and the Museum of the City of Prague (1898). In the 1890s, Prague
also hosted three international exhibitions.47 Writing in a more celebratory mode, Martin Pawley
describes Flusser’s Prague as one of Europe’s most cosmopolitan and avant-garde centers, in
44
See Flusser Studies 5 (2007), accessed May 31, 2014,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/interview.pd.
The first section of the issue is devoted to Vilém Flusser’s early years in Prague and includes an
2007 interview with Edith Flusser, Vilém’s wife, when Edith was 87 years old.
45
Architects like Jan Kotěra and Otakar Novotný were involved with Cubist and Functionalist
developments in architecture and taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Others,
including many former pupils of Kotěra, turned to De Stijl, Functionalism, Constructivism,
Purism and Poetism. See Vladimir Slapeta, “Czech Functionalism 1918-1938: AA Exhibition
Gallery, 12 November 12 December 1987,” AA Files 16 (Autumn 1987): 85-94; Otakar
Novotný: 1880-1959: architektonické dílo (Prague and Olomouc: Český fond výtvarných umění
Praha, 1980); Devětsil: Czech Avant-Garde Art, Architecture and Design of the 1920s and 30s
(Oxford, UK: Museum of Modern Art; London: Design Museum, 1990); and Jan Kotěra, 18711923: The Founder of Modern Czech Architecture (Prague: Municipal House and Kant, 2001).
46
Peter Demetz, Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (New York:
Hill and Wang / Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997), xii. See also Derek Sayer, Prague, Capital of
the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
47
Prague’s wealthier Jews had already left the district after the revolution of 1848. By 1852 Jews
were allowed to live wherever they wished in the city and in 1867 they were given civil rights
equal to the city’s Czech and German citizens. Peter Demetz, Prague in Black and Gold, 314-16.
18
which modern design flourished.48 Flusser’s own description in his book Bodenlos: A
Philosophical Autobiography, focuses on a multicultural center inspired by Masaryk in which
European Jewish culture, German culture, and the new Czech culture merged.49 Citing the
Prague Linguists, Kafka, experimental theater, phenomenology, and Einstein’s lectures at the
university, he wrote: “To grow up in such a climate, to sense these productive tensions in one’s
surroundings and within oneself, to participate in them actively since puberty, was entirely
natural for the son of Jewish intellectuals. Only through the distance of time and space did this
naturalness emerge as a privileged situation.”50
Flusser attended German-language primary school and the German Realgymnasium
grammar school in Smichov, where he wrote poetry and, when he was sixteen, a play titled
“Saul.” One of his most important experiences, however, was attending a 1937 lecture delivered
by Martin Buber, “Prejudice against God.”51 Buber’s charismatic delivery galvanized the young
Flusser, who would return to Buber’s writings repeatedly throughout his life. Buber’s idea of the
48
Martin Pawley, Introduction to Vilém Flusser’s The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design
(London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 10.
49
“Bodenlos” has been translated variously as “rootless,” “groundless,” and “homeless.”
Because it loses some of these valences in English and is generally referred to as Bodenlos in
English texts, I will refer to it by its German title. Written in 1973, the book was published
posthumously as Bodenlos. Eine philosophische Autobiographie (Düsseldorf; Bensheim:
Bollmann, 1992) and in Czech and Portuguese as Bezedno: filosofická autobiografie (Prague:
Hynek, 1998) and Bodenlos: Uma autobiografia filosofica (São Paulo: Annablume, 2010).
50
Quoted in Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, 7.
51
Vilém Flusser, The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism (Champaign, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 2003), 93.
19
“I and you” became in time central to Flusser’s theories of media and communication, which
emphasized the “dialogic” and “telematic.”52
In 1938, Flusser matriculated in law at Charles University in Prague. His education was
quickly cut short, however, which would affect him for much of his life, preventing him from
obtaining academic employment in the United States and from publishing in some venues. At the
Munich Conference in September 1938, at which no Czechoslovaks were present,
representatives of Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy agreed that Germany could annex
the Sudentenland along Czechoslovakia’s borders, which was inhabited mostly by German
speakers and included most of its mining industry and banking interests.53 The invasion
commenced on March 14, 1939 and Prague was occupied by troops the following day. There
was no armed resistance and Prague’s physical structures remained relatively untouched by the
war—although Prague was occupied longer than other regions: from six months before the
outbreak of World War II through several months after the liberation in 1945. The young
Czechoslovak Republic disintegrated immediately and civil society changed rapidly, with
professional societies publishing notices in newspapers declaring that “non-Aryan” members
must appoint “Aryan” substitutes to manage their affairs.54
52
Conversation between Vilém Flusser and Patrik Tschudin recorded on September 30, 1991 and
broadcast on December 13, 1991 on Radio DRS-2, Switzerland. Flusser, The Freedom of the
Migrant, 94.
53
Peter Demetz, Prague in Danger: The Years of German Occupation, 1939-1945: Memories
and History, Terror and Resistance, Theater and Jazz, Film and Poetry, Politics and War (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 4. Also see Vojtěch Mastný, The Czechs Under Nazi
Rule: The Failure of National Resistance, 1939–1942 (New York: Columbia University Press,
1971); Callum MacDonald and Jan Kaplan, Prague in the Shadow of the Swastika: A History of
the German Occupation 1939-1945 (Universitätsverlag, Vienna, 2001); and R.J. Crampton,
Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century—and After (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).
54
Demetz, Prague in Danger, 17.
20
Prague had been a haven for anti-Nazi intellectuals, and this changed quickly, too.55 The
liberal papers Prager Presse and Bohemia ceased publication in 1938 and the Prager Tagblatt
was closed by occupation authorities on April 4, 1939. The German university became an
educational institution of the Reich on September 1, 1939 and the Czech university was closed
on November 15, 1939.56 Hitler declared war against Poland on September 1, 1939 and Jews in
Prague were instructed to register their apartments and deliver their radios to special locations.
By February 1940, they were not allowed to attend the cinema or theater performances. In March
their identity documents had to be stamped with the letter “J,” as of May 17, 1940 they were
forbidden to linger in parks, gardens, or forests; to keep pigeons, use taxis, or sit in the front
carriage of a tram. If a tram had only one carriage, they were to wait for the next one with two
carriages.57
Flusser’s survival amidst the Nazi terror is a fundamental aspect of his biography. His
wife, Edith, was central to this narrative. Born in 1920, two months after Vilém, Edith Barth’s
family lived on the same street as the Flussers; their mothers played bridge together. Her father,
Gustav Barth, opened Prague’s first automated restaurant. At the age of sixteen Edith enrolled at
the Handelsakademie, where Gustav Flusser was the director, and she and Vilém attended dance
55
Some, like Bertolt Brecht, came to Prague only for a few days. Others stayed longer: Erich
Maria Remarque, Lion Feuchtwanger, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Friedrich Burschell (Proust’s
German translator), Bruno Frank, Stefan Heym, Franz Pfemfert, Friedrich Torberg. Artists
included John Heartfield, Oskar Kokoschka, and Peter Weiss, who came to Prague to study
painting and ultimately wrote the three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975-81).
Demetz, Prague in Danger, 30.
56
Because works of theater, literature, and music were later written, composed, and performed at
the concentration camp in Terezín, the Gestapo was charged with representing the camp to
outsiders as a kind of “spa” for artists and writers. There were instances when inmates were
commanded to mount performances for international observers. Demetz, Prague in Danger, 160.
57
Demetz, Prague in Danger, 63.
21
school together. Later, Gustav Barth would predict the severity of the Nazi occupation and move
his possessions from Prague to London. Gustav Flusser had received an invitation to teach at the
university in Jerusalem, but he felt tied to Prague. A verbal confrontation between the two
fathers ensued, but Gustav refused to leave and Vilém left the country with Edith and her mother
to join Gustav Barth in London.
The Journey to Brazil
Flusser briefly resumed his studies at the London School of Economics, but the
bombardment had started and London was not safe. Gustav Barth rented a bus with other Prague
families and told the driver to take them as far as the tank of gas would allow.58 They ended up
in Cornwall, near Exeter, and took up residence in an abandoned manor house. Unable to enroll
at the university, Vilém cut hair and Edith apprenticed in the maternity ward at a local hospital.
Opportunities for Jewish refugees to leave England were limited to places like Shanghai,
Panama, and Brazil. After being baptized, as required, Flusser and the Barths obtained visas to
Brazil and in 1940 they left South Hampton on a ship accompanied by a cruiser to protect against
submarines. The month-long voyage was made strictly in darkness to avoid detection by German
ships (passengers could not even light cigarettes), although Edith remembers it somewhat fondly:
they became friendly with other passengers, including Alex Kafka, whose father, Bruno, was a
second cousin of the author Franz Kafka. (Alex Kafka would later become an economist and
Brazilian Director of the International Monetary Fund.)59
58
Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, 15.
59
Ibid., 16.
22
However, the terror of war and the Nazis returned as soon as they reached the port of Rio
de Janeiro. While still onboard ship in the harbor, Flusser was informed that his father had been
murdered at Buchenwald on June 18, 1940. At the end of the war, in 1945, he would learn that
his mother and sister were killed at Auschwitz. Survival came with feelings of enormous guilt. In
Bodenlos Flusser writes:
The decision to escape had immediate and horrendous results. I had died for my parents,
siblings, and closest friends, and they had died for me. I looked into their faces and saw
death masks. I was a ghost among ghosts. When I, much later and successively, received
the news of their various and gruesome deaths, it was only an affirmation of that which I
had experienced back then. With the decision to escape they had already departed into the
realm of shadows, and their murder was only the automatic execution of a process that
had taken form back then. Not the Nazis—I myself had murdered them with my decision
to escape in order to save my shadowy self … This is how Prague died.60
The Barths and Flusser stayed in a pension in Rio for a few months then left for São
Paulo where Vilém found a job in a Czech import-export company, working for Edith’s uncle.
Edith and Vilém were married on January 15, 1941 and she was soon pregnant with their first
child, Dinah. Her parents and sister obtained visas and moved to the United States in 1941.
Flusser found intellectual companionship in Alex Bloch, another Jewish immigrant from Prague
who worked in a bookstore and provided Vilém with books, and with whom he would later
correspond.61 Despite his marriage and the birth of his children (Dinah, Miguel Gustavo in 1943,
and Victor in 1950), however, Flusser described the forties as a dark period. Edith accompanied
him to work because she was afraid he would kill himself,62 and Flusser later described carrying
around a piece of paper divided into two sections: “in one section I had listed the reasons for
60
Flusser, Bodenlos, 28-29; Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, 14.
61
These letters were later collected and published as Briefe an Alex Bloch (Letters to Alex
Bloch), eds. Edith Flusser and Klaus Sander (Göttingen: European Photography Verlag, 2000).
62
Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, 18.
23
suicide, in the others the reasons against it.”63 These were the days in which, referring to himself
in the third person, “one engaged in business during the day and philosophized at night. One
pursued both activities with detachment and both with disgust.”64
The Brazilian Language
The early part of Flusser’s exile was also marked by a lack of language. Arriving in
Brazil, the Flussers did not know “a word” of Portuguese.65 And yet, Flusser wanted to become a
writer and philosopher.66 Flusser’s later philosophy was couched in the idea of “groundlessness,”
with a prescient view of nomadism and migration.67 But Flusser was a Jewish refuge migrating
63
Zwiegespräche: Interviews 1967-1991 [Interviews 1967-1991] (Göttingen, Germany:
European Photography, 1996), 24; quoted in Finger, et al., Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, 15.
64
Flusser, Bodenlos, 41. Quoted in Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An
Introduction, 19.
65
Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, 18.
66
For essays on Flusser’s experience in Brazil, see Susanne Klengel and Holger Siever, eds.,
Das Dritte Ufer: Vilém Fusser und Brasilien [The third shore: Vilém Flusser and Brazil]
(Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009) and Gustavo Bernardo and Ricardo Mendes, eds.,
Vilém Flusser no Brasil [Vilém Flusser in Brazil] (Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumara, 2000).
67
See Flusser Studies 7 (2008), which is devoted to migration. In particular, Rolf Kaluweit’s
essay, “Postmodern Nomadism and the Beginnings of a Global Village,” which cites a 1990
essay by Flusser, “Nomadische Überlegungen (Thinking about Nomadism),” published in The
Freedom of the Migrant (2003), in which Flusser describes the difference between nomadism
and migration: “A migrant does not leave her area voluntarily but rather is forced in some way.
Her odyssey, at least in her range of expectations, is finite: sooner or later she arrives at another
shore and attains what Flusser calls ‘an unacceptable reality of second rank.’ The migrant thus
passes from one situation of unlivable settledness into an unlivable second one. Migration leads
to the interaction of two socio-cultural domains, not to the abundance of one domain and the
adoption of another…. On the contrary, nomadism, which is our actual concern, refers to just one
space that might be vague in its boundaries. Nomads scorn settledness from the outset. They
move from way station to way station without striking roots. Hence, the mapping of nomadism
differs rigorously from the mapping of migration.” Kaluweit, “Postmodern Nomadism and the
Beginnings of a Global Village,” Flusser Studies 7 (2008): 6-7, accessed June 2, 2014,
24
to a country that not only spoke a different language, but that carried with it a complicated
history of colonization, slavery, immigration, and independence. Brazil was the main destination
for Germans heading to Latin America in the nineteenth-century after a crisis in the German
states brought on by the French Revolution, political censorship, and economic depression.
German immigrants were vastly outnumbered by Italians, Spaniards, and Portuguese immigrants,
and by earlier Portuguese colonizers, African slaves, and native Indians. But they were
welcomed in a country under pressure from other nations to abolish slavery. On account of a
goal of improving its economy and “whitening” its population, hardworking Germans were seen
as “ideal settlers.”68
Brazil in the twentieth-century, however, had what Matthew D. Goodwin calls a
“bizarrely ambivalent” policy toward Jews. They were wanted for their perceived wealth and
skills and to help Brazil improve industrially, and because they were white. But they were also
judged as “a separate race,” if one that could not easily be distinguished physically.69 Brazilian
visas, even for illustrious European Jews were not always guaranteed: Stefan Zweig, whose 1941
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/kailuweitpostmodern-nomadism.pdf.
68
Kathöfer, “The Phantasm of the German Migrant,” 2-3. Also see Jeffrey Lesser, Negotiating
National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1999); Sales Augusto dos Santos, “Historical Roots of the ‘Whitening’ of
Brazil,” Latin American Perspectives 29.1 (2002): 61-82; Giralda Seyferth, “German
immigration and the formation of German-Brazilian ethnicity,” Anthropological Journal of
European Cultures 7.2 (1998): 131-54.
69
Matthew D. Goodwin, “The Brazilian Exile of Vilém Flusser and Stefan Zweig,” Flusser
Studies 7 (2008): 1-2. Accessed June 3, 2014,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/goodwinbrazilian-exile.pdf; citation of Jeffrey Lesser, Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the
Jewish Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). From 1933 to 1941, 9,427
German-Jewish immigrants entered Brazil. After Brazil entered the war, siding with the Allies,
however, the United States stopped pressuring the Vargas administration and immigration fell
sharply. Only six Jews entered in 1944. Lesser, Welcoming the Undesirables, 183.
25
autobiography Brazil: Land of the Future was criticized for promoting the Vargas regime’s
agenda and positing Brazil as a multicultural utopia that differed from the more capitalist-driven
United States, obtained a visa; Claude Lévi-Strauss did not.70 Ultimately, the idea of Brazil as a
tolerant haven for Jews might be a myth. In an interview recorded on September 30, 1991, nearly
two months before his death, Flusser admitted that “the Brazilian consul was corrupt, and he
accepted relatively small bribes, and so he gave us a Brazilian visa.”71 Gustav Barth’s money had
apparently bought their safe passage to Brazil.
The “Philosophical Self-Portrait” and Becoming a “Brazilian Writer”
The 1940s remained a dark period for Flusser. In a 1969 autobiographical essay titled “In
Search of Meaning,” he describes his intellectual trajectory and the violent uprooting from
Europe and relocation to Brazil:
I spent my youth in the spiritually and artistically inebriating atmosphere of the
between-wars Prague. I survived, groggily, the bestial and stupid earthquake of
Nazism, which devoured my world (i.e., my others and my things), but also the
scales of values that had structured that world. I was vomited, by the fury of
events, upon Brazil, which is a greatly amorphous situation, greedy in every
sense, and also in an ontic one. I was vomited upon Brazil at a plastic and
assimilable age, and I spent the last thirty years of my life in search of myself in
Brazil, and in search of Brazil within myself.72
What Flusser glosses over in his “Philosophical Self-Portrait” is the lack of a formal
education caused by the timing of his exile from Prague. He never obtained an advanced degree,
70
See Goodwin, “The Brazilian Exile”: 3, footnote 2 and Stefan Zweig, Brasil, pais do futuro
[Brazil, land of the future] (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Guanbara, 1941).
71
Flusser interview with Patrik Tschudin in The Freedom of the Migrant, 92.
72
Flusser, Writings, 198.
26
even if he “lived philosophically.”73 Gustavo Bernardo Krause describes Flusser’s philosophy,
which developed mostly outside the academy, as “street philosophy.” It is “as rigorous as the
best academic philosophy, but it is as poetic and clear as the best street philosophy, that is, the
philosophy that lives outside of the academic ivory tower.”74 As he recovered from the trauma of
the war, Flusser read through Kafka, Camus, José Ortega y Gasset, and Nietzsche.75 Nonetheless,
“My salvation was Kant, my catharsis in every crisis” and he devoured “Cassirer, Cohen,
Hartmann, the entire Marburg School,” until he decided that, “my central problem was going to
be language.”76 With this in mind, he read the writings of the Viennese School, Bertrand Russell,
Wittgenstein, and Heidegger – but not the French: “Saussure did not impress me.”77 Andreas
Ströhl argues that “Flusser saw himself as an Old European, especially when he was in Brazil”
and that his texts “have less in common with those of Marshall McLuhan or Jean Baudrillard
than with those of Edmund Husserl or Martin Buber.”78 Flusser rarely mentions other thinkers in
his writings, but his work contains references to Hannah Arendt, Franz Werfel, Kafka, and
Wittgenstein, as well as traces of Thomas Kuhn, Marshall McLuhan, Albert Einstein and Werner
73
Ibid.
74
See Gustavo Bernardo’s “One of the most important Brazilian philosophers,” Flusser Studies 3
(2006): 1-2. Accessed May 19, 2014,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/gustavobernardo-one-brazilian-phil.pdf.
75
Flusser, Writings, 199-200.
76
Ibid.
77
Ibid.
78
Ströhl, “Introduction” to Flusser’s Writings, x.
27
Heisenberg. Ströhl singles out Husserl and Buber as the largest influences on Flusser’s
thinking.79
Rafael Cardoso also argues for the importance of European Enlightenment thinking for
Flusser and, moreover places Flusser in a somewhat inflated place within that lineage, as
“arguably, the last representative of the grand tradition of critical analysis that dominated
European thinking—and, especially, the German-speaking portion of it—between the late
eighteenth and twentieth centuries.”80 For Cardoso this stretches from Kant to Adorno and
includes Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein and Heidegger, with the unifying
feature being “a belief in Reason as an instrument of investigation and evaluation”—although
Flusser himself would often critique the ideas of reason and rationality, arguing that they
resulted, ultimately, in “rational” apparatuses of destruction, like Auschwitz.
However, these arguments seem to entirely ignore the effect Brazil had on Flusser, which
he describes in the “Philosophical Self-Portrait”: “My German culture persisted, but gained a
new coloring: he who dwelled within the nucleus of myself was my enemy.”81 Flusser was not,
in his estimation, the “classic” immigrant who crosses the border of one culture and enters
another, but a migrant and a nomad. He writes in “The Brazilian Language”:
When I came to Brazil I did not have my own culture within me, I was in limbo. So I did
not experience the Brazilian culture as a border culture, but I considered it one among
many above which I hovered. I had never been a “classic” immigrant … In the case of
my own experience of Brazilian culture, the Portuguese language took center stage for
the simple reason that I had decided in its favor when I decided to become active in
Brazil. It meant that I experienced this language predominantly as rough material,
challenging me to work with and change it in a way so that this change may transform me
and bring me into contact with others. That is, I experienced the Portuguese language as a
79
Ibid., xi.
80
Rafael Cardoso, “Devil may care,” Flusser Studies 7: 1.
81
Flusser, Writings, 198-99.
28
challenge and a life-task.82
Flusser also started to see in the Brazilians themselves a reflection of his condition,
particularly of his own rootlessness since he realized later about Brazil, “the great majority of the
population lived a seminomadic existence during the 1950s, following the harvests in misery,
hunger, and disease.”83
It is interesting to note that Flusser begins the essay “The Brazilian Language” by starting
at the end of his period of perceived exile, as if hoping to minimize or erase the horror and
trauma of those years. The first sentences of the essay read: “Towards the end of the 1940s the
first real contact with Brazilian culture was complete. This step was determined by the decision
to become active in this culture. One wanted to grasp it as thoroughly as possible, not only to
absorb it but also in order to act within it. This is an atypical way of getting in touch with another
culture.”84 But his first encounters with the intellectual culture in Brazil were jarring. While on
the one hand he found “many forms of voodoo, spiritism, irresponsible lofty talk, and attitudes
copied third hand,” there was also amongst the Brazilian intelligentsia a “formalistic sterility”
filled with “Positivisms, scholasticism, Marxisms, academisms, and formalistic preciosities à la
brésilienne.”85
Flusser’s opinions sound like the prejudice of a European exile, but were echoed by
native Brazilians. In a paper from the early forties titled “Some Considerations on the Problem of
82
Flusser, “The Brazilian Language,” Flusser Studies 3: 2-3.
83
Flusser, The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2003), 10.
84
Flusser, “The Brazilian Language,” 1.
85
Flusser, Writings, 200. Raimundo de Farias Brito (1862-1917) was a Brazilian scholar,
philosopher, and educator.
29
Philosophy in Brazil,” Afranjo Coutinho, an instructor of philosophy in Bahia wrote that, “one
cannot speak of a Brazilian philosophy or of Brazilian philosophers as distinguished from
thinkers. We have neither. We have not even a philosophical mind. Our creative capacity
expresses itself in poetry and music, both of them having been elevated in our country to the
highest level of greatness.”86 Coutinho’s argument was repeated frequently in later decades as
liberation movements swept across the globe and multiculturalism and postcolonial theory
pervaded academia: “The creation of a Brazilian philosophy depends on our total behavior and
culture, which depend, in turn, on the general condition of our civilization. With a colonial status
of civilization we can have only a colonial mentality, which is not the ideal mentality for
building a creative philosophy.”87 Coutinho describes the adoption of French Positivism in
Brazil, particularly amongst the military, which I will take up later in relation to the military
coup of 1964 and the subsequent dictatorship. He also considers Farias Brito, whom Flusser
mentions in his biographical essay, and discusses how Brito was adopted by Catholic thinkers in
reaction to Positivistic, nationalistic ones, underscoring Flusser’s misgivings.
And yet, if Coutinho approached Brazilian philosophy as a skeptical native, and
colonized subject, Flusser, while finding the “Brazilian scene” lacking, also identified places of
entry for a migrant and exile, a young man without a degree, educating himself outside a formal
institutional structure. Decades later, using the language of information and media theory, he
wrote about Brazil:
The network being woven remained open. For example, the philosophical institute
in which Italian students of Croce, German Heidegger scholars, Portuguese
86
See Afranjo Coutinho’s “Some Considerations on the Problem of Philosophy in Brazil,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4, no. 2, Papers and Discussions of the First InterAmerican Conference of Philosophy (Dec., 1943): 186.
87
Ibid.
30
followers of Ortega, Jewish positivists from Eastern Europe, Belgian Catholics,
and Anglo-Saxon pragmatists took part had to open itself up to Japanese students
of Zen Buddhism, a Lebanese mystic, and a Chinese literary scholar, and it had to
make room for a Talmudist from Western Europe as well.88
One need only look at Flusser’s “traveling library” on view in his archive in Berlin—
actually his personal library, but jokingly called the “traveling library” by Edith Flusser, because
they moved around so much in the sixties and seventies—to see a reflection of this range of
thought. I will return to this argument later: Flusser’s status as a German or European versus
Brazilian thinker—really, perhaps, a post-national thinker whose thought is reflected in the
multiple languages he wrote in and the technological media he gravitated toward later in his
career. First, however, I will look at the texts he wrote in the fifties before coming into
significant contact with the intellectual community in São Paulo.
Manuscripts from the Fifties
In 1950 Flusser moved briefly with his family to Rio de Janeiro for work. The same year
he began exchanging letters with Alex Bloch89 and wrote a manuscript, in German, now lost, on
the history of ideas in the eighteenth-century.90 In a letter dated August 27, 1951 to the
Department of Philosophy at Columbia University in New York Flusser wrote that he was
impressed by “the inability of recent philosophy to digest the imminent, or even accomplished,
downfall of European civilization.” He added, “the eighteenth century seems to be at the same
88
Flusser, The Freedom of the Migrant, 9.
89
See Briefe an Alex Bloch [Letters to Alex Bloch], Edith Flusser and Klaus Sander, eds.
(Göttingen: European Photography Verlag, 2000). The first letter in this book is dated January 8,
1951, written while Flusser was in Rio. The archive dates the correspondence back to 1950.
90
The Flusser Archive biography dates this manuscript between 1950 and 1951. Accessed June
4, 2014, http://www.flusser-archive.org/aboutflusser/biography.
31
time the climax and the beginning of the decline of European civilization and I am therefore
planning a book on 18th century thought as seen from our present position.”91 Clearly, however,
the concern of that manuscript was Flusser’s own position in the world and how to frame his
argument within that experience. The letter continues:
Ever since my arrival in Brazil, my contact with recent philosophy has been
restricted to reading. In view of this country’s remoteness from events and the
smallness of the philosophically interested public there is, to my knowledge, no
chance in this country for a critical appraisal of my thinking and for an eventual
publication of the book I am planning.92
Flusser suggested that the introduction of the manuscript could be published as a discrete
essay, and although it was written in German, he could have it translated into English. There is
no record of a response. Flusser would continue to lament Brazil’s lack of vitality as an
intellectual center, although he could also switch gears and be optimistic. In 1952 he wrote to his
cousin David Flusser (né Gustav Flusser), who had settled in Jerusalem and eventually became a
renowned religious scholar, praising São Paulo:
The city is developing into something incredible, it is reaching the 3,000.000 [sic]
mark this year. When we came here in 1940 it had 1,200.00. It has surpassed Rio
and is approaching Buenos Aires very quickly to become the largest city of the
Southern hemisphere. They are finishing fifteen buildings every day, including
three skyscrapers. It looks quite like any big time US city [Flusser had not yet
been to the United States] only more modern. Nonetheless the way of life has a
Latin contonation [sic] (50% of the population are of Italian origin, 20% of
Portuguese origin) and although they work as much as the Americans, they do it
with more grace and savoir vivre.93
91
Letter from Flusser to Department of Philosophy, Columbia University, August 27, 1951.
Flusser Archive, English correspondence binder 53, number 83.
92
Ibid.
93
Letter from Vilém Flusser to David Flusser, July 17, 1952. Flusser Archive, David Flusser
correspondence.
32
Flusser would write two more books in German before switching to Portuguese. In 1957
he wrote The Twentieth Century, a manuscript with a similar thrust to the earlier one, but with a
more sweeping scope.94 Unpublished and rarely mentioned in the literature,95 the manuscript,
just over two hundred pages, includes a subtitle: “Attempt at a subjective synthesis.”96 A few
lines below this, on the cover page, is the phrase “Ex Ponto.” This could refer to Ovid’s firstcentury C.E. Epistulae ex Ponto, “Letters from the Sea”—in Ovid’s case, the Black Sea where
the poet was exiled. The table of contents and bibliography are some of the most vivid and
concise illustrations of Flusser’s range. The table of contents lists headings in this order:
“Politics” (“Rome,” “Byzantium,” “Babel,” “India” and the “Far East”); then “Society,”
“Clergy,” “Nobility,” “The City,” “Science,” “Worldview of Magic,” “Worldview of Science,”
“Retrospective of the Scientific Worldview,” “Worldview of the Vendanta [Upanishads],”
“Resume of Science”; and headings devoted to “Art,” “Philosophy” and “Religion.”97 Following
the table of contents, the manuscript is divided into short sections, some only a few paragraphs,
94
I obtained the manuscript, Das Zwanzigste Jahrhundert, in PDF form from Michael Hanke,
Associate Professor for Communication Sciences at the Federal State University in Belo
Horizonte, Brazil in December 2013. A copy was also uploaded to the Chilean website
http://www.flusserestudios.cl, but cannot be accessed from the United States.
95
For instance, it is not mentioned in Oliver Bidlo’s Vilém Flusser: Einführung [Vilém Flusser:
Introduction] (Essen: Oldib Verlag, 2008). Bidlo starts with Language and Reality instead.
96
Actually “Ein Versuch einer subjektiven Synthese,” although the “Ein” is crossed out with
three short hatch marks on the manuscript.
97
“Politik” (“Rom,” “Byzanz,” “Babel,” “Indien,” “Ferner Osten”), “Gesellschaft,”
“Geistlichkeit,” “Adel,” “Die Grossstadt,” “Wissenshaft,” “Weltbild der Magie,” “Weltbild der
Wissenshaft,” “Rückblick aufs Weltbild der Wissenschaft,” “Weltbild der Vedanta,” “Résumé
der Wissenshaft, “Die Kunst,” “Philosophie,” and “Religion.” Flusser, Das Zwanzigste
Jahrhundert, 1-6.
33
which would prefigure Flusser’s predilection for the short essay, and which he honed just a few
years later when he became a newspaper columnist.98
The bibliography of The Twentieth Century is also interesting, for two reasons: one is that
it demonstrates Flusser reading in multiple languages: primarily German, English, and French.
The second reason is that Flusser only included bibliographies in his early manuscripts; in later
essays and books, references had to be deduced by the reader and Flusser often quoted (or
slightly misquoted) texts and authors without citation. The bibliography here includes a short
notation stating that the books below functioned as “raw material” which Flusser believed
influenced him “primarily in principle.”99 Even listing the first ten is illuminating because it
shows Flusser’s extended reading, from ancient to modern; East to West; from philosophy to
psychology and religion; poetry to prose; and even human to animal, which would become
important in texts like Vampyroteuthis infernalis and the “Curie’s Children” column in Artforum,
which coincided with developments in biogenetics. The first entries in the bibliography are
Gerhard Adler’s Studies in Analytical Psychology, published between 1910 and 1965; W.C.
Allee’s The Social Life of Animals (1938); Franz Altheim’s Empire at Midnight: Asia’s Road to
Europe (1955); Aristotle’s Organon; Arthur Hilary Armstrong’s Introduction to Ancient
98
It should be noted that Flusser’s newspaper writing in Brazil was more along the lines of the
French feuilleton form developed for literary supplements, or Roland Barthes’ short essays for
Lettres Nouvelles, later published as Mythologies (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957). Another
comparison might be Clarice Lispector’s crônicas, originally published in the Saturday edition of
the Jornal do Brasil from August 1967 to December 1973 and later published as the collection A
Descoberta do mundo: crônicas (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1999), and in English as Selected
Crônicas (New York: New Directions, 1992).
99
“Die Synthese, die in diesem Buche angestrebt wurde, schöpft ihr Material nicht sum
mindesten aus Büchern. Um dem Leser eine notgedrungen begrenzte Idee von diesem
Rohmaterial zu geben, um dem Autor bis zu einem gewissen Grade den Rücken zu decken,
führen wir in der Folge einige jener Werke an, von denen er glaubt, dass sie ihn grundsätzlich
beeinflusst haben,” Flusser, Das Zwanzigste Jahrhundert, 215.
34
Philosophy (1947); Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab und Rustum (1853); Augustine’s Confessions and
City of God; Sri Aurobindo’s Le Guide du Yoga (Guide to Yoga) (1955) and Trois Upanishads
(Three Upanishads), first published between 1910 and 1920.100
The text begins in a signature manner for Flusser, looking back to ancient civilizations
and connecting them with the present:
Every period has the feeling of standing at a crossroads. Historical perspective
deceives us, though, so that we believe events periodically roll off in obedience to
their own laws and we believe we must distinguish between times of decay. That
alone makes it possible to speak from an understanding of history. If we could not
distinguish turning points in the story, they seem to us an amorphous process and
it would actually not make sense to speak of an understanding.101
Flusser thinks in broad terms about historical epochs and the possibility of synthesizing
them. (It makes sense that history would be significant for a writer who, some twenty years later,
would write a text called Post-History.) The idea of rupture is also central to his argument. He is
looking at large trajectories: the rise and fall of civilizations, chaos and barbarism,102 the rise of
100
They appear in the bibliography as follows, except that I have listed them in a continuous text
rather than separate lines: Adler G: Studies in Analytical Psychology; Allec [sic], W.C.: The
Social Life of Animals; Altheim F.: Reich gegen Mitternacht; Aristoteles: Organon; Armstrong
A.: Introduction to Ancient Philosophy; Arnold M.: Sohrab und Rustum; Augustin: Confessions;
City of God; Aurobindo S: Le Guide du Yoga; Trois Upanishads. Some of them, more
specifically, are Franz Altheim’s Reich gegen Mitternacht: Asiens Weg nach Europa (Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 1955); Arthur Hilary Armstrong’s Introduction to Ancient Philosophy (London:
Methuen, 1947); and Sri Aurobindo’s Le Guide du Yoga (1955) and Trois Upanishads (first
published between 1910 and 1920; Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 2001).
101
“Jede Zeit hat das Gefühl, an einem Scheideweg zu stehen. Die historische Perspektive
allerdings täuscht uns, sodass wir meinen, dass das Geschehen sich periodisch und als ob ihm
eigenen Gesetzen gehorchend, abrollen würde. So glauben wir, Zeiten des Werdens von den[en]
des Verfalls unterscheiden zu dürfen. Das ist[s] allein, was uns möglich macht, von einem
Verständnis der Geschichte zu sprechen. Könnten wir in der Geschichte keine Zäsuren
unterscheiden, erschiene sie uns als amorpher Prozess, dann hätte es tatsachlich keinen Sinn, von
einem Verstehen zu sprechen.” Vilém Flusser, Das Zwanzigste Jahrundert, 7. My translation.
102
Flusser, Das Zwanzigste Jahrundert, 15-18.
35
logic and pragmatism.103 He quotes—in English and without citation—“The Rubaiyat” of
Persian poet Omar Khayyam: “Shatter it to bits and then remould [sic] it nearer to the heart’s
desire,”104 mirroring both what had happened in recent Western culture and in his own life in
Prague. There is a sense of purpose embedded within his nihilism, however. At the end of the
introduction he writes that the point of traveling through history and witnessing its failures is “to
uncover the sources of our age.”105
During this period Flusser also wrote a German manuscript titled The History of the Devil
and translated it into Portuguese. Neither of these texts—the German or Portuguese versions of
The History of the Devil—would be published in the fifties, although the Portuguese version was
published as his second book, in 1965.106 Clearly, this was a transitional period for Flusser, as he
shifted from writing in German to Portuguese. However, he was still doing business during the
day and philosophy at night. In 1959, he became a director of the Stabivolt, the transistor factory
where he had worked throughout the fifties—in retrospect a fitting day job for a thinker who
would end up theorizing technology and new media, but it wasn’t until the early 1960s that he
began to make contact with members of the Brazilian philosophical community.
The Philosophical Self-Portrait: João Guimarães Rosa
103
Ibid., 18-20.
104
Ibid.
105
“die Quellen unserer Zeit.” Flusser, Das Zwanzigste Jahrundert, 12.
106
Vilém Flusser, A História do Diabo (São Paulo: Editora Martins, 1965). The German version
was published posthumously as Die Geschichte des Teufels (Göttingen, Germany: European
Photography, 1993).
36
If history and “rupture” were Flusser’s focus in the fifties, in the late fifties and early
sixties his interest shifted to language. In an essay titled “In Search of Meaning (Philosophical
Self-portrait)”107 written in the late sixties, Flusser describes the development of his thought. In
“First productive phase”—he’s vague about dates, but uncharacteristically specific with his
references—he writes that he began “to read systematically about language,” focusing on the
Vienna School, Bertrand Russell, and Wittgenstein. He was reading them in a new way,
however, resulting from his reading of Heidegger. (He was not, to reiterate, interested in French
thought: “Saussure did not impress me.”)108 He also mentions Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Goethe, and
Thomas Mann, calling them the “great masters of language,” along with his “two most important
influences,” Kafka and Rilke, whom he places alongside Wittgenstein and Heidegger:
Kafka, the ascetic, and Rilke the orgy of language. Kafka, like Wittgenstein, the
relentless revealer of the phoniness of language, in order to clear the way toward the
sacred purity of the fundamental silence of language. Rilke, like Heidegger, the prophet,
revealing the mystery that dwells in language.109
One of the first essays Flusser published in the literary supplement of the newspaper O
Estado de São Paulo was “Prague, City of Kafka” in 1961.110 But if the first productive phase
underscores the argument for Flusser as a European thinker, in the next section Flusser writes
107
Writings, 197-208.
108
Ibid., 201.
109
In the next paragraph Flusser describes how music led back to philosophy: “Following that
model, I dove, as if spontaneously, into the ocean of music, the world of records. For reasons I
cannot explain, Mozart took hold of me violently. I felt his almost superhuman perfection in the
effort to overcome human despair. And this dive of mine into music returned me to
Schopenhauer, so anti-Mozart and yet so language become music and music become language.
‘Was er sagte ist vertan, was er war, das bleibt bestahn. Seht ihn nur an! Niemand war er
Untertan’ [Whatever he said is gone, whatever he was remains. Just look at him! He was inferior
to nobody] (Nietzsche). I wrote Lingua e realidade trying to say all this.” Flusser, Writings, 202.
110
Sander, Sources, 14.
37
that “Brazil opened itself up to me through gigantic windows: Guimarães Rosa and Vincente
Ferreira da Silva. My two great Brazilian masters and (dare I say it myself?) my two friends—
dead, both of them.”111 Ferreira da Silva seems like a logical reference point, since he was a
philosopher.112 But Flusser writes, “I recognized in Guimarães Rosa all my linguistic
commitment on a grandiose level. Sagarana and Corps du Ballet, and especially The Devil to
Pay in the Backlands, are like demonstrations in fieri of my theses in Lingua e realidade.”113
João Guimarães Rosa was a medical doctor, diplomat, and writer whose opus Grande
Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands), published in 1956, is often compared to
James Joyce’s Ulysses or Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz for its experimentation with
language and narrative, as well as its length: over five-hundred pages with no chapter divisions.
How close Flusser was to Guimarães Rosa is uncertain. Unlike his friendly relations with Milton
Vargas, who would become a longtime correspondent, a letter in the Flusser Archive shows
Flusser addressing Guimarães Rosa with the rather formal “Dear Ambassador” (“Caro
embaixador”).114 By comparison, Flusser addressed his letters to Vargas, “my dear friend”
(“Meu caro amigo”).
111
Flusser, Writings, 203.
112
Ferreira da Silva’s works have not been translated into English. See Vicente Ferreira da Silva,
Obras completas (São Paulo: Instituto Brasileiro de Filosofia, 1964-1966). Gustavo Bernardo
Krause also cites an unpublished essay in Edith Flusser’s archive, “A imortalidade de Vicente
Ferreira da Silva” (11S) in his essay “Brasilianische Philosophie? Philosophieren, in situ” in
Klengel and Siever, Das Dritte Ufer, 39-49.
113
Flusser, Writings, 203. For the relationship between The History of the Devil and Grande
Sertão, see Willi Bolle’s “Die luziferische Funktion der Sprache: Über Vilém Flusser und João
Guimarães Rosa” in Klengel and Siever, Das Dritte Ufer, 63-79.
114
Letter from Flusser to Guimarães Rosa, January 28, 1964, Flusser Archive, Portuguese
correspondence, number 15.
38
Nonetheless, there are many similarities between the two and one can see retrospectively
how Guimarães Rosa was an important model for Flusser. Guimarães Rosa was fluent in
Portuguese, German, French, and English. (He also knew Esperanto, Spanish, and some
Russian.)115 Moreover, Guimarães Rosa played fearlessly with narrative form, in the same way
Flusser would develop a signature short essay style. Flusser wrote two essays on the essay genre,
one of which, “Essays,” explained it thusly:
The essay is not merely the articulation of a thought, but of a thought as a point of
departure for a committed existence. The essay vibrates with the tension of the
fight between thought and life, and between life and death, that Unamuno called
‘agony.’ Because of this the essay does not resolve its topic as the treatise does. It
does not explain its topic, so in this sense it does not inform its readers. On the
contrary, it transforms its topic into an enigma. It makes itself in the topic and in
its readers. This is what makes it attractive.116
Sagarana (1946), Guimarães Rosa’s first significant book, was a fairly straightforward
fictional outing: a collection of short stories about the people of the sertão or backlands of Minas
Gerais state, where he was born. But his next book, Corpo de Baile (1956) was originally
published as seven novellas in two volumes divided up into what Guimarães Rosa called
“poems” and “novellas,” and the second edition was published as one volume later divided into
three books. His opus, Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands), also
published in 1956, and which might be more literally translated as “The Great Wilderness:
Paths,” follows a former gunrunner, Riobaldo, who recounts to a silent doctor his exploits as well
as his affair with Diadorim, the only daughter of a bandit farmer—and his arrangement with the
devil to sell his soul in order to avenge the killing of a comrade. One must remember that Flusser
115
Jon S. Vincent, João Guimarães Rosa (Boston: Twayne, 1978).
116
Quoted in Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, 17 and Flusser,
Writings, 194. Later in this essay Flusser points out how Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is a treatise
rather than an essay and cites another author known for blurring genres: Miguel de Unamuno
(1864-1936), the Spanish essayist, novelist, and Nobel Peace Prize winner.
39
would write The History of the Devil during this period, in 1957 and 1958, shortly after the
publication of Grande Sertão. The posthumously published collection Tutaméia (1967) by
Guimarães Rosa also shifted between the idea of estoria (story) versus historia (history) and
Palavra [Bird/Word] (1970) is even more heterogeneous, with an emphasis on language more
than narrative.
Even more important perhaps than their formal and stylistic innovations was Guimarães
Rosa’s approach to translation.117 Guimarães Rosa was intimately involved with the
commissioning of translators, utilizing his diplomatic skills (he was in the Brazilian diplomatic
service in Germany during the war) to manage the translations, assist publishers in
commissioning translators, and corresponding with each of his major translators, often fostering
a sense of urgency and competition.118 Piers Armstrong writes that Grande Sertão: Veredas was
a “virtually unique” case in world literature in its “pedigree of translators” and the richness of
dialogue between writer and translator.119 Guimarães Rosa’s approach to translation was
aesthetic and philosophical—but also pragmatic. Translation was crucial to a Latin American
author attempting to enter the global conversation and Guimarães Rosa developed a logistic
strategy for dissemination outside Brazil with each translation conceived in terms of his
“apprehension of the cultural more than the linguistic possibilities of the target community”: the
English translation would address the international market while the philosophically rich German
117
Piers Armstrong, “Guimarães Rosa in Translation: scrittore, editore, traduttore, traditore,”
Luso-Brazilian Review 38, no. 1 (Summer, 2001): 63.
118
Ibid., 69.
119
Ibid., 66.
40
version would provide a master model for other translations and the Italian one would provide a
“spiritual affinity” with Latinate cultures.120
Guimarães Rosa’s work was already considered exotic within Brazil because he was
translating languages and modes of living from his native region to other Brazilian readers. But if
“universals” might be considered fundamental to the language of modernism, Armstrong shifts
to the language of the postmodern, using words such as “appropriation” and “pastiche” to
address how Guimarães Rosa arrived at an original narrative voice that would make him distinct
from his European predecessors. As in the case of Flusser, language was central to his concepts
of meaning and truth, two ideas that would be increasingly challenged in the sixties and
seventies. What he suggests is that
the writer is attempting to discern a truth, one which is similarly available to the
translator, i.e., that the translator could actually achieve a better version of the
truth (here the pertinent theoretical perspective is Borges’s paradoxical notion of
the unfaithfulness of the original to the translation; however, it is important to
grasp that the genuinely superstitious Guimarães Rosa stressed metaphysical truth
and did not like Borges engage in the notion of many possible substitutions for
reality).121
For his part, Flusser removed the middle figure, becoming the translator himself. Writers
engaged in concrete poetry, which dominated São Paulo in the sixties and which Flusser
mentions periodically in his writing, were also confronted with these difficulties; the issue was
120
Ibid., 70.
121
Ibid., 66. Italics mine. By comparison, Walter Benjamin argued that translation was a form
rather than a process and that one had to look at the original text to see if it was in fact
“translatable.” Benjamin’s emphasis on the “original” and the “translated” text, or “copy,” is also
notable in light of his writing on photography and reproducibility. Rather than meaning being
created in translation, Benjamin argued, “the task of the translator consists in finding the
particular intention toward the target language which produces in that language the echo of the
original.” Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” (1921), Walter Benjamin: Selected
Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA
and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 258.
41
debated by Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos, who coined the term
“transcreation” to describe what happens to poetry in translation.122 But Flusser was already
sensitive to issues of language and of Brazil’s cultural “remoteness,” as his letter to Columbia
University in 1951 shows. What Guimarães Rosa provided in the fifties perhaps was a cogent
model of how language was not just the vehicle for meaning, but how translation itself—like
Heidegger’s “way,” which will be discussed later in this dissertation—becomes the creator of
meaning.
The Philosophical Self-Portrait: Vicente Ferreira da Silva and Philosophy in Brazil
The other “giant” Flusser mentions in the essay “In Search of Meaning: Philosophical
Self-Portrait” is Vicente Ferreira da Silva, a philosopher credited with bringing Heidegger to
Brazil, but with whom Flusser often clashed around his negative views of nature and
technology.123 Vicente’s wife, Dora Ferreira da Silva, was a poet who started the magazines
122
Christopher Larkosh, “Flusser on Translation,” Flusser Studies 2 (2006), accessed June 3,
2014,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/flussertranslation02.pdf. Also see Susanne Klengel, “Brasilien denken. Flusser als Vermittler,
Phänomenologie, Anthropophage – eine epistemologische Gratwanderung,” Klengel and Siever,
Das Dritte Ufer, 111-129. Some texts she cites are Max Bense’s “Konkrete Poesie” in Sprache
im technischen Zeitalter 15, a special edition of Text-theorie und Konkrete Dichtung (1965),
1236-1244 and Haroldo de Campos’s “Versuchsbuch. Galaxien,” translated by Flusser and
Anatol Rosenfeld in the series rot (red) (1965), 25.
123
Ströhl, editor’s note, Writings, 207. Flusser also described Ferreira da Silva as having an
“apocalyptic vision of technology” in Writings, 204. For an essay on the extreme views of
Brazilian landscape elicited by writers including Euclides da Cunha, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and
Max Bense, as well as Flusser, see Dirk-Michael Hennrich’s “Hyperbolische
Tropenlandschaften. Brasilienansichten von Simão de Vasconcelos bis Vilém Flusser
(Hyperbolical Tropical Landscapes: Views of Brazil from Simão de Vasconcelos to Vilém
Flusser)” in Flusser Studies 14 (2012). Accessed June 1, 2014,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/hennrichhyperbolische-tropenlandschaft.pdf.
42
Dialogue in 1950 and Cavalo Azul in the late sixties. (The sixth issue of Cavalo Azul was
actually devoted to Heidegger and Flusser contributed the essay “The Soul Sold.”)124 From the
vantage of the late sixties, Flusser writes: “To think that Vicente Ferreira da Silva lived in my
next neighborhood during the terrible war period and during the years of anxiety that followed it,
and that I did not meet him is a nightmare. Had I known Vicente in 1940, my way would have
been different. And had he known me, this I believe with all my heart, he, and with him Brazilian
culture, would have changed at least a little.”125
Flusser refers here presumably to some of Ferreira da Silva’s ideas, like the Brazilian’s
rejection of nature in his philosophy. But while Ferreira da Silva is often cited for introducing
Heidegger to Brazil, it is important to consider him within the greater scope of Latin American
philosophy.126 Broadly speaking, twentieth century Latin American philosophy grew out of a
tradition that had roots in Mesoamerican and Pre-Columbian culture, including the Aztec,
Mayan, and Incan peoples, mixed with earlier ideologies and reactions against colonialism,
slavery, and independence. On the one hand, despite the “utter silence about Latin American
philosophy and philosophers” in world-historical narratives, various strains of European thought
actually reached South America before they reached North America, due to the forced exile of
124
Vilém Flusser, “A Alma Vendida,” Cavalo Azul 6 (November 1970): 88-93. The essay
considers sources of German Romanticism. Flusser also translated Dora Ferreira da Silva’s
poems into German. See Dora Ferreira da Silva, Poemas da estrangeira (São Paulo: T.A.
Queiroz, 1995), Poesia reunida (Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 1999), and Sander, Sources, 236.
125
Flusser, Writings, 203.
126
Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, 19. Other sources describe
Ferreira da Silva as “one of the most important and enthusiastic followers of the existentialist
movement.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998), 512. Similarly,
in Situating Existentialism, ed. Jonathan Judaken and Robert Bernasconi (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2012), Ferreira da Silva is described as an existentialist, while Argentinian
Carlos Astrada and Peruvian Alberto Wagner de Reyna are described as Heideggerians.
43
European intellectuals during the 1930s and 1940s.127 It has also been argued that there can be no
such thing as Latin American philosophy because it only reflected the interests of colonial and
neocolonial empires.128 But the effects of colonialism and slavery on Brazilian philosophy were
often very specific. Writing in the early 1960s, Arthur W. Munk pointed out that Auguste
Comte’s nineteenth century positivism was strong in Brazil, whose flag actually bears the motto,
‘Order and Progress.’129 Writing nearly half a century later, Amós Nascimento suggests a more
sinister application. The abolition of slavery in 1888 led to the establishment of the Brazilian
Republic in 1889, without a civil war, but with no change in the situation of Afro-Brazilians,
who became the poor and migrated to cities. The positivistic influence in the military academy at
the turn of the century taught a brand of scientific syncretism which supported disciplines, such
as phrenology, eugenics, anthropometry, craniology, criminalism, and ethnology, and followed a
Darwinistic determinism in order to establish a hierarchy of the races and arrive at the synthesis
127
Eduardo Mendieta, ed., Latin American Philosophy: Currents, Issues, Debates (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), 1.
128
Mendieta, Latin American Philosophy, 2. Also see Jorge J.E. Gracia, Hispanic/Latino
Identity: A Philosophical Perspective (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999) and Amós Nascimento,
“Colonialism, Modernism, and Postmodernism in Brazil” in Mendieta, Latin American
Philosophy, 124-49. Nascimento is succinct: “Brazil was a Portuguese colony starting in 1500,
declared its independence from Portugal in 1822 to become the first and only monarchy in the
Americas, and adopted the status of a republic through a coup d’état in 1889. Over this period,
American Natives were slaughtered (1500-50), Africans were brought as slaves (circa 15501850), and the poor and undesirables were expelled from Europe to become colonists in an
immigration wave that lasted until the beginning of the twentieth century (broadly, 1800-1900).
Therefore, four out of the last five centuries of history have been marked by violent forms or
aspects of colonialism such as genocide, slavery, and expatriation. This confirms that it is
necessary to amplify our understanding of colonialism, instead of limiting it to a given
crystallized period” (129-130). For a detailed study on the ideology of colonialism in Brazil, he
suggests Nelson Werneck Sodré’s A Ideologia do Colonialismo (Rio de Janeiro: Vozes, 1984).
129
Arthur W. Munk, “The Spirit of Latin American Philosophy,” Ethics 72, no. 3 (April, 1962),
197.
44
of “racial perfectibility.” Philosophy and literature became instruments of this synthesis, aimed at
purifying the blood of the nation and searching for an “ideal Brazilian.”130
Twentieth-century Brazilian philosophy was marked by a backlash against positivism and
a revalorization of Thomas Aquinas in Catholic universities, as well as the influence of
philosophers exiled from Spain after the fall of the Spanish Republic and the writings of José
Ortega y Gasset. The question of whether Latin Americans were merely adopting European ideas
or forging their own forms led to a process of critical self-examination, which continues to be
debated.131 However, what many of these Latin American thinkers shared with Flusser was the
reality of migration and dislocation. Similarly, the question always arises: How could Flusser,
whose family had perished in the holocaust, embrace an avowed Nazi like Heidegger? As Ofelia
Schutte points out, “Heidegger, despite his Nazi leanings, offered a strong critique of technology
and European modernity, thereby distancing himself from certain core elements of the
Eurocentrist historical project.”132 And there were Latin American thinkers such as Paulo Freire
who took European philosophy and employed it to radical and revolutionary ends.133 Flusser’s
130
Nascimento, “Colonialism, Modernism, and Postmodernism in Brazil,” 135.
131
Enrique Dussel, “Philosophy in Latin America in the Twentieth Century: Problems and
Currents,” in Latin American Philosophy, 11-53; Amy Oliver, “Philosophy in Latin America,”
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. Craig (London: Routledge, 1998), accessed June
29, 2013, http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/ZA2009.
132
Ofelia Schutte, “Continental Philosophy and Postcolonial Subjects” in Latin American
Philosophy, 151-53.
133
“In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire explains the methodology and philosophy of his new
teaching strategy. He had read Fanon, along with the Western Continental canon of the sixties
(when his book was first published)—Marx, Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, Althusser, Buber. A
Christian, Freire had also read the New Testament, along with the work of Marxists, including
Third World Marxists, and developed a Christian interpretation integrating some of the keenest
insights of his sources. He intended his book to serve as a handbook for revolutionary leadership.
Devoted to empowering the people as they became engaged in a process of popular education, it
was received throughout the developing world as a tool of liberation. In 1964, Freire was
45
allies were much less radical, however. In Vicente Ferreira da Silva, Flusser saw “the same
Wittgenstein and the same Heidegger, the same Rilke and the same Kafka, the same thirst and
the same search. Yet everything different.” It was European ideas, “seen now not from within,
which was my vision, but from outside: his vision.”134 Ferreira da Silva was radical in one sense,
though: he was rebelling from the scholasticism of academic Brazilian philosophy and working
in the analytical vein, adopting existentialism, as well as the phenomenology introduced to Brazil
by another Flusser associate, Miguel Reale. And he was Flusser’s entry into Brazilian intellectual
circles.
Two other figures need to be mentioned in conjunction with Flusser’s entry into Brazilian
philosophy: Miguel Reale, a co-founder of the quarterly Revista Brasileira Filosofia (1951) and
the Instituto Brasileiro de Filosofia (IBF) where Flusser would deliver his first lectures in
linguistic philosophy in 1960; and Milton Vargas, an electrical engineer and another member of
the Institute.135 In an oft-cited passage from Bodenlos, Vargas remembered the first time he met
Flusser, at da Silva’s house:
Vicente, who had introduced Heidegger’s philosophy to Brazil, his wife Dora
who was already a quite well-known poet, and I were deeply in conversation
when someone knocked at the door. It was a peculiar young man, bald already
back then, with a sharp nose and impressive glasses. He was completely unknown
to us. Confidently, he introduced himself and said that he was looking for people
imprisoned by the Brazilian authorities on account of his freedom-oriented thinking, his
solidarity with humble folk, and his subversion of authoritarian thinking.” Schutte, “Continental
Philosophy and Postcolonial Subjects,” 158.
134
Flusser, Writings, 203.
135
In the correspondence in the Flusser Archive, Flusser addresses Reale formally, while his
letters to Vargas, which fill nearly nine binders, generally begins, “Meu caro Milton” [My dear
Milton]. Also see Milton Vargas, “Vilém Flusser in Brasilien,” ed. Volker Rapsch, Über Flusser:
Die Fest-Schrift zum 70. von Vilém Flusser (Düsseldorf: Bollman, 1990), 15-22.
46
with whom he could exchange ideas. He added that São Paulo was a desert devoid
of people and ideas.136
Through this circle, in 1959 Flusser started lecturing on the “Philosophy and Evolution of
Science” at Universidade de São Paulo (USP) and was invited to participate in the circle of
Instituto Brasileiro de Filosofia (IBF) [Brazilian Institute of Philosophy], in 1962. In 1961 he
began publishing in the newspapers Estado de São Paulo and Folha de São Paulo—and later, in
1966, in the German newspapers Merkur and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung—and began
honing his short-essay form. The breadth of the subject matter in the Estado de São Paulo essays
is impressive, ranging from language and translation to nature, Judaism, art, migration, and
philosophy and ideas that would be developed in longer texts, like the Devil, programs, doubt,
and the essay form itself.137 Additionally, in 1962 Flusser began giving philosophical lectures
every Wednesday afternoon in his home for the fellow students of his daughter, Dinah, who
helped publish his text, “Prague, City of Kafka” in the literary supplement of O Estado de São
Paulo.138 In 1963 he was hired to lecture in Communication Theories at the University of São
Paulo, delivering a series of lectures titled “Philosophy of Language.” This is not to say that in
the early sixties Flusser was wholly committed to Brazil. In 1962 Flusser wrote to Professor
Lionel Ruby of the American Philosophical Association that Brazil was at once “stimulating and
136
Quoted in Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, 19.
137
The most comprehensive list of O Estado essays can be found in Sander, Sources, 154-157.
Many of the essays were later published in Vilém Flusser, Da Religiosidade (São Paulo:
Conselho Estadual de Cultura, 1967), Lob der Oberflächlichkeit. Für eine Phänomenologie der
Medien, eds. Stefan Bollmann and Edith Flusser (Bensheim and Düsseldorf: Bollmann, 1993),
Medienkultur, ed. Stefan Bollmann (Frankfurt, Germany: Fischer, 1997), and Ficções Filosóficas
(São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1998).
138
See the Flusser Archive biography, accessed June 15, 2013, http://flusserarchive.org/aboutflusser/biography.
47
frustrating” because it was divided into two rival camps, the Marxist and the Catholic.139
Moreover, he was still seeking a job, despite the fact that American institutions are “extremely
degree conscious” and “I hold no degree, having left my home, Prague, when it was occupied by
the Nazis, at the age of twenty.”140 In December 1962 he received a predictable reply: it would
be “extremely difficult” to obtain a teaching position without a degree. By this time, however,
Flusser had already begun building a career based on a body of work written in Portuguese and
published in Brazil.
Language and Reality
Essays like “The Portuguese Language” (1960) and “Essay for the Study of the
Ontological Meaning of Language” (1962), both published in Revista Brasileira de Filosofia,
pick up threads from Flusser’s earlier writing, but also argue for mythology as the highest form
of language.141 Flusser’s first book, Language and Reality was published in 1963.142 Just over
two hundred pages, the text is divided into three major sections: “On language and reality”; “On
Language-Shaped Reality”; and “On Language-Created Reality.” As these headings would
139
Letter from Flusser to Lionel Ruby, November 2, 1962, quoted in Anke Finger,
“Introduction,” Freedom of the Migrant, vii.
140
Ibid., xvii-xviii.
141
Vilém Flusser, “Da língua portuguesa,” Revista Brasileira de Filosofia 10, no. 40 (1960):
560–566 and “Ensai o para um estudo do significa do ontologic o da língua,” Revista Brasileira
de Filosofia 12, no. 45 (1962): 69–90. Also see António Bráz Teixeira, “Religião, Sagrado e
Mito em Vilém Flusser,” Flusser Studies 11 (2011), accessed February 2, 2014,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/braz-teixeirao-sagrado.pdf.
142
Vilém Flusser, Língua e Realidade (São Paulo: Editôra Herder, 1963).
48
suggest, the book posits the idea that everything is linguistic: knowledge, truth, and reality.143
Language gives form to reality and creates reality, but since there are different languages, and
their structures vary, the realities created by them are different.144
If there seem to be overlaps with contemporary French philosophy here—with
structuralism, but also with Barthes’ Mythologies and other texts from the period—Michael
Hanke argues that Flusser’s assertion of an ontological structure to language in Language and
Reality leads to an ontology translated as reality, but one that is predicated on “German
philosophy tied to the German language (i.e., Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche).”145 Hanke points to
the list of European thinkers that Flusser mentions at the back of Language and Reality: the
Danish linguist Otto Jespersen; Fritz Mauthner’s Contributions to a Critique of Language (190102); Max Black’s Language and Philosophy (1949); Nicolai Hartmann’s In the Structure of the
Real World (1940) and The Foundation of Ontology (1935); Edmund Husserl’s Logical
Investigations (1900-01); Ernst Cassirer’s three volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923,
143
For a concise abstract of Language and Reality, see Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém
Flusser: An Introduction, xx.
144
Michael Hanke points out that “the title of Língua e Realidade, reprinted in Brazil in 2004,
contains a translation problem because the Brazilian Portuguese does not distinguish between
‘reality’ (Realität) and ‘actuality’ or ‘truth’ (Wirklichkeit) so that for such a consideration there is
already a reality (Realität) and a different reality (Wirklichkeit) that is not linguistically
formulated (realidade applies to both). Flusser himself translated the title with Sprache und
Wirklichkeit (1999: 144) [the non-linguistically formulated “reality”], a detail that is meaningful
in the context of his ontological approach.” [“Bereits der Titel von Língua e Realidade, 2004 in
Brasilien neu aufgelegt, enthält ein Übersetzungsproblem, denn das brasilianische Portugiesisch
unterscheidet nicht zwischen „Realität“ und „Wirklichkeit“, so daß eine Überlegung derart, es
gebe eine Realität und verschiedene Wirklichkeiten schon sprachlich nicht formulierbar wäre (für
beides gilt realidade). Flusser selbst übersetzt den Titel mit Sprache und Wirklichkeit (1999:
144), ein Detail, das im Kontext seines ontologischen Ansatzes bedeutsam wird.”] Hanke,
“Vilém Flussers Sprache und Wirklichkeit von 1963 im Kontext seiner Medienphilosophie,”
Flusser Studies 2 (2006): 5, accessed June 3, 2014,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/pag/02/sprache-wirklichkeit02.pdf.
145
Hanke, “Vilém Flussers Sprache und Wirklichkeit,” 9.
49
1925, 1929); Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead’s three volume Principia Mathematica
(1910, 1912, 1913); Wilhelm Dilthey’s The Formation of the Historical World in the Human
Sciences (1910); and Heidegger’s Off the Beaten Track (1935-36).146 Nonetheless, Europe was
seen by many thinkers to be a civilization in decline after fascism and a series of devastating
wars, and Brazil represented, in Hanke’s words, a “kind of laboratory for Flusser's media
philosophy.”147
But where is the media? Following the introduction, the next section in Language and
Reality begins:
Our age is characterized by a mania for statistics. Tables, curves and scores invade the
scientific and para-scientific literature, proof that we are a generation of accountants
engaged in taking an inventory of the world. Data is being compiled and compared, to be
computed. We are a generation of accountants who are about to be transformed into a line
of computers. The goal seems to be an Electronic Superbrain, devouring "data" and
excreting statistics. We lack, however, a basic statistics: what elements make up the sum
of the "data"?148
Rather than an Old World philosopher, Flusser sounds here like a new media theorist.
Using the tools of European philosophy, however, Flusser treats information as language. The
book argues that we are confronted with chaos in the form of “raw data” (dados brutos), and that
in order to create meaning and order, we must structure this data—which is where language
comes in. Language is what we inherited from earlier generations and what connects us;
146
Flusser, Língua e realidade (2004), 205-209; cited in Hanke, “Vilém Flussers Sprache und
Wirklichkeit,” 5-6.
147
Hanke, “Vilém Flussers Sprache und Wirklichkeit,” 2.
148
“A nossa época é caracterizada pela mania de estatísticas. Tabelas, curvas e contagens
invadem a literatura científica e paracientífica como prova de sermos uma geração de contadores
empenhados em levantar um inventário do mundo. Estão sendo compilados e comparados
‘dados’ para derem computados. Somos uma geraçaõ de contadores que está em vias de
transformar-se em uma linha de computadores. A meta parece ser um supercérebro electrônico
que devora ‘dados’ e excreta estatísticas. Falta porém uma estatística básica: quais os elementos
que perfazem a soma dos ‘dados?’” Flusser, Língua e realidade, 39. Translation mine.
50
conversation (conversaçaõ) is the essence of language and communication—something that will
be increasingly stressed in his later writings, particularly formulated as Martin Buber’s
“dialogic” thinking—and the structure of language, articulated through systems like philosophy,
religion, science, and art are what create “reality.” Within this, however, are various forms and
uses of language: prayer and mathematics, which foregrounds abstract and symbolic structures.
As Hanke points out, Flusser doesn’t explicitly examine new media in Language and
Reality, or in a subsequent text, Philosophy of Language (1966).149 And Language and Reality
was not warmly embraced in all quarters.150 But it contains the seeds of Flusser’s media theory in
which language was the entry point, even if Flusser himself later rejected the term “media
philosopher” and stressed that during this period, from 1961 to 1965, he taught philosophy of
science and was more interested in communication structures like art.151 (His first academic
lecturing in Brazil was on the “Philosophy and Evolution of Science” in 1959 at the
Universidade de São Paulo [USP] in 1959.) Language and Reality would also help establish
Flusser professionally: in 1964, he was appointed Professor of Communication Theories in the
Faculty for Communication and Humanities of Fundação A.A. Penteado (FAAP) in São Paulo, a
position he would hold until 1970. The same year, 1964, he became co-editor of the Revista
Brasileira de Filosofia.
149
Vilém Fusser, Filosofia da Linguagem (São Paulo: Instituto Tecnologica Aeronautico, 1966).
150
Hanke includes a survey of the book’s reception, with critics attacking it as “linguistic
solipsism” (Anatol Rosenfeld) or “wrong from beginning to end” (Oswaldo Marques, 1968), but
occasionally praising its poetic language and “ludic philosophy.” Hanke, “Vilém Flussers
Sprache und Wirklichkeit,” 12-16.
151
Ibid., 18-19. Hanke cites a 1988 interview with Marion Picker on July 17, 1988 in Cologne.
By the time of that interview Flusser had been an advisor to the São Paulo Biennial and was
writing for Artforum, so his ties with the art world were significant and fertile.
51
The History of the Devil, “On Doubt,” and Of Religiosity
In the introduction to his recent English translation of The History of the Devil, Rodrigo
Maltez Novaes writes that, when Flusser left Prague in March 1939, he took two books with him:
a small Jewish prayer book his mother gave him at the last minute and a copy of Goethe’s
Faust.152 The latter was a prime inspiration for Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão and Flusser
would write the first version of The History of the Devil, in German, in 1958, shortly after
reading Grande Sertão.153 Seven years later, in 1965, he translated Die Geschichte des Teufels
into Portuguese and published it as his second book, A História da Diabo. At first glance, the
book seems like a quirky item from his early career. Longer than most of his other books, the
writing is generally not as sharp or succinct and the seemingly religious subject matter seems
uncharacteristic of Flusser. And yet, the book includes the kernels of many ideas that would
occupy him throughout his career: language, writing, history, technology, science (physics and
biology in particular), evolution, art, nationalism, magic, and the differences between Eastern
and Western thought. Flusser mentions his two “most important influences” in the book—Kafka
and Rilke—as well as his Brazilian friends, Guimarães Rosa and Vicente Ferreira da Silva. The
greatest conversation, however, is with the Western European philosophical tradition: Descartes
and Kant, but more specifically Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and philosophy’s role in a world
dramatically altered by science and technology.
152
Vilém Flusser, The History of the Devil, trans. Rodrigo Maltz Novaes (Minneapolis:
Univocal, 2014). Originally published as A História da Diabo (São Paulo: Editora Martins,
1965).
153
The German version was published posthumously as Die Geschichte des Teufels (Göttingen,
Germany: European Photography, 1996).
52
Maltez Novaes argues that The History of the Devil essentially replicates Language and
Reality’s argument for language as the primary vehicle for the creative human Will, but this time
written as an “allegorical philosophy, or philosophical fiction.”154 The book is organized into
chapters named after the Seven Deadly Sins: Lust, Wrath, Gluttony, Envy and Greed, Pride, and
“Sloth and the Sadness of the Heart.” The internal organization of these sections once again
copies Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: a series of numbered propositions, although the layout is more
visual rather than structural.155 What becomes immediately clear, however, is that Flusser’s text
is a subversion. His Devil is a “glorious prince”156 whose “positive aspects” include his inventing
art, science, and philosophy. The Deadly Sins serve as stepping stones, a teleology served up in
“layers” that builds an argument about history and the contemporary moment. In the introduction
Flusser writes, “Pride is self-awareness. Greed is economy. Lust is instinct (or the affirmation of
life). Gluttony is the improvement of the standard of living. Envy is the struggle for social justice
and political freedom. Wrath is the refusal to accept the limitations imposed upon the human
Will; therefore, it is dignity. Sadness or sloth is the stage reached by calm philosophical
meditation.”157 In the text then, Pride expresses itself in the arts; Greed in the development of
economies; Lust as central to evolution, but also producing nationalism, which is “lust elevated
to the level of social reality” (remembering, of course, that Flusser would write a series of essays
154
Rodrigo Maltez Novaes, “Introduction,” The History of the Devil, xvii.
155
See Flusser’s letter from February 8, 1983 to Felix Philipp Ingold, in German, reprinted in
Flusser Studies 11 (2011). The letter outlines and explains the content of The History of the
Devil and connects it to Flusser’s writing on communicology in the seventies. Accessed June 3,
2014, http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/flusserhistoria-do-diabo.pdf.
156
Flusser, The History of the Devil, 2.
157
Ibid., 6.
53
later published as Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism);158 Gluttony drives the
development of technology, instruments and programs; Envy promotes activism on behalf of
social and political justice; Wrath gives humans dignity and leads us into science; while Sloth (or
sadness) is the highest stage, leading to philosophy.
Science is a primary concern. Nuclear physics is described as “a sin”159 and biology “in
crisis,”160 foreshadowing books like Vampyroteuthis infernalis in which animals assume similar
roles to the ones occupied here by God and the Devil. Flusser’s argument that science has turned
nature into technology also prefigures essays he would write for the “Curie’s Children” column
in Artforum, which speculated on biotechnology.161 The word “magic” also appears, which he
would brandish provocatively in his technical image writings. Maltez Novaes writes, “some say
Flusser allegedly felt this book had magical qualities and for this reason he would not allow it in
his house,” although “this myth is difficult to prove or disprove.”162 In the introduction, Flusser
describes his construction of the Seven Deadly Sins as a “magical circle of sins,”163 and in the
chapter on Wrath he describes how, in previous centuries, magic opened the door to nature and
science. What changed was the attitude toward the supernatural and causality: “magic formulas”
have been supplanted by “pure mathematical formulas.”164 In a particularly lyrical passage he
158
Ibid., 72.
159
Ibid., 22.
160
Ibid., 44.
161
Ibid., 118.
162
Maltez Novaes, “Introduction,” The History of the Devil, xx.
163
Flusser, The History of the Devil, 8.
164
Ibid., 103.
54
describes “today’s situation” in which the “lustful mass of the sensible world” bubbles
purposelessly with the “remains of the world of magic” hovering over it and the “rigid crystals”
of mathematical symbols underneath. And yet, an inversion is taking place in which the “crystals
are beginning to evaporate into magical fog.”165 What Flusser is describing in a sense is the
postmodern condition—the rigorous critique of Western rationality and scientific systems—
which wouldn’t be labeled as such for at least another decade. But he is also predicting his own
use of the term in texts like Towards a Philosophy of Photography, where he honed his
definition of “magic” to the succinct “existence in a world of eternal return”—in contrast to
linear history and causal phenomenon.166 Similarly, he would later distinguish between
prehistoric magic, which dealt with myths, and post-historical magic, which deals with programs.
In thinking about language, which was still his primary concern rather than media theory
or technical images, Flusser mentions concrete poetry and music as language forms and
considers mathematics as a “meta-language,” predicting his later stance in Does Writing Have a
Future?: that writing would disappear into binary code and images. But the biggest—and most
personal—argument is with philosophy. Kant and Descartes serve as backdrops; Flusser
mentions them several times, and Descartes would become the foil for his next work, On Doubt.
But the main interlocutors are figures like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who proclaimed God
dead at the end of the previous century, a pronouncement that extended into Existentialism,
represented by thinkers like Sartre and Camus. Near the end of the book, Flusser argues that
165
Ibid., 103-104.
166
Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Vilém Flusser (Göttingen:
European Photography, 1984), 60. Flusser also quotes Nietzsche in On Doubt, describing
Western philosophy as the “eternal return of the same.” See Vilém Flusser, On Doubt, trans.
Rodrigo Maltez Novaes (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014), 67.
55
neither God nor the Devil have “disappeared.”167 Instead, these “twin brothers” might be
considered alongside Eastern philosophy and particularly Buddhist teachings (or what Flusser
loosely calls “Yoga”).168 However, there is the concern of dissolving into nothingness when, in
the current “systematic revaluation of all values” we achieve the “enlightenment of Samadhi.”
The mind becomes emancipated, free of all illusion, until its only support is “the Devil’s trident”
and “the paradise of disciplined enlightenment is the rotating skewer, upon which the mind
spins.”169 What is the point of philosophy under these conditions? “We must not philosophize
with thirst for knowledge,” Flusser writes, “or with thirst for enlightenment … We must do it in
resignation.”170 Philosophy should be practiced as a game (prefiguring his interest in game
theory) and with irony, one of his primary rhetorical weapons.171 Philosophy becomes a “feast of
annihilation,” but its “rigor is authentic,”172 providing a path which preserves the “last vestiges of
hope.”173
167
Flusser, The History of the Devil, 215.
168
Ibid., 214.
169
Ibid., 180.
170
Ibid., 202.
171
Ibid., 203-204.
172
Ibid., 204.
173
Ibid., 217. The reception of The History of the Devil has been described in contrasting ways.
In the essay “In Search of Meaning (Philosophical Self-portrait)” (1969), Flusser writes, “I
rewrote A historia do diabo in Portuguese to reply to Guimarães Rosa and Vicente Ferreira da
Silva. It was published by Livraria Martins Editora and received without echo.” Flusser,
Writings, 204. Other sources argue that The History of the Devil was “amply reviewed in Brazil.”
Anke Finger, “Introduction,” Flusser Studies 07 (2008): 4. One of the few English accounts is by
Laurence Rickels, who compares Flusser’s text to Freud’s musings on the devil. Rickel calls The
History of the Devil Flusser’s best work “by far,” but “completely out of context with his
condensed all-out effort to be recognized many years later” and the only work by Flusser “that
56
Around the same time, Flusser wrote On Doubt, which picks up many threads from The
History of the Devil.174 However, where Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were touchstones for The
History of the Devil, Kant and Descartes are foils in On Doubt, which posits a “Critique of Pure
Doubt” in contrast to Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” and a challenge to Descartes’ cogito ergo
sum expressed in Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations (1641).175 The essay (which
mirrors the book version) begins: “Doubt is polyvalent. It means the end of a certainty … that is,
inverted certainty. In moderate doses it stimulates thought. In excessive doses it stops the
intellect. As an intellectual experience, it is one of the purest pleasures. As a moral experience, it
is torture … Doubt is a method that seeks to create inauthentic certainties through the destruction
of genuine certainties.”176 Clearly, here one can see Flusser’s alignment with other postmodern
thinkers (Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida) bent on overturning “natural” order and Enlightenment
seeks a fit with Freud” (as if psychoanalysis were one of Flusser’s primary concerns). See
Laurence Rickels, “The Sound of Satan,” in The Dreams of Interpretation: A Century Down the
Road, eds. Catherine Liu, John Mowitt, Thomas Pepper and Jakki Spicer (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 86. Given Rickels’ cynicism, one wonders if he was
pressured to address Flusser, since Rickels’ essay appears in a book published by the press that
has published many English translations of Flusser.
174
As with many Flusser’s texts, there are several versions of On Doubt. The essay version was
first published in the journal of the Institute for Technology and Aeronautics (Instituto de
Tecnologia e Aeronautica) as “Da Dúvida,” ITA-Humanidades 1 (São José dos Campos, Brazil,
1965): 7-20. It later appeared in the essay collection Da Religiosidade (São Paulo: Conselho
Regional de Cultura, 1967), 39-52. An English translation appeared recently as “On Doubt,”
trans. Rodrigo Maltez Novaes, Philosophy of Photography 2, no. 2 (July 2012): 220-229. The
book-length version was first published posthumously as A dúvida (Rio de Janeiro: Relume
Dumará, 1999) and more recently as A dúvida (São Paulo: Annablume, 2011) and On Doubt,
trans. Rodrigo Maltez Novaes (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014). The first German version,
translated by Flusser’s widow, Edith, appeared as Vom Zwiefel (Göttingen, Germany: European
Photography, 2006). Also see Gustavo Bernardo, A dúvida de Flusser. Filosofia e Literatura
(São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2002).
175
Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, 29.
176
Vilém Flusser, “On Doubt,” Philosophy of Photography (July 2012): 220.
57
reasoning. According to Flusser, the last step in the Cartesian method was to “doubt doubt.”177
However, this could turn into a nihilistic situation in which “doubt of doubt is the intellect’s
suicide”178—an unbearable existential situation, which produces meaningless and perhaps the
end of philosophy.
Positing On Doubt as a “modest search” within philosophy for “a new sense of
reality,”179 Flusser then sets out to trace the rise of certainty and to undermine Kant and
Descartes. In doing so, he revives from The History of the Devil the interest in “Yoga” and
Eastern thought, which seeks through meditation to conquer the Will’s drive to intellectualize—
that is, to form thoughts.180 What Descartes ignores, Flusser argues, is that there is a Self that
thinks and this Self has other attributes: it wants.181 Moreover, in our contemporary moment—
and this is interesting vis a vis later Flusser—there are also thoughts “mechanically produced by
electronic instruments.”182 This is an aside, however. What Flusser wants to focus on here is the
process: how thoughts behave and how they are produced—calling up Husserlian
phenomenology, which would become important for him in the next decade with books like
177
Vilém Flusser, On Doubt, trans. Rodrigo Maltez Novaes (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014), 4.
Flusser’s critique of Descartes would persist to the end of his life and become extended to
phenomenon like fascism. See Vilém Flusser, “All Cartesian Through is Fascist (Toute Pensée
Est Fasciste),” Calades, No. 117 (February 1991), 34-35. Cited in Sander, Sources, 230.
178
Flusser, On Doubt, 7.
179
Ibid., 10.
180
According to Flusser, “Yoga,” as he describes it, is “worth a thousand treatises by Nietzsche
or Bergson. It illuminates, in a flash of immediate experience, that which Nietzsche and Bergson
intended (inter alia), perhaps without knowing it.” Flusser, On Doubt, 19.
181
Ibid., 23.
182
Ibid.
58
Gestures.183 Thoughts exist in a web—another term that would become crucial as he moved
deeper into technology and information theory.184 The web of thoughts is identical to doubt, and
since the intellect as Flusser defines it is “the field in which thoughts occur,” the “intellect is the
field of doubt.”185 Flusser then dips briefly back into his Language and Reality arguments, citing
thinkers like Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Dilthey before concluding that the new “science of pure
language” is a “discipline yet to be established.”186 Grammar creates subject and object and a
“search for meaning” (which would become the title of a 1969 autobiographical essay), which
moves from “partial meaning to partial meaning in search of an unreachable full meaning.”187
One of the ways we attempt to produce meaning is by the use of proper names. The proper name
is holy; it has been mythologized and become an act of poetry or “verse,” consolidated in the act
of conversation. (Moreover, “to reformulate Descartes: ‘I have proper names, therefore I
am.’”)188 But, of course, the Western conversation is one approaching exhaustion and nihilism.
183
Ibid., 25.
184
The web is defined as “a dynamic set of organizations of concepts that absconds reality in the
effort to ultimately reveal it: it is a search for reality that starts by abandoning it.” Flusser, On
Doubt, 28. Flusser would also mention communication in similar terms in the essay “Filosofia da
Línguagem,” which published in the journal of the Institute for Technology and Aeronautics. See
Vilém Flusser’s “Filosofia da Línguagem,” ITA-Humanidades 2 (São José dos Campos, Brazil,
1966): 133-210. For example: “The conversation is a fabric made out of sentences that are
connected by links called arguments. It is a flowing fabric, expanding constantly. At certain
points in the fabric (it would be better to call them moments) the threads of the arguments cross
… the conversation consists of these knots that are tied together by arguments.” Flusser,
“Filosofia da Línguagem,” quoted in Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser, 34.
185
Flusser, On Doubt, 28.
186
Ibid., 32.
187
Ibid., 48.
188
Ibid., 75.
59
We are “groundless,” Flusser writes, using a term that will become the title for his
autobiography, Bodenlos; naming “the thing” (here echoing Heidegger) is a dead end, since we
are at a moment when the proper name, the “seed of order,” signifies nothing but itself; Western
conversation has become a prayer that “prays about itself”:189 it has become small talk. The
proper name is the hedge against the “all-different”: chaos, or everything that lies outside it.
What we need, Flusser argues, is a revaluation of the intellect, a knowledge of our limitations,
and to treat Western conversation not as “magical instruments and institutions” designed to
conquer, but as an engaged art. What must be sacrificed (again, circling around to The History of
the Devil) is pride. But it is also a new approach to meaning: as translation, from one language to
another, but also “from one layer of meaning to another within the same language.”190
Although Flusser would not venture further into Eastern thought—objects,
phenomenology, and technical images would provide more fertile ground and a receptive
audience—what he identifies in On Doubt is prescient. Recognizing the “conquest” nature of
Western thought, for him located in proper names and the pride inherent in Kantian and
Cartesian thinking, he ends the book with this proclamation: “Let us continue the great adventure
that thought is, but let us sacrifice the proud madness of wishing to dominate the all-different
with our thought. Let us face the all-different by adoring it, that is, by being doubtful and
submissive. In other words, let us once again be thinking beings; let us once again be
humans.”191 To name merely one recent writer and text, Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman (2013),
Flusser’s identification of Western thought’s “pride” echoes Braidotti’s argument of how
189
Ibid., 82.
190
Ibid., 94.
191
Ibid., 100.
60
Humanism not only posited the human as the dominant subject on the planet, but also created a
Eurocentric paradigm in which “subjectivity is equated with consciousness, universal rationality,
and self-regulating ethical behavior, whereas Otherness is defined as its negative and specular
counterpart.”192 Difference—Flusser’s the “all-different”—is pejoratively associated in
Humanism, with “sexualized, racialized, and naturalized others, who are reduced to the less than
human status of disposable bodies.”193
In 1967, a collection of Flusser’s essays was published under the title Of Religiosity.194
Most of the essays had already been published either in the literary supplement of O Estado de
São Paulo or the journal of the Institute for Technology and Aeronautics (Instituto de Tecnologia
e Aeronautica) in São José dos Campos. These included “On Doubt,” two essays on Kafka,
appreciations of Guimarães Rosa and Vicente Ferreira da Silva, essays on concrete poetry, music
and painting, and the Portuguese language. Flusser was also moving closer to communications
theory, with religious “faith” now underpinned by mathematics and codified by algorithmic
programming and algorithmic language as a “last reality.”195 Flusser later identified his
friendship with Milton Vargas during this period as instrumental in driving his interest toward
communications.196 He wasn’t always comfortable, however: “I felt a stranger in the desert land
of formulas, of computations, and of the excessively reasonable. I felt admiration, but also a deep
divergence, for engineers in poetry such as Haroldo de Campos. I had lost myself. In order to
192
Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013), 15.
193
Ibid.
194
Vilém Flusser, Da religiosidade (São Paulo: Comissão Estadual de Cultura, 1967).
195
Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, 39.
196
Flusser, “In Search of Meaning,” Writings, 204.
61
find myself again, I wrote ‘Até a Terceira e quarta geração’ [Unto the third and fourth
generations], influenced by Foucault, but still and ever looking for a new way out into nonlanguage within the tissue of language.”197 Rainer Guldin points out that there is a distinct
overlap here between Flusser and Norbert Weiner’s 1964 book God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment
on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion, and that the German edition of
Weiner’s book was in Flusser’s library.198 But he was also being pulled toward game theory, as
well as communications and visual art. He writes in the “Present Phase” section of “In Search of
Meaning,” that the discovery of game theory was “like a rupture of dams. Suddenly, I saw a
whole new field of action extending before me: the field of critique as transcendence of games,
that is, critiquing as meta-language” offering a way for the “odd pieces of my previous phases”
to fall into a pattern that opened up to the future.199
Brazil and the 1964 Coup d’Etat
197
Flusser, Writings, 205. Regarding “Até a Terceira e quarta geração,” Andreas Ströhl writes
that the manuscript was given to Miguel Reale “for safe-keeping, because it was never published.
Flusser wrote the text in 1965 and revised it again in 1970 for a planned publication by Editoria
Universitária that never happened. Later on, in the 1980s, Stefan Bollmann scheduled a Germanlanguage publication as volume 12 of the Schriften. However, only the first five volumes were
published.” Ströhl, Writings, 208, footnote 10.
198
Rainer Guldin, “Golem, Roboter und andere Gebilde. Zu Vilém Flussers Apparatbegriff,”
Flusser Studies 9 (2009): 3, accessed June 3, 2014,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/guldingolem-roboter.pdf. The German edition was published as Norbert Weiner, Gott und Golem Inc.
(Düsseldorf/Wien: Econ Verlag, 1965). Also see Erick Felinto’s “Pensamento Poético e
Pensamento Calculante: o Dilema da Cibernética e do Humanismo em Vilém Flusser” [Poetic
thinking and calculatory thinking: the dilemma of cybernetics and humanism in Vilém Flusser],
Flusser Studies 15 (2013), accessed June 3, 2014,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/felintopensamento.pdf.
199
Flusser, Writings, 205.
62
What is not explicitly stated is what was happening in Brazil in the late sixties. At the end
of “In Search of Meaning” (1969), Flusser writes: “I publish, that is, I try to change the world in
which I find myself. I do it with many doubts and many reservations. At the same time, this
publishing is my only justification to the others and to myself. And it is my only hope of not
having lived in vain … By this, I have perhaps contributed, though certainly in a problematic
way, to my Brazilian surroundings.”200 Sentiments of “changing the world” might sound
appropriate to the sixties, but they also apply particularly to Brazil, which was subject to political
turmoil and, by the time Flusser wrote these lines, severe repression.
Flusser had arrived in Brazil when it was under the reign of Getúlio Vargas, who rose to
power after the Revolution of 1930, instigated by the worldwide crisis of 1929. The Revolution
of 1930 ended Brazil’s First Republic and created a new type of state in which industrialization
was promoted, urban workers were offered state protections, and the military was given a central
role.201 Vargas remained in power for fifteen years.202 He was reelected president by a popular
vote in 1950, which ended in 1954 when, on the verge of a second fall from power, Vargas
committed suicide. The succeeding five-year administration of Juscelino Kubitschek was marked
by the official motto “50 years in five,” in which accelerated development was the goal.203
Brasília, the federal capital developed by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, with the landscape
200
Ibid., 206-207.
201
Boris Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press,
1999), 196-97.
202
First as head of the provisional government, then as president, elected in 1934 by indirect vote
of the Constitutional Assembly, and after November 10, 1937, as a dictator of the Estado Novo
(New State), under which congressional representation disappeared. See Fausto, A Concise
History of Brazil, 216-17.
203
Ibid., 253.
63
architect Roberto Burle Marx, was built and an automotive industry was installed. Some of this
was reflected in Flusser’s writing, particularly on design and its role and function in society.204 In
the 1964 essay “The Factory,” the factories of the future would be places where “human beings
can learn how robots function so that these robots can then relieve human beings of the task of
turning nature into culture”; factories themselves would become “scientific laboratories, art
academies and libraries and collections of recordings.”205
While Flusser was writing of a techno-utopian future, however, Brazil was faltering. In
1961, the International Monetary Fund and Brazil’s European and U.S. creditors rescheduled its
debt and the U.S. offered more aid to make sure the largest country in Latin America didn’t fall
into Communism.206 Protest movements were on the rise,207 the result of instability caused by
rapid industrialization, urban growth, increased migration, and discontent among rural
populations.208 Guerrilla warfare became a concern within the military after Fidel Castro came to
power in Cuba. In this climate, the military in Brazil acquired a permanent, active role in
guaranteeing national security and development.209 In April 1964, the military took control and
204
Some of the primary writings are collected in Vilém Flusser, The Shape of Things: A
Philosophy of Design (London: Reaktion Books, 2009). Many others were published in
magazines and journals in the seventies and eighties.
205
Vilém Flusser, “The Factory,” The Shape of Things, 49.
206
Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil, 263.
207
See Leôncio Martins Rodrigues, “Sindicalismo e classe operária, 1930-1964,” in Boris
Fausto, ed., História geral 3, no. 10 (São Paulo: Difel, 1986), 509-55.
208
Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil, 264-65. Also see Edmar Bacha and Herbert S. Klein,
eds., Social Change in Brazil, 1945-1985: The Incomplete Transition (Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 1989) and Alfred Stepan, ed., Democratizing Brazil (Problems of
Transition and Consolidation) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
209
Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil, 270-71. Also see Thomas Skidmore, Politics in Brazil:
An Experiment in Democracy, 1930-1964 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1969) and The
64
began setting up an authoritarian regime.210 The notorious Institutional Acts or AIs (Atos
Institucionais) were instituted—the first of which sought out people “responsible for ‘crimes
against the state or its patrimony, as well as for crimes of a social or political nature, and for acts
of revolutionary war.’”211 Citizens retained the right of habeas corpus and the press was left
relatively untouched, but violent repression was carried out in the countryside, particularly in the
Northeast, and in the cities students who had been politically active were targeted.212
In “The Terrace” section of Bodenlos, Flusser’s autobiography, he describes how the
patio behind his house in São Paulo became a gathering place for students, artists, scientists,
friends, and “friends of friends”—a place to think about “new music, new art, new poetry, new
theater, and new perceptions of the world.”213 In the early days of the regime, in 1966, Flusser
traveled to Europe and North America as a “delegate for cultural cooperation,” lecturing at
Harvard, Yale, MIT, and several European universities and in 1967 he was appointed Professor
for Philosophy of Communication at the Escola Dramática and the Escola de Superiore de
Politics of Military Rule, 1964-85 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990); Alfred Stepan,
The Military in Politics: Changing Patterns in Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1971).
210
“It is true that the United States government supported the coup and knew about it
beforehand. It even dispatched a naval task force to support the revolutionary movement in the
event of a prolonged struggle. But that measure was not necessary, given the ease with which the
military came to power,” Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil, 277.
211
Ibid., 281.
212
Ibid. General Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco was elected president by an indirect vote
in Congress on April 15, 1964.
213
Flusser, Bodenlos, 210; quoted in Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An
Introduction, 21. The German version was published as “Die Terrasse” in Bodenlos: Eine
philosophiche Autobiographie (Düsseldorf/Bensheim: Bollmann, 1992), 207-214. Finger,
Guldin, and Bernardo call this section “The Patio.”
65
Cinema in São Paulo.214 He would not have been wrong in thinking a “renaissance” might erupt
in Brazil because, as other writers have noted, at the beginning the regime tolerated a leftist
subculture in the major urban centers—a festive Left (esquerda festiva) that “actively produced
and consumed a redemptive protest culture perceived as a vehicle for political resistance.”215
The most celebrated aspect of this was Tropicalismo, which started in São Paulo in
popular music and branched out to film, theater, the visual arts, and literature. Led by Caetano
Veloso and Gilberto Gil, two young composers from Bahia,216 the Tropicalista group fused
international and local music and retooled the concept of antropofagia outlined in Oswald de
Andrade’s modernist Cannibalist Manifesto (1928), which advocated for “devouring” the
cultural heritage of dominant nations and creating an anti-colonialist blueprint for Brazilian
cultural.217 Technology was celebrated—Veloso and Gil used electric instruments—and song
lyrics underscored the current historical contradictions: violence and poverty versus the national
mythology of Brazil as a tropical paradise.218 This idea of a “redemptive” culture was true in
intellectual circles, too. In a 1970 essay titled “Culture and Politics in Brazil,” the Viennese-born
Brazilian literary critic Roberto Schwarz wrote: “Despite the existence of a right-wing
dictatorship, the cultural hegemony of the left is virtually complete. This can be seen in the
214
Flusser Archive biography, accessed February 15, 2015, http://vilem-flusser.com.
215
Introduction to Christopher Dunn’s “Tropicalism and Brazilian Popular Music under Military
Rule,” The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics, eds. Robert M. Levine and John J. Crocitti
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 241-57.
216
The Tropicalist group also included Tom Zé, Gal Costa, Torquanto Neto, and José Carlos
Capinam, the group Os Mutantes, and composers Rogério Duprat and Júlio Medaglia. Dunn,
“Tropicalism and Brazilian Popular Music,” Dunn, “Tropicalism and Brazilian Popular Music,”
The Brazil Reader, 242.
217
Ibid., 242-43.
218
Ibid., 243.
66
bookshops of São Paulo and Rio, which are full of Marxist literature; in incredibly festive and
feverish theatrical premieres, threatened by the occasional police raid; in the activities of the
student movement or the declarations of progressive priests. In other words, at the very altars of
bourgeois culture, it is the left which dictates the tone.”219
Opposition to the military government began to assert itself, though. The death of Che
Guevara in Bolivia on October 9, 1967 transformed the Argentine revolutionary into a hero for
young people; in March 1968, demonstrations were set off by the murder of a student by the
Brazilian military police. In June 1968, the Protest March of the Hundred Thousand (Passeata
dos 100,000) included students, clergy, and middle class residents of Rio de Janeiro.220 Worker
strikes proliferated and armed groups influenced by guerrilla rebels in other countries began to
emerge.221 On December 13, 1968, AI-5 was passed, which closed congress and, unlike the
earlier acts, had no expiration date. Boris Fausto writes: “With AI-5, the military nucleus of
power became concentrated in the so-called information community, that is, among those people
in command of intelligence and repression … Censorship of the media was put into practice.
And torture became an integral part of the government’s methods.”222 Government targets
shifted to include middle- and upper-class citizens: “The more prominent the victim, the greater
219
Roberto Schwarz, “Culture and Politics in Brazil, 1964-69,” Misplaced Ideas: Essays on
Brazilian Culture, ed. John Gledson (New York: Verso, 1992), 126-27.
220
Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil, 287.
221
Ibid., 289. The traditional leftist organization, PCB (Partido Communista Brasileiro) was
against armed struggle, however.
222
Ibid., 290. “One of AI-5’s many tragic effects was that it strengthened the theses of groups
dedicated to armed struggle. The military government appeared incapable of giving in to social
pressure and of reforming itself. To the contrary, it began to act more and more like a brutal
dictatorship. Starting in 1969, armed encounters multiplied,” (ibid.).
67
the shock.”223 The government used microwave communication systems, computer-based
suspect lists, and tapped phones to create a huge security apparatus that watched over university
classrooms, union headquarters, seminaries, high schools, newspaper offices, churches, and
community organizations.224 Censorship affected at least one of the publications Flusser wrote
for: O Estado de São Paulo.225 After AI-5 was passed on December 1968, there was a general
crackdown on culture: most visibly, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso were arrested in their
apartments in São Paulo, held for fifty-seven days without explanation, and later exiled to
London.226 Schwarz wrote: “The right has taken on the inglorious task of cutting its head off: its
best singers and composers have been imprisoned and are now in exile, Brazilian directors are
now filming in Europe and Africa, university teachers and scientists are leaving, if not going to
jail.”227
The military regime countered by claiming that a vigorous industrial recovery was
underway, headed by the automotive, chemical, and electrical industries.228 General Motors,
223
Thomas Skidmore, The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil, 1964-85 (Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 1990), 129-30. Skidmore cites the case of Rubens de Paiva, a distinguished
geological engineer from a socially prominent Rio background who was kidnapped and killed.
224
Ibid., 131. Furthermore, as Skidmore writes, Brazil’s human rights abuses were well
documented in military archives. Later, the São Paulo archdiocese research team was able to use
this for the documentary “Brasil: Nunca Mais” and it seems likely access to these records was
facilitated by someone inside. “If so, that underlines again the role played by military justice
both during and after the repression,” (ibid., 133).
225
“Other prime targets for the censors were Opinião, a weekly of center-left views; Movimento,
a military leftist weekly; O Estado de São Paulo, the conservative São Paulo daily owned by the
pugnacious Mesquita family; O São Paulo, weekly organ of the archdiocese of São Paulo; and
the centrist Veja, Brazil’s leading weekly newsmagazine.” Ibid., 135.
226
Dunn, “Tropicalism and Brazilian Popular Music,” 246.
227
Schwarz, “Culture and Politics in Brazil,” 154.
228
Fautso, A Concise History of Brazil, 291.
68
Ford, and Chrysler had invested in Brazil. After 1964, media and communications underwent a
tectonic shift with more people owning televisions, due to extended personal credit. TV Globo
became the national network, promoting “Brazil – a Great Power.” The economic “miracle” that
bloomed from 1969 to 1973 was later explained by the easy availability of loans and foreign
investment. The negative impact of the “miracle” included a decreased minimum wage, greater
disparities of wealth, and a decline or abandonment of state-sponsored social programs; Brazil
became “notorious worldwide for its high industrial potential coupled with low standards of
health, education, and housing.”229 Flusser himself described this as a “black period:” “forced to
teach” while living in the network of a totalitarian apparatus.230 Worse, he noted that, “young
people vanished from sight on a daily basis. The fledgling embryo of a new culture, which, as I
had to comprehend now, was not at all viable, became dismembered. The scene had changed:
reality had broken through.”231 Schwarz too noted a distinct shift, with university purges,
censorship of books, and teachers resigning “en masse.”232 Others note the unsettling situation in
which military personnel were entering the university to teach.233 The Flusser Archive biography
229
Ibid., 293-94.
230
“Es war eine schwarze Periode für mich, denn ich sah mich gezwungen, zu lehren, was mir
nicht wahr schien. So wurde das Lehrersein für mich zwar eine noch dringendere Aufgabe als
früher, aber gleichzeitig eine Plage.” [“It was a black period for me because I was forced to teach
what seemed to me not to be true. So the teaching for me was an even more urgent task than
earlier, although simultaneously a plague.”] Flusser, Bodenlos, 212. My translation.
231
Ibid.; also quoted in Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, 21.
232
Schwarz, “Culture and Politics in Brazil,” 154-55.
233
Ibid., 155-56. In the introduction to Elizabeth Ginway’s essay “Literature Under
Dictatorship,” the editors write that “the military regime in Brazil had an impact on an entire
generation of writers because of its use of censorship and its protracted hold on power for over
twenty years (1964-85),” although “the years 1969 to 1974 are remembered as the darkest of the
dictatorship,” The Brazil Reader, 248.
69
describes his personal situation thusly: “Because of the more and more problematic political
situation in Brazil during the dictatorship it is getting harder for Flusser to lecture and to
publish.”234 In “Taking Up Residence in Homelessness,” an essay from the eighties, Flusser
describes the process of becoming and un-becoming a Brazilian:235
After 1964, it became clear to me that the only possible way to build a Brazilian
homeland was through the eventual victory of technocracy over populism.
Moreover, it became clear to me what this homeland would look like: a gigantic,
progressive apparatus that would be equal in every way to the closed-mindedness,
fanaticism, and patriotic prejudices of every European homeland. And yet, my
involvement in Brazil lasted until 1972, when I made the painful decision to give
it up and live in Provence, which is for me an anti-Brazil.236
234
Flusser Archive biography, accessed February 15, 2014, http://www.flusserstudies.net.
235
See Flusser, Writings, 91-103. The citation in Writings states that the essay was originally
titled “Wohnung beziehen in der Heimatlosigkeit: Heimat und Heimatlosigkeit—Wohnung und
Gewohnheit” and delivered as a lecture at the Second International Kornhaus-Seminar on the
topic “Home and Homelessness” in Weiler im Allgäu. It was written in 1984 or 1985 and first
plublished in Christa Dericum and Philipp Wambolt, eds., Heimat und Heimatlosigkeit (Berlin:
Karin Kramer, 1987), and republished in Vilém Flusser, Bodenlos, 220-21.
236
Flusser, Writings, 99.
70
Chapter Two: Leaving Brazil and Flusser’s Writing in the Seventies
Flusser in the Art World: Brazilian Artists and the São Paulo Biennial
Although Flusser’s permanent departure from Brazil did not occur until 1972, it was
facilitated in part by his involvement with artists and the art world. In The Deep Time of Media,
Siegfried Zielinski, current director of the Flusser Archive, writes that Flusser was important for
artists in the eighties who were working with new media and looking for a perspective different
from the reigning poststructuralist and Lacanian ones.237 But Flusser’s engagement with artists
goes back much further, to the sixties and an older generation. After World War II, the Brazilian
art world underwent a structural change with the opening of the Museu de Arte Moderna in São
Paulo (1948) and the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (1949),238 the establishment of
an art market, and the first São Paulo Biennale in 1951.239 As in North America, battles between
figurative and abstraction artists were instrumental in these shifts, and Flusser’s friendships
allied him with the latter camp.240 Particularly important within that camp were his affiliations
with Samson Flexor (1907-1971) and Mira Schendel (1919-1988). Like Flusser, both were
237
Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing
by Technical Means (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).
238
The Museu de Arte Contemporânea of the Universidade de São Paulo was founded in 1963,
based on gifts from the private collections of Ciccillo Matarazzo (founder of the São Paulo
Biennial) and Yolanda Penteado and it became one of the most important collections of
international contemporary art in Latin America, starting with Cubism. It also favored
experimental art and the work of young artists, and exhibitions were organized that traveled to
provincial capitals.
239
Leonor Amarante, As Bienais de São Paulo. 1951 a 1987 (São Paulo: Projeto, 1989).
240
Brazilian artists working in abstraction, many of whom were immigrants, were also
inspired by Max Bill’s 1941 visit to Brazil, the first two São Paulo Biennales, and the
support of the critic Mário Pedrosa.
71
Jewish refugees from Europe. Flexor, from a wealthy family in Moldova and educated in
Brussels and Paris, participated in the French Resistance in World War II before moving to
Brazil in 1948 and settling in São Paulo. In 1951 he opened Atelier-Abstração, a
workshop/exhibition space which showcased the work of contemporary Brazilian abstract
painters.241 Schendel was born in Zurich and raised Roman Catholic in Italy, but stripped of her
Italian citizenship in 1938 and forced to leave the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in
Milan, where she was studying philosophy. After spending the war in Bulgaria and Sarajevo, she
immigrated to Brazil in 1949, where she met Knut Schendel, a German bookseller, in 1953.242
Through him she met Flusser and became part of that intellectual circle.243
Schendel’s paintings from the early fifties resemble the work of Giorgio Morandi
somewhat. She also was associated with the Concrete movement, creating geometrically abstract
paintings reminiscent of Mondrian, but with a darker palette. By the early sixties, however, she
began making two-dimensional works in which letters, numbers, and symbols were arranged to
look like everything from ancient hieroglyphs to math equations and computer code. Schendel is
best known for three series: Monotypes (Monotipias) (1964-65), Little Nothings
241
Lesser known than Schendel, Flexor was the subject of a retrospective in 2007 at the
National Art Museum of Moldova in Chișinău.
242
Or thereabouts: “Between 1939 and 1944, Mira’s movements are uncertain, however it seems
that probably in 1939 she heeded her mother’s advice and departs for Sofia, Bulgaria, to stay
with an aunt. While in Vienna, en route to Sofia, Mira joins a group of refugees bound for what
was then Yugoslavia. In Sarajevo, she meets a Catholic Croat of Austrian descent, Josip
Hargesheimer, whom she marries in April 1941. She receives a Yugoslav passport and papers
under her married name to replace her revoked Italian citizenship.” Mira Schendel (Exhibition
catalogue, Tate/Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 2013), 218. Schendel first exhibited in Brazil
in the early fifties under her married name, Mira Hargesheimer.
243
Flusser is first mentioned in the timeline entry for Schendel in 1955: “This period coincides
with her burgeoning friendships with the physicist and art critic Mario Schenberg; the
psychoanalyst, poet, translator and art critic Theon Spanudis; and the philosopher Vilém
Flusser.” Mira Schendel, 222.
72
(Droguinhas)(1965-66), and Graphic Objects (Objetos gráficos) (1967-68). Working on rice
paper, which she mounted in windows and the middle of rooms to highlight its transparency, she
also did thousands of drawings, replicating the reproductive nature of photography and printing
presses.244 One can also see the resonance of concrete poetry in her work. In 1967, Flusser wrote
about her work in O Estado de São Paulo:
Mira’s writings are not texts. They are not about anything, and so they cannot be
read as representations. They are pre-texts. They are what texts are before they
become texts. But as they are almost symbolic, as pre-texts, they cannot be ‘read’
as drawings either (not in the traditional sense of the term). They do not intend the
thing, as drawings do; though neither do they intend, as texts do, to be about
things. They should not be ‘read’ in a metaphorical sense, but literally.245
Two decades later, Flusser devoted chapters in a section titled “Dialogues” in Bodenlos,
to Flexor and to Schendel.246 (The book also includes photographs of each artist in the backyard
244
Writing about “Tangled Alphabets: León Ferrari and Mira Schendel” at the Museum of
Modern Art in 2009, Roberta Smith described “Still Wave” (1969), a work with thousands of
tiny threads of translucent nylon hung from the ceiling by jeweler’s hooks, as “an early and
rather monumental instance of Post-Minimalism.” Smith further described this exhibition as “the
Modern’s latest attempt to explore modernisms beyond the narrow Euro-American version that it
did so much to lock in place.” But to Smith the effort seems halfhearted at times, suggesting an
“unwillingness to commit” to extending modernism’s art historical narrative by “wedging a
double survey into galleries usually occupied by single ones” and showing together two artists
who knew each other only slightly. Nonetheless, “Tangled Alphabets” brought “together more
work by Ms. Schendel and Mr. Ferrari than has been seen in a North American museum.” See
Roberta Smith, “Alternative Modernism Via South America,” The New York Times, April 3,
2009: C25. The only other major solo show of Schendel in North America was at the Drawing
Center in New York in 1995. It should be noted that Schendel represented Brazil in the 34th
Venice Biennale in 1968, along with Lygia Clark, Farnese de Andrade, and Letycia Quadros and
she had exhibited in the São Paulo Biennials since the first one in 1951.
245
Vilém Flusser, “Indagações sobre a origem da lingua [Questions about the origin of
language],” O Estado de São Paulo, Literary supplement (April 29, 1967): 1. Quoted in Mira
Schendel (Tate/Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 2013), 227.
246
He would also write a memoriam for Flexor, who died in 1971, which would later appear as
Vilém Flusser, “Flexor: In Memoriam,” Samson Flexor. Do figurativismo ao abstracionismo, ed.
Alice Brill (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1990), 199-200. Cited in Sander,
Sources, 193.
73
patio of Flusser’s home in São Paulo and there is a reproduction of a 1968 Flusser portrait by
Flexor.) Flexor’s section includes a philosophical meditation on Flexor’s position as a European
Marxist in Brazil and art as a form of revolution.247 The section on Schendel is more personal.
Flusser wrote: “Our dialogues have an influence on Mira's work (and also, it must be said, on
mine). And Mira's work was the theme of the dialogues. This is precisely what is fertile in our
relationship: I am for Mira a genuine critic; I influence her work. And it provides me real issues
that have to be thought through and worked through.”248 In the next paragraph Flusser elaborates
on an issue in Schendel’s work that has affected his own:
“Transparency” is a consequence of the ability of the human gaze to penetrate
beneath the surface of things. With this capability, the human gaze distinguishes
itself from all others. The human is not necessarily thrown back by the surfaces
that surround him; he does not necessarily live like an animal in an ‘environment,’
but rather his view may be disciplined or brutalized by penetrating the surface
into the depths of things, and it is thanks to this depth-dimension that the human
finds himself in a “life world.”249
247
Vilém Flusser, Bodenlos: Eine philosophische Autobiographie (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999),
134. Originally published as Bodenlos: Eine philosophische Autobiographie (Bensheim and
Düsseldorf: Bollmann, 1992).
248
“Unsere Dialoge haben auf Miras Arbeit einen Einfluß (wie auch, das sei gesagt, auf meine).
Und Miras Arbeit war Thema der Dialoge. Das genau ist das Fruchtbare an unserer Beziehung:
Ich bin für Mira ein echter Kritiker: ich beeinflusse ihre Arbeit. Und sie stellt mir echte Themen,
die durchdacht und durchgearbeitet sein wollen.” Flusser, Bodenlos, 198. My translation.
249
“»Durchsichtigkeit« ist eine Folge der Fähigkeit des menschlichen Blicks, unter die
Oberfläche der Dinge zu dringen. Durch diese Fähigkeit unterscheidet sich der menschliche
Blick von allem anderen Sehen. Er wird nicht unbedingt von den Oberflächen, die ihn umgeben,
zurückgeworfen, und darum lebt der Mensch nicht unbedingt, wie das Tier, in einer »Umwelt«,
sondern der Blick kann, diszipliniert oder brutal, durch die Oberfläche hindurch in die Tiefen der
Dinge dringen, und es ist diese Tiefendimension, dank derer sich der Mensch in einer
»Lebenswelt« befindet.” Flusser, Bodenlos, 198-199. My translation. It should be noted that the
term “Lebenswelt,” or “life world” was instrumental to the phenomenology of philosophy of
Edmund Husserl, which will be discussed in more detail later in this dissertation.
74
The concept of surfaces would recur in Flusser’s work: both in writing as a “penetrating
gesture that informs a surface” and later in the technical image writings.250 But Schendel and
Flusser also shared a common background as displaced persons. “She didn't feel at home either
in Brazil or in Europe,” Schendel’s daughter said in a recent interview. “She spoke many
languages, but all of them with an accent … She hoped when she arrived in Brazil that she could
find a territory of her own – a place for her. But it was not that easy. She was a misplaced person.
Territory, for her, was always an issue, and you can see it in her work.”251 In Flusser and the
Arts, Marcel René Marburger also cites Flusser’s relationship with Schendel as an example of
how Flusser was engaged with “new media”252 artists not only in the seventies and eighties but
much earlier, as well.253
250
Vilém Flusser, “The Gesture of Writing,” reprinted in English and French in Flusser Studies 8
(2009) and quoted in Simone Osthoff’s “Introduction” to Flusser Studies 08 (2009): 3, accessed
June 3, 2014. http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/08introduction.pdf
251
Laura Barnett, “Mira Schendel: the refugee from Nazi Europe who settled in São Paulo,” The
Guardian, September 13, 2013, accessed June 4,
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/sep/13/mira-schendel-tate-modern-profile.
252
Marcel René Marburger, Flusser und die Kunst (Cologne: Self-published dissertation, 2011).
I put “new media” in quotation marks to highlight the resistance with which this term is met in
media studies. Although the question of new versus old media, in regard to art or otherwise, is
not a central concern of this dissertation, it should be noted nonetheless. See, for instance,
Friedrich Kittler’s “What’s New about the New Media?,” Mutations, ed. Rem Koolhaas, et al.
(New York: Actar, 2001), 58–69; Also see Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and
McKenzie Wark’s Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2014), particularly the introduction.
253
Marburger, Flusser und die Kunst, 14-15. Marburger also cites Isobel Whitelegg’s Writing the
Present: Vilém Flusser and Mira Schendel (Dissertation, University of Essex, Department of Art
History and Theory, September 2000). Regarding Flusser and the German media theory scene, it
should be noted that Siegfried Zielinkski is the current Director of the Flusser Archive in Berlin,
although it is housed in The Berlin University of the Arts (Universität der Künste Berlin).
Flusser’s involvement with German media theory will be discussed in later chapters.
75
Flusser’s most significant involvement in the institutional art world, however, was with
the São Paulo Biennial in the early seventies.254 Founded in 1951 by the Italian-Brazilian
industrialist Ciccillo Matarazzo and modeled after the Venice Biennale, the São Paulo Biennial
quickly becoming one of the most prominent international exhibitions in the world.255
Throughout the sixties, Flusser wrote about the Biennial for the literary supplement of O Estado
de São Paulo.256 In a 1969 article he described the Biennial as a “stubborn fact” that “has always
been intended to indicate Brazil’s competent modernism to an international clientele, and to
energize local developments by injections of the international.”257 This last article coincided,
however, with the military dictatorship’s most repressive period of rule and the largely
successful 1969 boycott of the Biennial’s 10th edition.258
254
See Marcel René Marburger’s “Chronologie eines kuratorischen Scheiterns [Chronology of a
curatorial failure],” Flusser Studies 13 (2012), accessed June 3, 2014,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/marburgerchronologie-eines-kuratorischen-scheiterns.pdf. From 2007 to 2010 Marburger was the scientific
supervisor of the Flusser Archive in Berlin and is considered one of the best authorities regarding
its contents.
255
Although his given name was Paulo Antônio Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho, he went by
Ciccillo Matarazzo.
256
See Vilém Flusser, “Da Bienal,” O Estado de São Paulo, Suplemento Literário (September 4,
1965): 6; “Bienal e fenomenologia,” O Estado de São Paulo, Suplemento Literário (December 2,
1967): 5; “As bienais de São Paulo e a vida contemplativa ,” O Estado de São Paulo,
Suplemento Literário (September 27, 1969): 4.
257
See Vilém Flusser’s “As bienais de São Paulo e a vida contemplativa,” O Estado de São
Paulo, Suplemento Literário (September 27, 1969): 4. Quoted in Isobel Whitelegg’s “The Bienal
de São Paulo: Unseen/Undone (1969-1981),” Afterall 22 (Autumn/Winter 2009), accessed
February 24, 2014, http://www.afterall.org.
258
See Claudia Calirman’s Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio and
Cildo Meireles (Duke University Press: Durham and London, 2012). Calirman’s book looks at
art responding to censorship and violence directly following AI-5 (1968–75), in which the arrest
and torture of students, politicians, intellectuals, and artists was sanctioned by the state.
76
The boycott was initiated in several quarters. On June 16, 1969, a group of artists and
critics gathered in Paris to read aloud a dossier titled “No to the São Paulo Biennial (Non à la
Biennale de São Paulo),” and to listen to testimonies given by Brazilian artists describing
violence, torture, and repression under the military dictatorship. This followed Pierre Restany’s
cancellation of an exhibition schedule to run parallel to the 1969 São Paulo Biennial titled “Art
and Technology.”259 Eduard de Wilde, director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam had
already withdrawn the Dutch delegation and on June 6 the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera
published an article titled “Lo Scandalo di San Paolo – La Biennale rischia per la situzaione
politica de Brasile (The Scandal of São Paulo – The Biennial is at risk because of the political
situation in Brazil).”260 After a vote, French artists decided to boycott the Biennial, which was
scheduled to open in September. Delegations from Sweden, Greece, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and
Mexico withdrew, including seventy-three year old Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros,
who had been invited to exhibit his mural March of Humanity on Latin America.261 The United
States also withdrew its entry. In April 1969, Hans Haacke wrote a strongly-worded letter to
György Kepes, director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, who was organizing a
much-anticipated art and technology exhibition to be shown in São Paulo:
The American government is engaged in an immoral war in Vietnam and supports
vigorously the fascist regimes in Brazil and other parts of the world. At this time,
all exhibitions under the auspices of the American government are done to
promote the image and the politics of this very government. It is a public relations
operation no matter what the intentions of the organizers and participants are, and
thanks to the tolerance of repressive governments, the energy of the artists is
channeled to serve a policy that they rightfully despise. If they don’t want to
259
The exhibition would have included works by César, Gyula Kosice, Piortr Kowalski, Julio Le
Parc, Marta Minujin, Bernard Quentin, Martial Rayasse, Vassilakis Takis, and others.
260
Calirman, Brazilian Art under Dictatorship, 24-25.
261
Ibid., 27.
77
become involuntarily accomplices they do not have another choice than to refuse
to show their work in the national representations abroad.262
On July 6, 1969, Grace Glueck published an article in The New York Times covering the
boycott. On July 14, in a joint press release with the Smithsonian, which had taken over
sponsorship of the U.S. delegation from the State Department, Kepes announced that nine of the
twenty-three artists selected to participate in the exhibition had withdrawn. He therefore decided,
“I do not see justification for presenting at Brazil an incomplete exhibition. It would be
misleading.”263
262
Ibid., 27-28. Haacke was not wrong. James Naylor Green writes that “scholars have
documented the ways covert funding channeled through the CIA supplied resources to
conservative Brazilian forces with an anti-left-wing agenda,” even though incomplete access to
CIA and other national security documents only allows researchers to identify the overall
approaches intended “to carry out a government destabilization plan backed by covert actions.”
See James Naylor Green, We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military
Dictatorship in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 30. Green details
how Phyllis R. Parker, a graduate student at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at
the University of Texas at Austin stumbled upon information showing that U.S. government
officials had lied about Washington’s involvement in the events of 1964, uncovering “Operation
Brother Sam,” a military contingency plan that provided assistance in the form of an aircraft
carrier, six supporting destroyers, four petroleum tankers, ammunition ships and provision ships.
However, the swiftness with which the Brazilian armed forces seized power allowed the White
House to cancel the task force. After the military takeover on April 1, 1964, U.S. ambassador
Lincoln Gordon urged the White House to recognize immediately the new government and a
message ws sent by President Johnson from the Oval Office which began: “Please accept my
warmest good wishes on your installation as President of the United States of Brazil. The
American people have watched with anxiety the political and economic difficulties through
which your great nation has been passing, and have admired the resolute will of the Brazilian
community to resolve these difficulties within a framework of constitutional democracy and
without civil strike,” Green, We Cannot Remain Silent, 22. When the news broke in 1976 about
U.S. involvement in Brazil, Gordon issued a statement titled “Made in Brazil” that argued the
coup was a “100 percent Brazilian movement” and that U.S. aid was a “contingency” in case
civil war broke out in Brazil (ibid., 47). Also see Thomas E. Skidmore, Politics in Brazil 19301964: An Experiment in Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).
263
Green, We Cannot Remain Silent, 121. Biennial organizers, assisted by Dr. Humbert
Affonseca, a wealthy São Paulo businessman, and the Brazilian consul general in New York,
tried to broker a last minute deal with Leo Castelli to loan thirty-three engravings by Roy
Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns and put these on view as the U.S. exhibition, but this failed,
leaving the Biennial without an official U.S. entry.
78
Lygia Clark and Amélia Toledo were the first to withdraw from the Brazilian delegation
and more would follow. The Brazilian Association of Art Critics (ABCA), presided over by
Mário Pedrosa, released a document on July 2, 1969 asking the government to reveal its criteria
for censorship in the visual arts, since censorship was neither in the Brazilian constitution nor
consistently applied by the current regime.264 Pedrosa was referring to the Second Bienal da
Bahia, a small exhibition in northeastern Brazil held in December 1968, at which federal police
confiscated ten works of art based on allegations of “erotic and overtly political content” and
exhibition organizers were jailed; and the May 1969 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in
Rio de Janeiro, from which twelve artworks would be chosen to represent Brazil at the Biennale
de Paris, and which was shut down before it opened to the public.265 Pedrosa also encouraged
members of the ABCA to refuse to participate in judging the 1969 São Paulo Biennial.266 Not
every Brazilian artist withdrew from the Biennial, however. Flusser’s friend Mira Schendel, who
had exhibited in the Biennial since its first edition in 1951, showed a work titled Still Waves of
Probability – Old Testament, Book of Kings I, 19 (Ondas paradas de probabilidade – Antigo
264
Calirman, Brazilian Art under Dictatorship, 31.
265
Ibid., 21.
266
Pederosa himself was forced into exile, although supported by an international cadre of
artists. An open letter to the president of Brazil signed by Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Pablo
Picasso, Max Bill, Soulage, and twenty-five Latin American artists living in Paris stated: “We,
the intellectuals and artists who sign this letter, have received with indignation and apprehension
the news of the order of arrest for political motives issued by your government against the writer
and art critic Mario Pedrosa. Mr. Pedrosa is known to us for his works in the field of art, and to
all those who have read his works or known him personally he represents one of the most
accomplished expressions of the intelligence of a country that he has always brilliantly
represented and uncompromisingly and courageously defended. We hold you personally
responsible for the bodily and mental well-being of this eminent Brazilian who has won
everywhere, by his personality, admiration and respect from his associates. We await with
impatience and anxiety to be informed that the measures taken against him by your government
have been revoked.” Titled “The Case of Mario Pedrosa,” the letter was published in The New
York Review of Books, March 9, 1972. Accessed February 28, 2014, www.nybooks.com.
79
Testamento, Livros dos Reis I, 19), an installation of nylon threads hanging from the ceiling and
accompanied by a moving Biblical text. Claudia Calirman writes that Schendel’s presence was
an act of protest that differed not only from the consensus supporting withdrawal, but which
“questioned the efficacy and force of artistic removal as a political strategy.”267
But the 1969 boycott would have lasting consequences. Efforts to sustain it to later
editions were put forth by an organization of artists in New York called Museo Latinoamericano,
which included the Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer and a self-published book titled
Contrabienal.268 Gordon Matta-Clark participated in the Contrabienial, writing an open letter in
1971 calling for artists to boycott the São Paulo Biennial that year,269 and Isobel Whitelegg
writes that the boycott successfully appropriated the exhibition's international prestige such that
participating in it had come to be seen as a dubious activity for any politically engaged artist, and
“national agencies, including the British Council, maintained a diplomatic but distanced mode of
participation until political change became apparent in the early 1980s.”270
Flusser entered the Biennial enterprise at this moment. In 1971, he presented an “Initial
Proposal for the Organization of Future Biennials on a Scientific Basis,”271 and was subsequently
267
Calirman, Brazilian Art under Dictatorship, 34.
268
Whitelegg, “The Bienal de São Paulo: Unseen/Undone (1969-1981).” Also see Luis
Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2007).
269
An excerpt of Matta-Clark’s May 19, 1971 letter was printed at the back of the catalogue for
the 27th São Paulo Bienal in 2006, after pages filled with the logos of corporate sponsors.
270
Whitelegg, “The Bienal de São Paulo: Unseen/Undone (1969-1981).” As Whitelegg points
out, the Biennial was also more complicated for artists who remained in Brazil. While Pedrosa
and artists like Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, who had gained international prominence in the
sixties, had left the country, the circle of artists who remained constituted an intimate group and
often made ephemeral works like Conceptual artists in New York or Europe.
271
Vilém Flusser, “Initial Proposal for the Organisation of Future Biennials on a Scientific
80
nominated by the board to be a “technical advisor” to the 12th edition of the Biennial in 1973.272
It was a period when curators were invested in changing exhibition paradigms: Harald
Szeemann's documenta 5 of 1972 in Kassel, Germany is an oft-cited example and exhibitions
like “Cybernetic Serendipity” (1968) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London,
“Software” (1970) at the Jewish Museum in New York, and “Information” (1970) at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York were also dedicated to showcasing so-called “new
media.”273 The São Paulo Biennial was working on an older model, though: there was no artistic
advisor or chief curator and its founder, Ciccillo Matarazzo, served as the director, organizing
the Biennial around the national-pavilion model. Flusser traveled to Paris, where, at the
Basis.” Vilém Flusser Archive, Binder Bienal 1, No. 166. The proposal in the Archive is dated
1972, so it might be a revised version.
272
Vinicius Pontes Spricigo, “Oui a la Biennale de São Paulo: Vilém Flusser’s Anti-Boycott,”
revised version of a paper presented at the conference “Zones de convergence: l’actualité de la
recherche en théorie et histoire de l’art latino-américain” at the University Rennes on the March
7, 2012, accessed March 2, 2014,
http://www.essex.ac.uk/arthistory/research/pdfs/arara_issue_11/spricigo.pdf. I also obtained a
draft of Spricigo’s “The Exhibition as Medium: the large scale art exhibitions from the
theoretical perspectives opened by Vilém Flusser and Hans Belting” at the Flusser Archive in
August 2013. In that paper, Spricigo writes: “It is important to underline that the position
occupied by Flusser as a technical advisor at the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo was related to
the discipline of theory of communication and aesthetics he created at the School of
Communication of the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado. Flusser was not a curator, as has
been argued by the researcher Ricardo Mendes and the artist Mario Ramiro. In fact, at that time,
the Bienal de São Paulo had neither a curator nor an artistic director. The exhibition was
organized by Matarazzo according to the national pavilion format. Flusser’s contribution to the
Round Table held at the 11th Bienal concerning the reformulation of the biennial was based on
the emerging field of communication sciences and was presented alongside other critical
contributions by Jorge Romero Brest, René Berger, Umbro Apollonio, Jorge Glusberg, Jacques
Lassaigne, Mário Barata, Dietrich Mahlow, among others.” Spricigo, “The Exhibition as
Medium,” 3-4.
273
Whitelegg also cites experimental practices supported in local São Paulo annual exhibitions,
like “Salão de Arte Contemporânea” (1966-75) at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea Campinas
and JAC (Jovem Arte Contemporânea) (1963-74) at the University of São Paulo Museum of
Contemporary Art (MAC-USP), which occupied a space directly adjoining the third floor of the
biennial pavilion. Whitelegg, “The Bienal de São Paulo: Unseen/Undone (1969-1981).”
81
invitation of René Berger, president of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), he
presented his proposal to restructure the Biennial, moving away from the model of national
representation, and creating a dialogue between art and the public sphere.274 In a letter to
Matarazzo, to which he attached his AICA proposal,275 Flusser wrote: “The so-called crisis in the
arts is not the result of structural crisis in the arts themselves, but of an inadequacy in the process
of communication between the arts and the people … If a meaningful communication between
both were established, art would again become part of daily life. The Bienal of Sao Paulo offers
itself as a laboratory for this purpose.”276 Rather than focusing on objects and setting up a
“monodirectional” mode of communication, the restructured Biennial would entail sharing
information between multidisciplinary groups and engaging different local institutions including
schools, factories, and so on.277
Flusser’s proposal was met with resistance in Paris, mostly because Restany and others
had decided to systematically boycott the São Paulo Biennial. Flusser argued, “There are two
ways to contest, one in a chair in Paris and the other on site. I propose the latter.”278 But he also
used the trip to Paris as an opportunity to reach out to other scholars and intellectuals, resulting,
for instance, in a series of lectures he delivered at the Institute de l’Environment in Paris in the
274
Vilém Flusser, “Proposal to be submitted to the General conference of AICA to be held in
Paris on September 12th, concerning the 12th S. Paulo Bienal” (1971), Vilém Flusser Archive,
Binder Bienal 1, No. 171.
275
Ibid.
276
Ibid. Also quoted in Spricigo’s “Oui a la Biennale de São Paulo,” 5.
277
Spricigo, “Oui a la Biennale de São Paulo,” 3.
278
Vilém Flusser, “General Conference of the AICA,” 1972, Archives de la Critique d’Art.
Quoted in Spricigo, “Oui a la Biennale de São Paulo,” 7. Spricigo also argues that, in taking this
stance, Flusser was trying to invert the flow of ideas from center to periphery.
82
fall of 1972.279 The demise of Flusser’s relationship with the Biennial Foundaiton (Fundação
Bienal)—he departed from his position as technical advisor in late 1972—was ultimately more
financially driven than political.280 Nonetheless, an “Art and Communication” section was
installed on the third floor of the 1973 Biennial pavilion, alongside a room devoted to the work
of Waldemar Cordeiro, an early computer artist.281 Otherwise, two of the artists Flusser proposed
were included: Fred Forest and Eric McLuhan, son of Marshall McLuhan.282 One of the fruits of
Flusser’s involvement would be his the lasting relationship with Forest.283 Flusser would
participate in a work by Forest called “Gestures” (1972-74) that inspired Flusser’s collection of
essays titled Gestures.284 The two also maintained a correspondence and Flusser later wrote an
essay, “The Sociological Art of Fred Forest,” for a book on Collectif Art Sociologique in
1975.285 Even after he left Brazil in 1972, Flusser remained involved with the Biennial and his
279
Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, 24.
280
Spricigo, “Oui a la Biennale de São Paulo,” 7. Spricigo does not detail this particularly well,
but it emerges in the correspondence with Matarazzo, carried on largely from Geneva.
281
In 1971, Cordeiro published a treatise, arteônica, on electronic art. See Waldemar Cordeiro,
ed., Arteônica (São Paulo: Editora das Americas, 1972), 3-4.
282
Ricardo Mendes, “Die Biennale von São Paulo 1973: Flusser als Kurator – eine unvollendete
Erfahrung,” in Das Dritte Ufer: Vilém Fusser und Brasilien, ed. Susanne Klengel and Holger
Siever (Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009), 169.
283
Also see art critic Annick Bureaud’s interview of Forest in Flusser Studies 08 (2009),
accessed June 1, 2014,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/bureaudinterview-avec-forest.pdf.
284
Vilém Flusser, Gestures: An Attempt at a Phenomenology (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota,
forthcoming 2014). Originally written in French and published posthumously as Les gestes
(Paris: Hors Commerce, 1999), Gestures is Flusser’s most influential book in France.
285
Vilém Flusser, “L’Art Sociologique de Fred Forest,” Collectif Art Sociologique: Theorie Pratique – Critique, Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, and Jean Thenot (Paris: Musée Galliéra, 1975),
31-34. Also see Vilém Flusser, “L’Espace Communicant: L’Experience de Fred Forest,”
83
contributions continued to be felt.286 The Biennial remained under the direction of its founder,
Ciccillo Matarazzo until 1977, but Flusser’s communication model was adopted by Walter
Zanini, who was appointed curator in 1981 of the 16th Biennial edition.287 Zanini's first edition
featured artists' books, video, mail art and actions by artists including Hervé Fischer, Iñarra and
Antoni Muntadas and replaced national representation with thematic “nuclei”: a set of
exhibitions, each organized around different principles and divided into “vectors” that grouped
works from the seventies according to “analogies between media.”288 Zanini invited Flusser to
participate as a lecturer in 1981, and Sheila Leirner, the subsequent curator, invited him to São
Paulo in 1985.
Flusser’s involvement with the Biennial influenced his philosophy, too. In 1972 he wrote
“Diachronology and Historicity,” an essay he mailed from Italy to Milton Vargas that described
abstraction as a “ladder” or “staircase” in which three-dimensionality was being replaced by twodimensionality.289 Flusser argued that the three-dimensional world was losing its connection with
Communication et langages 18 (Paris, 1973): 81-92 and Annick Bureaud, “Interview avec Fred
Forest, réalisée le lundi 22 décembre 2008 à Paris,” Flusser Studies 8 (May 2009): 1-12,
accessed June 22, 2015,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/bureaudinterview-avec-forest.pdf
286
See for instance Flusser’s interview with Jacques D. Rouiller, published as “La Biennale de
São Paulo transformée en Laboratoire Collective,” Gazette de Lausanne, June 1, 1973. Cited in
Sander, Sources, 231.
287
For more on Zanini, see Hans Ulrich Obrist’s “Interview with Walter Zanini,” in A Brief
History of Curating, ed. Hans Ulrich Obrist (Zurich/Dijon: JRP Ringier/Les presses du reel,
2008), 148-66.
288
Ibid.
289
Vilém Flusser, “Diacronia e historicidade,” 1972, Vilém Flusser Archive, Binder
Bienal 1, number 221. Also cited in Spricigo, “Oui a la Biennale de São Paulo,” 10.
84
conceptual and imaginative thinking and becoming increasingly abstract.290 In 1985, in the midst
of his technical-image phase, Flusser wrote that the Biennial’s “relational context is the focal
point of the problem. The choice of the artworks becomes the input of the context, and the
information of the audience becomes its output … The attention turns from the ‘source,’ the
‘transmitter,’ to the ‘channel,’ the ‘medium,’ since ‘the medium is the message.’”291 By this
time, Flusser had already written Towards a Philosophy of Photography. To do so, however, he
had to move to Europe and establish himself in a new intellectual atmosphere.
The Return to Europe and Writing in the Seventies
In 1972 Vilém and Edith rented their São Paulo house to a U.S. citizen and left Brazil for
good. Initially, they settled in Meran, a resort town in the South Tyrol in Italy. They were “free,”
according to Edith, although they were living “the life of nomads,” constantly traveling for
lectures and conferences, with Edith driving and Vilém sitting in the passenger seat belting out
Mozart arias.292 Important friends and collaborators emerged from the 1972 AICA conference in
290
Spricigo, “Oui a la Biennale de São Paulo,” 10-11.
291
Vilém Flusser, “18ª Bienal de São Paulo, exemplo de espaço tempo novo, 1985,” Vilém
Flusser Archive. Also quoted in Spricigo, “Oui a la Biennale,” 8-9.
292
Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, 23. Some of the lectures from
this period include “Some Present Trends in Brazilian Thought” at Columbia University’s
Institute of Latin American Studies and the Department of Philosophy in the early seventies
(interestingly, given the political situation in Brazil, the announcement for this in the Flusser
Archive states, “under the auspices of The Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations”); several
talks in conjunction with essays published in Main Currents (see correspondence in 1974 with
with Melvin L. Alexenberg at Teachers College, Columbia, in the Flusser Archive); a seminar
through the New Jersey Department of Education, Division of Research and Planning arranged
by Robert E. Weber, Director of the Project on Human Potential and the Year 2000. See Flusser
Archive, English correspondence, Binder 57, nos. 2-21.
85
Paris, and they affected Flusser’s writing and publishing.293 Most significant among them were
Abraham Moles, a professor of communication theory in Strasbourg and author of Information
Theory and Esthetic Perception (1966), and Louis Bec, the artist with whom Flusser would
collaborate on the science-fiction philosophy parable Vampyroteuthis infernalis (1987).294 In a
letter to Moles, Flusser voiced his interest in applying their shared interests in communications in
a more imaginative fashion: “Have you ever thought of using the new communications
technologies (not for ‘teaching’ it to others) [but] to articulate your ideas?”295
During this period Flusser began publishing in French-language publications like
Communication et langages, Cause commune, and Théâtre/Public, Gennevilliers.296 But he was
still publishing in São Paulo: particularly a column, “Posto Zero,” in the newspaper Fôlha de São
Paulo. Many of these essays on everyday objects would be published in Brazil as Things that
Concern Me (A coisas que me cercam) (1970)297 and appear in France—although translated from
293
Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser, 24.
294
Abraham Moles, Information Theory and Esthetic Perception, trans. Joel E. Cohen (Urbana
and London: University of Illinois Press, 1966). Moles is an interesting, if overlooked media
theorist. In the United States Information Theory and Esthetic Perception has been largely
ignored, although it is an early attempt to apply information theory to the realm of art,
particularly music. However, a recent catalogue for the New Museum exhibition Ghosts in the
Machine included one of Moles’ essays. See Abraham Moles, “Art and Cybernetics in the
Supermarket,” Ghosts in the Machine, ed. Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari (New
York: Skira Rizzolia, 2012). The exhibition “Ghosts in the Machine” was at the New Museum in
New York, July 18 – October 7, 2012.
295
Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, 24. They cite Absolute Vilém
Flusser, ed. Silvia Wagnermaier and Nils Röller (Freiburg, Germany: Orange Press, 2003), 111.
Also see Vilém Flusser, “La Communication: Une Philosophie Nouvelle? A propos d’Abraham
Moles. La communication: science our idéologie?,” Communication et langages 20 (Paris,
1973): 35-44.
296
Sander, Sources, 209-10.
297
See Vilém Flusser’s A coisas que me cercam (São Paulo: Fundo Estadual de Cultura, 1970).
Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo cite “three different but not identical versions in German, English,
86
English—as Force of the Everyday (La force du quotidien) (1973), kicking off what has been
described as Flusser’s “phenomenology decade.”298 Flusser also published a small pamphlet, The
Codified World (Le Monde Codifié), which was the transcript of a conversation held at the
Institut de l’Environnment in Paris on May 3, 1973—although he wasn’t satisfied with this
version and later translated it into German, publishing it in the Stuttgart newspaper Merkur.299 In
1974, Flusser participated in a project in France with the Gruppe Art Sociologique (Herv Fischer,
Fred Forest and Jean-Paul Thenot); guest-lectured at Columbia University, Fairleigh Dickinson
University, and the State University of New York at Buffalo; published essays in the New Yorkbased journal Main Currents;300 and participated in “Open Circuits: The Future of Television”
conference at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.301 Without offers for lengthier
and Portuguese,” Vilém Flusser, 60. Interestingly, these writers do not mention the French
version of La Force du quotidien, even in the index or “Abbreviations” of Flusser’s significant
texts at the front of their book.
298
Vilém Flusser, La force du quotidien, trans. Jean Mesrie and Barbara Niceall (Paris: Mame,
1973). The book, which was translated from English essays, includes a preface by Abraham
Moles. In addition to the essays mentioned here, also see his articles for Merkur, Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, Neuer Züricher Zeitung, Main Currents, and the Jewish periodical Shalom.
Flusser also sketched out ideas in the short “Posto Zero” pieces he wrote for the newspaper
Folha de São Paulo in 1972, like “Synthesis (Sintese),” “Masks (Mascaras),” “Passion
(Paixão),” “Irony (Ironia),” “Unicorns (Unicornios),” “People (Gente),” “Brainstorm (O bicho de
sete cabeças),” “Walls (Paredes),” “Pantry and Kitchen (Copa e cozinha).”
299
Vilém Flusser, Le Monde codifié (Paris: Institute de l’Environment, 1974) and “Die
Kodifizierte Welt,” Merkur 359 (April 1978): 374-379. The essay also appears as “The Codified
World” in Flusser’s Writings, 35-41.
300
Sander, Sources, 195.
301
Vilém Flusser, “Two Approaches to the Phenomenon, Television,” trans. Ursula Beiter, The
New Television: A Public/Private Art. Essays, Statements, and Videotapes Based on “Open
Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television” Organized by Fred Barzyk,
Douglas Davis, Gerald O’Grady, and Willard Van Dyke for the Museum of Modern Art New
York City, ed. Douglas Davis and Allison Simmons (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press,
1977), 234-247. The text is also available online at artcontex.com, accessed January 13, 2015,
87
engagements in the United States, however, in 1975 the Flussers moved to Robion, a village in
Provence, and Flusser lectured at the Institut de l'Environnement and the Ecole d’Art d’Aix-enProvence and participated in the 1975 Festival of Arles, speaking in a roundtable about art and
photography.302 In 1980, the Flussers bought a house in Robion with the intention of living out
their days in a “dignified manner.”303
Although the seventies are characterized as Flusser’s phenomenology decade, one could
argue that Flusser’s phenomenology stretched over the course of his lifetime304—and even
posthumously, given the publication of In Praise of Superficiality: Towards a Phenomenology of
Media in 1993.305 But, as Michael Hanke has pointed out, he also reviewed Brazilian books on
http://artcontext.com/crit/scrapbook/index.php?id=27. Also see the correspondence between
Flusser and Gerald O’Grady, Director of the Center for Media Study at SUNY, Buffalo. Fluser
Archive, English correspondence, Binder 55, nos. 1-12 and the German version of the essay:
Vilém Flusser, “Für eine Phänomenologie des Fernsehens,” Medienkultur (Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer Verlag, 1997), 103-123.
302
See Flusser’s “Art, Photographie et Philosophie” in le nouveau photocinéma 39 (October
1975). Flusser Archive M21-PHOCI-01-691.
303
Flusser elaborated: “dignified” didn’t mean “‘honored’ by others (that what you call society),
but it means: to accomplish something unbound by financial motives, power or fame.” Absolute
Vilém Flusser, ed. Wagnermaier and Nils Röller, 119. Quoted in Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo,
Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, 25.
304
For instance, Flusser wrote about the São Paulo Bienal in a phenomenological context (see
Vilém Flusser, “Bienal e fenomenologia,” O Estado de São Paulo, Suplemento Literário
(December 2, 1967): 5, as well as an essay “Für eine Phänomenologie des Turismus (Toward a
Phenomenology of Tourism)” published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 6, 1970.
Cited in The Freedom of the Migrant, 7. Also see Vilém Flusser’s “Aspects and Prospects of
Tsai’s Work” in Art International 709 (December 1978), which also takes a phenomenological
approach to the work of Tsai Wen-Ying. (Also published as “Cybernetic Art of Tsai Wen-Ying
in the catalogue National Museum of History, Taiwan/Taiwan Museum of Art, 1978.)
305
Vilém Flusser, Lob der Oberflächlichkeit: für eine Phänomenologie der Medien, (Bensheim,
Germany: Bollmann, 1993). Also see Vilém Flusser, Brasilien oder die Suche nach dem neuen
Menschen. Für eine Phänomenologie der Unterentwicklung, ed. Stefan Bollmann and Edith
Flusser (Mannheim, Germany: Bollmann, 1994); Vilém Flusser, Fenomenologia do brasileiro.
Em Busca de un Novo Homem, ed. Gustavo Bernardo Krause (Rio de Janeiro: Eduerj, 1998); and
88
media and communications, recommending them for publication in France, which shows his
interest in communications theory and cybernetics, as well as in connecting Brazilian and
European theory.306 The selected bibliography at the back of Flusser’s Writings mentions only
three texts from the seventies, two published in French and one in Portuguese: Force of the
Everyday (1972), The Codified World (1974), and Natural:Mind (1978).307 In the Sources, Klaus
Sander mentions unpublished manuscripts like In Search of New Man,308 Phenomenology of
Human Gestures,309 the autobiography that would be published as Bodenlos,310 and the lectures
Klengel, “Brasilien denken. Flusser als Vermittler, Phänomenologie, Anthropophage – eine
epistemologische Gratwanderung,” in The Third Shore, 111-129.
306
Michael Hanke, “Os Fundamentos Científicos da Comunicação. Uma crítica flusseriana a
comunicólogos cearenses e seus desdobramentos (The scientific foundations of communication:
A flusserian criticism of some comunicologists from Ceará),” Flusser Studies 15 (2013),
accessed June 3, 2014,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/hankefundamentos.pdf. Hanke discusses three books reviewed by Flusser: Muniz Sodré’s A
Comunicação do Grotesco; introdução à cultura de massa brasileira (Petrópolis, Brazil: Editôra
Vozes, 1971); Luiz Beltrão’s Sociedade de massa (Comunicação e Literatura) (Petrópolis,
Brazil: Editôra Vozes, 1972); and Fundamentos Científicos da Comunicação (Petrópolis, Brazil:
Editôra Vozes, 1973), by various authors.
307
Vilém Flusser, La Force du quotidien (Paris: Mame, 1972); Le Monde codifié (Paris: Institut
de l’Environnement, 1974); and Natural-mente (São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1978).
308
The entry for 1970/71 mentions the “emergence of the book manuscript on the search for a
new people” (“Entstehung des Buchmanuskripts Auf der Suche nach einem neuen Menschen.”).
In a 1971 letter to a potential editor (Sander doesn’t specify whom), Flusser wrote that “my essay
is an attempt at a phenomenology of the Brazilians from the world standpoint” (“Mein Essay
stellt den Versuch dar, eine Phänomenologie des Brasilianers vom Standpunkt Welt”). Sander,
Sources, 19-20.
309
Flusser, Phänomenologie der menschlichen Gesten, begun 1974. Sander, Sources, 20.
310
The early version was titled Testimony from the Bottomless Abyss (Zeugenschaft aus der
Bodenlosigkeit). Sander, Sources, 21.
89
at the Institut de l'Environnement in Paris that would be published in Kommunikologie.311 In his
introduction to the new English translation of Natural:Mind, Rodrigo Maltez Novaes offers a
slightly different narrative with the publication of The Force of the Everyday in 1973 followed
by Natural:Mind, written in Portuguese in 1974 and 1975 and published in Brazil in 1979,
Gestures written in French in 1976—but not published until 1991—and Pós-História written in
1979 and published in Brazil in 1983.312 To complicate matters further, in an issue of Flusser
Studies, Janine Marchessault and Rainer Guldin lay out a different chronology of the seventies,
couched in communications theory rather than phenomenology and which emphasizes
comparisons with Marshall McLuhan, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Baudrillard.313 These different
narratives are not entirely incompatible. Instead, they reflect Flusser’s indefatigable approach to
writing and publication and the fluidity between languages and disciplines that characterizes his
output. Moreover, there is a difference in approach here: cataloging published books as opposed
to lectures and articles. For Flusser, these were composed in the same manner and the oral
aspects of his legacy are only beginning to be explored.314
311
Vilém Flusser, Kommunikologie (Mannheim, Germany: Bollmann, 1996). Also see Sander,
Sources, 21-22. Sander’s dates are also different for Natural:mente, which he dates 1979—as
does Rodrigo Maltez Novaes—for the Portuguese publication, rather than 1978.
312
Vilém Flusser, Natural:Mind, trans. Rodrigo Maltez Novaes (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2013)
and Pós-história: Vinte instantâneos e um modo de usar (São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1983).
313
Janine Marchessault and Rainer Guldin, “Introduction,” Flusser Studies 6 (2008): 1, accessed
May 31, 2014,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/introduction06.pdf.
314
The recent issue of Flusser Studies 17 examined “Music and Sound in Vilém Flusser’s
Work,” and the DVD “We shall survive in the memory of others” (Berlin: Walther Konig, 2010)
includes Flusser lectures. Flusser composed his writings generally to be spoken or performed.
See Flusser Studies 17 (June 2014), accessed July 2, 2015,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/archive/flusser-studies-17-double-issue.
90
The Force of the Everyday, The Codified World, and “Two Approaches to the Phenomenon,
Television”
Flusser’s first book of the decade, The Force of the Everyday was published in France in
1973, but actually appeared in Portuguese around 1970 as Things that Surround Me, and many of
the essays appeared in other publications first.315 The book is made up of short philosophical
essays devoted to everyday objects: canes, bottles, pens, glasses, carpets, walls, mirrors, books,
beds, and automobiles. That Flusser was suddenly focusing on objects seems odd initially, until
put in context. In the introduction, Flusser cites Abraham Moles’ 1972 Theory of Objects as a
touchstone, and both books were written at a moment when French writers and thinkers were
focusing on objects and industrial design.316 Larry Busbea cites an “explosion” of design and
technology-oriented texts between 1954 and 1958: Pierre Francastel’s Art et Technique, Gilbert
Simondon’s Du mode d’existence des objets techniques and Jacques Ellul’s La technique ou
l’enjeu du siècle (The Technological Society), as well as Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Structural
Anthropology (1958), André Hermant’s Formes utiles, Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, and later
Jean Baudrillard’s System of Objects (1968), with “popular manifestations” including the films
315
By Flusser’s account in the introduction to The Force of the Everyday, “Beds” first appeared
in Comentàrio (Rio de Janeiro) and in slightly different form in Cause Commune (Paris); the
essays on walls, carpets, and mirrors were first published in the literary supplement of O Estado
de São Paulo and—the essays on walls and carpets—in the French periodicals CRÉÉ, Revue de
Design et d’Environnement Contemporain. The essay on bottles originally appeared in Main
Currents of Modern Thought (New York), while the essays on books, pens, and automobiles
were previously unpublished. See Flusser, The Force of the Everyday, 23-24.
316
See Abraham Moles, Théorie des Objects (Paris: Édition Universitaires, 1972). Flusser’s title
also echoes Moles’ Micropsycholgie de la Vie Quotidienné (Paris: Denoël Gonthier, 1976). Also
see Abraham Moles, Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique (Paris: Flammarion,
1958) and Information Theory and Esthetic Perception, trans. Joel Cohen (Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 1968); Art et Ordinateur (Paris: Casterman, 1971); Sociodynamique de la
culture (Paris: Mouton, 1967); Le Kitsch: l’art du bonheur (Paris: Mame, 1971); and Abraham
Moles and Elisabeth Rohmer, Psychologie de l’espace (Paris: Casterman, 1972).
91
of Jacques Tati, and the novels of Georges Perec and Alain Robbe-Grillet, which “addressed the
new ubiquity of commodities with irony and not a small amount of cynicism.”317 Busbea also
mentions several thinkers whose trajectories overlapped with Flusser: Henri Van Lier, Jean
Baudrillard, György Kepes, and Gilbert Simondon.318
It is Moles, however, with whom Flusser was in close dialogue. Flusser wrote in 1973 an
essay called “Apropos of Abraham Moles: Communication: A New Philosophy?” in which he
compared Moles’ thought not to science, but to the lineage of philosophy such as that of
Husserl—or the “new science.”319 About Theory of Objects, Busbea writes that Moles “had very
much internalized the object-environment continuum established in French object theory. Indeed,
317
See Larry Busbea’s “Metadesign: Object and Environment in France, c. 1970*” in Design
Issues 25, no. 4 (Cambridge: MIT Press, Autumn 2009): 105-06. Busbea discusses Moles at
length, as well as Max Bense. He doesn’t mention Flusser, but he mentions Jean Baudrillard’s
“Design and Environment or How Political Economy Escalates into Cyberblitz” in For a
Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (New York: Telos Press, 1981), 201–202.
318
See György Kepes, ed., The Man-Made Object (New York: Braziller, 1966) and Gilbert
Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier, Éditions Montaigne,
1958). Busbea, “Metadesign: Object and Environment in France,” 107. Also see Martin
Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” (1954) in Basic Writings, ed. David Krell
(New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993), 307–342; Lewis Mumford, Technics and
Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1934); and Jacques Ellul, La technique ou
l’enjeu du siècle (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1954) and The Technological Society, trans.
John Wilkinson (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1964).
319
See Vilém Flusser’s “Apropos d’Abraham Moles: La communication: science ou idéologie?”
in communication et langages 20, 4th trimester (Paris, 1973): 35-44. Flusser Archive M21COLANG-02.682. The opening page of the article includes the works of Abraham Moles to
which Flusser is responding: La Création scientifique (Geneva: Kister, 1957); Théorie de
l’information et perception esthéthique (Paris: Denoël, 1958-1971); Sociodynamique de la
culture (Paris: Mouton, 1968); Musiques expérimentales (Zurich: Cercle d’Art, 1961); L’Affiche
dans la sociéte urbaine (Paris: Dunod, 1969); Psychologie du kitsch (Paris: Mame, 1970);
Créativité et méthode d’innovation (Paris: Mame-Fayard, 1970); Art et ordinateur (Tournai:
Castermann, 1971); Encyclopédie de la Communication (Paris: C.E.P.L., 1971); Psychologie de
l’espace (Paris: Castermann/E. Rohmer, 1972); Théorie des objet (Paris: Edition universitaires,
1972). Flusser wrote at least one other article for the the same journal: “Le Phénomène
Surprenant de la Communication,” communication et langages 37 (Paris, 1978): 27-32. Flusser
Archive M21-COLANG-03.683.
92
his book would go the furthest in describing in exacting detail its social and psychological
mechanics,” incorporating Henri Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenology, and attempting to reconcile these with a cybernetic understanding of the world
adapted from Norbert Wiener, Marshall McLuhan, and the semiotic theories of Max Bense,
Tomás Maldonado, and Gui Bonsiepe.320 Like Moles, Flusser viewed the object
phenomenologically, but through Husserl rather than the lens of French writers such as MerleauPonty. In the essay “On Edmund Husserl,” Flusser explained how, coming out of the German
philosophical tradition, Husserl defined things in terms of the Schau (vision or perception) of the
Lebenswelt: the “concrete world in which we live” or the “network of concrete intentionalities,
an area of relationships.”321 Nothing could be “known if it is not experienced and evaluated, and
nothing can be evaluated without being experienced and known.”322 For Husserl, objects are
mere “abstract points” at which “various concrete intentions are aiming,” and this will have
enormous consequences for Flusser. It marks “quite brutally, the end of humanism” in which
“the human individual is no longer considered as a concrete thing but only as an abstraction from
concrete relationships which link men to one another and to intended objects.”323 In The Force of
320
Busbea, “Metadesign,” 110. Bense, Maldonado, and Bonsiepe were all associated with the
Ulm School of Design, which closed in 1968.
321
Vilém Flusser, “On Edmund Husserl,” Review of Czech Jews 1 (New York, 1987): 94.
322
Ibid., 95.
323
Ibid., 97. As I will argue later, this links Flusser with contemporary strains of theory and
philosophy that focus on objects and relations rather than human existence: “Thing Theory,”
Speculative Realism, and Object Oriented Ontology. See Bill Brown, Things (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004); Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the
Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago: Open Court, 2002); Graham Harman, Heidegger Explained:
From Phenomenon to Thing (Chicago: Open Court, 2007); and Quentin Meillassoux, After
Finitude: An Essay On The Necessity Of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London/New York:
Continuum, 2008).
93
the Everyday, Flusser stresses the importance of objects as phenomenological mediators between
humans and the environment, paving the way to think in terms of communications theory.
(Moles was less interested in individual messages than an “object ecology” mirroring the media
ecology proposed by communications theorists.)324 Hence, in the introduction to The Force of
the Everyday, Flusser writes that, by focusing on telephones, televisions, computers, the press,
advertising, television, or cinema, some communications theorists unnecessarily restrict the
scope of their investigation.325 Everyday objects, he stresses, are “intermediaries”—or “media”
and “communication tools,” hence their analysis is fundamental to the theory of
communication.326 This is, of course, a somewhat perverse approach to communications theory
in which ancient types of objects like canes and carpets eclipse televisions and computers.
Flusser argues, however, that objects can either be mediators or obstructions and that, if we don’t
see them as a means of communication, we will never discover the structure of communication
in our environment and will have the “opposite of what should be the theory of
communication.”327 In the preface to The Force of the Everyday, Moles compares Flusser’s text
to McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), writing that, while
McLuhan’s thesis is “the medium is the message,” in which media itself generally overwhelms
its content,328 for Flusser humans are not merely instruments of technology controlled by the
324
Busbea, “Metadesign,” 111.
325
Flusser, The Force of the Everyday, 21.
326
“Tous les objet sont des médiateurs potentiels. Leur analyse, sous cet aspect, est l'une des
tâches fondamentales de al théorie de la communication.” Flusser, The Force of the Everyday,
19.
327
Ibid., 19-20. My translation.
328
Abraham Moles, “Sur Les Médiateurs de la Communication” in The Force of the Everyday,
7-14. See Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York:
94
medium but subjects motivated by, for instance, the contents of a telephone call.329 “The medium
is not the message,” Moles writes, but merely one of the components in the world of
messages.330
The Flusser-McLuhan comparison is crucial, since Flusser was often likened to the
Canadian theorist, although he rarely cited him.331 In an interview with Daniela Kloock in
November 1991, shortly before Flusser’s death, Kloock remarked that McLuhan had also
associated media with extensions of or a substitute for the human body and Flusser quickly
responded, “Nennen Sie keine Namen” (“Do not mention any names.”)332 But Flusser and
McLuhan did use similar terms: “medium,” “the message,” “the box,” and “the window onto the
world.”333 Both called “man” the “tool-making animal,”334 and both wrote in an interdisciplinary
McGraw Hill, 1964) and McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium is the Message: An
Inventory of Effects (New York: Random House, 1967).
329
“The human being is motivated in his actions by the contents of the phone call, it is in its
value the content of advertising, but it is the telephonic habitus that inserts itself into the
technical society, joined together with the possession of a small bright screen.” (“L'être humain
est mû dans ses actes par le contenu de l'appel téléphonique, il l'est dans ses valeurs par le
contenu de la publicité, mais c'est l'habitus téléphonique qui l'insère dans la société technique,
conjointement avec la possession d’un petit écran lumineux.”) Italics in the original text. See
Abraham A. Moles, “Sur Les Médiateurs de la Communication,” The Force of the Everyday, 9.
My translation.
330
Moles, The Force of the Everyday, 9-10. Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo point out that in texts
like Kommunikolgie Flusser later defined himself by clearly distancing himself from McLuhan’s
work, by arguing that “media do not possess any one-sided structural trait wired into their
hardware and independent of their concrete use within a given sociopolitical setting.” Finger,
Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, 100.
331
Marchessault and Guldin, “Introduction,” Flusser Studies 6, 1.
332
Quoted in Marchessault and Guldin, “Introduction,” Flusser Studies 6, 2.
333
Kalina Kukielko and Barbara Rauch, “Marshall McLuhan & Vilém Flusser: The New Model
Artists,” Flusser Studies 6 (2008): 8, accessed June 3, 2014,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/kukielkorauch-new-model-artists.pdf.
95
fashion, similar to that of cultural theorists such as Raymond Williams, Roland Barthes and
Umberto Eco. They were also similar in their phenomenological approach to media studies: both
proclaimed the “prosthetic” nature of media in its relation to the human body.335 And they had
comparable relationships to the media they theorized: McLuhan did not drive a car or watch
television, and Flusser didn’t drive or use a personal computer.336 And yet, Janine Marchessault
and Rainer Guldin argue that McLuhan and Flusser were writing not just from polar ends of the
Americas, but with different theoretical ends in mind, too. By their account, McLuhan is a
formalist337 theorizing the gradual disappearance of the human body from knowledge production
in the electronic age, while Flusser is interested in the feedback loop of objects and the
phenomenological messages they provide.338
334
Scott L. Weiss, “Human Consciousness and the Construct of Meaning in the Communication
Theories of Marshall McLuhan and Vilém Flusser,” Flusser Studies 06 (2008): 5, accessed June
3, 2014,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/weisshuman-consciousness.pdf. For instance, in a paper published in 1980 after a conference Flusser
attended at L’Ecole Sociologique Interrogative in Paris on June 14, 1978, Flusser mentions
McLuhan—but only to discredit him: "That's why we think McLuhan is mistaken in claiming
that the medium is the message: the same medium can carry messages as diverse as the history of
the Gilgamesh and the gospel." (“C'est pourquoi nous pensons que McLuhan se trompe en
affirmant que le medium est le message: le même médium peut porter des messages aussi
différents que l'histoire de Guilgamech et l'évangile.”) My translation. See Vilém Flusser’s “La
Crise de la Science (The Crisis of Science)” in Cahier de L’Ecole Sociologique Interrogative, 2
(Paris, 1980): 5. Obtained in the Flusser Archive, Document M21-CRISE-01.687.
335
Marchessault and Guldin, “Introduction,” Flusser Studies 06, 1-2.
336
Marchessault, “McLuhan’s Pedagogical Art,” 4.
337
Formalist in his “inability to engage in any meaningful way with political economy or
structures of power.” Marchessault, “McLuhan’s Pedagogical Art,” 12. Although, in the same
essay Marchessault describes how McLuhan became friendly with the politician Pierre Eliot
Trudeau after McLuhan reviewed Trudeau’s book, Federalism and the French Canadians (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1968) for The New York Times.
338
Marchessault and Guldin, “Introduction,” Flusser Studies 6, 6.
96
The Codified World came out of a conference on May 3, 1973 at the Institut de
L'Environment in Paris and was originally published in French in 1974, as a forty-eight page
pamphlet, Flusser rewrote it in German and published it as “Die kodifizierte Welt” in Merkur in
1978.339 The French version of the essay begins by grappling with the difference between nature
and culture and the fact that culture is characterized by “codes” that represent things.340 The
French version of “The Codified World” leans heavily on language, considering the “universe”
of French language as a system of codes, as well as gestures (and paying homage to semiotics,
with references to denotative and connotative codes and a rare reference to Umberto Eco’s
“absent structure,”)341 and ends with a consideration of difference types of communication: the
339
Vilém Flusser, Le Monde codifié (Paris: Institut de l’Environnement, 1974). The French text
includes Flusser’s lecture and a subsequent discussion. The entry for this text in Flusser’s
Writings reads: “‘The Codified World’ was originally published as “Die kodifizierte Welt,”
Merkur 359 (April 1978): 374-379. It was republished in Vilém Flusser, Lob der
Oberflächlichkeit: Für eine Phänomenologie der Medien, Schriften 1, ed. Stefan Bollmann
(Bensheim and Düsseldorf: Bollmann, 1993). Copyright Edith Flusser.” Flusser, Writings, 219.
Meanwhile, Klaus Sander writes that Flusser felt “too uncertain in the French language” and
wrote the manuscript in English (“Flusser fühlt sich in der französischen Sprache noch zu
unsicher und verfaßt das Manuskript in Englisch.”) Sander, Sources, 21. Also see Vilém Flusser,
“The Codified World,” Writings, 35-41. The version in Writings is dated 1978.
340
The discussion at the back of the pamphlet includes an argument between Flusser and an
unidentified participant regarding the difference between nature and culture, predicting later
writings like Natural:mind, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, and the “Curie’s Children” essays in
Artforum. Flusser’s interlocutor claims that nature doesn’t exist without culture, but Flusser
argues that nature is a realm of neutral ethics; the distinction is not an epistemological difference,
but a moral one. The discussion here about whether rain or the moon are nature or culture is
echoed in essays like “Rain” and “The Moon” in Natural:mind. See Flusser, Le Monde codifié,
34ff.
341
Flusser, Le Monde codifié, 19. Also see Umberto Eco, La struttura assente: introduzione alla
ricerca semiologica (Milan: Bompiani, 1968) and Trattato di semiotica generale (Milan:
Bompiani, 1975). Like Flusser, Eco had published significantly in newspapers, including a
column in L’Espresso and essays in Corriere della sera. Also see Teresa de Lauretis, “Semiotics,
Theory and Social Practice: A Critical History of Italian Semiotics,” Cine-Tracts 2, no. 1.
(1978): 1-14; reproduced in revised form in Teresa de Lauretis, Umberto Eco (Florence: La
Nuova Italia, 1981), 31ff.
97
discursive and the dialogic—which would appear in later texts.342 The much shorter German
version, later translated to English and printed in Writings, is clearly influenced by Flusser’s
burgeoning interest in technological media and his participation in photography and television
conferences in the mid-seventies. This version gets straight to the point, positing that meaning
and “life in the world” (echoing Husserl’s Lebenswelt) are utterly transformed by the
communications revolution.343 Flusser begins with the example of color and how our world has
been transformed since World War II by an explosion of color: everything from colorful socks,
pajamas, beverages, and ice cream to advertisements, stoplights and Technicolor film.344 Color is
part of the codified world—the code being a system of symbols whose purpose is to facilitate
communication between people (and wherever you discover codes, you can infer human
presence)—but it is also delivered via surfaces, which will become important in the technical
image writings.345 Flusser’s list of surfaces sounds familiar after reading The Force of the
Everyday: walls, screens, paper surfaces, plastic, aluminum, glass, textiles. All have become
important “media” and linear codes like the alphabet—harking back to the essay “Lines and
Surfaces,” but also looking forward to Does Writing Have a Future?—are becoming less
342
Flusser, Le Monde codifié, 28. The other important thing that Flusser does in the French essay
is identify two types of codes: elite and mass, or “elite media” and “mass media,” (ibid., 31).
This is important for his later approach to technical images, in which he doesn’t champion art
photography specifically, but rather those who experiment with what he calls photography’s
“program.”
343
Flusser, “The Codified World,” Writings, 35.
344
Flusser would later write an essay on color, “Farben statt Formen” [Colors Instead of Shapes],
Lob der Oberflächlichkeit: Für eine Phänomenologie der Medien. Schriften Bd. 1 (Bensheim and
Düsseldorf: Bollmann, 1993), 118-129. His discussion of color is also interesting in relation to
the rise of color photography in the art world at the same moment. William Eggleston’s 1976
exhibition of color photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is seen as an early
benchmark of that rise.
345
Flusser, “The Codified World,” Writings, 36-37.
98
important.346 If one wants to read or decipher a text, one has to read to the end of a line/sentence
to receive the message, while in images the eye wanders across the image, ordering things into
position. This is not a new situation: images dominated code systems before text was invented,
as Flusser will argue in Towards a Philosophy of Photography.347 But even after the invention of
writing “surface codes”—frescoes, tapestries, mosaics, stained glass church windows—played an
important role.348 Flusser sees a new generation programmed by technical images and their
diachronized rather than synchronized mode of time, and argues that these images are
emblematic of a new age, which he calls “post-historical.” This includes photography, which is
part of the new consciousness in that “the techno-codes are a further step away from texts,
because they allow us to make images out of concepts. A photograph is not the image of the facts
at hand, as was the case with the traditional image, but rather the image of a series of concepts,
which the photographer has come up with in the scene that signifies the facts at hand.”349
346
Ibid., 36ff. Flusser Studies includes two versions of the previously unpublished essay
“Skins,” probably written in the early eighties, and Michael T. Schetsche and Thomas Temme’s
“Some Remarks on a Theory of Superface.” Flusser Studies 2 (May 2006), accessed June 4,
2014, http://www.flusserstudies.net/archive/flusser-studies-02-may-2006.
347
Flusser also attempts a definition of “image,” honed later in Towards a Philosophy of
Photography. Here he writes that “the scenic character of codes gives rise to a specific way of
life of societies that they program. One can call it the ‘magical form of being.’ An image is a
surface whose meaning is suspended in a moment: It ‘synchronizes’ the situations that it
represents as a scene.” Flusser, The Codified World, 37. Later the definition of an image will be
simplified to “a magical surface within which the elements relate magically.” Flusser, Towards a
Philosophy of Photography (Göttingen, Germany: European Photography, 1984), 60. The
recurrence of the word “magic” throughout “The Codified World” is also notable and will
become prevalent in later technical image texts.
348
Flusser, The Codified World, 36.
349
Ibid., 40. This section also includes a good explanation of the difference between linear and
surface thinking in which texts are “explanations” and techno-images are “models.” Flusser
writes, “The revolutionary originality of techno-images is not that they move themselves, that
they are ‘audiovisual,’ that they shine in light of the cathode ray [sic], and so on, but that they are
‘models,’ the image of a concept of a scene. That is a ‘crisis,’ because the reaching beyond texts
99
Technical images produce a crisis in which old “programs” such as politics, philosophy, and
science are disabled. However, in the same way as it took centuries for people to learn how to
wield the writing code, we can gradually learn techno-codes. The essay ends on a hopeful note:
“The decline and fall of the alphabet points to the end of history in the narrow sense of the word.
The present reflection hopes to raise the question concerning the commencement of the new.”350
Like The Codified World, the essay “Two Approaches to the Phenomenon, Television”
also came out of a conference: “Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of
Television,” held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in January 1974.351 Flusser would
write isolated essays on television, although he generally considered it under the rubric of
technical images and later of communicology, his term for communications theory.352 Two
things are particularly interesting about this essay. One is the company in which it was given: an
illustrious group of artists, critics, and theorists (Flusser’s panel alone included René Berger,
disempowers old programs, such as politics, philosophy, and science, but does not replace them
with new programs,” (ibid., 40-41). Also see articles like “L’irruption du techno-imainaire
(Irruption or the techno-imaginary)” in Interférences 7 (Paris, 1977): 45-47. Obtained in the
Flusser Archive, Document M21-INTERF-01.690.
350
Flusser, “The Codified World,” Writings, 41.
351
The essay was also reprinted in German as “Für eine Phänomenologie des Fernsehens” (1974)
in Lob der Oberflächlichkeit, Schriften Bd. 1, 2 (Mannheim, Germany: Bollmann, 1995), 180200, and in Medienkultur (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2008), 103-123.
352
See Vilém Flusser, “Die Tyrannei der Sender,” Die Revolution der Bilder. Der FlusserReader zu Kommunikation, Medien und Design (Mannheim, Germany: Bollmann, 1995), 115118, first published as “Vom Fernsehen,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 25, 1971;
“Fernsehen,” Kommunikologie (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2007), 200-204; Vilém Flusser, “Fernsehbild
und politische Sphäre im Lichte der rumänischen Revolution,” Von der Bürokratie zur
Telekratie: Rumänien im Fernsehen, ed. Peter Weibel (Berlin: Merve, 1990), 103-114; and
“Television Image and Political Space in the light of the Romanian Revolution,” Lecture,
Budapest, April 7, 1990, accessed June 27, 2015,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFTaY2u4NvI.
100
Gerald O’Grady, Pierre Schaeffer, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and John McHale.)353 The
second is that Flusser’s essay considered television from a phenomenological perspective, as a
box in the living room around which people sit, with buttons that viewers can press, which gives
them the illusion of freedom and control.354 Expanding on the quotidian phenomenon in The
Force of the Everyday, he argues that television is a new window opening onto the world—an
update of the window people leaned out of in ancient villages to communicate with their
neighbors. He echoes McLuhan in one sense: the television is said to produce “messages.” But
for Flusser, the medium moves only one way, creating the illusion of participation while really
encouraging passive reception. For television to become an “improved window,” it needs to be
treated as both discursive and dialogical, not just transmitting messages but allowing us to
“‘recognize’ the other person, in the sense of perceiving and conceiving his message, and it
would allow the other person to recognize us in the same way.”355 Here one can see the influence
of Martin Buber’s idea of seeing God in the face of the Other—but updated for the
telecommunications age in which we address one another through surfaces and screens. Flusser
would elaborate on this later in the technical image writings. In the meantime, however, he
would pick up the argument from the discussion following his lecture on The Codified World,
parsing nature and culture.
353
Some of the other participants included Gregory Battcock, Hollis Frampton, Nam June Paik,
Joan Jonas, Stan VanDerBeek, Vito Acconci, Allan Kaprow, Shigeko Kubota, Richard Serra,
John Baldessari, David Ross, Barbara J. London, and Harald Szeeman.
354
Flusser’s discussion of the box foreshadows his writing about the black box—including the
camera, but also other apparatuses—in Post-history and other texts. See Vilém Flusser, “Two
Approaches to the Phenomenon, Television,” 237.
355
Ibid., 247.
101
Natural:Mind
Flusser’s attempt to erode the divide between humans and their environment, as well as
the hierarchy of humans over other animals would be a primary concern in Vampyroteuthis
infernalis (1983) and the “Curie’s Children” column in Artforum. These ideas were also
articulated in a series of essays he began writing in 1974, collected as Natural:Mind and
published in São Paulo in 1979.356 Reflecting one of his favorite devices—the circular narrative
in which the concluding essay serves as an introduction—Flusser explains in “Natural:Mind (a
kind of conclusion)” at the end of the book that the essays could be read in any sequence,
echoing the literary experiments of Oulipo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortazar.357 Devoted to
356
Regarding the title, translator Rodrigo Maltez Novaes writes that Flusser “chose the adverb
naturalmente (naturally) as the title for the Portuguese version of the book, which he
communicated to [Milton] Vargas on the note that accompanied the last set of essays on March
17, 1975. The addition of a colon in the final Portuguese title was a last minute flash of
inspiration just as the book was about to go to press. The graphic separation of the root and the
suffix, natural:mente, created a phrase out of the same word and thus added a second layer of
meaning that transformed the title into a concrete poem.” Novaes, “Introduction,” Natural:Mind
(Minneapolis: Univocal, 2013), xiv. Also see three previously unpublished essays on nature and
culture: Vilém Flusser, “Paraiso (Paradise),” “Von den Gärten (On Gardens),” and “Outono
(Autumn),” in Flusser Studies 14 (November 2012). Only “Autumn” is dated: October 22, 1979,
accessed June 4, 2014, http://www.flusserstudies.net/archive/flusser-studies-14-%E2%80%93november-2012.
357
Borges’ short story “The Garden of the Forking Paths” offers the blueprint for this. In the
story, the protagonist is a descendent of Ts’ui Pên, creator of a manuscript described as both a
book and a labyrinth with no linear narrative (the hero dies in one chapter and reappears in a later
one). “The Garden of the Forking Paths” has been described as a hypertext that essentially
predicts the structure of the internet and “the increased complexity of human consciousness and
the failure of linear media to capture the structures of our thought,” The New Media Reader, ed.
Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 3. The New Media
Reader also includes writing by Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potential, Workshop for Potential
Literature) and Italo Calvino’s “Prose and Anticombinatorics” (183-189), an essay on using a
computer algorithm to compose a story. Also see Calvino’s lecture “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” in
The Uses of Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1986), 3-27; Umberto Eco’s
The Open Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), originally published as
Opera aperta: forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee (Milan: Bompiani,
1962); and Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s essay “Topological Structures in Modern Literature,”
published in Spanish in the Buenos Aires magazine Sur (May/June 1966), which examined
102
paths, valleys, birds, rain, cows, grass, the moon, meadows, winds, fog, and other phenomena,
the essays hinge around a dialectic between nature and culture that Flusser deviously seeks to
collapse. In “Paths,” the first essay in the book, for instance, Flusser looks at the Fuorn Pass,
which connects the Engadin Valley to the valleys in Trentino-Alto Adige on the borders of Italy,
Austria, and Switzerland. “The Fuorn Pass is an asphalt road,” he writes. And yet, “for countless
millennia,” it was the path for herds of horses, cattle, and reindeer, “a path which they crossed
while being chased by Paleolithic hunters, our ancestors. The route of today’s road was ‘built’ by
those herds … we, who travel by car from Bolzano to Zernez, are only following their footsteps,
exactly as our ancestors, the hunters, did.”358 Teasing out the difference between “natural” and
“artificial” paths, Flusser concludes that it is “extremely problematic … to want to establish a
rigorous dialectic between culture and nature.”359 Similarly, where birds once served as models
for flight, now that humans can actually fly our relationship to birds must change: “We see birds
as flying apparatus, even though such apparatus did not have birds but aerodynamic equations as
models. In this sense, airplanes are less ‘natural’ instruments than levers and mirrors: they do not
have natural things as models.”360
labyrinthine narratives from the ancient period through Borges and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Also see
Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Pantheon/Random House, 1966).
358
Flusser, Natural:Mind, 1-3.
359
Ibid., 10.
360
Ibid., 22. Flusser was hardly alone in this conclusion. As Charles Harvard Gibbs-Smith points
out, Leonardo da Vinci proposed a number of possibilities for flight in his notebooks, including
human-powered flying machines with harnesses attached to movable, bird-like wings. But it was
the Wright brothers’ adoption of fixed-wing principles based on wind-tunnel experiments in their
workshop in Dayton, Ohio between 1901 and 1902, that paved the way for human flight. See
Charles Harvard Gibbs-Smith’s Aviation: an historical survey from its origins to the end of the
Second World War (London: H.M.S.O./Science Museum, 1970). Also see “The Wright Brothers
and Early Flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, 1900-1903,” accessed May 19, 2014,
http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/wrbr/hrs/chapter1.pdf. The same analogy-103
The rest of the essays challenge the nature-culture binary in other ways. In “Rain,”
Flusser describes how observing rain through a window while smoking a pipe and listening to
Mozart represents the victory of culture over nature since it offers the possibility of a distanced
contemplation of nature.361 And yet, irrigation—which Flusser calls “programmed” rain—upsets
this neat divide, demanding that we reconsider our ideas of nature, culture, technology, and
progress. In “Cows,” which has been reprinted twice in recent English language publications,362
Flusser describes cows as “efficient machines for the transformation of grass into milk” with
“hardware” that can be used in the form of meat, leather, and other consumable products, and
prototypes for Western notions of progress: a “highly sophisticated and anthropomorphic
machine.”363 Finally, “The Moon” questions whether the moon, which belonged until recently to
the class of things that are visible but inaccessible to our hearing, touch, smell or taste, has been
transformed into a fiction, since it has been “touched” by astronauts.364 In a hilariously perverse
passage, Flusser argues that, “since the Moon (according to TV and newspapers) has left the
field of nature and entered into that of culture,” it no longer belongs to “astronomers, poets, and
important later for Flusser—can be extended to artificial intelligence (AI). As one journalist
recently pointed out, AI “started working when it ditched humans as a model … That’s the thrust
of the analogy: Airplanes don’t flap their wings; why should computers think?” James Somers,
“The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think,” The Atlantic, October 23, 2013, accessed
May 19, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com. The article profiles Douglas Hofstadter, an early AI
researcher and author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic
Books, 1979), who pursued an AI trajectory based on human cognition and intelligence. Also see
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, ed. Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig (Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2010).
361
Flusser, Natural:Mind, 29.
362
Vilém Flusser, “Cows,” trans. Rodrigo Maltez Novaes, Artforum (September 2013): 275-277;
and in Philosophy of Photography 2, no. 2 (July 2012): 244-247.
363
Vilém Flusser, Natural:Mind, 47.
364
Ibid., 65.
104
magicians,” but “politicians, lawyers, and technocrats.” It has become the property of NASA and
a form of “real estate”:365 “NASA has transformed the Moon from a natural phenomenon into a
culture one (into an instrument of astronautics) by having touched it.”366 One of Flusser’s
clearest outlines of the nature/culture dichotomy appears at the end of this essay: “I see now,
surprisingly, that the Moon, far from being a natural phenomenon on its way to becoming
culture, is, and always has been, a cultural phenomenon that is starting to become nature. Here is
what culture really is: a set of necessary things that become progressively more indispensable.
And here is what nature is: a set of unnecessary and dispensable things. Nature is a late and
luxurious product of culture.”367
Ultimately, the impact of natural experiences are indistinguishable from cultural ones,
leading Flusser to conclude that the ontological distinction between nature and culture is not
existentially sustainable within the current context.368 This upsets concepts and categories like
science, modernity, and progress. Physics, which Flusser sees as the paradigm for early modern
science, can no longer be the model for all sciences; instead, communications theory becomes
more viable.369 Thus Natural:Mind itself becomes part of an “embryonic” scientific literature in
365
Ibid., 66. Also see David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek, Marketing the Moon: The Selling
of the Apollo Lunar Program (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014). This book argues that rather than
functioning as a secretive government operation, space exploration was turned into a communal
one via marketing and public relations campaigns for the Apollo program and product placement
that included Hasselblad (the “first camera on the moon”), Sony cassette recorders, Tang instant
fruit-flavored drink, and the Exer-Genie personal exerciser.
366
Flusser, Natural:Mind, 68.
367
Ibid., 70-71.
368
Ibid., 132.
369
Ibid., 138.
105
which Husserl, Ortega y Gasset, and Bachelard are predecessors.370 In the concluding sentences
of the book, Flusser draws this out even further, describing the book as a “tourist guide” for
Brazilians (since it was first published in Brazil) that explains the European attitude toward
nature: ‘“Tourist guide,’ as long as ‘tourism’ is understood as an updated synonym of the term
‘theory.’”371
Flusser would continue to write about the nature-culture dichotomy in the eighties. But
his focus was increasingly turning toward technology, writing, and history.372 In a January 1976
letter to Helena and Ladislas (Lotzi) Segy, friends who ran a gallery in New York, Flusser
detailed some of his recent activities:
This is what I am doing: (a) a series of phenomenological essays on gestures:
doing, searching, walking, painting, photographing, eating, writing, listening etc.
aim: a book to be called “the meaning of gestures”. (b) A long paper on
sociological art. (c) a course of lectures on “les phénomènes de la
communication.” (d) A collection of essays on “nature” versus “culture,” (the
given versus the made). Ever since we left São Paulo in ’72, I published three
books: “La Force du quotidien”, “Le monde codifié” and “Techno-imaginaire”,
and numerous articles in various media, including some in the States.373
Post-History
With this in mind, Post-History may be seen to sit at a divide in Flusser’s oeuvre. Written
in the late seventies as a series of lectures to be delivered in Brazil, France, and Israel, the
manuscript exists in multiple versions: two in Portuguese, two in German, and partial versions in
370
Ibid., 139.
371
Ibid., 143.
372
Also see articles like Vilém Flusser’s “Kitch and Post-History” in Natural/cultura 1 (Salerno,
Italy, 1985): 22-25. Flusser Archive M22-NATCUL-01-718.
373
Letter from Flusser to the “Segy-ies,” January 5, 1976. Flusser Archive, English
correspondence, binder 57, number 18.
106
French and English.374 Many of the ideas and concepts that occupied Flusser over previous
decades are here, but the book is also a leaping-off point for the technical image writings. PostHistory addresses knowledge, religion, science, ideology, politics, progress, education, nature,
culture, art, and history, but using concepts from fields like cybernetics, communications,
information, and game theory and terms like “program,” “codes,” “functionary,” “instrument,”
“noise,” “redundancy,” “input,” “output,” and “apparatus.” The other significant factor that
Flusser formulates his arguments in relation to other thinkers—although these figures are not
actually identified in the text. In a letter to Milton Vargas dated October 22, 1980, Flusser
outlined the thinkers confronted in each essay: Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Rudolf Carnap,
Karl Marx, Karl Popper, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Abraham Moles, José Ortega y Gasset, Jürgen
Habermas, Theodor Adorno, Marshall McLuhan, A. Rappaport,375 Edmund Husserl, Ernst
374
Rodrigo Maltez Novaes, “Translator’s Introduction” in Post-History, xi. The book was first
published in 1983 in Portuguese as Pós-História – Vinte instantaneous e um modo de usar by
Duas Cidades, the São Paulo publisher that also published Natural:Mind. But many of the ideas
had been sketched out in different essays over the years. For instance, in “Line and Surface,”
published in Main Currents in 1973, Flusser included a section titled “Toward a Post-Historical
Future.” See Vilém Flusser, “Line and Surface,” Main Currents 29, no. 3 (New Rochelle, NY:
Center for Integrative Education, 1973): 100-106. An abstract of the essay was later published in
The Philosopher’s Index 7, no. 4 (1974). Flusser’s correspondence with Don Stacy, a U.S. artist
and board member of Main Currents should also be mentioned. It fills two binders in the Flusser
Archive.
375
Probably Anatol Rapoport (1911-2007), the Ukrainian-born theorist. A similar error appears
in the Patrick Tschudin interview with Flusser in The Freedom of the Migrant—only corrected in
that book. Flusser states, “Until the middle of the twentieth century we thought that that people’s
ability to make decisions was some sort of pinnacle … But there are people who have really
cudgeled their brains over such concepts. And among these people—Rupperport,* to name
one—there are those who have asked, ‘Can this be formalized? What does it mean to make a
decision?” Flusser, The Freedom of the Migrant, 97. At the bottom of the page, the asterisk is
explained: “Presumably the transcription of the interview should read ‘Rappoport’ or ‘Rapoport.’
According to his widow, Edith Flusser, Flusser is referring to Anatol Rapoport (1911- ), an
emeritus professor of mathematics and psychology and of peace studies at the University of
Toronto who has published prolifically on game theory, among numerous other topics,” (ibid.).
107
Bloch, The Hudson Institute,376 Martin Heidegger, John Dewey, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Franz
Kafka.377 This list includes some of the thinkers Flusser grappled with during his teenage years
in Prague (Marx, Buber); during his traumatic wartime and existential postwar years (Kafka,
Ortega y Gasset, Sartre, Heidegger, Arendt); during his immersion in language philosophy
(Carnap, Wittgenstein); and during his engagement with communications theory (McLuhan).
How, then, do communications and information theory inform traditional philosophy and
create new concepts and arguments in Post-History? The opening section, “User’s Manual,”
offers some clues. The title of this section reflects both the instruction manuals that come with
consumer products, but also Life, a User’s Manual, a novel published by Georges Perec, a
member of Oulipo, which used information theory to think about narrative structure.378 Flusser
writes:
The sequence of the essays is random: they can be read in any order. Nevertheless
there is a discursive thread that orders the essays. This is a discourse that runs
from despair toward hope, however tenuous. Whoever follows this course must
have read the text in the correct order. Although an equally useful method would
be to read the text in leaps, like the movement of the knight on a chessboard. This
method will allow the unmasking of the methodical tricks (paraphenomenological), to which the author appealed.379
In “Our Program,” addressed to Rudolf Carnap, Flusser writes that the notion that the
world and human existence are programmed is relatively new.380 Nonetheless, this ends up
376
A conservative think tank founded in 1961 by Herman Kahn and colleagues from the RAND
Corporation.
377
Maltez Novaes, “Introduction,” Post-History, xi-xii.
378
See Georges Perec’s La Vie, mode d’emploi (Paris: Hachette literature, 1978), translated as
Life, a User’s Manual, trans. David Bellos (London/Boston: D.R. Godine, 1987).
379
Flusser, Post-History, 2.
380
Ibid., 19.
108
affecting everything from ideology and history to art, politics, and human freedom, because
programs are systems based on chance, in which “every virtuality, even the least probable, will
be realized of necessity if the game is played for a sufficiently long time.”381 In this programmed
world, the worker described in the essay “Our Work” becomes a functionary and society is
transformed into a cybernetic system composed of functionaries and apparatus.382 Knowledge
and the idea of progress are affected—see “Our Knowledge” and “Our Health”—because science
has become a game for programmers and, more importantly, an apparatus.383 In “Our
Communication,” written in response to Moles, history is influenced by changing modes of
discourse and dialogue, particularly in the way discourse switches from “theatric” (schools,
theaters, etcetera) and “pyramidal” (state, party, etcetera) to the “networked” dialogues
characterized by the mass media, which produces feedback rather than new information.384 In
“Our Inebriation,” written in response to Heidegger, Flusser looks at the “ontological position of
381
Ibid., 22.
382
Ibid., 33.
383
Ibid., 42.
384
Ibid., 57. Furthermore, “A second comment in Flusser’s fifth lecture, ‘Du discours
scientifique à la démagogie’ [from the unpublished lecture series Les phénomènes de la
communications, written in the mid-seventies], provides a direct link between Flusser’s notion of
amphitheater and McLuhan’s idea of a global village. Flusser is critical of McLuhan’s ‘global
village’ metaphor here: ‘Notre société est devenue un amphithéâtre cosmique, un cirque
cosmique, et non un village cosmique come le dit McLuhan.’ (‘Our society is derived from a
cosmic amphitheater, a cosmic circus, and not a cosmic village according to McLuhan.’) He
would have been sympathetic to McLuhan’s preferred metaphor which was the ‘global theater’ –
a notion of mediation referring to what Canadians experienced daily from their southern
neighbors: the spectacle of American media culture. For Flusser, however, the problem with
McLuhan’s notion of ‘global village’ or even global theater, for that matter, is the fact that it
implies a sort of harmonic unity and does not deal explicitly enough with the problem of
unidirectional communication. In fact, the ampitheatrical media do not allow for dialogical forms
of reaction because they function, above all, as distributive communication devices.”
Marchessault and Guldin, “Introduction,” Flusser Studies 06, 3-4.
109
drugs”385 and the “narcotic media,”386 but also “a specific drug called ‘art.’”387 If drugs are
characterized by an “ontological viscosity,”388 a similar phenomenon exists in art, and the artist
becomes “the inebriate who emigrates from culture in order to reinvade it.”389 This is not to say
that art is a free or revolutionary space, in the nineteenth-century or romantic sense. As Flusser
points out in “Our School,” a response to John Dewey, the industrial model of education
produced fine art academies that crippled and amputated artists’ “political and epistemological
dimension.”390 But art can still serve as a model because “creative inebriation,” occurs within
every discipline, turning private experience into a public declaration that can transform
apparatus.391 Flusser writes:
Notwithstanding: art is a kind of magic. As it publishes the private, as it “turns
conscious the unconscious,” it becomes a mediation of the immediate, a feat of
magic ... And culture cannot forego this magic: because without this source of
new information, however ontologically suspect, culture would fall into
entropy.392
This is a political gesture, of course. Flusser argues that “to publish the private is the only
type of engagement in the republic that effectively implies the transformation of the republic
385
Flusser, Post-History, 132.
386
Ibid., 131.
387
Ibid., 136.
388
“Given its ambivalence, the ontological position of drugs is slippery. Drugs are a medium for
overcoming cultural mediation in order to to reach immediate experience. Drugs are the
mediation of the immediate.” Flusser, Post-History, 132. Italics in original text.
389
Ibid., 136.
390
Ibid., 147.
391
This argument echoes those made by political theorists from Jacques Rancière to Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri, who posit art as a field where the political imaginary can flourish.
392
Flusser, Post-History, 137.
110
because it is the only one that informs.”393 But other terms take precedence over politics:
“doubt,” to which we have seen Flusser devote considerable time,394 and “ideology,” for which
he maintains a special reservoir of scorn. Ideology is intermittently a form of “pseudoknowledge,”395 a stubborn “insistence on one point of view,”396 and, in the case of political
ideologies, a type of madness that characterizes “history in its last stages.”397
The term that dominates Post-History however, and which predicates Flusser’s turn
toward photography and the technical image in the nineteen-eighties, is apparatus. In the first
essay in Post-History, “The Ground We Tread,” written as a dialogue with Hannah Arendt,
Flusser describes Auschwitz as the place where “the Western tendency toward objectification
was finally realized and it was done so in the shape of an apparatus.”398 After Auschwitz,
393
Ibid., 138.
394
In Post-History, doubt and critique are almost synonymous: “as Kant used to say, critique or
doubt, is not a dwelling,” (ibid., 68).
395
Flusser, Post-History, 39.
396
Ibid., 101. These statements on doubt and ideology will be repeated in Towards a Philosophy
of Photography: “The act of photography is that of ‘phenomenological doubt,’ to the extent that
it attempts to approach phenomena from any number of viewpoints. But the ‘mathesis’ of this
doubt (its deep structure) is prescribed by the camera’s program. Two aspects are decisive for
this doubt. First: Photographers’ practice is hostile to ideology. Ideology is the insistence on a
single viewpoint thought to be perfect. Photographers act in a post-ideological way even when
they think they are serving an ideology. Second: Photographers’ practice is fixed to a program.
Photographers can only act within the program of the camera, even when they think they are
acting in opposition to this program. This is true of all post-industrial acts: They are
‘phenomenological’ in the sense of being hostile to ideology, and they are programmed acts.
Thus it is a mistake to talk of a drift towards ideology on the part of mass culture (e.g. on the part
of mass photography). Programming is post-ideological manipulation.” Flusser, Towards a
Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 38.
397
Flusser, Post-History, 95.
398
Ibid., 6. In a footnote, translator Rodrigo Maltez Novaes writes: “When using the term
‘apparatus’ in English, Flusser always used the term in its Latin form for both the singular and
the plural forms. In English it is possible to use both apparatus and apparatuses for the plural, but
111
apparatuses sprang up “like mushrooms after a Nazi rain, from the ground that has become
rotten.”399 Some claim to be “friends of mankind,” like scientific, technical and administrative
apparatuses. But, Flusser argues, such labels and ideologies are deceptive and serve only to cover
up the essence of apparatus: “They are all just like Auschwitz, black boxes that function with
complex inner-workings in order to realize a program … such apparatus function, all of them,
toward the annihilation of all their functionaries, including programmers. Exactly because they
objectify and dehumanize man.”400
In succeeding essays, Flusser teases out the nature of apparatus. It is not just “intelligent
instruments”401—echoing later writers like Manuel De Landa402—but a game with rules that
need to be explained. There is not one, but multiple apparatuses, and they are all synchronized:
the transport apparatus with the industrial apparatus, and the administrative apparatus with the
entertainment one.403 There can be smaller apparatuses: art, cinema, the supermarket. What is
important to note is not just their existence, but their effect: they’ve produced an upheaval of
since Flusser opted to use apparatus as the plural in all the texts that he wrote in English, I
decided to retain the same form for the translations in order to keep the translated texts as close
as possible in style to his own English texts,” (ibid.).
399
Flusser, Post-History, 9.
400
Ibid.
401
Ibid., 25 and 76-79. “Intelligent instruments are instruments that are equipped with minimemory and mini-programs that execute specific tasks automatically. They cook dinners, cut
grass, write letters, and assemble cars. They are robots in every sense; they are not
anthropomorphic, to the contrary as predicted by all the preceding science fiction. Because these
miniatures, far from being anti-apparatus, are themselves apparatus; and they work within and in
function of gigantic apparatus. Therefore the de-alienating pretention of the defenders of
miniaturization seems doubtful,” (ibid., 76-77). Italics in original.
402
See Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Zone Books,
1991).
403
Flusser, Post-History, 59.
112
history resulting in the migration of peoples and the reshuffling of space and time.404 Moreover,
the relationship between humans and apparatus does not flow in one direction; programming is
not controlled by humans:405
Apparatus always function increasingly independently from their programmer’s
intentions. And apparatus that are programmed by other apparatus emerge with
increasing frequency. Their initial purpose always recedes farther beyond the
horizon, and becomes less interesting. Human programming is itself increasingly
programmed by apparatus.406
Flusser is emphatic on this point:
We must neither anthropomorphize nor objectify apparatus. We must grasp them
in their cretinous concreteness, in their programmed and absurd functionality, in
order to be able to comprehend them and thus insert them into meta-programs.
The paradox is that such meta-programs are equally absurd games.407
What he concludes is that we must learn is to accept the absurd, if we wish to emancipate
ourselves: “Freedom is conceivable only as an absurd game with apparatus, as a game with
programs … whether we continue to be ‘men’ or become robots depends on how fast we learn to
play: we can become players of the game or pieces in it.”408 In this, and throughout Post-History,
one can see allusions to thinkers like Ortega y Gasset and Adorno and their engagement with
Kulturkritik (cultural criticism)—particularly in essays like “Our Dwelling” and “Our Clothes,”
written in dialogue with Ortega y Gasset and Adorno, respectively. More significant here are
404
Ibid., 68.
405
Here we see a distinct overlap with De Landa, who in the early nineties wrote about an
imminent future in which pilotless aircraft and unmanned tanks would be “intelligent” enough to
choose their own targets and the blurring distinction between the “advisory” and “executive”
capabilities of military applications of artificial intelligence. See De Landa’s War in the Age of
Intelligent Machines, 1.
406
Flusser, Post-History, 25.
407
Ibid., 26.
408
Ibid.
113
connections to thinkers who have written about apparatus itself: Louis Althusser,409 Michel
Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,410 and more recent scholars like Giorgio Agamben,
Philippe Ortel, Suzanne Pagé, Samuel Bianchini, Jean-Louis Deotte, Alexander Galloway, and
radical groups like Tiqqun.411 It is also important to note that the term “apparatus” has potentially
different meanings and linguistic nuances from the French “dispositif” (Foucault’s term) and that
409
One of the most famous twentieth-century thinkers to use the term “apparatus” is " Althusser.
See Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in Lenin and Philosophy and other
Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 121-176; originally published as
“Idéologie et appareils idéologique d’État (Notes pour une recherché)” in La Pensée 151 (June
1970): 3-38. Althusser’s concept of apparatus was more topographical (spatial) and theorized in
relation to Marx and the economic base (superstructure) as an edifice and social formation,
particularly in the context of the postwar French Communist Party. Flusser approached apparatus
in a more technological sense. And while Althusser sees the apparatus as repressive, a tool of the
ruling class, Flusser sees it as something that pervades all of society and ultimately reproduces or
programs itself.
410
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (Pantheon Books, New
York, NY, 1978), originally published as Histoire de la sexualité (Paris: Édition Gallimard,
1976); and the interview “The Confession of the Flesh” (1977) in Power/Knowledge Selected
Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Vintage, 1980), 194–
228; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture,” A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987),
424-73; originally published as Mille Plateaux (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1980).
411
See Philippe Ortel’s writings on apparatus in relation to photography, literature, and theater:
Littérature et photographie (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008) and Philippe Ortel
and Gaëlle Lesaffre, Discours, Image, Dispositif: Penser La Représentation (Paris:
L’Hartmattan, 2008); Suzanne Pagé’s writing on the museum as apparatus; French artist Samuel
Bianchini’s website Dispotheque.org for work on interactive media and apparatus, accessed May
28, 2014, http://dispotheque.org/; Jean-Louis Déotte’s Qu'est-ce qu'un appareil: Benjamin,
Lyotard, Rancière (Paris: Harmattan, 2007); Giorgio Agamben’s What is an Apparatus? And
Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Tiqqun, “As a Science of
Apparatuses,” This is Not a Program (New York: Semiotext(e)/Intervention Series, 2011), 135204; Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2006) and The Interface Effect (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2012). I
thank Caroline Sebilleau, Louis-Georges Schwartz, and Matthew Antezzo for suggesting some
of these texts. Later I will discuss writers who used the term “apparatus” in a specifically image
and media theory context: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Jean Baudrillard, Friedrich Kittler—as
well as Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin.
114
Agamben has disputed its translation as “apparatus.”412 Flusser’s editors and translators have
also pointed out that the Portuguese dispositivo is commonly translated as “apparatus” or
“device,” which is more technical, while dispositivo, like the French dispositif, carries the
original meaning of the Latin dispositio, which in classical rhetoric was a system used for
organizing arguments.413
More important for this dissertation is how apparatus is connected with a theory of
photography and technical images. In the essay “Our Images” in Post-History, written with
Marshall McLuhan in mind, Flusser writes that technical images are different from traditional
images in that traditional images are produced by humans and technical images by apparatuses.
Moreover: “Apparatus[es] are black boxes that are programmed to devour symptoms of scenes
and to spew out these symptoms in the form of images. Apparatus[es] transcode symptoms into
images … The message of technical images must be deciphered, and such decoding is even more
arduous than that of traditional images: the message is even more ‘masked.’”414
412
See Giorgio Agamben’s lecture “What is a Dispositif?” presented at the European Graduate
School in 2005, accessed May 26, 2014, http://www.egs.edu. Part One begins: “For reasons that
will become clear in the course of my lecture, I am not satisfied with the current English
translation of ‘dispositif’ as procedure or apparatus. And I would prefer to keep nearer to the
French original. This is why I have proposed a probably monstrous translation as dispository.
The term is in the English Oxford dictionary. It is an astrological term, the law of the sign and its
relation to other planets. Thus the depository being the lord of the astrological sign embodies all
the forces and influences that the planet exerts on the individuals restraining them in all possible
ways. This is perhaps a good translation for Foucault’s dispositif. By the way, questions of
terminology are important in philosophy. Even if we do not reduce philosophy to technology like
Schlag proposes, terminology is extremely important. As a philosopher whom I respect very
much used to say, ‘Terminology is the poetical element of philosophy,’” (ibid.).
413
See Editor’s Note in Priscila Arantes, “Media, Gestures, and Society: Dialogues between
Vilém Flusser and Fred Forest,” Flusser Studies 8 (2009): 1, accessed May 26, 2014,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/arantesmedia-gestures-society.pdf.
414
Flusser, Post-History, 96.
115
For historians of photography, the statement that “apparatus are black boxes” hardly goes
unnoticed since the camera is (or was at the time of Flusser’s writing) a black box.415 The
Portuguese version of Towards a Philosophy of Photography even includes the term in its title:
Philosophy of the Black Box.416 For Flusser, the black box is an expansive metaphor: media are
black boxes;417 the family can be a black box.418 The cinema, examined in the essay “Our
Rhythm,” which is dedicated to Marcuse, is a black box that is both literal and metaphoric. It is
also an apparatus that produces “optical fraud” in the form of projected illusion, where receivers
collaborate in their own “annihilation as subjects.”419 In this essay and “Our Images,” in
particular, Flusser sketches out some of the fundamental elements of his technical image theory.
However, he also traces the path through which technical images lead to altered consciousness
and “post-history.” In the final essay in the book, “Our Return,” which is dedicated to Kafka,
Flusser argues that while industrial societies are transitioning into post-industrial societies, linear
and historical thinking founded on texts is being challenged by the “post-textual codes” found in
technical images. This creates a new type of consciousness that is difficult to characterize:
415
The camera as apparatus will be discussed in the following chapter. In the meantime, one
essay to cite is Matthew Fuller, “The Camera that Ate Itself,” Flusser Studies 4 (2007), accessed
June 1, 2014,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/fuller_the_ca
mera.pdf. The text is a reprint of the second chapter of Fuller’s Media Ecologies: Materialist
Energies in Art and Technoculture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).
416
Vilém Flusser, Filosofia da Caixa Preta (São Paulo: Editora Hucitec, 1985).
417
Flusser, Post-History, 56-57.
418
Ibid., 153.
419
Ibid., 62-63.
116
“Current times are marked by the discrepancy between the established social forms, thought
structures, and levels of consciousness.”420
One of the key elements distinguishing Flusser’s theory from other photographic theories
is simply that it includes all technical images—film, television, video, photography—and comes
with the caveat that we still can’t adequately read or analyze them yet:
The gesture to codify and decipher technical images takes place at a level that is
one step away from the level of writing and two steps away from the level of
traditional images. This is the level post-historical consciousness. This is a level
that is still difficult to sustain. It is far too new in order for us to occupy it, unless
for fleeting moments. We tend to constantly fall back into the level of historicity.
We are, in relation to technical images, the same as the illiterate are in relation to
texts.421
Flusser argues that our ability to read these images will be developed through “technical
imagination” informed by “informatics, cybernetics, and game theory” rather than aesthetics,
literary criticism, or other methodologies adopted to interpret photography.422 This
Einbildungskraf, or new technical imagination, would become Flusser’s theory for deciphering
420
Ibid., 159.
421
Ibid., 95.
422
Flusser, Post-History, 98. The importance of games for Flusser cannot be overstated: “In the
post-industrial society, ‘theory’ will very probably be a game strategy,” (ibid., 34). Games and
game theory were also important to twentieth-century artists as diverse as Marcel Duchamp, the
Situationists, and Adrian Piper, who cites R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa’s Games and
Decisions (New York: John Wiley, 1957) in an important 1990 essay: “Artistic success in the
contemporary Euroethnic art world is perceived by all as the payoff of a zero-sum game, in
which one player’s win is another player’s loss.” Adrian Piper, “The Triple Negation of Colored
Women Artists,” reprinted in Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology 1968-2000, ed. Hilary
Robinson (Oxford, England and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 61. For Flusser,
however, games are theory, and vice versa; “Programs are games,” Post-History, 99. Similarly,
programmers are players, such that “our environment reveals itself as a context of games that are
co-implied, and whose rules are co-implied. In such an environment we are all played players,
Homines ludentes, and pieces of the game: an absurd situation,” (ibid., 104). In terms of
philosophy, “games are our ontological ground and all future ontology is necessarily game
theory,” (ibid., 105).
117
images. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. His ideas were essentially in place in the
seventies; they just weren’t employed in the service of a distinct “theory of photography.” In that
sense, one might say that Flusser’s writings from this period comprise a theory looking for a
context. He would find an appropriate context in European photography and media theory—but
also, to a lesser degree, in the U.S. art context, which was engaged with images, but also with
biotechnology, biogenetics, and other fields that were having a profound effect on human
consciousness and society.
118
Chapter Three: The Technical Image Writings and Other Texts
Photography Theory in the Seventies
By emigrating to Europe in the seventies, Flusser was finally moving to a center and
away from the intellectual periphery he had lamented throughout the fifties and sixties.
Photography writing and scholarship was flourishing in the seventies and Flusser gravitated
towards it in the same way he had migrated toward the art world in São Paulo in the sixties and
early seventies. Interviewed three days before his death in 1980, Roland Barthes noted, “there
does seem to be a kind of ‘theoretical boom’ in photography … People who are not technicians,
historians, or aestheticians are becoming interested in it.”423 Geoffrey Batchen has written that,
by the time Barthes’s Camera Lucida was published in 1980, Susan Sontag and Michel Tournier
had just published books on photography (Sontag’s is in Barthes’s bibliography); the University
of Aix-Marseilles had recently accepted a proposal for a doctoral program in photography; and
the Musée d’Orsay in Paris had established a photography collection. Further, Cahiers de la
photographie published a special issue in 1981 and in 1982 the Centre de la Photographie was
created in Paris.424
The increase of interest in photography coincided with a number of phenomena.
Industrialized societies were awash in images—what Germans would call the Bilderflut, or
423
Roland Barthes interviewed by Laurent Dispot, Le Matin, February 22, 1980, in Roland
Barthes, The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Hill
& Wang, 1985), 351. Quoted in Geoffrey Batchen, “Palinode,” Photography Degree Zero:
Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 17.
424
Ibid.
119
“image flood.”425 In the U.S. and Europe, a canon of photography theory was being formed.
Virtually all of it was written in Europe, England, or the United States.426 Primary among these
texts—although written decades earlier—are Walter Benjamin’s essays, particularly “A Little
History of Photography” (1931) and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproducibility” (1936), which were translated and disseminated in English only in the late
sixties and seventies. Also important was the proto-Frankfurt School figure Siegfried Kracauer
and his essay “Photography” (1929), as well as film critic and theorist André Bazin, whose essay
“The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1945) was influential in both the film and
photography scholarship.427 The sixties and seventies signaled a distinct shift in practice, too. As
Batchen writes, it became possible to study for a master of fine arts degree in art photography in
the United States in the mid-sixties, and by the late seventies photography, “whether as historical
425
See Vilém Flusser’s “The City as Wave-Trough in the Image-Flood,” Critical Inquiry 31, no.
2 (Winter 2005): 320-328. Also see Kunibert Bering, Stefan Hölscher, Rolf Niehoff, and Karina
Pauls, eds., Nach der Bilderflut: Ästhetisches Handeln von Jugendlichen (Oberhausen, Germany:
Athena, 2012).
426
Despite Asia’s embrace of photographic technology in the nineteenth century and the
development and manufacture of electronics and digital technology in Asia and the subcontinent
in the last century, little photographic theory has been written that has made its way westward.
Part of this may have to do with photography’s Western origins: writing on the Indian
photographer Raghubir Singh, Ashley la Grange has argued, “had Indians invented photography,
the theoretical and artistic problems seen by Western photographers concerning color would
never have arisen” since “Indian artists did not see in black and white before colonialism and
photography. Their tradition of drawing was unlike the Western one and was filled with color.”
Ashley La Grange, Basic Critical Theory for Photographers, (Burlington, MA: Focal Press,
2005), 159. Interestingly, although she includes figures like Bertrand Russell and Italo Calvino,
Flusser’s writings are not included in her anthology. Also see Christopher Pinney and Nicolas
Peterson, eds., Photography’s Other Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
427
Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1995), 47-64; André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic
Image,” Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (Summer 1960): 4-9. Interestingly, Kracauer’s “Photography”
was only published in English in 1993. See Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” trans. Thomas Y.
Levin, Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (1993): 421-436.
120
object or professional practice, had become fully institutionalized, having at last found a secure
niche in universities, art schools, art museums, and the marketplace, as well as the culture at
large.”428
Artists who didn’t identify as photographers, per se, were increasingly adopting video
and photography to document performances or make conceptual works and the idea of “making”
rather than “taking” pictures was exemplified by artists later identified as the “Pictures
Generation.”429 The sense that photography was the primary visual language of the contemporary
era also resulted in what Batchen has described as a “newly invigorated critical writing.”430 In
May 1968, A.D. Coleman’s first column appeared in the Village Voice, signaling the perceived
need for a dedicated photography critic.431 In 1976, Coleman’s writings were included in a
428
Batchen, “Palinode,” 17. Prior to the 1960s, the center for photography instruction in the
United States was the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, set up
by the former Bauhaus instructor László Moholy-Nagy and originally called the New Bauhaus in
1937. Aaron Siskind taught there from 1951 to 1971, Harry Callahan from 1947 to 1961, and
other faculty included György Kepes and Arthur Siegel. See “L. Moholy-Nagy and the Institute
of Design in Chicago,” Everyday Art Quarterly 3 (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, Winter 1946
– Spring 1947): 1-3 and Taken by Design: Photographs from the Institute of Design, 1937-1971,
ed. David Travis and Elizabeth Siegel (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago and University of
Chicago Press, 2002). Otherwise, black and white photography was often taught in painting
departments – for instance, as early as 1951 at the Rhode Island School of Design, which hired
Harry Callahan to start a Masters of Fine Arts degree in photography in 1963. See RISD’s
website, accessed October 24, 2015, http://photo.risd.edu/history.php.
429
See Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds., Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of
Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Douglas Eklund, The Pictures Generation, 19741984 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); and
Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 75-88.
430
Batchen, “Palinode,” 17.
431
A.D. Coleman, Light Readings: A Photography Critic’s Writings, 1968-1978 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1979).
121
special issue of Artforum devoted to photography,432 edited by John Coplans and Max Kozloff, a
critic for The Nation, Artforum, and the Voice who would discover Flusser and recommend him
to Artforum.433 Also in 1976, the journal October was founded by former critics at Artforum,
signaling a shift in art discourse that helped put photography at the center.434 In a special 1978
issue of October devoted to photography, the editors noted that the practice of photography was
expanding and solidifying at the same moment as painting and sculpture were “in a state of low
tension” in the U.S., and they called for a “radical sociology of photography” to counter the
market-driven tendency of both photography collecting and scholarship.435 The same October
issue mentions the artist Allan Sekula as an exception.436 In 1975, Sekula had published “The
432
Artforum 15, no. 1 (September 1976). Articles included Max Kozloff’s “Nadar and the
Republic of Mind"; Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr.’s "How Others Live: Some Recent Photography
Books”; Nancy Foote’s "The Anti-Photographers"; A.D. Coleman’s "The Directorial Mode:
Notes Toward a Definition"; and Aaron Scharf’s "Marey and Chrono Photography."
433
Max Kozloff, The Privileged Eye: Essays on Photography (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1987) and Lone Visions, Crowded Frames: Essays on Photography (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1994).
434
The end of the early era of Artforum is tracked in Amy Newman’s excellent oral history
Challenging Art: Artforum, 1962-1974 (New York: Soho, 2000).
435
Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, “Introduction” (signed by “The Editors”) in
“Photography: A Special Issue,” October 5 (Summer 1978): 4. The issue included essays by
Rosalind Krauss, Hollis Frampton, Hubert Damisch, Craig Owens, Douglas Crimp, Jean Clair,
and Thierry de Duve, and an historical text by the photographer Nadar. A closer look at this issue
also reveals theses and arguments that would later manifest in October. For instance, Clair’s
article, “Opticeries,” on Marcel Duchamp and Krauss’s use of Duchamp for her argument about
photography as “indexical.” The critical postmodernism of these writers was an antidote to
formalism. However, as Jae Emerling has recently noted, the stance represented by October was
limited in that it arose primarily to the discourse epitomized by Clement Greenberg or, in the
curatorial sphere, John Szarkowski. Jae Emerling, Photography: History and Theory (New York:
Routledge, 2012).
436
Krauss and Michelson, “Introduction,” October 5 (1978): 4.
122
Invention of Photographic Meaning” in Artforum.437 Borrowing from Roland Barthes, Sekula
was bent on “denaturalizing” the narrative of art photography as propagated historically by
figures like Alfred Stieglitz, among others.438 In order to make photography into an art form,
Sekula argued that, “a clear boundary has been drawn between photography and its social
character.”439
The other major U.S. text that needs to be discussed in this context is Susan Sontag’s On
Photography (1977), a collection of essays originally commissioned by and published in The
New York Review of Books.440 Sontag’s book is marked by a post-Vietnam-War malaise. The
first and best-known essay in the book, “In Plato’s Cave,” opens with a rumination on the
437
Allan Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning” in Photography in Print: Writings
from 1816 to the Present, ed. Vicki Goldberg (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1981), 452. Originally published as “The Invention of Photographic Meaning,” Artforum 13, no.
5 (January 1975): 36–45. Also see Allan Sekula, Photography against the Grain: Essays and
Photo Works 1973–1983 (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984).
438
“The photograph is imagined to have a primitive core of meaning, devoid of all cultural
determination. It is this uninvested analogue that Roland Barthes refers to as the denotative
function of the photograph. He distinguishes a second level of invested, culturally determined
meaning, a level of connotation. In the real world no such separation is possible. Any meaningful
encounter with a photograph must necessarily occur at the level of connotation.” Allan Sekula,
“On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” 455. Sekula’s model was Lewis Hine, the
sociologist who employed photography for social reform. Sekula felt Hine stood “outside the
discourse situation represented by Camera Work,” (ibid.) Also see the posthumous “Special
Issue: Allan Sekula and the Traffic in Photographs,” Grey Room 55 (Spring 2014).
439
Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” 467. The October editors also
mentioned that certain French texts take a sociological approach to photography: Bernard
Edelman’s Ownership of the Image: Elements for a Marxist Theory of Law and Gisèle Freund’s
Photography and Society.439 Mostly, however, they would turn to thinking about how subjects
and ideology are formed and promulgated in photography using Freud, Lacan, and Marx as
models for analyzing historical photographic practices. See Bernard Edelman’s Ownership of the
Image: Elements for a Marxist Theory of Law (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979),
originally published as Le droit saisi par la photographie (Eléments pour une théorie marxiste
due droit) (Paris: Editions Francois Maspéro, 1973) and Gisèle Freund, Photographie et sociéte
(Paris, Edition du Seuil, 1973; originally published 1936).
440
Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977).
123
ubiquity of photography, but also focuses on photographic evidence, idealization and aggression,
on voyeurism and on how cameras are like guns and cars: “fantasy-machines whose use is
addictive.”441 Morality, ideology, ethics, bureaucracy, cataloguing, eroticism, pleasure, and
compulsion are central in Sontag’s theorization. Interestingly, she often reads photography
through film, while focusing particularly on films whose narratives pivot around photographs or
the act of photographing. Despite the fact that Sontag was never part of the October cabal (her
exclusion from the 1978 special photography issue, a year after the publication of her book, is
notable), she shared its outlook in two respects: the idea that film was eclipsing literature as the
vital art medium and the claim for critical postmodernism’s turn away from aesthetics and
formalism toward a social reading of photography. Subsequent essays in On Photography look at
how nations and ideologies are shaped through photography;442 at how Surrealism “lies at the
heart of the photographic enterprise”;443 and at issues of mimesis and technology wherein the
camera figures as a machine of “fast seeing.”444 Sontag acknowledged the writings of Walter
Benjamin, but dismissed his idea of “aura” by noting that, “exhibition in museums and galleries,
has revealed that photographs do possess a kind of authenticity.”445
441
Ibid., 14.
442
“[Diane] Arbus’s work is a good instance of a leading tendency of high art in capitalist
countries: to suppress, or at least reduce, moral and sensory queasiness. Much of modern art is
devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible.” Sontag, On Photography, 40.
443
Ibid., 52. Here Sontag shows a distinct overlap with Rosalind Krauss, whose career has been
partially devoted to Surrealism, which her erstwhile mentor Clement Greenberg despised.
444
Ibid., 124.
445
Ibid., 140. The brief “Anthology of Quotations” at the end of On Photography is also
interesting as a postmodern pastiche in which citations from Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein and
photography specialists like Helmut Gernsheim are printed alongside advertisements for Minolta
and Polaroid cameras. See Sontag, “A Brief Anthology of Quotations,” On Photography, 183208.
124
The era included other important writers and discourses, however. In 1975, Joel Snyder
and Neil Walsh Allen argued, similar to the October writers, that photography criticism was
impoverished and that Szarkowski’s formalism was the problem—although they also objected to
Rudolf Arnheim’s idea of photography as a purveyor of authenticity and truth.446 Laura Mulvey
and Peter Wollen, writers for the British journal Screen, overlapped with Bazin, Arnheim, and
others in considering photography alongside film. Wollen’s “Photography and Aesthetics”
(1978) argued that photography automatically produced “information”—knowledge that is
different from painting and traditional aesthetic forms—and saw Benjamin as a precursor to
creating a photography theory that could produce both photographic knowledge and art.447
Meanwhile, Laura Mulvey’s extraordinarily influential “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
(1975) took a comparable tack to Sekula’s, denaturalizing the world of film, the gaze of the
viewer, and the way images in the filmic context create “order and meaning”—except Mulvey
followed a psychoanalytic approach, citing Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality and Instincts and
Their Vicissitudes, as well as Lacan’s mirror stage.448 Victor Burgin’s 1977 essay “Looking at
Photographs” is even closer to Sekula’s example, using Barthes’s Elements of Semiology (1964)
to compare how language, which seems “natural,” can be compared to photographs, which
446
Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen, “Photography, Vision, and Representation,” Critical
Inquiry 2, no. 1 (Autumn 1975): 143-169; and Rudolf Arnheim, “On the Nature of
Photography,” Critical Inquiry 1 (September 1974): 149-161. Arnheim is best known for his Art
and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1954), as well as Visual Thinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969) and The
Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982).
447
Peter Wollen, “Photography and Aesthetics,” Screen 19, no. 4 (1978): 9-28. For another essay
comparing film and photography see Christian Metz’s “Photography and Fetish,” October 34
(1985): 81-90.
448
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6-
18.
125
circulate freely (“naturally”) through our environment.449 One could also mention the British
writer John Berger, whose book Another Way of Telling (1982) followed up his television show
and the subsequent book, Ways of Seeing, and, significantly, focused on photography.450
Argentinian filmmaker Raúl Beceyro published the still untranslated Ensayos sobre fotografia in
Spanish in 1978451 and in France Pierre Bourdieu’s Photography: A Middle-brow Art had been
published in 1965.452 Using a sociological approach, Bourdieu argued that photography offered a
good ground on which to study French society and its class divisions, leading to his best known
text, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979).453
The towering figure in photography theory from this period, however, is Roland Barthes.
Barthes started writing about photography in the fifties and sixties. In essays like “Photography
and the Electoral Appeal” and “Shock-Photos”—both included in Mythologies (1957)—as well
as “The Photographic Message” (1961) and “Rhetoric of the Image” (1964), Barthes used
methods drawn from structural linguistics, semiotics, and Brechtian Marxism to demonstrate
how everyday images function like sign systems, containing ideological messages that aren’t
immediately apparent. Drawing from Ferdinand Saussure’s writings on linguistics, which he had
449
Victor Burgin, “Looking at Photographs,” Thinking Photography (London and New Jersey:
Macmillan and Humanities, 1982), 142-153. Originally published in Tracks 3, no. 3 (Fall 1977):
36-44.
450
John Berger and Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling (New York: Pantheon, 1982); John
Berger, Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series with John Berger (London: British
Broadcasting Corporation; New York: Penguin, 1977).
451
Raúl Beceyro, Ensayos sobre fotografia (Mexico: Arte y libros, 1978).
452
Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Cambridge, UK:
Polity Press, 1990). Originally published as Un art moyen (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1965).
453
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). Originally published as La distinction:
critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979).
126
used to examine everything from literature to the fashion system, Barthes described different
levels of photographic meaning: the denotative level, which was essentially descriptive, and the
connotative level, which created a “rhetoric of the image” that both relies on and bolsters
particularly cultural and historical contexts. Later, in “The Third Meaning: research notes on
some Eisenstein stills” (1970), which was published in a 1974 issue of Artforum,454 Barthes
examined how film stills go beyond the connotative and denotative orders to something more
“obtuse”: exceeding signification but rooted in the materiality of the filmic medium.455
Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida
In 1980 Barthes published Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, his only book
dedicated to photography, and the one that has dominated worldwide photography discourse at
the end of the twentieth century.456 Influenced by Benjamin—particularly Benjamin’s 1936 essay
454
Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning: research notes on some Eisenstein stills,” trans.
Richard Howard, Artforum 11, no. 5 (January 1973): 46-50. Originally published as “Le
troisieme sens: Notes de recherche sur quelques photogrammes de S. M. Eisenstein,” Cahiers du
cinéma 222 (1970): 12-19; later published in Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text (London:
Fontana, 1977), 52-68. The same Artforum issue published an essay by Annette Michelson
(“Camera Obscura/Camera Lucida”); essays on film by Rosalind Krauss (“Montage ‘October’:
Dialectic of the Shot”) and Hollis Frampton (“Stan and Jane Brakhage, Talking”); and a text by
filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (“Eisenstein on Mayakovsky”).
455
“By contrast with the first two levels, communication and signification, this third level - even
if the reading of it is still hazardous – is that of signifiance, a word which has the advantage of
referring to the field of the signifier (and not of signification) and of linking up with, via the path
opened by Julia Kristeva who proposed the term, a semiotics of the text.” Barthes, Image-MusicText, 54. This concentration on the ontology of the image and its similarities to and differences
from film connects Barthes to André Bazin, who also approached photography in relation to
cinema. See Bazin’s “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1945), in Trachtenberg, ed.,
Classic Essays on Photography (New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 237-268.
456
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1981). Originally published as La chambre claire: note sur la
photographie (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, Gallimard, Seuil, 1980).
127
“A Little History of Photography,” which he used as a template—and Sontag, it was a slim
volume resulting from a commission by Les cahiers du cinema. The book signals a move away
from structuralism toward poststructuralism—and beyond. In the back is a list of references that
includes Sontag, Beceyro, Bourdieu, and Freund, as well as Italo Calvino’s short story “The
Adventure of a Photographer” (1958) and an essay by Jean-François Chevrier, which appeared
along with the Calvino story in a special 1978 issue of Le Nouvel Observateur devoted to
photography;457 literary figures like Proust and Valéry; Sartre’s L’Imaginaire (to which Bazin,
interestingly, was also responding);458 recent theorists like Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, JeanFrançois Lyotard, and the lesser known (in the U.S., anyway) Tel Quel figure Jean-Joseph
Goux.459 Also mentioned in the back of Camera Lucida are two books that reveal Barthes’s late
interest in Buddhism: by Chögyam Trungpa and Alan Watts.460 The French edition of Camera
Lucida even includes a Buddhist quote on its back cover, taken from Chögyam Trungpa, that
was removed in the English edition:
Marpa was very stirred when his son was killed, and one of his disciples said,
‘You always say to us that all is illusion. Isn’t the death of your son then an
illusion? And Marpa responded, ‘Certainly, but the death of my son is a super
illusion.’461
457
See Italo Calvino, “L’apprenti photographe” and Jean-François Chevrier, “Une inquiétante
étrangeté” in Le Nouvel Observateur, Spécial Photo, no. 3 (June 1978).
458
Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Imaginaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1940).
459
Jean-Joseph Goux, Les Iconoclastes (Paris: Seuil, 1978); Julia Kristeva, Folle vérité, seminars
of Julia Kristeva (Paris: Seuil/Tel Quel, 1979); Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XI (Paris:
Seuil, 1973); Jean-François Lyotard, La Phénoménologie (Paris: P.U.F., 1976).
460
Chögyam Trungpa, Pratique de la voie tibétaine (Seuil: Paris, 1976); Alan Watts, Le
Bouddhisme Zen (Paris: Payot, 1960).
461
“Marpa fut très remué lorsque son fils fut tué, et l’un de ses disciples dit: ‘Vous nous disiez
toujours que tout est illusion. Qu’en est-il de la mort de votre fils, n’est-ce pas une illusion?’ Et
Marpa répondit: ‘Certes, mais la mort de mon fils est un super-illusion.’ Pratique de la voie
tibétaine.”
128
Perhaps the most interesting overlap between Barthes and Flusser, although it will not be
explored at length in this dissertation, is around phenomenology. Not only did Barthes cite
Lyotard’s work on phenomenology, but he also lists Husserl’s Aspects of Phenomenology in his
references, “as cited by” the French psychiatrist Arthur Tatossian.462 Beyond this, Camera
Lucida is a strongly autobiographical response to photography—arguably representing even a
return to the humanism Barthes’s earlier structuralist and semiotic work critiqued. Following the
writing method used in A Lover’s Discourse (1977), it also represents the development for
Barthes of a “third form” of writing—what scholars have called “paracriticism” or
“paraliterature.”463
Camera Lucida begins with an extremely French anecdote: a personal encounter with a
photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852, and the effect it has on
Barthes as the viewer: “I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.”464 Barthes discusses a
range of photographs, from photojournalism to pornography with a heavy emphasis on the
French: Niépce, Daguerre, Lartigue and Nadar. Kertész appears while Avedon and Mapplethorpe
462
Barthes, La chambre claire (Paris: Édition de l’Étoile, Gallimard, Le Seuil, 1980), 185-186.
463
Nancy Shawcross describes Barthes’ late writing as a “third form,” between essay and novel,
in Roland Barthes on Photography: The Critical Tradition in Perspective (Gainesville, FL:
University Press of Florida,1997). Here she is borrowing Barthes’s use of the term “third form”
in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1986), 281. Ulmer calls the same
body of Barthes’s writing a “third front” of criticism in “The Discourse of the Imaginary,”
Diacritics 10 (1980): 67; Emma Kafalenos calls it “paracriticism” (see Kafalenos, “Fragments of
a Partial Discourse on Roland Barthes and the Postmodern Mind,” Chicago Review 35, no. 2
[Winter, 1985], 72-94). Rosalind Krauss compared The Pleasure of the Text, A Lover’s
Discourse, and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes to the writings of Jacques Derrida, arguing
that both writers were working in a form somewhere between literature and criticism that she
called “paraliterature.” Rosalind Krauss, “Poststructuralism and the Paraliterary,” in The
Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986),
292.
464
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 3.
129
are the recurring U.S. photographers. Most important, however, is the apocryphal “Winter
Garden” photograph not reproduced in the book: a snapshot of his mother as a child which may
or may not exist and which serves as a marker for memory, vision, death, and the power of
photographs. As is standard for Barthes, Camera Lucida is structured around a number of binary
oppositions: photography “in opposition” to cinema,465 and the famous studium, or subject of the
photograph, versus the punctum or “prick”: an accidental detail unintended by the photographer
that creates an idiosyncratic locus of signification that may differ from one viewer to the next.466
There is also the binary of the Operator (photographer) and the Spectator (ourselves) and one
contained in photography’s eidos or noeme, its essence: the idea that photographs represent an
“anterior future,” a camera lucida rather than a camera obscura—that is, a prism rather than a
“dark passage” or chamber.467
Criticisms of Camera Lucida are legion: the text is limited in its application because
Barthes focuses primarily on photographs of people and particularly on the apocryphal Winter
Garden photograph, creating a personal theory of photography with a mythical object at its
center.468 Moreover, Barthes’s fidelity to realism is anachronistic at a moment when truth in
465
Ibid. Italics in original.
466
One might also mention the binary of the “denoted message” and “connoted message” found
in earlier texts like “The Photographic Message” (1961): what is depicted in an image and its
style or reception, respectively. The punctum has become one of the most popular terms in
photography criticism. See Michael Fried’s “Barthes’s Punctum,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 3
(Spring 2005): 539-574.
467
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 106.
468
Max Kozloff attacked Barthes’s personal approach as a sentimental “self-confession.” See
Max Kozloff, “The Amused Consciousness of Roland Barthes” (1981), The Privileged Eye:
Essays on Photography (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 247-248.
Similarly, Jane Gallop calls Barthes’s sense of the photograph “very mystical and very naïve.”
See Jane Gallop, “The Pleasure of the Phototext,” Illuminations: Women Writing on
Photography from the 1850s to the Present. (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 399.
130
photography was being questioned—by artists, but also by photojournalists and post-Vietnamera audiences.469 In many ways, Camera Lucida feels like an extension of the Mourning Diary,
linking Barthes’ mother’s passing with the demise of the chemical medium to create a kind of
death-theory of photography.470 In a 1977 interview Barthes called every encounter with
photography “a contact with death” and “a fascinating and funereal enigma.”471 In another
interview the following year he said:
In the final analysis, what I really find fascinating about photographs, and they do
fascinate me, is something that probably has to do with death. Perhaps it’s an
interest that is tinged with necrophilia, to be honest, a fascination with what has
died but is represented as wanting to be alive.472
Despite its idiosyncrasies and limitations, Camera Lucida is a benchmark of photography
theory: arguably “the most quoted book in the photographic canon.”473 It also fed into particular
More important for Gallop, Barthes is an author who “never talks about sexual difference,”
(ibid., 400).
469
“Photography’s referent is not the same as the referent of other systems of representation .…
It’s not optionally real; it’s necessarily real … Every photograph is somehow co-natural with its
referent.” Barthes, Camera Lucida, 76. Similarly, “Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
This is the new embarrassment, which its invention has introduced into the family of images,”
(ibid., 87).
470
Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010).
Barthes penned multiple death-books in the wake of his mother’s demise: not just Camera
Lucida, but the recently published Mourning Diary, in which he described his state as
“abandonitis,” (ibid., 86). This is also the author who wrote “The Death of the Author” (1967),
included a Buddhist quotation about death on the back of Camera Lucida, and a reproduction of
a James Van Der Zee photograph in the same text—although Peter Wollen suggests that Barthes
was perhaps not even aware of Van Der Zee’s book The Harlem Book of the Dead. See James
Van Der Zee, The Harlem Book of the Dead (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Morgan & Morgan, 1978) and
Peter Wollen, “Fire and Ice” (1984), reprinted in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells
(London: Routledge, 2003), 76-80.
471
Quoted in Batchen, Photography Degree Zero, 9.
472
Ibid.
473
Batchen, Photography Degree Zero, 3.
131
debates in U.S. art history and criticism, from the formalist critical writing to which October
writers were reacting to U.S. art history’s embrace of postwar trauma narratives.474 A larger
round up of photography theory during this period might cite authors such as Christian Metz,
Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Martha Rosler, Jeff Wall, Georges Didi-Huberman, Abigail SolomonGodeau, and Ariella Azoulay.475 To these we must add Flusser since, while his position in the
canon of German photography theory is secure, he has yet to be acknowledged in the United
States within the discourse of contemporary photography theory.
474
See for instance Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993);
“Obscene, Object, Traumatic,” October 78 (1996): 106-24; and The Return of the Real
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (1979): 50-64; “The
Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” October 19 (1981): 3-34, and “Notes on the Index:
Parts I and II,” The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1985); Benjamin Buchloh, “Divided Memory and Post-Traditional Identity:
Gerhard Richter’s Work of Mourning,” October 75 (Winter 1996): 60-82; Georges DidiHuberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art (University
Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005) and Images in Spite of All: Four
Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Margaret Iversen,
“What is a Photograph?” Art History 17 (1994): 450-463 and Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan,
Barthes (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007); George Baker,
“Photography between Narrative and Stasis: Degeneration, and the Decay of the Portrait,”
October 76 (1996): 72-113; Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg, eds., Trauma and Visuality in
Modernity (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2006); Ulrich Baer, Spectral
Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2002); Cathy
Caruth, Unclaimed Experience in Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996). Also see Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), since Lacan’s definition of trauma was
instrumental for many of these writers, as well as Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, trans. James Strachey (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1961); “Mourning and
Melancholia,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycho-Analytic Works of Sigmund Freud,
ed./trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud, vol. 14 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), 239-260;
and The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin Books, 2003).
475
See Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” October 34 (Autumn 1985): 81-90; JeanMarie Schaeffer, L’image précaire: du dispositive photographique (Paris: Seuil, 1987); Georges
Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005); Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of
Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art” (1995) in Douglas Fogle ed.,
The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960-1982 (exhibition catalogue,
Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2004), 32-44.
132
Flusser’s Writings on Photography: The Technical Image Trilogy
Even before entering the Anglo-European discussion on photography, Flusser was
writing about the technical image. To say that he was writing about photography before the
eighties, however, is to make a slightly complicated claim. Many narratives of his work—
particularly the German and Brazilian ones, which currently dominate the Flusser literature—
incorporate Flusser’s photography writings into his media theory or describe them as a theory of
communications, and his work is still read primarily by media and communications scholars.476
Meanwhile, most of the art historians who have approached Flusser are interested in his
connections with artists such as Mira Schendel or with the São Paulo Biennial. What is important
to stress is that, while Flusser’s best known text, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, includes
the word “photography” in its title and he wrote criticism and essays for photography journals,
he was clearly aware of entering photographic discourse as a specific field, and using it as a
platform for larger ideas. In this sense, one might compare Flusser’s adoption of photography
theory to the U.S. art world’s embrace of certain strains of French philosophy that couldn’t find a
home elsewhere.477 The French theory boom was facilitated particularly in the U.S. through the
476
See Oliver Bidlo’s Vilém Flusser (Essen, Germany: Oldib, 2008); Elizabeth Neswald’s
Medien-Theologie. Das Werk Vilém Flussers (Cologne and Weimar: Böhlau, 1998); and Silvia
Wagnermaier and Nils Röller, eds., Absolute Vilém Flusser (Freiburg, Germany: Orange Press,
2003). Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, sections of which
appeared previously in Portuguese and German, includes the photography discussion in the
chapter titled “Communication and Media Theory.” Also see Rainer Guldin, Anke Finger, and
Gustavo Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: uma introdução (São Paulo: Annablume, 2008) and Vilém
Flusser’s Kommunikologie (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2007).
477
See François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed
the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008) and Anaël Lejeune, Olivier Mignon, and Raphaël Pirenne, eds., French Theory and
American Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013). For French theory’s influence on vision in art
133
figure of Sylvère Lotringer;478 Flusser found a similar champion in Andreas Müller-Pohle, editor
of European Photography.
Since the seventies, Flusser had lectured and taught at the School of Art and Architecture
in Marseille-Luminy, the School of Art in Aix-en-Provence, and presented papers at many
conferences in France and Germany.479 The most important connection he made, however, was
history, see Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century
French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
478
Lotringer was a scholar based at Columbia University and co-founder of the press
Semiotext(e), which introduced figures such as Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard, among
others, to North Americans. For the U.S. invention of the concept “French Theory,” see Sylvère
Lotringer and Sande Cohen, eds., French Theory in America (New York and London: Routledge,
2001).
479
There are twenty-nine Conference Binders in the Vilém Flusser Archive, containing letters,
notes, lectures, and other documentation. A few of these include: “Art et Communications,”
where Flusser lectured on “Le role de l’art dans une rupture culturelle,” Paris, December 11,
1972; Fifth Annual Festival of Photography in Sammeron, France, June 30, 1976; “Les
Sulfanogrades,” where Flusser gave a lecture on “Orthonature et Paranature,” Chalon, France,
October 9, 1976; “La Lecture de l’Image,” Paris, November 30, 1978 (Jean Baudrillard
presented the previous day); “Kritik und Fotografie, 2. Teil,” where Flusser lectured on
“Fotografie und Tauschwert,” Vienna, October 23, 1981 (other presenters at this conference
include Benjamin H. Buchloh, Peter Weibel, Martha Rosler, A.D. Coleman, Douglas Crimp,
Rosalind Krauss, and Victor Burgin); “Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie” in
Albi, France, December 1982 (also July 9, 1983); Bielefeld Symposium on Photography, where
Flusser lectured on “Kriterien-Krise-Kritik,” Bielefeld, Germany, November 2-3, 1984;
“Colloque International Definition(s) de la Photographie,” where Flusser lectured on “La photo
en tant qu’object post industriel,” Aix-en-Provence, November 7, 1985; “Fotografie:
Analysen/Konzepte/Perspektiven,” Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, November 25-27, 1985;
“Becher, Teller, Löffel,” Allgäu, Germany, where Flusser lectured on “Kybernetische Lösung
des Nahrungsproblems,” August, 28, 1986; “Repenser la Culture et la Technologie,” July 8,
1980; “Création (photographique) en France,” Toulon, January 22, 1988; “ZEIT-Symposium:
Kunst Wissenschaft Politik,” Graz, Austria, April 24-26, 1989; “Technik und Kultur,” Philips
AG, where Flusser lectured on “Das Universum der technischen Bilder,” Nuremberg, Germany,
October 27, 1989; “The Media Are With Us! The Role of Television in the Romanian
Revolution,” Budapest, Hungary, April 6-7, 1990; a conference to honor Flusser’s sixtieth
birthday at the Ecole d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence, where Flusser lectured on “(Philosophie):
‘Affinité innée/Affinité acquise,’” along with Louic Bec, Stefan Bollmann, David Flusser, Fred
Forest, Carl Gersner, Andreas Müller-Pohle, and Voker Rapsch, Aix-en-Provence, May 11,
1990; “Standpunkte zu Schrift und Typographie,” Darmstadt, Germany, November 19, 1990;
“Strategien des Schein: Im Irrgarten der Begriffe und Medien,” where Flusser delivered the
134
meeting Müller-Pohle at a symposium held in Mickeln Castle in Düsseldorf in February 1981,
where Flusser delivered a paper titled “How Are Photographs Deciphered?”480 Müller-Pohle
would go on to publish many Flusser texts, including what is commonly referred to as the
technical image trilogy: Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), Into the Universe of
Technical Images (1985), and Does Writing Have a Future? (1987). He would also publish the
German versions of Vampyroteuthis infernalis and The History of the Devil; a posthumous book
of collected photography writings and one of interviews; Supposed: A Sequence of Scenes
(Angenommen. Eine Szenenfolge); and Flusser’s correspondence with Alex Bloch. Flusser also
lecture “Projektion statt Realität,” November 28, 1990 (Siegfried Zielinski and Peter Weibel also
presented); “Création – Découverte,” Goethe Institute, Paris, May 14-15, 1990; “Fotografie/Neue
Medien,” Hochschule für Kunst, Bremen, Germany, 1991; “Krieg und Fotografie,” where
Flusser lectured on “Fotografie, die Mutter aller Dinge,” Müncher Stadtmuseum, Munich,
November 11, 1991; “Kultur und Technik im 21. Jahrhundert,” Wissenschaftszentrum
Nordheim-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, November 22-23, 1991; Other correspondence in the
Conferences Binders (there are twenty-nine binders devoted to conferences) relates to
conferences at the Bildo Akademie für Mediendesign und Kunst, Berlin; Institut Français,
Berlin; Kunst Museum, Berlin; Museum for Photography, Braunschweig, Germany. A sample of
Flusser’s schedule, near the end of his life, might be gleaned from a letter he sent to Wolfgang
Hippe in 1990, in which Flusser’s “future German travel” for the year included commitments in
East Berlin (Februrary), Baden-Baden (February), Stuttgart (March), Hamburg (May), Siegen
(May), Frankfurt (May), West Berlin (July), Oetztal (September). Letter from Vilém Flusser to
Wolfgang Hippe, February 15, 1990, German Conferences Binder, No. 23, Vilém Flusser
Archive.
480
The title in German was “Wie sind Fotografien zu entziffern?” Müller-Pohle recounts the
story of their meeting in the Kunstforum devoted to Flusser after his death: Andreas MüllerPohle, “Der Tod des anderen,” Kunstforum International, no. 117 (1992): 85-86. A catalogue
was produced afterwards for the symposium: Internationales Fotosymposion 1981, Schloss
Mickeln bei Düsseldorf: Ist Fotografie Kunst? – Gehört Fotografie ins Museum? ed. Erika Kiffl
(Munich: Mahnert-Lueg, 1982). The copy in the Vilém Flusser Archive includes the inscription,
“For Vilém Flusser in great dedication, April 4, 1990, Düsseldorf (Für Vilém Flusser in grosse
Zueignung, von Erika Kiffl, 11.4.1990, Düsseldorf).” Participants in the symposium included
Flusser and Müller-Pohle (a photograph of Flusser lecturing is on the cover of the catalogue),
Wolfgang Kemp (later co-editor of Theorie der Fotografie IV, 1980-1995 [Munich:
Schirmer/Mosel, 2000], which would include Flusser’s writings), Michael Schmidt, Anna Auer,
Sue Davies, and Larry Fink.
135
published numerous articles in European Photography magazine481 and was given his own
column, “Reflections,” in European Photography in 1988.482
Towards a Philosophy of Photography
In his Kunstforum tribute to Flusser, Müller-Pohle recounts that, after meeting Flusser in
Dusseldorf in 1981, he asked him to write a book about photography and Flusser responded:
“We’ll call it ‘Towards a Philosophy’ of Photography. We’ll organize it in a focused way, let’s
say, in nine chapters. That makes sixty pages. Do you agree?”483 Flusser wrote the essays in nine
months. The German edition appeared in 1983 and Flusser’s English translation was published in
481
See Vilém Flusser’s Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie (Göttingen: European Photography,
1983); Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Vilém Flusser (Göttingen: European
Photography, 1984); Ins Universum der technischen Bilder (Göttingen: European Photography,
1985); Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft? (Göttingen: European Photography; Immatrix
Publications, 1987); Vampyroteuthis infernalis. Eine Abhandlung samt Befund des Institut
Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste (Göttingen: European Photography; Immatrix
Publications, 1987); Angenommen. Eine Szenenfolge (Göttingen: European Photography;
Immatrix Publications, 1989); Ein Gespräch (Göttingen: European Photography, 1991); Die
Geschichte des Teufels (Göttingen: European Photography, 1993); Zwiegespräche. Interviews
1967–1991 (Göttingen: European Photography, 1996); Standpunkte. Texte zur Fotografie
(Göttingen: European Photography, 1998); Briefe an Alex Bloch (Göttingen: European
Photography, 2000).
482
Vilém Flusser Archive, accessed July 23, 2014, http://www.flusser-archive.org.
483
“Wir nennen es 'Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie.' Wir legen es fokussierend an, sagen
wir, in neun Kapiteln. Das macht sechzig Seiten. Sind Sie einverstanden?” Quoted in MüllerPohle, Kunstforum, no. 117 (1992): 85.
136
1984.484 A Portuguese edition, also translated by Flusser, appeared in 1985 and eventually the
book was translated into over twenty languages.485
The universe explored in Towards a Philosophy of Photography is the “photographic
universe” (Das fotografische Universum) the permanently changing environment in which one
“redundant” image replaces another and we live in a shifting field of images so familiar we are
often not even aware of them.486 Flusser describes it thusly:
484
A later translation by Anthony Mathews, published by the British publisher Reaktion in 2000,
is the edition with which most English readers are familiar, due to the limited availability of the
European Photography version. Furthermore, the European Photography edition is full of
idiosyncrasies and poor editing. Quotation marks are printed in reverse, like German quotation
marks (”photography“ instead of “photography”) and there are typographical errors.
485
Vilém Flusser, Filosofia da caixa preta (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1985); Per una filosofia della
fotografia, trans. Chantal Marazia (Turin: Agorà, 1987); For fotografiets filosofi (Horten,
Norway: Preus Fotomuseum, 1987); En filosofi för fotografin, trans. Jan-Erik Lundström
(Göteborg, Sweden: Korpen, 1988); Hacia una filosofía de la fotografía, trans. Eduardo Molina
(Pie de Imprenta, Mexico: Trillas, 1990); A fotográfia filozófiája, trans. Panka Veress and István
Sebesi (Budapest: Tartóshullám/Belvedere-ELTE BTK, 1990); Bir fotoğraf felsefesine doğru
(Istanbul: Agac, 1991); [Towards a Philosophy of Photography], trans. Shenzhen Masafumi
(Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 1992); Za filosofii fotografie, trans. Božena Koseková and Josef Kosek
(Prague: nakladatelství Hynek, s.r.o., 1994); [Towards a Philosophy of Photography] (Taipei:
Yuan-Liou, 1994); Pour une philosophie de la photographie, trans. Jean Mouchard (Saulxures,
France: Circé, 1996); Προς µια φιλοσοφία της φωτογραφίας (Thessaloniki: University Studio
Press, 1998); [Towards a Philosophy of Photography] (Seoul: Communication Books, 1999); Za
filozofiju fotografije, trans. Tijana Tubić (Belgrade: Kulturni Centar Beograda, 1999); Za edna
filosofia na fotografiata (Plovdiv, Bulgaria: Horizonti, 2002); Pentru o filosofie a fotografie
(Bucharest: Idea Design & Print, 2003); Za edna filosofia na fotografira (Moscow, 2002); Ku
filozofii fotografii, trans. Jacek Maniecki (Katowice, Poland: Akademia Sztuk Pieknych w
Katowicach, 2004); Filozofija Fotografije (Zagreb: Scarabeus, 2007); Een filosofie van de
fotografie (Utrecht: Uitgeverij Ijzer, 2007); K filozofiji fotografije (Ljubljana: ZSKZ, 2010).
486
“It is precisely this steady change which has become habitual for us: one redundant
photograph replaces another redundant photograph. It is change itself which has become habitual
and redundant; and it is ‘progress’ itself which has become uninformative and ordinary. What
would be extraordinary, informative, and adventurous in our situation would be a sudden
stagnation: every morning the same newspaper on the breakfast table, and every month the same
poster in the shop window. This is what would shock us and surprise us. The photographs which
replace each other steadily and according to program are redundant, precisely because they are
always new ones. They are the realizations of the virtualities of the photographic program, and
they are automatic realizations of these virtualities. This is the challenge of the photographic
137
To find oneself within the photographic universe is to experience, to know and to
evaluate the world as a function of photographs. Each single experience, piece of
knowledge or value may be separated into single photographs as they have been
seen and taken advantage of. Each single action may be separated into the single
photographs as they have been used as models of action.487
But first, we must understand the components of the photographic universe. Flusser
doesn’t actually specify the “foundations” of photography until the end of the book, although
they are invoked throughout the essays.488 The four key terms, defined in a “Lexicon of Basic
Concepts” at the back of the book, are image, apparatus, program, and information.489 “Image”
is defined in the lexicon as “a meaningful surface within which the elements relate magically.”490
The first essay in the book is also titled and devoted to “The Image,” in which we learn that
images are “significant surfaces.”491 That is, meaning rests on their surfaces and it may be
“seized at a glance” by scanning the image rather than reading in a linear fashion, as we do
written text. Unlike Barthes, who described photographs as having both a connotative and a
universe, the challenge to the photographer: how to oppose the flood of redundant photographs
with truly informative photographs.” Flusser, “The Photographic Universe,” Towards a
Philosophy of Photography (EP), 47.
487
Ibid., 51.
488
Ibid., 55.
489
In the “Introductory Note” at the beginning of the book Flusser writes: “In order to preserve
the hypothetical nature of the essay, I have abstained from quoting previous works on related
subjects. For that same reason, there is no bibliography. Instead, I have included a short lexicon
of terms basic to the essay or implied in it. The definitions proposed in it are not meant to claim
any general validity; they purpose themselves, in a sense, and should function as working
hypotheses for those readers who may wish to go further along the line of reflection and analysis
offered here. Hence the purpose of the essay: not to defend an extant thesis, but to contribute to a
discussion about the subject ‘photography’ in a philosophical spirit.” Flusser, Towards a
Philosophy of Photography (EP), 5.
490
Ibid., 60.
491
Ibid., 6.
138
denotative meaning, Flusser disputes this—but by comparing images to numbers, mirroring
cybernetic and information theory.492
The discussion of images opens the way for thinking about how image culture, or the
photographic universe, operates differently from the era of historical consciousness ruled by text,
which Flusser argues came to an end in the nineteenth-century with the invention of technical
images. He argues that texts were created in the second millennium B.C. as “meta-codes” of
images: to refer to and explain images and “to transcode image elements and ideas into
concepts.”493 Now, however, we have technical images which are produced by apparatus and
discussed in the second essay, “The Technical Image.” Flusser calls technical images the
“indirect products of scientific texts,” which possess magical effects.494 This is not hard to
envision when one thinks of the light projected from a film projector or the transfixing glow of a
television or images on a computer screen. These don’t possess the same prehistoric magic as,
for instance, cave paintings, though—which clearly relates to Benjamin’s idea of “aura,” which
the Frankfurt School writer argued was eclipsed in the age of mechanical reproducibility.
Instead, where prehistoric magic entailed a “ritualization of myths,” technical images are for
Flusser a “ritualization of programs,” which he defines as “models transmitted in writing by
492
“The path followed by our scanning eyes is complex, because it is formed both by the image
structure and the intentions we have in observing the image. The meaning of the image as it is
disclosed by scanning, then, is the synthesis of two intentions: the one manifest in the image
itself, the other in the observer. Thus, images are not ‘denoting’ symbol-complexes such as
numbers, for instance, but ‘connoting’ symbol-complexes: images offer room for interpretation.”
Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (EP), 6.
493
Ibid., 8.
494
Ibid., 10.
139
authors who are ‘functionnaires,’ [functionaries] that is, people who stand within the
communicative process.”495
Technical images are produced by an apparatus, which is the subject of the next essay,
“The Apparatus.” In the lexicon Flusser defines an apparatus as “a toy which simulates
thought”—a curious and enigmatic definition unless you consider it within the context of his
interest in game theory.496 But here is also a place to clarify how Flusser was inspired by
Heidegger. It seems odd that Flusser, whose entire family was killed in the holocaust, would
admire a philosopher who was affiliated with the Nazis. Flusser addresses this in one interview,
with a French publication.497 It should also be noted that, in addition to Heidegger’s 1927 opus
Being and Time, the writings important here are also the later ones: “The Age of the World
Picture” (1938), “The Turning” (1949), and “The Question Concerning Technology” (1955).498
In “The Apparatus,” Flusser includes an etymological explanation of apparatus:
495
Ibid., 12. In the lexicon at the back of the book, “Program” is defined as “a game of
combinations with clear and distinct elements.” Kombinationsspiel, or “combination play,” as
Flusser writes in the German version, makes more sense: it is in soccer, for instance, the
synchronized passing of the ball between two or three players (ibid., 61).
496
Ibid., 60.
497
“Heidegger was suspected of having maintained murky or perhaps even too clear relations
with Nazism. I knew that when I first encountered his thought. It was during the war, I was in
Brazil, forced by the events in Germany. My whole family had been exterminated there. I did not
know that yet, but I suspected it. You can thus imagine that I opened the first book of Heidegger
that I stumbled upon with great reservation; I would even say with utmost antipathy. But the
effect the reading had on me was so profound, it has so much changed my vision of things that it
became difficult for me to remember my initial doubts when I encountered this thought.” Vilém
Flusser, “Heidegger et le Nazisme: ‘Nous sommes face à l’expression la plus importante de la
pensée de notre siècle,’” Calades 86 (February 1988). Quoted in Sjouke van der Muelen,
“Between Benjamin and McLuhan: Vilém Flusser’s Media Theory,” 198.
498
All of these are included in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and
Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Perennial, 1977).
140
The Latinate term “apparatus” stems from the verb “apparare,” which is “to
prepare.” Latin also contains the verb “praeparare,” however; the difference is one
of prefixes: “ad” and “prae.” The most available translation for “apparare” in
English would be “to make ready.” In this sense, an apparatus would be an object
which makes itself ready for something, while a “preparation” would be an object
which patiently waits for something. The camera makes itself ready to take
pictures, tries to ambush them, is on the lurk for them. This lying-in-wait for
something, this predatory character of the apparatus, must be understood in our
attempt to define “apparatus” etymologically.499
Looking at “The Question Concerning Technology” (1955), one can see how Heidegger
performs a similar operation on the word “technology,” which deserves quoting at length:
The word stems from the Greek. Technikon means that which belongs to technē.
We must observe two things with respect to the meaning of this word. One is that
technē is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman, but also
for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Technē belongs to bringing-forth, to
poiēsis; it is something poietic.
The other point that we should observe with regard to technē is even more
important. From earliest times until Plato the word technē is linked to the word
epistēmē. Both words are names for knowing in the widest sense. They mean to
be entirely at home in something, to understand and to be expert in it. Such
knowing provides an opening up. As an opening up it is a revealing. Aristotle, in a
discussion of special importance (Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. VI, chaps. 3 and 4),
distinguishes between epistēmē and technē and indeed with respect to what and
how they reveal. Technē is a mode of alētheuein. It reveals whatever does not
bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look and turn
out now one way and now another. Whoever builds a house or a ship or forges a
sacrificial chalice reveals what is to be brought forth, according to the
perspectives of the four modes of occasioning. This revealing gathers together in
advance the aspect and the matter of ship or house, with a view to the finished
thing envisioned as completed, and from this gathering determines the manner of
its construction. Thus what is decisive in technē does not lie at all in making and
manipulating nor in the using of means, but rather in the aforementioned
revealing. It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that technē is a bringingforth … Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence
[West] in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where
alētheia, truth, happens.500
499
Ibid., 15. In the German edition Flusser says in this passage, “in German,” and suggests the
word “fürbereiten” (to pre-prepare) (Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie, 20; in French, the
word suggested is “apprêter” (Pour une philosophie de la photographie, 24); in Portuguese,
Flusser elides the specific language translation altogether, simply providing the Latin terms.
500
Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” (1955), The Question Concerning
Technology and Other Essays, 12-13.
141
Compare this also to Flusser’s etymological breakdown of the word “technology,” which
appears in an essay titled “About the Word Design”:501
Another word used in the same context is “technology.” The Greek techne means
“art” and is related to tekton, a “carpenter.” The basic idea here is that wood (hyle
in Greek) is a shapeless material to which the artist, the technician, gives form,
thereby causing the form to appear in the first place. Plato’s basic objection to art
and technology was that they betray and distort theoretically intelligible forms
(“Ideas”) when they transfer these into the material world. For him, artists and
technicians were traitors to Ideas and tricksters because they cunningly seduced
people into perceiving distorted ideas.
The Latin equivalent of the Greek techne is ars, which in fact suggests a
metaphor similar to the English rouge’s “sleight of hand.” The diminutive of ars
is articulum – i.e. little art – and indicates that something is turned around the
hand (as in the French tour de main). Hence ars means something like “agility” or
the “ability to turn something to one’s advantage,” and artifex – i.e. “artist” –
means a “trickster” above all. That the original artist was a conjurer can be seen
from words such as “artifice,” “artificial” and even “artillery.” In German, an
artist is of course one who is “able to do something,” the German word for art,
Kunst, being the noun können, “to be able” or “can,” but there again the word for
“artificial,” gekünstelt, comes from the same root (as does the English
“cunning”).502
The overlaps here are obvious. Clearly, Flusser was sympathetic to Heidegger’s notion
that “language is the house of Being”:503 that the way of philosophical inquiry, as it makes itself
in and through language is as important as technology as an object of inquiry. Here one might
quote the opening of Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology”:
In what follows we shall be questioning concerning technology. Questioning
builds a way. We would be advised, therefore, above all to pay heed to the way,
and not to fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics. The way is the way
of thinking. All ways of thinking, more or less perceptibly, lead through language
501
Vilém Flusser, “About the Word Design” in The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design,
trans. Anthony Mathews (London: Reaktion, 1999). Originally published as “Vom Wort Design”
in Vom Stand der Dinge (Bensheim, Germany: Bollmann, 1993).
502
Ibid., 17-18.
503
Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to
The Task of Thinking (1964) (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 217.
142
in a manner that is extraordinary. We shall be questioning concerning technology,
and in so doing we should like to prepare a free relationship to it. The relationship
will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology. When
we can respond to this essence, we shall be able to experience the technological
within its own bounds.504
But there is another area in which Heidegger pertains to Towards a Philosophy of
Photography: that of apparatus. I have already partially outlined the robust discourse around
apparatus that stretches from Bertolt Brecht’s “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication”
(1932) to Louis Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatus and more recent thinkers like Giorgio
Agamben’s What is an Apparatus? (2009) and Tiqqun’s “As a Science of Apparatuses”
(2011).505 Flusser, of course, had thought of apparatus in natural terms, with the bird as a flying
apparatus in Natural:Mind, and how apparatuses produce technical images that are harder to
504
Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 3-4. Heidegger’s notion of the “way” of
discussing technology—that is, the thinking that produces technology rather than specific
technologies—also has echoes in structuralism and poststructuralism. I am not going to delve
into those connections here—particularly influence of Heidegger on thinkers like Derrida, which
has been dealt with elsewhere. See David Wood, ed., Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Spirit
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993) and Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger
and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1989) and Aporias (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), which serves
as a culminating essay to Derrida’s grappling with Heidegger.
505
Bertolt Brecht, “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication,” in Brecht on Theatre: The
Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 5152; Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2009); and Agamben’s lecture “What is a Dispositif?” presented at the European Graduate
School in 2005, accessed May 26, 2014, http://www.egs.edu. In addition to his overlap with
Flusser on apparatus, Giorgio Agamben also wrote on gestures. See the essay “Notes on
Gesture” in Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Cesare Casarino and Vincenzo Binetti
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 49-62. Also see Tiqqun’s “As a Science of
Apparatuses,” This is Not a Program (New York: Semiotext(e)/Intervention Series, 2011), 135204, which takes its epigraph from Reiner Schürmann’s “What is to be done with the end of
metaphysics?” in Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans ChristineMarie Gros (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 5-6.
143
decode because the message is even more “masked” than in traditional images.506 In Towards a
Philosophy of Photography, Flusser shifts from “technical images” to “photography”:
The camera constitutes a prototype for all the immense apparatus[es] which
threaten to become monolithic (such as the administrative apparatus) as well as
those microscopic apparatus which threaten to slip from our grasp (such as the
chips in electronic apparatus)—and which determine the present and immediate
future to such a high degree. Analyzing the camera helps to understand apparatus
in general, in other words.507
In photography, Flusser finds an exceptionally elastic mode (I will refrain from calling it
a medium) for discussing apparatus. He can jump from the small and material to the larger and
more abstract: “Considering the camera (or any apparatus, for that matter) …”508 There is also a
Heideggerean excursion in the essay “The Apparatus” into considering apparatus as a “tool,”
which Flusser quickly discards, since the idea of a tool relates to an earlier age of the Industrial
Revolution.509 Returning to that lexical definition of apparatus as “a toy which simulates
thought,” we can see how it relates to Flusser’s two other keywords, information and program—
and how photography serves as a prototype and a vehicle for thinking about post-history (the
same way Heidegger treated technology as determining the human condition). Flusser writes
about the photographer, whose handling of the camera is not “work,” but who searches for
“undiscovered virtualities in the camera program enabling him to produce new information.”510
Here we see Flusser’s application of game theory—which coincidentally overlaps with certain
506
Flusser, Post-History, 96.
507
Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (EP), 15.
508
Ibid., 18
509
Moreover, “apparatus are indeed a result of industry, but they point towards a post-industrial
complex. This is why an industrial analysis (such as a Marxist one) is no longer valid where
apparatus is concerned,” Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (EP), 17.
510
Ibid., 19.
144
Dadaist and Duchampian ideas about art making—but also the idea of photography as an
emblem of the post-industrial (post-historical) age.511 As he writes in “The Apparatus,” power
has shifted from ownership to programming and this “shift of power from the object to the
symbol is the true mark of the ‘information society’ and of an ‘information imperialism.’ Japan
may serve as an example: the country does not possess great resources of raw materials or of
energy; its power is based on programming, data processing, information, symbols.”512 Flusser’s
proposal is radical. In the eighties, reading photography through information and software might
have seemed counterintuitive since these were the very technologies challenging photography.
But while the production and dissemination of photography was changing, the idea of apparatus
and program didn’t go away.513 Photography runs on a program: fashion photographs, art
511
“Such an activity is not dissimilar to playing chess. The chess player is also in search of new
virtualities within the chess program: he looks for new moves, and new results. A chess player
plays with chess figures; a photographer plays with the camera. The camera is not a tool, but a
toy, and the photographer is not a worker as such, but a player: not ‘homo faber,’ but ‘homo
ludens.’ Except: the photographer does not play with, but against, his toy. He crawls into the
camera in order to discover the tricks hidden there. The pre-industrial craftsman was surrounded
by tools, and the industrial machine was surrounded by workers, but the photographer is within
the camera, intricated in it. This is a new kind of relationship, where man is neither the constant
nor the variable, but one where man and apparatus form a single function-unit. This is why the
photographer should be called the ‘functionnaire’ of an apparatus.” Flusser, Towards a
Philosophy of Photography (EP), 19.
512
Ibid., 22. The essay shows its date in that last example: both in the Japanese allusion and
because natural resources have continued to be a source of power and conflict. Moreover, as
more than one writer has pointed out, the move from tools to software does not remove power
from owners. See also See Sean Cubitt’s review of Vilém Flusser’s The Shape of Things: A
Philosophy of Design, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Writings, and The Freedom of the
Migrant: Objections to Nationalism in Leonardo 37, no. 5 (2004): 405.
513
As Flusser wrote in a later essay, “Computers are apparatuses that process information
according to a program. This is the case for all apparatuses anyway, even simple ones, such as
the camera. . . . In the case of the computer, however, this condition is particularly clear: when I
purchase a computer, I have to buy not merely the apparatus (hardware) itself but also the
programs (software) that go with it.” Vilém Flusser, “Kunst and Komputer” [Art and Computer]
in Lob der Oberflächlichkeit (Bensheim: Bollmann, 1993), 259. Quoted in Sjoukje van der
145
photographs, war photographs—all are identifiable by certain “programmed” markers in the
images, as well as by how they are disseminated and displayed. Regarding the distinction
between apparatus and program, Flusser writes: “Evidently, there can be no such thing as an
‘ultimate’ program for an ‘ultimate’ apparatus, because each program must have a meta-program
above it.”514
To make this clear, Sjouke Van der Meulen compares Flusser to Theodor Adorno and
Max Horkheimer. While the Frankfurt School writers’ theorization of the culture industry relied
on the notion of a flood of images (before the term “image flood” [Bilderflut] was introduced),
she points out that Flusser uses the term “program” in the place of “industry” and the term
“postindustrial” over “industrial”—which places him closer to information theorists like Norbert
Weiner, an observation which I will discuss in the next chapter.515 And while the term
“functionary” carries distinct Kafkaesque overtones that tie Flusser to an older model of
apparatuses and administrative control (and Flusser does indeed mention Kafka in Towards a
Philosophy of Photography), there is the important addition of game theory: the question of not
just who controls the program, but how one can be both a programmer and a functionary of the
program.516
Meulen’s “Between Benjamin and McLuhan: Vilém Flusser’s Media Theory” in New German
Critique 110:37, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 193.
514
Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (EP), 21.
515
Van der Meulen, “Between Benjamin and McLuhan,” 194. Also see Max Horkheimer and
Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of
Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 94–137; Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or,
Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (New York: Wiley, 1948).
516
Van der Meulen elucidates this clearly: “In English, this term would be translated as ‘official’
or “clerk,’ but in German the term is derived from the verb funktionieren, ‘to function. Thus the
German term has bureaucratic connotations: a Funktionär is an employee in a bureaucratic
146
While Flusser doesn’t cite or describe specific photographs in Towards a Philosophy of
Photography, and there are no illustrations, he does distinguish photography from technical
images in the book, which he doesn’t in Post-History (1983). Technical images reside in the
photographic universe of Technicolor images, while photography has its roots in black and white
images.517 These are all abstractions, or “theoretical” images—although here we run into
problems, because color photography, for Flusser, is more abstract than black and white
photography: the difference between the green of a lawn, for instance, and how it is represented
in a color photograph, is more complex than the obvious coding of information in black and
white photographs.518 In this mischievous analysis we can see the influence of Heidegger’s essay
“The World Image,” which I will get to shortly when considering the essay “The Photographic
system who executes orders. The photographer’s first responsibility, according to Flusser, is not
to become a function of his or her camera, or the apparatus’s clerk.” Van der Meulen, “Between
Benjamin and McLuhan,” 197. She compares this with the protagonist of George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-four, but the author whom Flusser most often and consistently invokes,
throughout his career and in the photography books, is Franz Kafka.
517
Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (EP), 29.
518
“Early photographs were black/white, unmistakably attesting to their origins as being
abstracted from some theory of optics. With the progress of another theory, chemistry, color
photographs became feasible. It appears as if early photographs were able to re-introduce color
to the world. In fact, however, color photographs are at least as theoretical as black/white
photographs. For example, the ‘green’ of a photographed lawn is an image of the concept ‘green’
as it occurs in some theory of chemistry (say, additive as opposed to subtractive color). The
camera (or the film fed into it) is programmed to translate the concept ‘green’ into an image of
‘green.’ Naturally, there is an indirect and roundabout connection between the photographic
‘green’ and the green of the lawn ‘out there,’ because the chemical concept of ‘green’ is based on
some image of the world ‘out there.’ There is, however, a very complex series of successive
coding processes between the photographic green and the green ‘out there,’ a series which is
more complex than the one linking the photographic gray of a black/white photograph with the
green of the real lawn. The lawn photographed in color is a more abstract image than the lawn
photographed in black-and-white. Color photographs are on a higher level of abstraction than
black/white photographs. Black/white photographs are more concrete, and in this sense, are
‘Truer’ than color photographs. Or the other way around: the ‘truer’ the colors of a photograph
become, the more mendacious they become. They hide their origins as theory more effectively.”
Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (EP), 30-31.
147
Universe.” But we can also see here one of the elements of photography that was particularly
disputed during the seventies and eighties: its reputation as a purveyor of the real. In Flusser, the
fidelity to realism that haunted Barthes and other theorists is gone. Photography is now an
apparatus that transforms phenomena into codified information.519 This is not to say that Flusser
totally ignored the idea of the real as it presented itself in the concept of index. In a passage in
Towards a Philosophy of Photography he wrote that, “to all appearances” technical images “do
not have to be decoded since their significance is automatically reflected on their surface—just
like fingerprints, where the significance (the finger) is the cause and the image (the copy) is the
consequence.”520 This functions like a trick, however, since observers end up looking at
photographs not as images but as windows into the world (in the same way the television was a
new window in the 1974 essay “Two Approaches to the Phenomenon, Television”). The
purported “objectivity” of technical images is an illusion; they are “metacodes of texts” rather
than records of reality.521 Flusser writes that the traditional distinction between realism and
idealism is overturned, such that “it is not the world ‘out there’ which is real, nor is it the
concepts ‘in here’ within the apparatus program; what is ‘real’ is the image as it comes about.522
519
Moreover, as Steven Shaviro points out, unlike other critics who approached images through
the concept of simulacra, “Flusser evidences no nostalgia. He has no Baudrillardian yearning for
a ‘real’ that would have supposedly existed prior to photographic reproduction.” See Steven
Shaviro’s blog “The Pinocchio Theory,” entry on Flusser, accessed July 7, 2014,
http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=266.
520
Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Reaktion), 14.
521
Ibid., 15. Shaviro points out that Flusser explicitly criticizes the Frankfurt School for “the
humanist nostalgia behind its attempts ‘to unmask the [class] interests behind the apparatuses.’
Such approaches merely seek to reinstate the humanistic subject that photography and other postindustrial technical apparatuses have destroyed once and for all.” Shaviro, “The Pinocchio
Theory.”
522
Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (EP), 26. Furthermore, “the world and the
apparatus program are but premises for the realization of photographs; they are virtualities to be
148
But this development comes with two additional caveats. One is that the photographic
universe is not just a world of images we inhabit, but also a universe that is becoming automated,
in which apparatuses program themselves. Here one can see echoes of Heidegger’s world
picture. In “The Age of the World Picture,” originally delivered as a lecture in 1938,523
Heidegger argued that, when we reflect on the modern age, we see ourselves as “in the
picture”—that is, not a “picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture.”524
Moreover, “the world picture does not change from an earlier medieval one into a modern one,
but rather the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the
modern age [der Neuzeit].”525 Heidegger compares the modern idea of “representing” to the
Greek idea of “apprehending.” For him, humanism first arises with the “modern essence of
representedness,”526 in which the human sees herself as subject and other things (including
humans—Heidegger uses anthropology as a touchstone) as objects, particularly for study:
“Science comes out of this, and research, as well as the calculating, planning, and molding of all
realized in the photograph. What we have, then, is an inversion of the vector of significance:
‘real’ is not what is signified, but what is significant, the information, the symbol. This inversion
of the vector of significance characterizes everything that has to do with apparatus, and thus,
with the post-industrial in general,” (ibid.).
523
Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” The Question Concerning Technology
and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Perennial, 1977), 115-154. In the
preface Lovitt writes, “The lecture was given on June 9, 1938, under the title ‘The Establishing
by Metaphysics of the Modern World Picture,’ as the last of a series that was arranged by the
Society for Aesthetics, Natural Philosophy, and Medicine at Freiburg in Breisgau, and which had
as its theme the establishing of the modern world picture.” Ibid., x.
524
Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” The Question Concerning Technology
and Other Essays, 129.
525
Ibid., 130.
526
Ibid., 132.
149
things.”527 For Flusser, “The Photographic Universe”—citing here the penultimate essay in
Towards a Philosophy of Photography—is the condition in which one is “to know and to
evaluate the world as a function of photographs,” where the images in our world change so
quickly they become redundant. To experience a static state, from this standpoint, would be
“extraordinary.”528 Within this universe, beyond the “representedness” of Heidegger’s modern
age, are apparatuses which emulate Cartesian thought in that they are composed of clear, distinct
elements. For photography, this means that each photograph corresponds to a specific
combination of elements within the camera program, and there is “is a kind of bi-univocal
relationship between the universe and the program, in which each program point corresponds to
a specific photograph, and each photograph to a specific program point; in this way, the
apparatus is omniscient and omnipotent in its universe.”529
It is here that Flusser finally defines “program,” putting aside all human intervention with
programs to focus on the “automatic program,” as “a game of combinations based on accident,
on chance.”530 To exist in the photographic universe, surrounded by these chance realizations of
program options is to exist in flux with one redundant photograph replacing another. (One only
need think of the urban environment, of city streets or subway systems where advertisements and
announcements change constantly and we have limited or no control). However, there are
photographers who can play against the photographic program, creating informative rather than
redundant photographs and therefore breaking through the boundaries of the photographic
527
Ibid., 135.
528
Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (EP), 47.
529
Ibid., 49.
530
Ibid., 49.
150
universe to create situations not inscribed in the program, the “game of combinations.”531 Here
one might think of the urban interventions of the Lettrist and Situationist International—
particularly the practice of détournement, in which media images might be disfigured or defaced,
altered like collages “turned against themselves”—graffiti, or art that is somehow not recuperated
back into the art “program.”532
For Flusser, the other important area for disrupting the program is criticism. However—
and this is where Flusser parts ways with many other theorists—for him the problem in using a
“humanistic” approach is that it is necessary to see photography within its apparatus condition:
“Apparatus were invented with the intention of their being automatic, which means ‘independent
of future human intervention.’ The intention producing them was to exclude man from their
functions, and no doubt this intention has been fulfilled.”533 Or, as he wrote in Post-History
(italics his): “Apparatus always function increasingly independently from their programmer’s
intentions.”534 The humanistic critique of the intentions behind the apparatus thus falls short
because the critic now must “dive into the confines and the darkness of the black boxes
themselves” rather than examining “the input”—or, to put it in other terms, their
531
Ibid., 50.
532
One current example of art inspired by Flusser and yet reinscribed back into the art program
is that of Christopher Williams. Williams has repeatedly cited Flusser as an influence and used
his ideas to create photographs that depict deconstructions of the “apparatus” (the camera, for
instance). In his recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he tried to
reveal the museum apparatus by a variety of interventions: changing the wall text, the height of
the pictures, and so on. I would argue that these initiatives are not “playing against the program”
so much as representing the program (ergo more Heideggerean than Flusserian). For a
particularly incriminating statement in which one can see Williams twisting uncomfortably to
make a “critical” argument—that is, a sort of institutional critique—see his “500 Words” in
Artforum (Summer 2014), accessed August 20, 2014, http://artforum.com/words/id=47543.
533
Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (EP), 52.
534
Flusser, Post-History, 25.
151
representations.535 Photography is no longer a representation or a reflection of the world but a
programmed and programming part of it; an apparatus in a universe of apparatuses. At the end of
this essay, Flusser lays his cards on the table:
The task of a photographic philosophy is to reveal this struggle between man and
apparatus in the realm of photography, and thus to contribute to a possible
solution to the conflict. The hypothesis sustaining this essay is that, if such a
philosophy of photography were to succeed in its task, this success would be of
importance not only in the realm of photography but also for post-industrial
society in general. The photographic universe is only one among many apparatus
universes, and it is not the most dangerous one at that. The following chapter will
attempt to show that the photographic universe may serve as a model for postindustrial existence in general, and that therefore, a philosophy of photography
may serve as a point of departure for any philosophy which has the current, as
well as the future form of human existence as its subject.536
This leads to the other caveat, already acknowledged in Post-History: our ability to
interpret technical images and apparatuses is still rudimentary. As Flusser writes in Post-History,
“we are, in relation to technical images, the same as the illiterate are in relation to texts”; we need
to develop a “technical imagination” to help us decipher them.537 In the final essay of Towards a
Philosophy of Photography, “The Need for a Philosophy of Photography,” Flusser dives into the
black box of photography. In the first paragraph—again, this is the last essay of the book—
Flusser finally provides a definition of photographs:
They are images which have been produced and distributed by automatic and
programmed apparatus according to a game based on chance informed by
necessity, and have been distributed by these same methods; they are images of
535
Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (EP), 52.
536
Ibid., 54.
537
Flusser, Post-History, 95. Underscoring this, is a recent remark by Diarmuid Costello about
the limitations of photography criticism and scholarship within the art history context:
“Whenever we begin to talk about photography outside the art historical frame of reference, it’s
as if the conversation just dies. We don’t know what to say, or how to proceed.” Quoted in Jae
Emerling, Photography: History and Theory, 7.
152
magical situations, and their symbols promote an improbable behavior in their
receivers.538
But then, playing the philosophy game in true Heideggerian fashion, Flusser abruptly
reverses himself: “The definition proposed here has that curious advantage for philosophy: it
cannot be accepted.”539 That is, if we accept the definition of photography Flusser has proposed,
we cannot accept “man as a free agent,” one of the springboards for philosophy. In his afterword
to the Reaktion edition of Toward a Philosophy of Photography, Hubertus von Ameluxen links
the book with Flusser’s earlier writings: “Towards a Philosophy of Photography is a work of
doubt and concern … a work of indecision characteristic of the photographic universe in which
one still has to come to terms with a history steeped in photographs … the act of photography,
according to Flusser, is one of ‘phenomenological doubt.’”540 If Flusser’s On Doubt was a
challenge to Descartes’ cogito, signaling for Flusser an end of certainty and Enlightenment
rationalism—with concrete poetry as the model for a new language and a “new structure of
reality”541—in the eighties Flusser’s model was now photography and the technical image. We
are living in a new structure of reality, which is no longer historical and linear. Therefore, we can
no longer look for casual answers to our questions.
Heidegger readers will remember a famous section of “The Question Concerning
Technology” given over to a discussion of causality: the “four causes,” or ways of being
responsible—causa materialis, causa formalis, causa finalis, and causa efficiens—and the
538
Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (EP), 55.
539
Ibid.
540
Hubertus von Ameluxen, “Afterword,” Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Reaktion), 89-
90.
541
Flusser, “On Doubt” in Philosophy of Photography (July 2012): 228.
153
conclusion that causality itself has changed in the modern period. Flusser picks up this thread,
writing at the end of Towards a Philosophy of Photography, “we must take leave of
causality.”542 Heidegger’s discussion of causality altered by the modern world eventually leads
into his discussion of freedom, and Flusser will go there, too. But Flusser brings in terms that
have been essentially forbidden in photography discourse and academic philosophy—such as
“magic”:
Such space-time as reconstructed from images is proper to magic, where
everything repeats itself and where everything partakes of meaningful context.
The world of magic is structurally different from the world of historical linearity,
where nothing ever repeats itself, where everything is an effect of causes and will
become a cause of further effects. For example, in the historical world, sunrise is
the cause of the cock’s crowing; in the magical world, sunrise means crowing and
crowing means sunrise. Images have magical meaning.543
The humans who invented writing in the second millennium B.C. “transcoded the circular
time of magic into the linear time of history.”544 Our magic is different from theirs in that it
conjures tricks with abstractions: particles that make up technical images. Prehistoric magic dealt
with myths; post-historical magic with programs. In the lexicon at the back of Towards a
Philosophy of Photography, magic is defined as “existence in a world of eternal return,”
emphasizing the circular, feedback loop of post-history and the end of linearity.545
This provocative use of the term “magic” may be one of Flusser’s greatest contributions
to current photography theory. For instance, interviewing Michael Taussig for Cabinet magazine
542
Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (EP), 55.
543
Ibid., 7.
544
Ibid., 7.
545
Ibid., 60.
154
and referring to Taussig’s book The Magic of the State (1997), photography writer David LeviStrauss comments:
I take permission to use “magic” first from Vilém Flusser's groundbreaking work
in Towards a Philosophy of Photography, and move from that into the “science of
images” developed in the Renaissance, especially by Giordano Bruno, to theorize
the current state of image politics. Anyone living in Bush & Co.'s United States
cannot help but draw parallels between the spirit-possession politics and image
magic of The Magic of the State and the current situation here.546
Similarly, one can see in art of the last decade and a half a proliferation of interest in the
term “magic.” There has been a return of interest in spirit photography, in ghostly avatars on the
Internet, and in the “magic” of photograms, which, like Talbot’s images, “draw themselves.”
Exhibitions like “Strange Magic” (Luhring Augustine, New York, June – July 2007) and “A
Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” (Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, June – August, 2006),
curated by artists Justine Kurland and Dan Torop referenced this specifically. The latter was
accompanied by this statement:
This is a photography exhibition about magic. For us, the photographer is a seeker
of mystery and the act of photographing casts a spell that turns the banal into the
supernatural. The works displayed here propose a history of photography which
emphasizes the spiritual over the rational.547
So much here reeks of Flusser, who uses the word “spell” as much as “magic” throughout
Towards a Philosophy of Photography, suggesting that the effect of existing in the photographic
universe is to be caught up in the magic spell of images. However, unlike the artists who address
scientific rationality, Flusser’s immediate concern is causality and the structuring of time and
546
See David Levi-Strauss’s “The Magic of the State: An Interview with Michael Taussig” in
Cabinet, Issue 18 (Summer 2005), accessed August 22, 2014,
http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/18/strauss.php. Also see Michael Taussig, The Magic of the
State (London: Routledge, 1997).
547
Press release for “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, June
27 – August 11, 2006, accessed August 25, 2014, http://www.miandn.com/exhibitions/a-rabbitas-king-of-the-ghosts/works/1/.
155
consciousness. Causality has been altered and Flusser feels that the photographic universe has
programmed us to think functionally instead; reasoning now happens the same way it occurs in
other fields like psychology, biology, linguistics, cybernetics, and informatics.548 We, as humans,
produced tools modeled after our own bodies—then the tools became models for us and society.
(Although, Flusser quickly reminds us, photography is not a tool: it is a game.) So, if we take
photography as a model for a changed structure of reality and thought, we are confronted with a
problem: not the “classical problem of alienation,” but an existential revolution for which we
don’t have historical precedents: “to put it brutally: what is involved here is the challenge of
reconsidering the problem of freedom in an entirely new context. This is what a philosophy of
photography would really address.549
Here we are a long way from thinking about photographs as images and the contexts—art
historical, museological, etcetera—in which they have historically been studied. In this chapter I
have placed Flusser’s writing alongside that of authors such as Barthes, purposely withholding a
discussion of the writers with whom he is most often compared: Marshall McLuhan, Jean
Baudrillard, and others. In this last passage, however, one can see how a “philosophy” of
photography differs from a “theory”: it moves beyond ontology or Barthes’s eidos to a
reconceptualization of causality and freedom. In the next chapter I will consider Flusser in this
latter context. But to finish with Towards a Philosophy of Photography: if we have left the linear
world of causality, how do we pose the question of human freedom? Or: if “everything comes
about by chance, and if everything comes to nothing, where is there any room left for human
548
Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (EP), 56.
549
Ibid., 57.
156
freedom?”550 The simple answer is within the gesture of photography, or within the work of
those experimental photographers who work against the program to outwit the “stupidity of the
apparatus” and produce something unexpected and informative instead of redundant. Freedom is
“playing against the apparatus.”551 Flusser stresses that photographers do not generally
acknowledge their activities in this light. But he concludes:
The task of a philosophy of photography is to analyze the possibility of freedom
in a world dominated by apparatus; to think about how it is possible to give
meaning to human life in the face of the accidental necessity of death. We need
such a philosophy because it is the last form of revolution which is still accessible
for us.552
For Müller-Pohle, writing in Kunstforum after Flusser’s death, what Flusser’s
“photophilosophy” meant was establishing an “ethos of photography.”553 However, in view of
Flusser’s previous writings, this puts too much emphasis on photography, per se. Rather, it
seems better to take Flusser at his word: photography provides a prototype, a model for
examining society shaped and conditioned by apparatus, which he explored further in the last
two books in the technical image trilogy.
Into the Universe of Technical Images and Does Writing Have a Future?
Flusser had been prognosticating since the seventies about an Einbildungskraf or
“visualization”: a photo-criticism in the form of an expanded technical imagination that would
550
Ibid., 57.
551
Ibid., 58.
552
Ibid., 59
553
Müller-Pohle, Kunstforum, no. 117 (1992): 86
157
become a new faculty for deciphering images.554 However, his forecast in Into the Universe of
Technical Images (1985), the second book in the technical image trilogy, was that “photography
is about to become redundant as a technology.”555 In this book he focused instead on the universe
of technical images, which could be defined as abstractly as “envisioned surfaces”556 or “mosaics
assembled from particles,”557 and as concretely as photographs, films, videos and television
screens. Moving closer to the emerging field of computer technology, technical images are
defined in Into the Universe of Technical Images as anything made with a technical apparatus,
but also as “computations of concepts”558 born into a “computed universe in which particles are
assembled into visible images.”559
The book follows the standard Flusser format, with short essays that develop parts of a
larger idea—although here the essays are titled by different verb infinitives: “To Abstract,” “To
Imagine,” “To Make Concrete,” “To Touch,” “To Envision,” and so on. German infinitives can
also stand as nouns, which gives Flusser’s titles an added valance that is lost in translation. Also,
where the larger implications of Towards a Philosophy of Photography were withheld until the
554
See texts such as Vilém Flusser, “L’irruption du techno-imaginaire,” Interférences, no. 7, 3rd
trimester (1977): 45-47; and “Ora Aprenda a ler Televisão, Fotografia …” in Especial
(December 1979): 50-55.
555
Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 45. Originally published as Ins Universum der technischen
Bilder (Göttingen: European Photography, 1985).
556
Ibid., 33.
557
Ibid., 6.
558
Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 10.
559
Ibid., 10.
158
final essay, here they are laid out in a “Warning” at the beginning of the book, in which Flusser
raises the prospect of a “future society that synthesizes electronic images.” He continues:
Seen from here and now, it will be a fabulous society, where life is radically
different from our own. Current scientific, political, and artistic categories will
hardly be recognizable there, and even our state of mind, our existential mood,
will take on a new and strange coloration. This is not about a future floating in the
far distance. We are already on its cusp. Many aspects of this fabulous new social
and life structure are already visible in our environment and in us.560
Flusser then raises the stakes even higher, stating that the society we live in is a
“utopia”—except it is a “groundless utopia,” without reference points, and which could move in
two directions: toward the negative, totalitarian control society or the more positive “dialogic”
one. In the same way Towards a Philosophy of Photography shows the profound influence of
Heidegger and the idea of living in a world picture adjusted for the cybernetic age, Martin
Buber’s dialogic philosophy colors Flusser’s conception of a new utopia. One can also see the
echoes of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions from 1962, which popularized
the idea of scientific “paradigm shifts,” and which influenced Flusser’s thinking.561 I will pick up
this thread, of the dialogical, later. But first, to return to the title and the universe of technical
images: Flusser now separates technical images from photography, stating that the new utopia
“will no longer be found in any place or time but in imagined surfaces” that “absorb geography
and history.”562 Although surfaces were mentioned in Towards a Philosophy of Photography,
560
Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 3.
561
See Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1962). There is disagreement about whether Kuhn took his idea of the paradigm
shift from Michael Polanyi, whose lectures he attended. Also see Michael Polanyi’s Science,
Faith and Society (London: Oxford University Press, 1946) and Personal Knowledge: Towards a
Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), both of which argue that
personal judgment colors and affects scientific research and methodology.
562
Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 4.
159
they were not among Flusser’s four primary elements. This sets Into the Universe of Technical
Images apart: images are no longer snapshots or billboards, but non-physical objects; something
in a sense predicting the digital files we circulate via the Internet or social media platforms like
Facebook, Snapchat, or Instagram.
In the first essay, “To Abstract,” Flusser distinguishes traditional two-dimensional images
from technical images, which are “mosaics assembled from particles … posthistorical,
dimensionless.”563 We already know that technical images are made by apparatuses, but Flusser
now clarifies the difference between traditional images, which are made by hands and fingers
and perceived by eyes, and technical images, which can code abstract and invisible particles
(photons and electrons, for instance) into information that reads as an image. In other words,
with technical images, the abstract is made visual. In subsequent essays Flusser describes how
technical images circulate. The essay “To Touch” delves into the world of keyboards and keys.
Flusser considers the difference between a chimpanzee sitting at a keyboard and a human—and
ultimately, artificial intelligence. “To Envision” moves from the simple gesture of key-pressing
to creation. “When I write, I write past the machine, toward the text,” Flusser says (bearing in
mind that he was famous for using a portable Olympia AEG typewriter at the same moment as
personal computers were becoming available); “when I envision technical images, I build from
the inside of the apparatus.”564 Near the end of this essay Flusser lays out the stakes: “Perception
theory, ethics and aesthetics, and even our very sense of being alive are in crisis.”565 For the first
generation to “command the power to envision,” Flusser sees this as a major shift in human
563
Ibid., 6.
564
Ibid., 36.
565
Ibid., 38.
160
consciousness in which the “search for deep coherence, explanation, enumeration, narration, and
calculation, in short, and historical, scientific, and textually linear thinking is being surpassed by
a new, visionary, superficial mode of thinking … The power to envision is the power of drawing
the concrete out of the abstract.”566
The essay “To Signify” picks up the arguments about abstraction and the dimensionless
image. Where traditional images needed walls (cave walls, or people’s houses), technical images
have “no such tangible substrate”—except, for the time being, the paper photographs are printed
on.567 Furthermore, technical images are not depictions but projections that capture “meaningless
signs that come to us from the world (photons, electrons) and code them to give them a
meaning.”568 Flusser argues, in concert with McLuhan at this point, that it is not what is shown in
the technical image but rather the image itself that is the message. Unlike McLuhan, however,
Flusser is more interested in the “vector” of meaning: the direction in which the image points
rather than the medium itself. He writes that we live in a world of “commandingly outstretched
index fingers”569 whose direction we follow, and which reach into both public and private space,
turning everyone into receivers, creating a closed feedback circuit between people and images.
Everything, including history, is sucked into this circuit in order to feed the technical image.570
The turning point for our discussion might be the essay “To Scatter,” nearly midway
through Into the Universe of Technical Images, in which Flusser states that, “the present cultural
566
Ibid., 38.
567
Ibid., 47.
568
Ibid., 48.
569
Ibid., 50.
570
Ibid., 55.
161
revolution is technical, not ideological,” and “today’s revolutionaries are not Kaddaffis or
Meinhofs but rather the inventors of technical images.”571 The destruction of traditional social
groups comes about by the invention of technical images: television, but also “the young
Californians who sit in isolation at their computer terminals with their backs to one another have
no social awareness.”572 And yet, “dialogic threads”— cables, videophones, and conferencing
video—could open up “the fascist tissue of the rising society.”573 Flusser doesn’t cite the popular
example of hackers. Instead, he introduces the term telematics. In Post-History, he described the
difference between a “discursive” and a “dialogic” society (discursive knowledge speaks of
objects and the dialogic speaks of Others; discourse moves in one direction and is dictatorial
whereas dialogue is about mutual interaction and exchange). Western society, he wrote, is
currently marked by a predominance of the discursive over the dialogic: “dialogues” created by
the mass media, where we get the bulk of our information, exist as a feedback loop rather than a
democratic dialogue.574 In “To Discuss,” he proposes telematics as a possibility for breaking this
impasse. The word comes from “telecommunications” and “informatics” and links images and
telegraphy—what have become in our age fairly common simultaneous transmissions of word,
image and sound.575 Part of what marks Into the Universe of Technical Images is that Flusser
571
Ibid., 63.
572
Ibid., 62.
573
Ibid., 64.
574
Vilém Flusser, “Our Communication,” Post-History, 51-58.
575
“We have only very recently become aware of the principle of calculating and computing,
that we have only recently realized that the same principle applies to both communication
through the radiant streaming of particle elements (telecommunication) and the grasping of
particle elements as new information (the production of technical images) … Thanks to the
telegraph, information is instantly accessible everywhere. And yet it didn’t occur to anyone at the
time that photographs could be telegraphed.” Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 79.
162
himself was questioning the separation of different senses and modalities: “I have excluded
everything to do with ear and mouth, with sounds and words, from my thinking. I have omitted
the audiovisual character of the universe of technical images.”576
What I am more interested in here is how Flusser’s idea of telematics as dialogic rather
than discursive links back to Martin Buber, and how telematics might be utopian in the
“positive” way Flusser proposed at the beginning of Into the Universe of Technical Images.
Regarding the first point, Flusser writes that “the convergence of images and
telecommunications is so new that we experience it as a technical phenomenon and not yet as a
cultural one.”577 However, as apparatuses become more “user friendly,” he argues that they will
be more prone to dialogue: children will be able to use them, for instance, and unlike
newspapers, with their one-way transmission of information, images will be sent by individuals.
(One might think in this context of blogs or various forms of social media.) Flusser also
predicted the “empty chatter and twaddle on a global scale”—“isolated, distracted, key-pressing
human beings”—that often results from such conversations.578 But he saw “possibilities for real
dialogue of unprecedented richness.”579 Where “telematic gadgets” such as videos, videogames,
videodisks, and cassettes were programmed to distract users, Flusser imagined a future society
576
Ibid., 164. In this, Flusser replicates the bias of art history toward the visual, which has been
challenged by writers from W.J.T. Mitchell and Martin Jay to Jonathan Sterne and Brandon
Joseph, who write about sound and sound art, respectively. This is an omission to be taken up in
further scholarship just getting underway. Conferences like “The Status of Sound: Writing
Histories of Sonic Art” at the CUNY, Graduate Center, November 30, 2012 are evidence of the
burgeoning interest in sound within art history departments. Accessed August 22, 2014,
http://centerforthehumanities.org/conference/status-sound-writing-histories-sonic-art.
577
Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 80.
578
Ibid., 86.
579
Ibid., 83.
163
that might use Buber’s ideas to enact a dialogic “reordering of society.”580 Taking the principle
of Buber’s most famous text, I and Thou, and the idea that an “I” only exists in relation to a
“you,” Flusser imagined applying this to the production and circulation of technical images.581
Near the end of Into the Universe of Technical Images, Flusser asks, “What do I actually mean
when I say of telematics that it permits a dialogical programming of image-producing
apparatuses?”582 He predicts that there will be no centralized senders, but individual image
makers sitting before their terminals, able to program their own apparatuses, “enriching and
correcting one another.”583 There will be an ongoing “dialogical programming of all apparatuses
by all participants” and people of the future will “program rather than be programmed,” calling
into being “that which Buber called ‘dialogic life.’”584
Flusser overlooks a few things, of course. One is the idea of ownership, which has
become a central debate with regard to the Internet. The other is the idea of “self.” Earlier in the
book, Flusser stated that his conception of “I” is as “a nexus point in a dialogical web” in the
superbrain of networked society.585 In the final pages of Into the Universe of Technical Images,
however, he says that he is thinking of “one’s own” and “another” in terms of programing, just
“as Heidegger did in Identity and Difference and as the debate between Sartre and Foucault tried
580
Ibid., 93.
581
See Martin Buber’s I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1970). Originally published as Ich und Du, (Berlin: Schocken Verlag, 1922).
582
Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 154.
583
Ibid.
584
Ibid.
585
Ibid., 92.
164
to do.”586 He then heads off into a somewhat obscure argument about how Judaism forbade the
production of images and Christianity and Islam followed a similar path because human-made
images obscure the “true image,” which is the face of another human being, through which we
encounter God:
All pretelematic images, from Lascaux to video, are discursive, broadcast images,
projected against the other, obscuring his face. They are forbidden. They lead the
wrong way, away from God. Telematic, dialogically synthesized images, on the
other hand, are media between one human being and another, through which I
may see the face of the other. And through this face I may see God.587
Flusser concludes that, perhaps through telematics we can find our way back to being
“genuinely humane”: engaged in purposeless play that produces a “school for creativity, a school
for freedom.”588 It is an argument that seems both prescient—and vapidly utopian. And yet,
Flusser called his writing a critique of the present rather than a prognostication, and as David
Crouch pointed out recently, when reviewing the English translation of the book:
Just four years before the text’s publication, MS-DOS and the first IBM-PC were
invented. In 1985 photographs were taken on the Minolta 7000, motion picture
films were still coiled in rolls of celluloid, and the highest grossing picture at the
cinema box office for that year was, somewhat fittingly, Back to the Future. This
was a time in which the Commodore 64 was popular and the year in which the
Atari ST and Amiga were released.589
Crouch finds in Flusser’s text “a sense of eerie prescience.”590 It is a work of speculative
philosophy, but Flusser himself warned at the end of Into the Universe of Technical Images
586
Ibid., 154.
587
Ibid., 156.
588
Ibid., 171.
589
David Crouch, “Back to the Future: Vilém Flusser’s Into the universe of technical images,”
Digital Culture & Education, published online September 15, 2012, accessed August 22, 2014,
http://www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/uncategorized/dce_r004_crouch/.
590
Ibid.
165
against forecasting and predicting, invoking Heidegger: “All prediction damages the future.”591
Flusser then summons two nineteenth-century philosophers: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
Rather than endorsing Schopenhauer’s divided “world of will,” as represented by music, and a
“world of representation,” Flusser argues for a merger of the two in the universe of technical
images, enacted through the Nietzschean will to power that makes representation concrete,
eternally recurring and reproducible—in which the nineteenth-century philosopher’s concept of a
superman can be reconfigured for the contemporary age as a “cybernetic superbrain.”592 The
penultimate paragraph in the book reads like a cross between Surrealism and science fiction,
suggesting a “dream world in which the dreamers seem exceptionally alert,” because:
to press the buttons that produce pictures, the dreamer needs to calculate and
compute clear and distinct concepts. It is a dream world, then, that does not lie
below waking consciousness but above it, conscious and consciously constructed,
a hyperconscious dream world.593
The “Summary” includes a numbered list of the “problems” encountered and addressed
by the preceding essays: “What are technical images?”; “How do technical images function as
models?”; “What does a society so fully in the thrall of images look like? How can we make
images dialogically?”; “In [telematic dialogue], how does one learn to distinguish creativity from
imitation, information from redundancy?”; “How could such a cerebral society cope with bodily
human individuals?”; “How can we ignore the human body when we live and die with it?”;
“How can anyone so removed from everything physical (all work and all suffering, all activity
and passivity), anyone so focused on pure information, live, and would such a life be worthy of
591
Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 159.
592
Ibid., 166.
593
Ibid.
166
the name?”594 In these questions, Flusser posed some of the basic questions of our technologized
era. One can also see overlaps with the work of then-contemporary artists who became interested
in the body during the peak of the AIDS crisis, but also with theorists like Donna Haraway, Rosi
Braidotti, and N. Katherine Hayles, whom I will discuss in the next chapter.
In the meantime, I will spend less time on Does Writing Have a Future?, the third book
in the technical image trilogy. This is not to imply that the book is unimportant—although the
text might be more relevant to scholars of literature, language, and translation.595 The thrust of
the book is spelled out in the introduction:
Writing, in the sense of placing letters and other marks one after another, appears
to have little or no future. Information is now more effectively transmitted by
codes other than those of written signs. What was once written can now be
conveyed more effectively on tapes, records, films, videotapes, videodisks, or
computer disks, and a great deal that could not be written until now can be noted
down in these new codes. Information coded by these means is easier to produce,
to transmit, to receive, and to store than written texts. Future correspondence,
science, politics, poetry, and philosophy will be pursued more effectively through
the use of these codes than through the alphabet or Arabic numerals. It really
looks as though written codes will be set aside, like Egyptian hieroglyphs or
Indian knots. Only historians and other specialists will be obliged to learn reading
and writing in the future.596
In predicting an end to writing Flusser invokes a major cultural shift. In his narrative, the
alphabet was invented to replace images (pictograms) and it was only in the eighteenth century,
after a three-thousand year struggle, that texts succeeded in “pushing images, with their magic
594
Flusser, “Summary,” Into the Universe of Technical Images, 169-172.
595
In her translator’s note, Nancy Ann Roth points out that it isn’t a coincidence “that the most
comprehensive study of Flusser’s work to date, Rainer Guldin’s 2005 Philosophieren zwischen
den Sprachen is organized around the concept of translation.” In Vilém Flusser, Does Writing
Have a Future? trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011), 166. Also see Rainer Guldin’s Philosophieren zwischen den Sprachen: Vilém
Flussers Werk (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2005).
596
Vilém Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future?, 3.
167
and myth, into such corners as museums and the unconscious.”597 Writing represents a
“transcoding” of thought: translating images that exist on two-dimensional surfaces into onedimensional linear codes.598 Now, however, writing is being replaced by a new kind of image:
the technical image. And like other forms of culture, writing is becoming automated. Soon
everything that was mediated by text will be transmitted more effectively and more creatively
through informatic media.599 Rather than privileging memory, we will have to learn how to
forget, to erase the alphabet from our memories and store the new codes.600 We will no longer
have to think critically, along the lines of the Enlightenment model, because historical
consciousness has run its course.601
A couple of things need to be pointed out. One is that the first edition of Does Writing
Have a Future? was published digitally, appearing on a floppy disk in 1987—an attempt to
translate alphanumeric text into algorithmic code. Flusser considered the publication of a
traditional book version in 1989 a “failure” signaling the continuation rather than the eradication
597
Ibid., 147.
598
Ibid., 15.
599
Ibid., 61.
600
Ibid., 149.
601
Ibid., 92. Here Flusser directly attacks the Frankfurt School, arguing that the Enlightenment
project of critical reading, which started with writers like Kant and Rousseau, has ended: “All
texts, even critical ones, have become critically decipherable, and all lines are turned against
themselves, like Ouroboros, to swallow their tails,” (ibid.). David Crouch challenges this
conclusion: “Text itself seems far from on the wane but ever more imbricated with image.
Perhaps text has been worn-out by its relations with technical images, corrupted into the
contractions and codes of ideograms, pictographs, cyberjargon, webspeak, texting and tagging,
but it persists nonetheless. And what of the continued, if crippled, production and consumption
of literary works? If not on paper, at least linear narratives are still enjoyed on one or other kind
of reading apparatus. Texts appear to infect images evermore, and this more nuanced relationship
is not adequately addressed by Flusser’s conception of a clean break between text and image.”
See David Crouch, “Back to the Future.”
168
of writing.602 And yet, he conceded, how does one discuss the demise of writing in a manner
other than writing? (Flusser was a gifted orator and his lectures serve as another medium.)
Another point is that, Does Writing Have a Future? appeared a few years before Hypertext and
the moment when certain authors and scholars were declaring an end to books.603 As early as
1973, Flusser was announcing an end to “written lines”—only in earlier essays he was arguing in
terms of surfaces rather than images, with the temporally quicker mode of “surface thought”
replacing “linear thought.”604 By the late eighties, words like “digital,” “recoding,” and
“information” dominated his argument. And while photography is barely mentioned in Does
Writing Have a Future?, the book serves as an important component of Flusser’s argument for
the triumph of technical images over written text.
Flusser’s Other Writings: Photography Texts
Flusser’s reputation as a photography writer blossomed in Europe after the publication of
Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Browsing through binders in the Flusser Archive in
Berlin, one encounters a multitude of documents relating to photography conferences in which
Flusser participated in Germany, France, and Spain, as well as correspondence with artists and
curators like Joan Fontcuberta, Joachim Schmid, Gottfried Jäger, Peter Weibel, Eduardo Kac,
602
Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future?, 164.
603
See Robert Coover, “The End of Books,” The New York Times Book Review, June 21, 1992,
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/coover-end.html. George Landow, Hypertext:
The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1992); Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994);
Jane Yellowlees Douglas, The End of Books—Or Books Without End?: Reading Interactive
Narratives (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
604
Vilém Flusser, “Lines and Surfaces,” Writings, 21-34.
169
George Gessert, and Max Kozloff.605 Flusser used lectures and presentations to develop papers
which he would publish in multiple forms and languages. For instance, for a photography
conference at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin in 1985, he delivered the paper “Die
Fotografie als nach-industrieller Gegenstand,” which would become “The Photograph as PostIndustrial Object,” published in Leonardo, which I will discuss shortly. For Practical
Psychology, a journal based in Bochum, Germany, he would write essays such as “Perception”
and “The World of Art as a Mirror and/or Concealment of Human Intention.”606 Flusser was also
writing photography criticism—or some version of it, since the pieces were often more similar to
his essays or short philosophical pieces published in Brazilian newspapers in the sixties than
conventional art criticism. There were writings published in Camera Austria, a handful of essays
in Kunstforum—he was given a column there shortly before his death—and, of course,
contributions to European Photography, where he wrote about artists like Roland Günter, Jiří
Hanke, Paolo Gioli, Boyd Webb, Lizzie Calligas, Henri Lewis, Herlinde Koelbl, Herbert W.
Franke, Nancy Burson, Astrid Klein, Gerd Bonfert, and Bernard Plossu.
Two essays I would like to discuss here both started as German essays and were
translated into English by Flusser and published in the U.S. journal Leonardo. The Czech-born,
Canadian artist Jan Zach recommended him to Leonardo, a journal in Berkeley, California
605
Within the binders devoted to conferences in the Vilém Flusser Archive are interesting
exchanges—for instance, between Flusser and Joan Fontcuberta, with Fontcuberta asking Flusser
if he can speak in Spanish at “Photographic Springtime,” a festival in Barcelona in March 1984.
Flusser responds [the correspondence is in English], “I can lecture in Portuguese slightly adapted
to Spanish. And in that case I shall speak slowly. But I can also lecture in English, French or
German, with Spanish interpolations. Given the close similarity between Portuguese and
Spanish, there will be no linguistic problems.” Letter from Vilém Flusser to Joan Fontcuberta,
German Conferences Binder, No. 22, Vilém Flusser Archive.
606
See “Wahrnehmung” in Praktische Psychologie 13 (1990) and “Das Universum der Technik
als Spiegel und/oder als Verschleierung menschlicher Absicht” in Praktische Psychologie 11
(1987). Vilém Flusser Archive.
170
devoted to the use of contemporary science and technology in the arts. In July 1985, Leonardo
Coordinating Editor Pamela Ryan-Grant wrote to Flusser in Robion, asking him to contribute to
the journal.607 Flusser replied that he would like to publish “The Photograph as Post-Industrial
Object” because he had just translated the essay from German to English and was about to
deliver the German version at a symposium (the Karl-Hofer Symposium in Berlin). There is
more correspondence around this essay than most in the Flusser Archive because it was for a
peer-reviewed journal and because, as Flusser wrote to his friend Felix Philip Ingold, some of the
readers and editors were struck by Flusser’s “peculiar style.”608 The manuscript reviews are
often, perhaps unintentionally, rather humorous:
The author writes well; he has chosen an interesting topic; and he has something
interesting to say. But it is just not possible to publish a paper without any
references whatsoever dealing with a topic which has been so much discussed. I
sense references to Heidegger on technology, and certainly more generally to
Continental philosophy; he should be looking, also, at the large literature on
photography, especially the essays by Joel Snyder which exactly touch on his
topic. Otherwise he is in the position of reinventing the wheel … Obviously the
author has done some reading; he needs to indicate that fact.609
In a letter back to Lisa Bornstein at Leonardo, Flusser writes:
The reviewer of my text wants me to quote from the large literature on
photography, which is exactly what I wanted to avoid, since I believe that the
current writing on this subject (especially Roland Barthes and his followers),
misses the point I am driving. Indeed, I want the reader to think that I reinvented
the wheel, although in an ironical way … Indeed, I have done some reading (as
the reviewer so kindly says), but that fact should come out from the text, not from
607
Letter from Ryan-Grant to Vilém Flusser, July 27, 1985, Leonardo Correspondence Binder,
No. 6, Vilém Flusser.
608
Quoted in Sander, Sources, 24.
609
Manuscript review, dated October 11, 1985, in the Leonardo Correspondence Binder, No.
140-141, Vilém Flusser Archive. In the section on this form where it asks, “Should manuscript
be published?” the anonymous reviewer has checked “Yes, if revised” and above that typed
“radically.”
171
pseudo-academic footnotes. If there is anything an essay should avoid (in
opposition to a scientific treatise), it is precisely this sort of preciosity.610
Eventually Flusser did make changes to his essay, shortening it (Leonardo requested it to
be under 2,500 words) and including a sort-of-bibliography that, rather than listing specific texts,
explained how the paper is based on four “essays:” Natural:Mind, Post-History, Towards a
Philosophy of Photography, and Into the Universe of Technical Images, as well as an essay in
progress (evidently Does Writing Have a Future?). The bibliography also states, almost as if
responding to the manuscript reviewer’s specific points, that the first section of the essay devoted
to objects is influenced by Heidegger’s analysis of “Thing” (“Ding”) and “Stuff” (“Zeug”) and
Abraham Moles’s critique of Marxist dialectics; the section dealing with chemical photographs
(“the usual type”) is in response to Barthes and Benjamin, but applying information theory to the
analysis of photography; the section dealing with “electromagnetic photos (the new type)” is a
synthesis of Sedlmayer’s new criticism and Buber’s analysis of intersubjective existence; and the
last section was written in preparation for a discussion with Jean Baudrillard on German
television scheduled for February 26, 1986.611
The essay itself is divided into ten sections identified by Roman numerals: Objects;
Cultural Objects; Industrial Objects; Post-Industrial Objects; Photos; Apparatus; Three Types of
Photos; Electromagnetized Photos (with three subsections: Memory, Total Art, Dialogue);
610
Letter from Vilém Flusser to Lisa Bornstein, December 18, 1985, Leonardo Correspondence
Binder, No. 10., Vilém Flusser Archive.
611
Vilém Flusser, “The Photograph as Post-Industrial Object: An Essay on the Ontological
Standing of Photographs,” Leonardo 19, no. 4 (1986): 331-332. Also published as “Die
Fotografie als nach-industrieller Gegenstand” in FotoKritik 21-22 (November 1986): 14-17.
Although he does not specify, one assumes Flusser is talking about Hans Sedlmayer, the
Austrian art historian who was, somewhat ironically, an early member of the Nazi party.
Sedlmayer adopted and modified Alois Reigl’s idea of the Kunstwollen, that the intention of the
artwork could be objectified. Intentionality, while discarded by post-formalist critics, is a term
that comes up frequently in Flusser’s own writings.
172
Dialogue; “Les Immateriaux,” which takes its title from a recent exhibition at the Centre
Pompidou in Paris, curated by Jean-François Lyotard; and Intersubjectivity. Many of these terms
and ideas are familiar from Flusser’s oeuvre, although in this essay he pulls the object-oriented
writing of the seventies into his eighties technical-image argument. Hence, the essay starts with a
phenomenological description of the difference between subject and object and how objects gain
value by having work injected into them. Flusser makes the distinction between industrial
objects, which were the products of artists and artisans, and post-industrial objects, which are
shaped by apparatus. “Post-industrial objects,” he writes, “will differ from industrial ones in that
they will become almost ‘value-less’ supports for programmed information.”612 The influence of
Heidegger can be felt at the end of this section, where Flusser argues that soon humans will no
longer be “true” subjects because they can be replaced by apparatus, which will confront the
objects for them. Culture will no longer be a store of values, but of memories.
In the fifth section, “Photos,” Flusser finally addresses photography. This is the section
Flusser mentioned in the bibliography—as in his letter to Lisa Bornstein—that was a response to
Barthes, whom Flusser felt was “missing the point.” It is a provocative section. Flusser declares
photographs “practically worthless supports of information” and a few sentences later amplifies
this point: “Photos and printed matter have the following in common: both can become a
nuisance by creating waste material. However, in printed matter a human subject, an ‘author,’
elaborates the information (unless a word processor is used), while in the photo an apparatus
does.”613 Instead of focusing on images, Flusser argues that post-industrial culture in general can
be grasped better by focusing on the camera and apparatus, which he describes in the next
612
Flusser, “The Photograph as Post-Industrial Object,” 330.
613
Ibid.
173
section as a “machine that calculates probabilities.”614 And here, Flusser identifies a
philosophical problem: if culture was created to hedge against the entropic death or decay (in his
terms “loss of information”) of nature and its objects, what happens when apparatuses appear
that can create this information? What happens to value? (A concept that, not coincidentally, also
is central to art history.)
To tease this out, Flusser looks at three kinds of photographs: fully automated ones (e.g.,
NASA satellite photos), amateur photographs, like snapshots, and “experimental” photographs in
which the photographer works against the program of the camera. None of this is new. But here
Flusser highlights the “inner dialectic of freedom” that occurs when, instead of creating value,
humans are committed to deviating from value. The last sections of the essay are given over to
suggesting how the new electromagnetic photos—examples are in “Les Immateriaux,” which
showcased satellite images, holograms, and other types of digital images—will do away with
material support, creating new forms of memory and a “total art” in which science and art are
reunited, classification systems are discarded, and human dialogue becomes possible through the
exchange of particle-based images. Humans will no longer be subordinate to objects but instead
live in a culture of immaterial information in which “useful activities” can be performed by
apparatus and humans are free to exist as knots within a social network, becoming universal
artists.615 Flusser acknowledges that this is a utopian forecast. It is, nonetheless, technically
feasible for the first time.
Two points are expanded upon in two other essays, regarding memory and immateriality.
“On Memory (Electronic or Otherwise)” was also published in Leonardo and based on a talk
614
Ibid.
615
Ibid., 331.
174
Flusser was about to give at the Ars Electronica symposium in Linz, Austria in September
1988.616 What is interesting about “On Memory” is that it essentially recasts much of the
argument of “The Photograph as Post-Industrial Object” into the idea of “electronic memory.”
Read alongside his photography writings, it is interesting to see how Flusser changes the terms of
photography from remembrance (Barthes continually refers to Proust, although he argues the
photograph is more a resurrection of the dead than a “remembrance”) to information storage.617
Electronic memories are also described as “simulations,” which puts Flusser much closer to Jean
Baudrillard, as I will discuss in the following chapter. “A simulation here means an imitation that
exaggerates a few aspects of the original while disregarding all the other aspects,” he writes.
“Thus, a lever is a simulation of the arm: it exaggerates its power to lift while disregarding all the
other aspects of the arm.”618 Similarly, electronic memory is a simulation of the memory
functions of the human brain, but it will free up the human brain to perform other functions.
Another essay, “Immaterialism,” recently published for the first time in the British
journal Philosophy of Photography, elaborates on the ramifications of new images lacking
material support, which are composed of particles instead and “oblige us to rethink eternal
problems.”619 For instance, if electronic memories relocate our memory outside of bodies, the
immaterial nature of electromagnetic images suggests similar cataclysmic change: “The very
616
Vilém Flusser, “On Memory (Electronic or Otherwise),” Leonardo 23, no. 4 (1990): 397-399.
The correspondence in the archive shows that Flusser had also submitted other essays to
Leonardo, including “Plant Life” and “Grandmother,” neither of which were accepted.
617
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 82. Furthermore: “Not only is the Photograph never, in essence, a
memory (whose grammatical expression would be the perfect tense, whereas the tense of the
Photograph is the aorist), but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory.”
Ibid., 91.
618
Flusser, “On Memory,” 398.
619
Vilém Flusser, “Immaterialism,” Philosophy of Photography 2, no. 2 (2011): 218.
175
pillars of Occidental culture, ‘matter,’ ‘spirit,’ and ‘form’ have fallen … but a mystery now
envelops the concepts of ‘energy’ and ‘probability’ instead. If one throws metaphysics out
through the door, it comes back through the window.”620 This idea of digital immateriality has
been disputed to some extent by later media writers,621 as well as by photographers who have
pointed out that digital photography labs are more “material” (filled with hardware and
expensive to maintain) than chemical ones, and that much photography has been lost in recent
decades in the frantic transition from one format to another.622
However, what sets Flusser apart from other photography theorists of this moment is his
emphasis on a future of images rather than an end of photography, and an insistence on present
and future images as electromagnetic. In keeping with this future-looking perspective, Flusser
was concerned that we would need to learn how to read or “decipher” these new images.
Echoing Benjamin, who famously decreed that in the future literacy would consist of the ability
to read photographs, Flusser wrote in another recently published essay that, “the present is
620
Ibid., 219.
621
“Digital media is degenerative, forgetful, eraseable. This degeneration makes it both possible
and impossible for it to imitate analog media. It is perhaps a history-making device, but only
through its ahistorical (or memoryless) functioning, through the ways in which it constantly
transmits and regenerates text and images.” Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “The Enduring Ephemeral,
or the Future Is a Memory,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008): 160.
622
“Digital technology seems to offer greater potential for storage of and easy access to images,
but I think that the effect may be quite the opposite after a period of time … For example, I have
no problem making prints from my own 30-year-old negatives that are comparable to prints from
100+-year-old glass plates. But I cannot access my digital image files from 6-8 years ago. These
files were made on computers with now-obsolete chips and obsolete versions of software (both
operating and specific programs) then stored on media (Syquest drives, Zip disks, etc.) that are
no longer supported by available hardware.” Bob Thall, Chair of the Photography Department at
Columbia College in Chicago, Words Without Pictures (New York: Aperture; London: Thames
& Hudson, 2010), 340-342.
176
marked by our post-historical illiteracy.”623 What is needed is a criticism for technical images
that addresses production as much as the image. Similarly, in an essay titled “Photo Criticism”
published in European Photography in 1984,624 he argued that the task of a “correct”
photography criticism is to “render explicit the complex co-implications between man and
apparatus that result in photographs.”625 More specifically, the critic should ask: “What sort of
camera has produced the photograph? In what part of the world, with which techniques, and
against which cultural, political and historical backgrounds, was this camera produced, and in
what ways does it differ from other cameras available on the market? … To what degree did the
camera program deviate the photographer from his intention?”626
Finally, “The City as Wave‐Trough in the Image‐Flood” (1988), is a rich and visionary
essay that takes proposes technical images formed from particles as new models for the city,
contrasting this “topology” with geography in which cities were represented on flat surfaces,
such as maps.627 (The essay also uses the term Bilderflut, which, although it doesn’t figure
largely in the essay, became a popular term in German media studies signifying the deluge of
mass media images.) Rather than relying on the ancient division of the city into Economy
(marketplace), Politics (public sphere), and Theory (sacred space), for Flusser the new image of
623
Flusser, “Towards a theory of techno-imagination” (1980), Philosophy of Photography 2, no.
2 (2011): 200.
624
Flusser, “Photo Criticism,” European Photography (January 1984), 22-25.
625
Ibid., 24.
626
Ibid.
627
Vilém Flusser, “The City as Wave-Trough in the Image-Flood,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2
(Winter 2005): 320-328. Originally published as “Die Stadt als Wellental in der Bilderflut,” in
Die Revolutionen der Bilder: Der Flusser-Reader zu Kommunikation, Medien, und Design.
Mannheim: Bollmann, 1995.
177
the city is a net of relations in which the threads of the net are channels through which
information flows.628 Within this net, human subjects are like knots and their relations are the
different densities on the net, with the denser places developing into “wave-troughs” (Wellental)
that oscillate back and forth. Every wave becomes a flash point for “intersubjective virtualities”
and the wave troughs are called cities.629 The new image of the city is thus immaterial: a network
of wires and cables. It is not “geographically locatable; on the contrary, it is everywhere where
humans open up to one another.”630 Here, of course, you can see the continued echoes of
Buber—but also the very clear outlines of Internet sites and social media in which communities
are formed and subjects exist merely in relation to one another as they enter this realm. In the
sixties, Flusser wrote about masks in carnival in Brazil, and here he retrieves that example, citing
how we don masks—essentially different identities—to participate in cities: “One dances in the
mask of a television image (identifies oneself with and within it), in the mask of a Party member,
an academic title, a family relationship, an artistic orientation, a philosophic intention.”631 But
Flusser is now also beyond Buber in thinking about human subjectivity, writing that this image
of humanity also corresponds to “ecology (organisms are knottings together of ecosystems);
molecular biology (phenotypes are knottings together of genetic information); or atomic physics
(bodies are the knottings together of the four field strengths).”632
628
Flusser, “The City as Wave-Trough,” 325.
629
Ibid., 326.
630
Ibid., 327.
631
Ibid., 326.
632
Ibid., 325.
178
This is an important jumping off point. Because, while I have attempted to isolate
Flusser’s photography and technical image writings in order to clarify his ideas and contextualize
them within photography theory and scholarship, Flusser’s writings were themselves net-like:
various knots and nodes formed around particular subjects, but he eschewed classification and
disciplinary categories—and these categories were in flux anyway, particularly in newly formed
fields like media studies. In his introduction to “The City as Wave-Trough,” translator Phil
Gochenour compares Flusser to Gregory Bateson rather than Marshall McLuhan, and the
comparison is apt, given Bateson’s use of cybernetics and information theory to reconceptualize
anthropology and human relationships.633 Gochenour also compares Flusser’s thinking about
technology and human subjectivity to that of media theorists like Niklas Luhmann, Norbert Bolz,
Friedrich Kittler, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Heinz von Foerster, and Ernst
Glaserfeld, as well as the Radical Constructivist movement (a term coined by Glaserfeld) in
German cybernetic theory. For these thinkers—particularly von Foerster—technology and
subjectivity must be thought in terms of epistemology and biology, which we will shortly see
was central to Flusser’s writing and thinking.634 Here, considering information theory, biology,
and epistemology, we are a long way from traditional photography theory. And yet, it is exactly
this wide-ranging, net-like thinking that makes Flusser’s writings exciting: rather than looking
back with nostalgia at chemical photography, he used digital images as a model for theory and as
another knot in the complex relationship between technology, humans, and other species.
633
Ibid. Gochenour also distinguishes Flusser from Jurgen Habermas, whose idea of the public
sphere assumed an autonomous subject entering that space rather than one dialogically formed,
and the Frankfurt School, who treated technology and the media as indoctrinating, mediating,
and alienating rather than dialogic.
634
Ibid., 321.
179
Flusser’s Other Writings: Vampyroteuthis infernalis
An important text to mention in this context is Flusser’s science-fiction philosophy or
“parabiology” text Vampyroteuthis infernalis, which was published in German in 1983, the same
year as Towards a Philosophy of Photography.635 French artist Louis Bec provided illustrations
and authorship is attributed to both of them. Meanwhile the Portuguese version—translated by
Flusser himself, but unpublished during his lifetime—is attributed solely to Flusser.636 There are
differences between the two editions: the German version is fifty pages shorter and in the
Portuguese version Flusser stretches out and draws more conclusions. The Portuguese version
also includes an important discussion of apparatus at the end. Flusser had, of course, written
about the natural world and its intersection with humans in Natural:Mind. Now, however, he
discovered a creature about which little was known: Vampyroteuthis infernalis, or the “vampire
squid from hell,” the sole species in the Order Vampyromorpha, which has features of both
octopods and squid, and which he used to write a fable about evolution, history, and human
635
Vilém Flusser and Louis Bec, Vampyroteuthis infernalis: A Treatise with a Report by the
Institute Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste, trans. Valentine A. Pakis (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Originally published as Vampyroteuthis infernalis: Eine
Abhandlung saamt Befund des Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste (Göttingen:
Immatrix/European Photography, 1987). I will also refer to the Portuguese version, Vilém
Flusser, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, trans. Rodrigo Maltez Novaes (New York and Dresden:
Atropos Press, 2011) and Vampyroteuthis infernalis (São Paulo: Annablume, 2011), in
Portuguese).
636
The Portuguese version cited here was translated from an unpublished manuscript in the
Vilém Flusser Archive. See editor’s preface, Vampyroteuthis infernalis (Atropos, 2011), 13. A
text by Abraham A. Moles was also discovered in the archive and included as the foreword to the
English translation of the Portuguese text. Regarding Bec’s contributions, he was a visual artist
and founder of the surrealist-sounding Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste. Many
of his drawings in the book are of invented species—a practice similar to the photographic work
of Joan Fontcuberta, the Spanish conceptual photographer with whom Flusser corresponded and
occasionally lectured or collaborated.
180
existence.637 “Vampy,” as Flusser called the creature in his correspondence with Milton Vargas,
Abraham Moles, and Dora Ferreira da Silva, in which he developed ideas for the essay, is
approximately a foot long and lives in the mesopelagic zone of the ocean, between half a mile
and several thousand feet deep, in tropical and temperate regions of the world. Most important
for Flusser’s purposes is that it this is an aphotic (lightless) habitat, a high-pressure, oxygen
minimum zone (OMZ) where humans cannot exist.638 Vampyroteuthis has existed nearly
unchanged for over three hundred million years, making it a kind of living fossil, or what
biologists call a “phylogenetic relic.” Its body is reddish-brown body and it has large blue eyes,
eight arms and two retractile filaments that are used to capture food, although it subsists
primarily on “marine snow,” the organic detritus that drifts down through the ocean.639 Vampy
also possesses light-emitting organs called “photophores” and under duress it releases a
bioluminescent mucous with glowing blue light particles that confuse predators and prey. The
animal can turn its body nearly inside out, either as camouflage or to trap prey, although mainly
for the former purpose.
Flusser had not seen a vampire squid. In fact, very few people had until recently. The
cephalopod was first named in 1903 by the German naturalist Carl Chun; later biologists called it
Cirroteuthis macrope, Watasella Nigra, and Retroteuthis Pacifica, but Chun’s name—perhaps
637
See Hendrik J.T. Hoving and Bruce H. Robison, “Vampire squid: detrivores in the oxygen
minimum zone,” Royal Society of Biological Sciences, published online September 26, 2012,
accessed September 27, 2014,
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2012/09/13/rspb.2012.1357.full.pdf+html.
638
In Central California, where Hoving and Robison studied Vampyroteuthis, it was found
through out the 600 to 900 meter depth range.
639
For a description, see the MarineBio Conservation Society’s entry on Vampyroteuthis
infernalis, accessed September 12, 2014, http://marinebio.org/species.asp?id=179.
181
ironic—stuck.640 Images of Vampy were only recently captured by ROVs (remotely operated
underwater vehicles), including 170 specimens between 1992 and 2012—well after Flusser
wrote his book—and one was displayed in a public aquarium for the first time in 2014.641
According to Klaus Sander, Flusser visited the Natural History Museum in London and
aquariums in Monaco and Banyuls-sur-Mer for research. In his correspondence, Flusser also
mentions three examples of Vampyroteuthis infernalis fished out of the South China Sea, from
which he presumably took his inspiration.642 The lack of information available on Vampy was of
little concern. It allowed Flusser greater freedom to imagine the habits and nature of the animal
and “despite the barrier that separates us, Vampyroteuthis is not unknowable.”643 As a fable, it
was “an attempt to critique our vertebrate existence from the molluscan point of view. Like every
640
See Carl Chun’s Aus de Tiefen des Weltmeeres (Regensberg, Germany: University Library of
Regensburg, 1900).
641
Although “Thirty-six trawled specimens were collected between 1964 and 1971 by R/V
Velero IV off southern California and northern Baja California; four were collected in 1967 in
Mexican waters off northern and central Baja California by R/V Velero IV. These 40 specimens
are accessioned in the collections of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. Another
three specimens were collected off the California coast in 2011 by cruises of the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography as part of the California Current Ecosystem Long-Term Ecological
Research (CCE-LTER) programme.” Hoving and Robison, “Vampire squid,” 2. In order to keep
the Vampyroteuthis infernalis in captivity, well above the OMZ, Hoving and Robison write that
they had to keep young specimens in plastic bags and older ones in circular kreisel tanks.3 The
specimen shown in captivity was at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, May 2014,
accessed September 12, 2014, http://montereybayaquarium.tumblr.com/post/84435959998/nowon-exhibit-two-rare-deep-sea-cephalopods-we.
642
Vilém Flusser, Vampyroteuthis infernalis (Atropos, 2011), 119.
643
Ibid., 23.
182
fable, this one shall also be mostly about men, although an ‘animal’ will serve as its pretext.”644
He wrote the book primarily in 1981.645
Flusser was clear on his intent: to disrupt the hierarchy which places humans above
animals. In doing so, he invokes Saint Francis of Assisi, who preached of an integrated world in
which humans and animals (and the environment) were God’s equal creations: “This fable shall
follow the Franciscan example, and shall seek to overcome anthropocentrism during its
contemplation of life’s current. It shall seek to grasp evolution from a vampyroteuthian point of
view. To oppose the human Darwin with a vampyroteuthian Darwin.”646 One can already see
Flusser setting up a series of dialectics: Vampyroteuthis infernalis and humans; the watery, lowoxygen “abyss” where Vampy lives and the land on which humans reside; how one organism’s
paradise is another one’s hell. Vampy becomes the paradigmatic “Other,” harking back to
writings like The History of the Devil, since its phylogenic name consigns it to “hell”—although
Flusser just as often prefers the term “abyss.” Furthermore, Flusser often examines Vampy “from
a cybernetic point of view,” spending many pages outlining the anatomy and behavior of the
organism, but also imagining its nervous system as a network.647 What is key here is that, in the
same way as Flusser explored the nature-culture dialectic in Natural:Mind and found it to be
false, in Vampyroteuthis infernalis he finds the hierarchy humans have set up, placing
themselves above other species, specious. After all, Vampy can do things like emit light and
survive in a low-oxygen habitat, which we cannot. In typically Flusserian (or Heideggarian)
644
Ibid., 27-28.
645
Sander, Sources, 25.
646
Flusser, Vampyroteuthis infernalis (Atropos, 2011), 31-32.
647
Ibid., 34.
183
fashion, he steps back from this narrative to show how scientific objectivity itself is flawed.
Viewed from the “objective” standpoint of science, Vampy exists in the “zoology of
cephalopods”; and yet: “The search for scientific objectivity is revealing itself in its continual
advancement not as a search for ‘purity,’ but as pernicious madness. The present demands that
we give up the ideal of objectivity in favor of other intersubjective scientific methods.”648
For Flusser, one of the primary culprits in establishing “scientific objectivity” within
biology is Charles Darwin. As Flusser has shown in earlier writings, the idea that species evolve
ever upwards, with humans exemplifying the pinnacle of biological success is a suspect theory
when one considers the “rationalized” hells of Auschwitz and other mechanized extermination
camps. Flusser stresses instead the game-theory nature of evolution: its randomness and the
permutations produced by programs—“unimaginative automation”—which are usually wrong:
that is, creatures are unable to survive in their habitats and perish.649 Here Flusser draws a
parallel between Vampy and humans: we are both products of pure chance. Vampy is a mirror
that shows our imperfections and in this mirror we can recognize what we are both negating:
“We are opposing spirits that negate the same ‘world.’”650 This spirit, he points out, is not like
the one theorized in eighteenth-century philosophy as Geist. Instead, it is a Freudian one—or,
more precisely, a Reichian one: referring to the radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who
theorized vital energy through the concept of “orgone,” as well as a fusion of the mouth and the
anus, a synthesis of the dialectic of Eros and Thanatos. Flusser considers Vampy much closer
than humans to this “orgasmic” evolutionary model. And considering how Darwinian and
648
Ibid., 38. Italics mine.
649
Ibid., 47-48.
650
Ibid., 49.
184
Lamarckian concepts of evolution—driven by heredity and environment, respectively—led to
concepts like species and race, which culminated catastrophically in Nazi Germany and Stalinist
Russia,651 Flusser argues that this is where philosophy and biology meet. Theoretical reason
becomes for humans what the web is to the spider:
The web works for the spider to catch flies, and theoretical reason works for man
to catch generalities. A certain biologically-based Kantianism (every species has
its own web of specific “categories”) definitely does not work to solve the
epistemological problem. Because biology is itself a product of the human “web.”
It catches everything within the categories of theoretical reason, including reason
itself, and not only the spider’s web. The biologically-based Kantianism does not
resolve the problem, it only transfers it to another level. And it is not in this way
that we will be able to reformulate the problem of reformulating the question of
the origins of species.652
Flusser suggests two “meta-models” for avoiding this impasse in which biology is caught
in the web of Kantian reason: Wilhelm Reich and game theory. In Reich’s model, an explosion
of energy in the universe results in the divergence and then concentration of condensed energy or
“orgone” in which complex objects emerge: organisms which, rather than evolving, “repress”
certain characteristics, thereby avoiding the antimony of “origin of species.”653 In the gamestheory model the universe becomes a “progressive realization of virtualities” contained in a
program that asserts itself via permutations of chance: a game in which “the ‘hereditists’
emphasize the pawns of the game, and the ‘environmentalists’ the game board, but these are two
aspects of the same game of chance.”654 At this point Flusser brings up phenomenology, which
651
Ibid., 59-60.
652
Ibid., 61. Italics in original.
653
Ibid., 62.
654
Ibid., 63. In the back of the English translation of the Portuguese version is a letter from
Milton Vargas from January 23, 1981, found in the Vilém Flusser Archive, in which Vargas sent
Flusser an article on the theory of evolution [Roger Lewin, “Evolutionary Theory Under Fire,”
Science Magazine 210, no. 21 (November 1980)]. Vargas summarizes the article and concludes:
185
returns us to the world in which we exist: a world of relations in which “organisms are
abstractions of a particular relational fabric, and their environment is another abstraction of the
same fabric,” and the argument between “hereditists” and “environmentalists” is itself abstract
speculation.655 This is particularly pertinent in studying Vampy—or at least during Flusser’s
moment, when few examples of Vampyroteuthis infernalis had actually been seen—because we
cannot study him in his habitat. Instead, we are forced to use intuitive methods that implicate our
epistemological position as much as explain the animal. Flusser teases this out further: seventy
percent of the earth is covered with water, “brimming with life” which we only partly know.
Vampy thus becomes an analogue for the earth itself, and his “uninhabitable” infernalis must be
viewed as a paradise, since he has survived there for millions of years—much longer than
humans have existed on earth.
Flusser uses this as a springboard for demonstrating how we need to liberate ourselves
from our models, and particularly with regard to the philosophical concept of the subject. If
existence has been treated as a “being-in-the-world” consisting of a subject in relation to objects
and objects in relation to subjects (here he cites Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and
Descartes in their various ways of describing the human world view), then Vampy forces us to
rethink this model. A “vampyroteuthian epistemology,” not predicated on “resolving problems”
but on discriminating between influences and impressions assists this. (In the German version of
“However, says the author, in several cases the fossils do not document a smooth transition from
old to new morphologies … Is this perhaps a flaw in paleontological data? If that is so, this could
be resolved by new findings and research, as there are thousands of geological formations still
unknown. But this poses the doubt: is this a true characteristic of evolution – which is not really
smooth and continuous, but full of convulsions and distortions in its aim? I believe that if this is
so, then the nature of chance and probability would be affirmed, which since Mendel has been
linked to evolution.” Flusser, Vampyroteuthis infernalis (Atropos), 132-33.
655
Ibid., 64.
186
the text Flusser calls this the “vampyroteuthian Dasein” rather than the “vampyroteuthian
epistemology,” invoking Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world.)656 In a letter to Dora
Ferreira da Silva, Flusser invoked three additional models and aims for his text:
Plato’s Symposium, with the myth of the perfect man as an eight-armed sphere,
[Hieronymous] Bosch, and Kafka’s Metamorphosis. And I follow these three
aims: 1. To attain enough distance from the human condition to be able to observe
it, but a distance that is not transcendent. 2. To write a fable that is simultaneously
scientifically exact and mad fantasy (fantasia esatta). 3. To face Evil intentionally
with the spirit of “transvaluation,” but in reality, convinced that it is Evil as such
that is the real religious problem.657
A vampyroteuthian critique of human culture offers the following examples: Vampy’s
concepts of sexuality, family, and freedom show that it is “better programmed for socialization
than man”;658 its “social unconscious” and ability to recognize itself in the Other is more
articulated than in humans; hence, contra Darwin, Vampy might be better adapted for survival
than humans. We can even use Vampy as a model for art, since his emitting of light as a form of
duplicitous messaging is a “total art” in which deceit reigns. (This overlaps not only with
Flusser’s description of art history, a “history of misunderstandings” that is being modified by
communications theory in which the gesture of art making is becoming more “conscious and
disciplined,” but also with his concept of design as deceit, which I will discuss shortly.)659
Photography makes a brief appearance late in the book in a section titled
“Vampyroteuthian art.” Here Flusser considers how humans pass on acquired knowledge and
656
Flusser, Vampyroteuthis infernalis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 39.
657
Letter from Vilém Flusser to Dora Ferreira da Silva, June 9, 1981, found in the Vilém Flusser
Archive. Quoted in Vampyroteuthis infernalis (Atropos, 2011), 142.
658
Flusser, Vampyroteuthis infernalis (Atropos, 2011), 101.
659
Ibid., 112.
187
information by imprinting it onto objects, hoping these objects will outlive them.660 This attempt
to store information in objects—one can see here echoes of Flusser’s writings from the seventies
on objects—also affects humans: the “resistance of objects” (materials and media), creates a
feedback loop between humans and objects that ultimately modifies humans. Vampy’s “object”
is the sepia cloud which he emits to ward off predators, but more importantly to deceive them.
For Vampy then, “art” and “deceit” are synonyms, an argument Flusser will reiterate in The
Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design. 661 But for Vampy, the most important “information
storage” is genetic, and this genetic information “will not only outlive all books, buildings and
paintings, but also the species itself, although in a mutated form.”662 Similarly, for humans, the
information age provides a new awareness, that objects will not suffice to hold information.
Rather, “Our communicational structures are becoming fundamentally transformed, in the sense
of becoming constituted by ephemeral and transient media that allow the Other to be informed
without the need for objects. It is as if humanity, after a multi-millennial turn through the
objective world, had now reencountered the vampyroteuthian path.”663 First came the printing
press, which stored information itself, rather than books (here, one can see Flusser’s allegiance to
the apparatus over the object), then cybernetic programs within apparatus which imprint
information onto tools and objects: mass culture in the form of myriad gadgets, but also
photography. In photography, the object (photographic paper) is less interesting than the
660
“Vampyroteuthis also resorts to several types of objects (colors, lights, sepia clouds), which
he manipulates in order to transmit information to other Vampyroteuthes. The difference is only
that men trust the permanence of objects more so than Vampyroteuthes.” Ibid., 106.
661
Ibid., 111.
662
Ibid., 111.
663
Ibid., 113.
188
information transmitted. Or, in vampyroteuthian terms: the photographic paper is for the
photographer what the skin is for Vampyroteuthis: “a medium for colorful messages.”664
Moreover, since Vampy emits information, the organism itself may function as apparatus.665
This serves as a model for humanity—although this could be a good thing or a bad thing:
apparatus and function could be integrated, but this could also result in a “totalitarianism of
integrated apparatus” which is invisible and imperceptible.666
In his foreword to the Portuguese version of Vampyroteuthis infernalis, Abraham Moles
reflects on Vampy as a scientific essay, but one that distorts “the rules of the game.” Part fiction,
part “hard” science, it might be “the spark of a new method of philosophical thought.”667 Flusser
himself argues that texts like Vampyroteuthis infernalis aren’t necessarily “science fiction,” but
“fictitious science” in which scientific objectivity is overthrown in the service of “a concretely
human knowledge.”668 At the end of the book Flusser argues that biology as the source for his
fable is significant because it is a model in flux. Where the “fable” told by biology used to be
that an original cell contained every possible life form on earth, biotechnology and genetic
engineering will change the rules of this game. As Flusser wrote to his friend Milton Vargas:
New species may emerge artificially by crossing different phyla. These are such
fantastic things that the imagination fails … the challenge is not biological but
664
Ibid., 115.
665
Ibid., 116.
666
Ibid., 116.
667
Abraham Moles, “Foreword,” Vampyroteuthis infernalis (Atropos, 2011), 20. This forward
was probably intended for a French version of the book, but it was included posthumously in the
Portuguese edition.
668
Flusser, Vampyroteuthis infernalis (Atropos, 2011), 123.
189
epistemological; to rethink evolution not in “causal” terms or “finalistic” terms,
but in “programmatic” terms.669
Two final points: Vampy is our Other (Flusser also called him our “antipode” and our
“brother”);670 here again are echoes of Martin Buber—although taken to an extra-human level.
Second, Vampy becomes part of the contemporary conversation around climate change since, as
a biologist who studies the animal argued recently, it is threatened by ocean warming, decreasing
oxygen, pollution, overfishing, industrialization, and dozens of other changes.671 Although
Flusser’s parabiological fable predates much companion-species literature, which pushed
anthropocentric liberation philosophies to their logical conclusion, there is important overlap
between Flusser and thinkers like Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, and Rosi Braidotti, who
looked at biotechnology, human/animal relations, post-humanity, and the Anthropocene. I will
discuss this in the next chapter. If Flusser’s dialectic between Vampy and humans seemed
669
Letter from Vilém Flusser to Milton Vargas, January 28, 1981, found in the Vilém Flusser
Archive. Quoted in Vampyroteuthis infernalis (Atropos, 2011), 136. In other letters, Flusser and
Vargas discussed how biological engineering also reached back to the Nazis and their dreams of
creating a superman.
670
“Our astronomy is his geology. Our conscious mind is his subconscious. Our logic is his deep
psychology, our sex his geometry. His ‘spoken language’ (he speaks through the skin) has a
sexual syntax. Our theory is his orgasm. Our culture is stored in manipulated objects; his
memory (treacherous, that is: artistic) is ephemeral, and only stored in the cerebral memory of its
participants … For us the world is splendid (reflects sunlight). For him the world is made to
shine by his bioluminescent organs. For us the ‘truth’ is the discovery of the reality behind
appearances. For him, it is the feat of making appear what the eternal night hides. For us ‘to
think’ is to organize concepts, that is: the outlines of objects felt by the fingers (begreifen des
vorhandenen). For him ‘to think’ is to discriminate between the influences of the world, all of
them experienced sexually, since Vampyroteuthis grasps, smells and absorbs by means of sex.
Our thought is mechanical, his cybernetic.” Letter from Flusser to Dora Ferreira da Silva,
January 29, 1981, quoted in Vampyroteuthis infernalis (Atropos, 2011), 137-38.
671
Dr. Bruce Robison, video released by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute on
National Geographic’s website, February 3, 2010, accessed September 12, 2014,
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/01/100203-squid-vampire-threatened-video/.
190
farfetched in the eighties, the common fate of all species in what is now called the Anthropocene
shows the prescience of his text.
Flusser’s Other Writings: The “Curie’s Children” Column in Artforum
Thinking about Haraway, Hayles, biotechnology and climate change leads nicely into
discussing Flusser’s largest body of texts published in the U.S. during his lifetime: the “Curie’s
Children” column he wrote for Artforum between 1986 and 1991.672 In a recent interview, David
Frankel, who edited the column at Artforum and is now Editorial Director in the Department of
Publications at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, said that he was not familiar with
Flusser’s writings when he began editing them in 1986 and he sensed no one else at the
magazine was either.673 Max Kozloff recommended Flusser to Artforum and Frankel’s sense was
that “the columns are nice little things, but they are far from his most important work.”674 This is
672
Flusser did not come up with the title for the column, although he did not challenge it. In a
letter to Charles Miller, then the new Managing Editor of Artforum, Flusser writes from Robion,
“On my return from Brazil I find your issue containing my contribution on Light Metaphors
(which you called ‘Curie’s Children’). I should like to express my thanks for the prompt and
efficient way in which you handled the matter. It is indeed a pleasure and an honor to be
collaborating with your excellent publication.” Letter from Vilém Flusser to Charles Miller,
September 1, 1986, Artforum Correspondence Binder, No. 7, Vilém Flusser Archive.
673
Telephone interview with David Frankel, September 9, 2014. The correspondence between
Flusser and Artforum in the archive supports this. In a letter to Flusser, Tracy Tullis wrote: “I am
enclosing a letter from an Artforum reader in Canada who, as you can see, is interested in
knowing where else he may find your work. It would be helpful for us to have this information,
in case others write to us with similar questions, as they occasionally do with various authors.
(For that matter, I would be interested to know myself—I love your columns, and would like to
see anything else you have written.) If you could send us a list of some kind at your convenience,
I would be very grateful.” Flusser, of course, obliged, sending a one-page list of publications.
Letter from Tracy Tullis to Vilém Flusser, November 6, 1986, Artforum Correspondence Binder
(unnumbered), Vilém Flusser Archive.
674
Telephone interview with David Frankel, September 9, 2014. Max Kozloff gave the Artforum
editors a Flusser essay, “Taking Leave of Literature,” and the first letter Flusser received was
from Kathryn Howarth, Managing Editor, informing Flusser that they were holding the essay for
191
true to some extent, although Flusser had great hopes for the collaboration. He described himself
and his interest in Artforum in a December 1986 letter to Charles Miller, who had started as
Managing Editor the previous summer:
For quite a number of years I have been working on a series of essays which try to
consider our present crisis from a variety of angles … There is an inner logic to
this series of investigations: each essay approaches the crisis from a different
point (from the exact sciences, from history, from technology, from aesthetics,
from codification). The five essays [Natural:Mind, Post-History, Towards a
Philosophy of Photography, Into the Universe of Technical Images, and Does
Writing Have a Future?] (which took 20 years to compose), thus imply each
other. (I tell you all this, because you seem to take interest in my work.)
I have now reached a stage where I must try to synthesize the various
threads, and to come to some sort of conclusion. It so happens that our contact
coincides with this turning point in my writing. This is very important for me: not
only does our contact suggest to me that I might have found an editor which
“controls” me, but it also opens up for me the American stage, with which I had
so far almost no relation. These two things are important for the following
reasons: (1) One writes for one’s editor, and only through him for others. My
German editor [Andreas Müller-Pohle] is an excellent thinker and friend, but I
feel to have taken up too much of his thinking. My Brazilian editor is too much
under my influence to be really critical of my writings. I have a feeling that you
might take a different place in my work, if we could establish this precious
relationship “editor:author.” (2) I write everything in four languages (Portuguese,
German, French, and English), to control my ideas, but so far have published very
little in English. I know of course America is the most important place where to
publish, because it is there where most new ideas are born.675
Flusser’s letter is important because it describes how his philosophy is a system
connecting history, technology, aesthetics, and codification (information). But the letter also
shows how at this point the urge to “synthesize” was paramount. In another letter to Miller,
Flusser wrote that he felt the author-editor dialogue was “one of the most precious
later use. Letter from Kathryn Howarth to Vilém Flusser, June 8, 1986, Artforum
Correspondence Binder, No. 1., Vilém Flusser Archive.
675
Letter from Vilém Flusser to Charles V. Miller, Artforum Correspondence Binder, No. 17,
Vilém Flusser Archive.
192
intersubjective relations.”676 Miller would not become Flusser’s editor, however. Instead, Frankel
inherited Flusser. He describes his experience working with Flusser on “Curie’s Children”:
One thing about the columns is that they came in very badly written. They were
written in English and the text had to be deciphered. It was always kind of a
puzzle. There were always things that had to be unraveled. Some [essays] were
very elegantly constructed. They were like little games that had sequences in
which things had to be connected.677
Frankel echoes what is obvious in the Artforum correspondence: Flusser was happy with
the texts that resulted from Frankel’s editing.678 The “Curie’s Children” essays generally follow
the pattern of his short essay form and, in “Communication,” “Discovery,” “Science,” “Future
Architecture,” “An Unspeakable Future,” “Books,” “Popes,” and “The Term Design” pick up
676
Letter from Vilém Flusser to Charles V. Miller, January 27, 1987, Artforum Correspondence
Binder, No. 20, Vilém Flusser Archive.
677
Telephone interview with David Frankel, September 9, 2014. Furthermore, Frankel recounts,
“The pieces weren’t very long. They would arrive—I don’t remember what medium [fax]. I
would get them and edit them. The text came in and it wasn’t clear or simple and I would unravel
them. I would call [Flusser] and read the edit from beginning to end, line by line. He would listen
and say “excellent, excellent.” That was a kind of a refrain. He wasn’t a very patient guy,
though; if you got something wrong, he got irritated very quickly. There was a certain amount of
conversation about the meaning. Sometimes there were things I couldn’t figure out. I would ask
him about them, so we’d have conversations about this sentence or that sentence. I always liked
talking to him. There was a certain sense of urgency about these texts. I would telephone and his
wife would answer and she would run to get him and he would run to the phone. There was an
eagerness,” (ibid.). And Flusser wrote to Kathryn Howard at Artforum, “It is my custom to write
excerpts from essays on which I am working, and to publish them in European and Brazilian
media. If you agree, I shall send you English translations of those articles as they come out from
my typewriter. But I shall have to ask you to be indulgent with my English. (I write in
Portuguese, German and French). You will get a paper within the next few weeks, which will
permit you to judge its pertinence within the context of your publication.” Letter from Vilém
Flusser to Kathryn Howard, June 9, 1986, Artforum Correspondence Binder, Vilém Flusser
Archive.
678
Although Flusser wrote to Charles Miller with one criticism: “You are doing an excellent job,
and I thank you for it. There is, however, the following point we have to discuss in the future:
You will have noticed that everything I write has an ironic twist to it. This is eliminated by your
reformulation. I understand that this has to do with your general editing policy, but still: we must
talk about this in detail.” Letter from Vilém Flusser to Charles V. Miller, September 4, 1987,
Artforum Correspondence Binder, No. 27, Vilém Flusser Archive.
193
ideas from the last two decades of Flusser’s writing. For instance, the series “On Discovery”
(published in Artforum’s September 1987, October 1987, March 1988, April 1988, and March
1989 issues) examines knowledge and belief, considering models from Aristotle to Galileo and
finally biotechnology and artificial intelligence. Circling back to the arguments in
Vampyroteuthis infernalis, Flusser describes the “stupidity of biological ‘evolution,’” in which
information is changed by chance, “amplified, in Darwin’s terms, by natural selection” and how
this has been eclipsed by “biotechnics,” which allows biological information to be manipulated,
injected into living matter, and passed on to future generations.679 Exciting as always for Flusser
were the epistemological and aesthetic ramifications of genetics and biotechnology:
We now possess a technique that permits us to create the foundations of mental
processes that have never before existed, processes for which words like
“sensation,” “perception,” “desire,” “thought,” and “decision” are inappropriate,
since they describe only processes we know. In short, the statement that we can
now create new forms of life implies that we can now create “spirits” that we are
incapable of understanding.680
For Flusser this functioned as a new art of living in which “originals”—dubiously
romantic when applied previously to art forms—could be literalized.681 The next “Discovery”
installment (Artforum, April 1988) looked at pictures and the new ability to make images on
computer screens. The article echoes Flusser’s previous writing on technical images, but the
ideas were not familiar to Artforum editors or the majority of its readers, and although the
correspondence suggests the columns were popular with readers, to someone familiar with
Flusser’s oeuvre, they feel a bit flat. The essay attempts to move past a description of “old”
images toward “new” ones and the “technical imagination” proposed in earlier writings; the
679
Vilém Flusser, “Discovery,” Artforum (March 1988): 14-15.
680
Ibid., 15.
681
Ibid.
194
word “apparatus” appears fleetingly, although it is not elaborated upon; and a somewhat new
idea of photography is spelled out in which the camera is described as a “primitive computer.”682
Within this new mode of picture making the human imagination “withdraws” into programming:
“Old pictures are orienting tools within the world: they point at the world, they show it, they
mean it. The new ones are projections of calculating thought: they point at thought, they show it,
they mean it.683
More important for Flusser at this point is how the new images affect epistemology and
cognition, as thoughts rather than representations: “We now possess the ability to calculate the
world as a field of virtualities, and to compute some of those virtualities into simulations of
realities according to our own program. This is the new imagination.”684 The consequence of this
is that we are no longer “sub-jects,” but “pro-jects” who possess a new imagination and ability to
“dive into a field of virtualities.”685 The overlap with Jean Baudrillard is notable here, although
Flusser is characteristically positive about technology, whereas Baudrillard and most French
thinkers were not.
The “Discovery” essay in the Summer 1988 issue picked up where the preceding month’s
column left off, considering how new technology and biotechnology affect art and thought.686
Art becomes not a gesture of imitation (mimesis) but invention (poeisis), and this can be
extended to biology: we can have a “geep,” a goat crossed genetically with a sheep, and plant
682
Vilém Flusser, “Discovery,” Artforum (April 1988): 15.
683
Ibid.
684
Ibid.
685
Ibid.
686
Vilém Flusser, “Discovery,” Artforum (Summer 1988): 17.
195
and animal hybrids in the future: wheat with eyes and horses with leaves. Entropy and chance
enter when we consider differences between art and computer programming; Flusser concludes
that “there remains a residual reluctance” for computer programmers to see their work as a
“medium of expression”—although from his standpoint, art and science are both “infused with
spirit.”687 “Science” in the October 1988 issue of Artforum looks at programming species, such
that the Walt Disney of the future might be a molecular biologist and the future Disneyland a
landscape in which art informs nature. The December 1988 installment, also titled “Science,”
considers color—something Flusser had addressed in earlier essays, but here also using the terms
“denotative” and “connotative” familiar to readers of Roland Barthes (though Flusser’s
vocabulary is derived more from communications theory than structuralist linguistics). Flusser
argues that colors might become a form of thinking, an Esperanto that could complement or
substitute for written and spoken language and perhaps bridge the realms of art and science.688
“Discovery” (March 1989) starts with the idea of counting numbers and typing as “stuttering.”689
Using Max Planck’s idea of oscillating atoms absorbing and emitting energy in quanta rather
than a continuous flow (quantum physics rather than classical physics) as proof of a “stuttering”
universe, Flusser argues that alphanumeric code should be abandoned for computer code. This is
really just an elaboration of his end-of-writing argument, but it also suggests that our thinking is
structured by technological developments (rather than us shaping and structuring the world) and
687
Ibid., 18. It is important to note that Flusser invokes the language of communications theory
to describe these inventions: these “transcendental creations” are like “noise” within a
preexisting system.
688
Vilém Flusser, “Science,” Artforum (October 1988): 9-10; Vilém Flusser, “Science,”
Artforum (December 1988): 9-10.
689
This essay also appears in different form as “Why Do Typewriters Go ‘Click?’” in The Shape
of Things: A Philosophy of Design, 62-65.
196
that the shift from linear writing to binary code leads to “synthetic” thinking because to count is
to “assemble” while to write is to “analyze.” Ultimately, Flusser shapes an argument against the
negative view of simulation—but also against technological development as completely
Orwellian:
Those who vilify counting insist that those projected worlds [holograms] are
nothing but fictitious simulations of the true world. Perhaps they are right, but for
the wrong reasons. For those projected worlds are computations of calculations,
but so is our “true” world, as our nervous system receives point-like stimuli that
our brain computes into our perceptions of the world. Thus, either the projected
worlds are just as true as the true one, or the true world is just as fictitious as the
projected world. The marvelous thing about counting is that it enables us to
project alternative worlds, we need no longer be subject to a single one.690
“Future Architecture” (April 1989) picks up on arguments from earlier Flusser essays
about how the communications revolution changes our environment, with the house being
perforated like Swiss cheese by cables, wires, and antennae.691 “Wondering About Science”
(Summer 1989) looks at concepts of wonder impacted by the Enlightenment, philosophy, and
science and at how contemporary science is more about producing rather than explaining
“wonders.” Flusser concludes by arguing that chance and deliberation are integral to our
understanding of nature (evolution) and culture (art/science), and how it might be more
appropriate to understand science and technology as “absurd gestures” rather than deliberate,
rational ones.692 “An Unspeakable Future” (March 1990) considers images produced by artists
versus computer programmers, while “Future Architecture” (May 1990) returns to houses, but
690
Vilém Flusser, “Discovery,” Artforum (March 1989): 12.
691
Vilém Flusser, “Future Architecture,” Artforum (April 1989): 13-14.
692
Vilém Flusser, “Wondering About Science,” Artforum (June 1989): 104-107.
197
this time theorizing them as “knots” in the human network and shelters which are less about
keeping out the rain than negotiating the “hail” of mass communication.693
“Popes” (October 1990) argues that art critics and popes are in the same business,
building bridges between words and images and heaven and earth, respectively, and how
computers and artificial intelligence could change all of these: images, words, and faith.694 “Art
and Politics” (December 1990) makes a similar claim: artists and politicians both make things to
be exhibited in public—except they have switched places in the programming age, with artists
effectively “governing the city.”695 “Three Times” (February 1991) looks at time, entropy, and
absurdity and “Three Spaces” (May 1991) at different concepts of space: human, virtual, vital,
“real,” and cosmic.696 “Books” (November 1991) suggests that the material value of books is
worthless and that in the future letters will be transcoded into images and books will
disappear.697 Finally, the posthumously published “The Term Design” (March 1992) recycles the
essay “About the Word Design,” which appeared in several places, including the book The Shape
of Things.698 This last essay was accompanied by an editor’s note announcing Flusser’s death
and stating that Artforum was holding a number of columns by him, which would appear in
693
Vilém Flusser, “An Unspeakable Future,” Artforum (March 1990): 22-23; Vilém Flusser,
“Future Architecture,” Artforum (May 1990): 35-36.
694
Vilém Flusser, “Popes,” Artforum (March 1990): 25-27.
695
Vilém Flusser, “Art and Politics,” Artforum (December 1990): 25-26.
696
Vilém Flusser, “Three Times,” Artforum (February 1991): 25-26; Vilém Flusser, “Three
Spaces,” Artforum (May 1991): 23-24.
697
Vilém Flusser, “Books,” Artforum (November 1991): 14-15.
698
Vilém Flusser, “The Term Design,” Artforum (March 1992): 19-20.
198
future issues. Only one more appeared: “Progress” in the June 1992 issue, which reflected upon
Flusser’s complicated relationship with that Enlightenment term.
The “collaboration” with Artforum was fruitful, particularly since it leaves a more
substantial record of Flusser’s writing in English than any other, and within an art context. But it
was not a perfect fit. For instance, the illustrations often seem to reflect New York art world
interests and tastes more than Flusser’s ideas. (According to David Frankel, in keeping with most
magazines’ policies, the images were generally chosen by a photo editor.) Flusser’s April 1988
essay, “Discovery,” for instance, focused on “new” technical images but was illustrated by an
undated Garry Winogrand photograph of the Los Angeles Airport. While an airport might be
considered as a Flusserian “non-space”—to put it in Marc Augé’s later term—Winogrand was
more of a traditional photographer than what Flusser had in mind when he thought of new
“programmed” images.699 Works by Nancy Dwyer, Rodney Graham, Maura Sheehan, Peter
Nagy, Matt Mullican, Tom Radloff, Ana Mendieta, Jessica Diamond, and Glen Baxter were also
used to illustrate Flusser’s texts. While these names are all familiar to a certain audiences, they
reveal the gap between Flusser’s writings and the U.S. art world. (More appropriate perhaps
were reproductions of work by Philippe Starck and Nam June Paik.)
However, the Artforum editors could be astute in their handling of Flusser. In 1990 David
Frankel sent Flusser a copy of Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book, asking him to review it for
the magazine. Flusser responded with enthusiasm, particularly because he saw that the book
699
See Marc Augé’s Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (New York: Verso, 2009).
Interestingly, in the same “On Discovery” essay, Flusser uses the world “nonplace” to describe
imagination: “When making a picture, we not only observe but imagine. We step back from the
world into ourselves, into somewhere not so much a place as a nonplace. Our imagination is our
capacity to withdraw from the world to that nonplace.” Flusser, “On Discovery,” Artforum (April
1988): 14.
199
“repeatedly refers to my friend Friedrich Kittler’s ideas.”700 (Although, later Flusser found
Ronell’s book “hard to swallow” and asked for an extension until Spring of 1992—by which
time he had died in a car accident outside Prague).701 In 1991, however, Charles Miller made the
mistake of sending a letter to Andreas Müller-Pohle, Flusser’s editor and close friend,
complaining, “Can’t think why you allow Flusser’s scientistic [sic] inebriation into your pages,
especially since you probably haven’t room for a refutation.”702 Ever faithful (Flusser even
bequeathed a house in the Czech Republic which he had regained after the war to Müller-Pohle),
Müller-Pohle delivered the letter to Flusser, who responded angrily to Miller:
Andreas handed me your (not very kind) letter of the 10th with your reply to my
“Habits” essay. I shall not go into your refutations of my hypothesis, because they
are so common sense as not to be interesting. But I am writing this letter because
it strikes me that we touch on an important point when you speak of my
“scientistic inebriation.”703
Flusser then proceeded to explain the difference between modern “exact” sciences and
Geisteswissenschaften (two cultures: art and science) and how he thought this division was now
over—that the exact sciences are themselves cultural phenomena since scientific objectivity has
been eclipsed by notions of inter-subjectivity. Flusser concluded: “You are quite right: this is
indeed an inebriating vision. Because if you do away with the distinction between science and art
(between truth and fiction), you open up spaces for the creation of alternatives to this sorry
700
Letter from Vilém Flusser to David Frankel, Artforum Correspondence Binder, No. 86, Vilém
Flusser Archive.
701
Artforum Correspondence Binder, Nos. 84 and 93, Vilém Flusser Archive. See Avital Ronell,
The Telephone Book: Technology-Schizophrenia-Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska, 1989).
702
Letter from Charles Miller to Andreas Müller-Pohle, January 10, 1991, Artforum
Correspondence Binder, No. 87, Vilém Flusser Archive.
703
Letter from Vilém Flusser to Charles Miller, February 4, 1991, Artforum Correspondence
Binder, No. 91, Vilém Flusser Archive.
200
scheme of things we are in. Thank you for having given me the opportunity to say so in a brief
letter.”704 Miller wrote back, arguing that he felt the “value of the intersubjective and exact is
overrated,” and his position was “approximately that” of Hilary Putnam, whose 1981 book
Reason, Truth, and History challenged the notion of scientific thinking as “rational.”705 Miller
and Flusser might actually have been in agreement, although the “Curie’s Children” essays show
how there were many ways in which Anglo-American and European thinkers diverged. This
partially explains why—even though Flusser was published in Artforum and the correspondence
in the archive suggests an enthusiastic reception—he lacked U.S. champions, such as thinkers
like Foucault and Baudrillard had found in Sylvère Lotringer, and why Flusser’s writings
ultimately didn’t have much traction in the U.S. art world. In 1989 he was commissioned to write
an essay for the exhibition “The Image of Thinking in Visual Poetry” at the Guggenheim
Museum in New York. The Flusser Archive holds correspondence, including Flusser’s revisions
to the text he submitted, “The Imagination of the Second Order.” The exhibition was never
mounted, however. Flusser’s name fell into relative obscurity and his writings have been little
acknowledged in the U.S. art world until very recently.706
Flusser’s Other Writings: Kommunicologie, The Shape of Things, and Other Texts
Among Flusser’s other monographs, few contribute to a theory of the image as much as
the writings I have already mentioned. Supposed: A Sequence of Scenes, on futuristic models of
704
Ibid.
705
Letter from Charles Miller to Vilém Flusser, February 18, 1991, Artforum Correspondence
Binder, No. 92, Vilém Flusser Archive. Also see Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
706
Canceled Conferences Binder, Nos. 53-72, Vilém Flusser Archive.
201
society, was published in 1989.707 Gestures came out in 1991, gathering together ideas from his
lectures and phenomenology projects of the seventies.708 Bodenlos, the autobiography he began
in the early seventies, was published in 1991. It has not been translated into English yet, although
there are versions in Portuguese and Czech.709 One interesting book relating to technology,
although not a monograph, is Philosophies of the New Technology, which resulted from a
symposium of the same title in Linz, Austria on September 14, 1988. It includes essays by
Flusser, Jean Baudrillard, Friedrich Kittler, Peter Weibel—an important Flusser supporter—
Hannes Böhringer, and Heinz von Foerster.710 Flusser’s essay, “Memories” (“Gedächtnisse”) is
essentially similar to “On Memory,” published in English in Leonardo. Kittler lectured on
“Fiction and Simulation”; Baudrillard on “Video World and Fractal Subject.” Most interesting
perhaps is seeing these thinkers grouped together, since Baudrillard was embraced in the U.S. art
world and Kittler’s media theory had become popular in the preceding decade, particularly after
the English publication of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.711
707
Vilém Flusser, Angenommen. Eine Szenenfolge (Göttingen: Immatrix Publications, 1989). As
of October 2014, still untranslated into English.
708
Originally published as Gesten. Versuch einer Phänomenologie (Bensheim and Düsseldorf:
Bollmann, 1991); translated into Spanish as Los gestos. Fenomenología y comunicación, trans.
Claudio Gancho (Barcelona: Herder, 1994) and French as Les gestes, trans. Marc Partouche
(Paris: HC d’Arts, 1999).
709
Vilém Flusser, Bodenlos: Eine philosophische Autobiographie (Bensheim and Düsseldorf:
Bollmann, 1992); Bezedno: filosofická autobiografie (Prague: Hynek, 1998); Bodenlos: Uma
autobiografia filosofica (São Paulo: Annablume, 2010).
710
Vilém Flusser, Jean Baudrillard, and Hannes Böhringer, Philosophien der neuen
Technologien (Berlin: Merve, 1989).
711
Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and
Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). Originally published as
Grammophon, Film, Typewriter (Berlin: Brinkmann and Bose, 1986). Flusser’s copy of the book
in German includes the inscription from Kittler, “In memory of Linz, F.K. [in Erinnerung am
Linz, F.K.].”
202
The books published posthumously by Stefan Bollmann, along with Edith Flusser, need
to be mentioned. Many of them gather writings previously published in one form or another, like
Volumes One through Four in the Bollmann series: In Praise of Superficiality: Towards a
Phenomenology of Media (1993), Post-history: A Revised Historiography (1993), From Subject
to Project: Incarnation (1994), and Communicology (1998).712 Communicology collects
Flusser’s media writings and has been important in Germany in establishing Flusser as part of
the eighties media-theory canon, alongside Kittler, Siegfried Zielinski and others. Flusser
developed an idea of “communicology” while teaching communications in Brazil and the book is
composed largely of his lectures at the University of São Paulo (translated here into German)—
but also lectures written in French and given at the School of Art and Architecture at MarseilleLuminy in 1977 and the Center for Theater in Aix-en-Provence in 1986 and 1987.713 Looking
more closely at the individual sections, one can see headings and concepts covered in earlier
works. Different forms of communication like theater, amphitheater, discourse, and dialogue
appeared in Post-history. Sections are devoted to photography, film, video, and television (one
thinks here of Kittler’s book, with its examples of gramophone, film, and typewriter) and a
section given to “techno-imagination,” Flusser’s idea of a new form of criticism inspired by
technical images. What Communicology does is bring together ideas from Post-history and the
712
See Vilém Flusser’s Schriften, eds. Stefan Bollmann and Edith Flusser (Bensheim and
Düsseldorf: Bollmann): Band 1: Lob der Oberflächlichkeit. Für eine Phänomenologie der
Medien (1993); Band 2: Nachgeschichte. Eine korrigierte Geschichtsschreibung (1993); Band 3:
Vom Subjekt zum Projekt. Menschwerdung (1994); Band 4: Kommunikologie (Bensheim and
Düsseldorf: Bollmann, 1994; Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1998; 2007). After
Bollmann went bankrupt, some of these volumes were republished by Fischer Taschenbuch,
Frankfurt am Main.
713
Flusser, Kommunikologie (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2007), 353.
203
technical image trilogy and deliver them in a manner that establishes Flusser within media and
communications theory.
The most important book to mention at this juncture, however, is The Shape of Things: A
Philosophy of Design, which is Flusser’s most read and cited text in English, after Towards a
Philosophy of Photography.714 Originally published in German in 1993—although in somewhat
different form than the English text mentioned here—it has been translated into French, Spanish,
Italian, Japanese, and Czech.715 It includes essays already mentioned, such as “About the Word
Design” (published in Artforum) and “With As Many Holes as Swiss Cheese,” which revises and
conflates several essays by Flusser concerning architecture changed by technology, in which
walls are perforated by cables and the house becomes “the nucleus of an interpersonal
network.”716
Design is important within Flusser’s oeuvre. Not only does it intersect with the writing on
objects he did in the seventies, but it also runs parallel to the technical-image writings, since
design is applied technology and intricately linked with human relations and ethics. For Flusser,
design is defined as a form of deception. It is linked with mechanics and machines, and these can
be traced etymologically back to Greek words like mechos: “a device designed to deceive—i.e.,
714
Vilém Flusser, The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design, trans. Anthony Mathews
(London: Reaktion, 1999). Most of the essays in The Shape of Things were originally published
in Vom Stand der Dinge. eine kleine Philosophie des Design (Bensheim, Germany: Bollmann,
1993).
715
Vilém Flusser, Vom Stand der Dinge. eine kleine Philosophie des Design, ed. Fabian Wurm
(Göttingen: Steidl, 1993); The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design, trans. Anthony
Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 1999); Petite philosophie du design (Paris: Circe, 2002);
Filosofía del diseño, trans. Pablo Marinas (Madrid: Síntesis, 2002); Filosofia del design (Milan:
Bruno Mondadori, 2003); [The Shape of Things: Towards a Philosophy of Design] (Tokyo:
Kajima Institute, 2009); Tvar věcí. Filosofie design (Prague: Fra, 2013).
716
Flusser, The Shape of Things, 83.
204
a trap—and the Trojan Horse is one example of this.”717 Design includes things like levers,
which are meant to trick gravity. Design can also function as a rather broad term, incorporating
art, science, and engineering. In the essay “Form and Material” ancient canals, Picasso’s
Demoiselles d’Avignon, and Mirage fighter jets are all included under the rubric of “design.”718
The question of ethics appears in essays like “War and the State of Things,” where Flusser slyly
asserts that good design means technology that kills effectively, such that people who are antiwar are also anti-design: “Such people are prepared, in the interest of peace, to accept bad
design.”719 (The Nazi technicians who built the gas chambers, for instance, had to apologize for
their poor design: that is, they didn’t kill people quickly enough.) “The Factory,” an essay
originally written in 1964, and which reflects Flusser’s own employment in a factory in São
Paulo in the fifties, tracks the development of human history and manufacturing. It also includes
a famous Flusser shorthand formula for historical development: “hands, tools, machines,
robots.”720 In this version of history, human existence changes as tools are acquired and our
relationship with the environment changes because “tools are empirical, machines are
mechanical, and robots are neurophysiological and biological.”721 If God was the original
designer/creator, displaced in the Renaissance, we are now embarking on a new era of design as
717
Ibid., 17.
718
Ibid., 27.
719
Ibid., 32.
720
Ibid., 44.
721
Ibid., 46.
205
objects are divorced from material, becoming information and “non-objects” like software.722
Architecture changes (thinking in terms of topology instead of geography is once again invoked)
and a new set of ethics comes into play. The Nazis represented one iteration of this; the “postindustrial” weapons of the (first) Gulf War another, as he writes in “The Ethics of Industrial
Design.”723 For Flusser, the dystopias of eugenics and unethical design are a wake-up call, as he
describes in the science-fiction-like essay “Submarine”: “If we do not manage—by going beyond
ideology—to find a way of approaching a solution to the ethical problems of design, then
Nazism, the Gulf War and similar events will go down in history as merely the opening stages of
a period of destruction and self-destruction. The fact that we are beginning to wonder about such
questions gives reason for hope.”724
Flusser’s writings on migration and nationalism should also be mentioned. These connect
Flusser’s biography with his intellectual investment in technology and politics. The fifth volume
of the Bollmann writings, Brazil, or the Search for a New People: Towards a Phenomenology of
Underdevelopment is important, as well as The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to
Nationalism, also edited posthumously by Stefan Bollmann.725 The Freedom of the Migrant
includes essays like “The Challenge of the Migrant,” “On the Alien,” “We Need a Philosophy of
722
“A computer memory is a non-thing. Similarly, electronic images and holograms are nonthings. These are non-things because they cannot be held in the hand.” Flusser, The Shape of
Things, 91.
723
Ibid., 66-69.
724
Ibid., 69.
725
Vilém Flusser, Schriften. Band 5: Brasilien oder die Suche nach dem neuen Menschen. Für
eine Phänomenologie der Unterentwicklung (Bensheim and Düsseldorf: Bollmann, 1994; and
The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism (Springfield: University of Illinois
Press, 2003). Originally published as Von der Freiheit des Migranten. Einsprüche gegen den
Nationalismus (Bensheim: Bollmann, 1994).
206
Emigration,” and “Thinking about Nomadism,” several of which include references to Flusser’s
(not particularly active) Judaism and the stereotype of the wandering Jew, along with the idea of
heimat—home, homeland, and region—and his own loss of heimat. Additionally, however,
Flusser’s disillusionment with Brazil and its failure to exist for him as heimat is addressed, as
well as a critique of nation states in general.726 In an interview at the end of the book, he says,
“You know, I believe that patriotism is the greatest obscenity. And I have just returned from a
trip to Israel, and I’m a Jew.”727 In the same interview, however, he mentions Buber, revealing
how the great Jewish thinker influenced his philosophy of technical images:
Thanks to Buber I also came to understand the Jewish prohibition against graven
images. I don’t know whether it shares roots with Islam’s injunction. Humankind
is made in the image of God. When I look into the face of another person, I open
my own face to his gaze, that is the only form in which I can know God. If I then
make images on the side, I then obstruct my path to the other, and in so doing to
the completely Other. It became clear to me from these two sides that the concept
of an “I” was not merely an ideological blinder but the sin in the Jewish-Christian
sense. The Church might say the sin against the spirit.728
The Freedom of the Migrant addresses nomadism in multiple forms, from refuges to
tourism and artists,729 and how technology relates to this.730 Although Flusser doesn’t state it, the
726
“The guiding principle is that nationalism, this invention of the enlightened seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century bourgeoisie, has proved to be a catastrophic crime and that when giant nationstates are abolished, people will be able to enter into freely chosen associations. These might
include work and leisure-time communities instead of national communities. As Goethe put it,
relationships of choice rather than of blood.” Flusser, “Reunification or Networking?” in The
Freedom of the Migrant, 73.
727
Flusser interview with Patrik Tschudin, The Freedom of the Migrant, 104.
728
Ibid., 94.
729
“The nomad who emerges from the nineties will more likely be an artist than a hunter or
herdsman. Out of dispersed potentials he will artfully compute concrete realities (effects rather
than realities).” Flusser, “Nomads,” The Freedom of the Migrant, 53.
730
“(1) It is information and not possessions (software not hardware) that empowers, and (2)
communication, not economics, now forms the substructure of the village (society). What this
207
logical conclusion is that one might find the Other in technical images like the dialogic ones
offered by the Internet and later social media.731 But as Flusser states in an interview with Patrik
Tschudin included at the end of the book, “individual and society are all abstractions. What does
exist is an interpersonal relationship, a networking, an intersubjective field of relations, from
which I may extrapolate society or the individual.”732 This leads to an end of politics, a vision of
utopia stemming from technology. Flusser emphasizes near the end of the interview:
“Fear” is not the emotion that characterizes my writings; hope is! I believe that we
have reached a technological threshold that will allow us to live differently with
each other than was heretofore possible. Don’t underestimate technology! I think
that for the first time we now have the technical ability to overcome geography
and history and to relate to each other based on competence and not what one has
received. And I am tremendously enthusiastic about this! I am very enthusiastic! I
don’t believe in this utopia; I don’t think it will be followed through to
completion, but that doesn’t really matter.733
And here I will end this chapter, since the interview, recorded on September 30, 1991
serves as an apt summary of all the threads suggested above: from technical images to networks
and society reconfigured in theoretical terms along inter-subjective, post-historical, and postpolitical lines. Less than two months later, on November 27, 1991, Flusser died from injuries
sustained in a car accident near the Czech border, after giving a small seminar at the Goethe
two-part formulation makes clear is that the settled form of existence—home—and a fortiori the
stable, field, hill, and stream are no longer functional. In effect, we have begun to be nomadic.”
Flusser, “Thinking about Nomadism,” The Freedom of the Migrant, 43.
731
In the same interview, however, Flusser describes his migration over to art and technical
images thusly: “Decent human beings are interested in mathematics; when they get old, they
begin to be interested in art. That was how it was with me as well. That was how I became
involved with the Biennale and with such silly things as photography and video et cetera.”
Flusser interview with Patrik Tschudin, The Freedom of the Migrant, 92.
732
Ibid., 102.
733
Ibid., 106.
208
Institute in Prague, at the invitation of Andreas Stöhl. He was buried in the New Jewish
Cemetery in Prague.
209
Chapter Four: Flusser’s Reception and Context
Flusser and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Husserl, and Heidegger
This chapter will discuss Flusser as a twentieth-century thinker: his European—and
particularly Central European—upbringing and enduring interest in the philosophy of that
region; his status as a media philosopher and technical image theorist; and his relevance for the
current moment. As I stated in the first chapter, writers such as Andreas Ströhl have argued that
Flusser saw himself as an Old European, and I want to examine this first, looking at the
philosophers Flusser referenced most frequently. For instance, Flusser wrote that when he read
the first sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) it resulted in a
“moment of transformation.”734 But Wittgenstein’s influence continued to the end of Flusser’s
life: his first and second books, Language and Reality and The History of the Devil, were
structured in what Flusser called a “caricature of the Wittgensteinian method,” mimicking the
numbered, philosophical propositions in the Tractatus;735 Flusser reviewed a new German
edition of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations for the Revista Brasileira de filosofia in
1966, in which he called Wittgenstein a “gigantic figure” and “one of the major thinkers;”736 and
734
Flusser, The Freedom of the Migrant, 100.
735
Flusser quoted in Rodrigo Maltez Novaes, “Introduction,” The History of the Devil
(Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014), xvii.
736
Vilém Flusser, "Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophische bemerkungen," Revista Brasileira de
filosofia 16 (1966): 129-132. Also see Matthias Kross, “Zwischen Logik und Existenzialismus.
Flussers Wittgenstein,” The Third Shore, 81-98.
210
Flusser was still quoting Wittgenstein in texts like Gestures, a German version of which he was
preparing shortly before he died in 1991.737
For Wittgenstein, the primary problems of philosophy rested on “the misunderstanding of
the logic of the language.”738 This included cleaning up philosophical language, since he felt that
most philosophers do not understand the logic of language and thus fall into making nonsensical
propositions. (Similarly, he wrote in the preface to the Tractatus that he would not cite sources—
a notable feature of Flusser’s mature writing.)739 For Flusser, the importance of Wittgenstein can
be felt most obviously in Language and Reality, although some writers have argued that he was
reading Wittgenstein against the grain in this text.740 Wittgenstein provided a grounding in
language, and Language and Reality reflected this insistence that not only does language create
reality, but thinking itself is limited by language. Flusser would later borrow from Wittgenstein
the idea of Sprachspiele or language games as laid out in the Philosophical Investigations, in
which different forms of language function differently (Wittgenstein provided an exhaustive list,
737
Regarding “problems that refuse to be grasped in words and words that refuse to be spoken,”
Flusser writes, “Wittgenstein said, ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.’”
Vilém Flusser, “The Gesture of Speaking,” Gestures, trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 31. Also see Karlheinz Ludeking, “Pictures and
Gestures,” British Journal of Aesthetics 30.3 (July 1990): 218–232.
738
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner
& Co.; New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1922), 23. Project Gutenberg eBook, released
October 10, 2010, accessed November 8, 2014, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5740/5740pdf.pdf?session_id=a869dbc014e06717ee34be1481a6de0ec5d11611.
739
“What I have here written makes no claim to novelty in points of detail; and therefore I give
no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought
before me.” Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 23. Although in the next paragraph of the preface
Wittgenstein noted that “the great works of [Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob] Frege and the writings of
my friend Bertrand Russell” had stimulated his thought.
740
Matthias Kross, “Medienphilosophie als ethisches Projekt? Vilém Flussers Wittgenstein”
Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society 6 (2006), accessed November 8, 2014,
http://wittgensteinrepository.org/agora-ontos/article/view/2070.
211
from reporting an event to making up a story, asking, thanking, translating, or telling a joke.)741
The Wittgenstein of Tractatus argued that, “the object of philosophy is the logical clarification of
thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.”742 Similarly, Flusser would often set aside
the word “theory” in quotation marks (as he did many terms) and push this further to indicate
that theory and philosophy were a kind of game: “everything is art, language, including that
utmost game: ars moriendi. It must be translated between games, including the game of
death.”743 But if language itself was a “game,” it could be simplified rather than complicated: the
late Wittgenstein emphasized ordinary language over formal logic, and this reliance on simple
language can be felt throughout Flusser’s oeuvre.744 Moreover, Wittgenstein’s idea that the
“picture is the model of reality” could be seen as an early seed for Flusser’s thinking, not only
because it reveals Wittgenstein’s attitude that language is un-representable, but because it
suggests the importance of technical images within a new post-historical reality in which writing
is eclipsed.745
In terms of important European philosophers, Flusser also cites members of the Vienna
Circle, who were influenced by the Tractatus—particularly Rudolf Carnap, whose logical
positivism concerned the distinction between philosophy and science, as well as Ernst Cassirer.
Michael Hanke extends the list to include Otto Jespersen, Fritz Mauthner, Max Black, A. Waag,
741
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1953). For a discussion of Sprachespiele with regard to literary interpretation, see G.
L. Hagberg, Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 9–44.
742
Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 52.
743
Flusser quoted in Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, 59-60.
745
Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 28. Also see Eugen Fischer, “Philosophical
Pictures,” Synthese 148 (2006): 469-501.
212
Nicolai Hartmann, Russell, Whitehead, and Wilhelm Dilthey—along with Husserl and
Heidegger.746 Flusser’s essay “On Edmund Husserl” went through several iterations and serves
as a testament to his enduring debt to Husserl, the principal founder of phenomenology.747 With
Husserl, knowledge takes precedence over the subject and the object, creating what Flusser calls
a “dynamic net” of “concrete intentionalities” in which experience is concrete and subject and
object are abstract. Nothing is known without being experienced and evaluated and the world
becomes a “pure and concrete field of relations.”748 One can discern in this premise the idea of
the “photographic universe,” which is “to know and to evaluate the world as a function of
photographs.”749 But one can also see the overlap with Buber, who was more interested in human
relations—intersubjectivity—than in knowledge, per se.750 Flusser writes that, “under
phenomenological vision, society will be seen as a net composed of intersubjective intentional
relations. The knots in the net are what used to be called ‘individuals’ … Since Husserl, there
746
Michael Hanke, “Vilém Flussers Sprache und Wirklichkeit von 1963 im Kontext seiner
Medienphilosophie,” Flusser Studies 02 (2006): 5.
747
Vilém Flusser, “On Edmund Husserl,” Philosophy of Photography 2, no. 2 (2011): 234-38.
This version is from an unpublished manuscript, written in English, in the Vilém Flusser
Archive., document No. 723. It is interesting to note that Husserl was also Central European—
and was, moreover, a Moravian Jew who later converted to Protestantism—whose mentor was
Thomas Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia. Flusser’s father, Gustav, wrote a
biography of Masaryk.
748
Flusser, “On Edmund Husserl,” 236-37.
749
Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (EP), 51.
750
“Husserl was of Jewish origin, but there seems to be nothing especially Jewish about him.
Unless, that is, we consider his ‘epoche’; this attempt to step back from the ‘Lebenswelt’, and to
keep silent so that it may speak for itself. There is something deeply unsatisfactory, even
mystical, about this. It is, in fact, a religious attitude, and it may be considered a Jewish one
(although Husserl would probably disagree). It is very like the attitude that characterizes the
Sabbath. I suspect that Jewish mystics would, with some reservations, accept Husserl as one of
their own. This is a paradox worth consideration.” Flusser, “On Edmund Husserl,” 238.
213
can be no such thing as an ‘I’ that is unrelated. In fact, I am the sum of my relations.”751
Furthermore, “there is no such thing as ‘a society.’ If the knots are unknotted, the net will
collapse and disappear: it comprises the knots. ‘I’ and ‘society’ are abstract extrapolations from
concrete intersubjective relations.”752
The concept of the photographic universe can be linked even more strongly to Heidegger.
Flusser’s friend Vicente Ferreira da Silva was credited with bringing Heidegger to Brazil and
Dora Ferreira da Silva, the poet and wife of Vicente, dedicated an issue of the literary journal
Cavalo Azul, to which Flusser was a frequent contributor, to Heidegger in 1968.753 Flusser
dedicated “Our Inebriation” in Post-History to Heidegger, whom he claimed had “changed my
vision of things.”754 One can discern in Flusser’s concept of the photographic universe
Heidegger’s Dasein or “being-in-the-world,” as laid out in Being and Time, in which we’re
immersed in a situation—time, history, context—of which we are not fully conscious.755 Dasein
is always rooted in time, but also vaguely aware that the world is ungrounded (the familiar word
751
Ibid., 237.
752
Ibid.
753
Dora Marianna Ferreira da Silva, ed., Cavalo Azul 6 (São Paulo, 1968). Understandably, since
Dora Ferreira da Silva was a poet, this issue of Cavalo Azul emphasizes the influence of poetry
on Heideigger. It includes a Portuguese translation of Heidegger’s “Hölderlin and the Essence of
Poetry” (1936), as well as poems by Henriqueta Lisboa, Haroldo de Campos, Ferreira da Silva,
and meditations on Heidegger and poetry by Jean Wahl and Vicenta Ferreira da Silva. Flusser’s
essay, “A Alma Vendida” considers the origins of German romanticism, thinking about Goethe,
Schiller, Herder, Lessing, Novalis, and Hölderlin. See Vilém Flusser, “A Alma Vendida,”
Cavalo Azul 6 (São Paulo, 1968): 88-93.
754
See Vilém Flusser, “Heidegger et le Nazisme: ‘Nous sommes face à l’expression la plus
importante de la pensée de notre siècle (Heidegger and Nazism: ‘We are facing the most
important expression of thought of our century,’” Calades 86 (February 1988). Quoted in Sjouke
van der Muelen, “Between Benjamin and McLuhan,” 198.
755
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (New
York: Harper Perennial, 2008).
214
Bodenlos; Flusser also used the term Dasein, untranslated). Flusser follows Heidegger in
attempting to create a language appropriate to this state of affairs. If Heidegger felt like
philosophical language was unsuited to describing Dasein, Flusser set about fashioning
philosophy that would reflect shifts in translation, but also Dasein in a world in which
technology determines the human condition. (I have already noted how Heidegger’s essays “The
Age of the World Picture” (1938), “The Turning” (1949), and “The Question Concerning
Technology” (1955) relate to Flusser’s writings on the technical image, as well as Flusser’s use
of etymology to explain terms like “apparatus” and “technology.”)
Heidegger is also important for Flusser in considering history. For Heidegger, historical
epochs represent different ways of being in the world: Greeks, Christians, and modern humans
each had their own Dasein. For Flusser, the formulation of “hands, tools, machines, robots”
addresses a similar situation in which there are no universal structures and our Dasein is
mediated through technology.756 Heidegger’s philosophical presupposition that technology
determines our human condition is central to Towards a Philosophy of Photography—but Into
the Universe of Technical Images takes this even further.757 For Heidegger, history has changed
from antiquity to the present, culminating in a technological state of being that dominates the
planet. For Flusser, we have entered post-history, an epoch of technological images in which
writing, which created history, doesn’t have a future. Heidegger saw our version of being at a
756
Gabriela Freitas, “Um diálogo entre Flusser e Heidegger: o ser no universe das imagens
técnicas” in Flusser Studies 17 (June 2014), accessed November 24, 2014,
www.flusserstudies.net. In her article, Freitas argues that Flusser inverts Heidegger’s “being-inthe-world” into “being-face-to-face-with-the-image,” so that only the image is concrete and we
end up back in the objective world, in a state of being-in-the-universe-of-technical-images. Also
see Matthias Kross’s “Arbeit am Archiv: Flussers Heidegger” in Technobilder und
Kommunikologie: Die Medientheorie Vilém Flusser, ed. Oliver Fahle, Michael Hanke, and
Andreas Ziemann (Berlin: Parega, 2009), 73-91.
757
Van der Meulen, “Between Benjamin and McLuhan,” 198.
215
dead end: nihilism. But in technology Flusser sees optimism and a way of creating a telematic
society. Following the later work of Heidegger, thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida attempted
to deconstruct the definition of being or the subject, deploying a genealogical analysis of the
trajectory through which “the subject” was constructed and legitimized, not just in philosophy
(by Descartes, for instance), but in the political, juridical, educational, and ethical realms—and
adapted idiomatically in various languages. For Flusser, writing near the end of his life in From
Subject to Project: On Becoming Human, the human subject becomes “project”: a projector of
possible lives and alternative worlds.758
Invoking Derrida also helps in thinking about Heidegger and nationalism. In a 1992
interview at Oxford University, Derrida discussed how we think of philosophy as a universal
discourse while it has always been linked to specific cities and languages—particularly in the
nineteenth century, when European nations were being formed.759 For Derrida, deconstruction
was a project aimed at reaffirming “singularity” without giving rise to violent forms of
nationalism; an attempt to reaffirm difference while respecting the Other’s difference.
Heidegger, of course, represents the “bad” sort of nationalism: the recent publication of his
“Black Notebooks,” journals he kept between 1931 and 1941, confirm his anti-Semitism and
unmistakable rather than naïve allegiance to Nazism.760 However, many Jewish philosophers
758
Vilém Flusser, Vom Subjekt zum Projekt. Menschwerdung (Bensheim and Düsseldorf:
Bollmann, 1994).
759
Jacques Derrida interview with Alan Montefiore, February 13, 1992, Oxford University,
accessed July 15, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s8SSilNSXw.
760
Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen II–VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938) [Reflections II–VI
(Black Notebooks 1931–1938)], ed. Peter Trawny (Frankfurt, Germany: Klostermann, 2014);
Überlegungen VII–XI (Schwarze Hefte 1938/39) [Reflections VII–XI (Black Notebooks
1938/39)], ed. Peter Trawny (Frankfurt, Germany, Klostermann, 2014); Überlegungen XII–XV
(Schwarze Hefte 1939–1941) [Reflections XII–XV (Black Notebooks 1939–1941)], ed. Peter
216
have been influenced by Heidegger; Derrida, like Flusser, was Jewish—and heavily indebted to
Heidegger. As with Derrida’s approach to philosophy and nationalism, one might say that
Flusser found his strongest weapon in writing texts like The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections
to Nationalism, which both “use” Heidegger and critiques nationalism.761
Flusser and Philosophy: Martin Buber, Franz Kafka, and José Ortega y Gasset
When Flusser left Europe in 1939, the only books he had with him, to reiterate, were
Goethe’s Faust and a small Jewish prayer book his mother gave to him at the last moment.762 I
have already mentioned the impact upon Flusser of seeing Martin Buber lecture in Prague and
how the circulation of technical images in a “dialogic” society might be seen as a secular version
of Buber’s “I” and “thou” relationship. For Flusser, however, “dialogical life” was transformed
into “dialogical programming” in which each image-maker sitting before her computer can
program her own apparatus, rather than being programmed. The “I” becomes a knot in a
dialogical web of networked society.763 In other places, Flusser synthesizes Husserl’s notion of
the life-world as a network of concrete intentionalities764 with Buber’s transcendental, existential
version of dialogue: “A telematized society will be exactly that network of pure relationships that
Trawny (Frankfurt, Germany: Klostermann, 2014). Hannah Arendt, Heidegger’s former student
and lover, also served as an apologist. See Hannah Arendt’s “Heidegger at Eighty,” The New
York Review (October 21, 1971): 51. For a less sympathetic account written by another
Heidegger student, see Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1989).
761
Also see Vilém Flusser, “Heidegger et le Nazisme: ‘Nous sommes face à l’expression la plus
importante de la pensée de notre siècle,’” Calades 86 (February 1988).
762
Novaes, “Introduction,” The History of the Devil, xi.
763
Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 92.
764
Ströhl, “Introduction,” Writings, xiv.
217
Husserl defines as the concrete structure of the social phenomenon … Instead of the individual
man being the supreme value, it is now the dialogue between men that becomes the supreme
value, or what Martin Buber, whose thought was profoundly influenced by Husserl, called the
‘dialogical life’ (das dialogische Leben).”765 For Flusser, Buber’s dialogical life spoke not “of”
God but “to” God, with “the Judeo-Christian tradition breaking through the technological
surface.”766
If Buber served as a beneficent link between Flusser and Prague, Andreas Ströhl calls
Franz Kafka Flusser’s “threatening older brother”: the one whose God stranded him absurdly at
the edge of nothingness.768 Like Flusser, Kafka (1883-1924) was from the German-speaking
Jewish minority in Prague. In “Waiting for Kafka,” an essay written in the sixties and published
in Portuguese and German, Flusser addresses this:769 “Kafka’s thoughts are determined by the
structure of German grammar. Kafka had German thoughts, and everything he thought was
structured a priori by the grammar of this language. When [his writings] are translated into other
languages, Kafka’s thoughts are structurally distorted. Thus, any alleged sympathy with these
translated thoughts may actually be based on errors.”770 Flusser was freed from the “sterile” High
765
Flusser, “On Edmund Husserl,” quoted in Writings, xiv.
766
Vilém Flusser, from “Dialogische Medien” in Kommunikologie (295), quoted in Writings, xv.
768
Ströhl, “Introduction,” Writings, xvi.
769
Flusser, “Waiting for Kafka” (1967), Writings, 150-159. In the back of Writings, in the
section devoted to copyright and original publication information, Ströhl explains: “A shorter
version of ‘Waiting for Kafka’ was originally published as ‘Esperando por Kafka,’ in Cavalo
Azul (April-June 1963). The extended version that appears here was first published in Vilém
Flusser, Da religiosidade (São Paulo: Comissão Estadual de Cultura, 1967), and later published
in German as “Warten auf Kafka,” in Vilém Flusser, Jude sein: Essays, Briefe, Fiktionen, ed.
Stefan Bollmann and Edith Flusser (Mannheim: Bollmann, 1995).
770
Flusser, “Waiting for Kafka” (1967), Writings, 151.
218
German of Kafka, which originated as an artificial literary language in the chancellery offices of
the Emperor Charles IV of Prague.771 But his tone and approach became part of Flusser’s
thinking and writing—particularly with regard to irony:
Because of this idiom, Kafka’s message possesses the aura of ridiculously absurd
pedantry so characteristic of him. The language of Prague oscillates between the
poles of pedantic artificiality (historically embodied by the Austro-Hungarian
bureaucracy) and ridiculous language mixes (for example, historically embodied
in the Czech, semi-German Officer Schweik). Because this language structures
Kafka’s thoughts a priori, they automatically oscillate within this dialectical
tension. The overcoming of this tension leads directly to a malicious irony, which
we usually call Kafka’s irony.772
Flusser argues that Kafka used this “climate of inauthenticity” to create an ironic
authenticity.773 Kafka’s search is like that of the mystics: a search for God. But what Kafka
ultimately accomplishes is the “existentialization of Nietzsche” in which God is a “pedantic,
over-organized, ridiculously incompetent God” who is “sick and tired of himself.”774 The result
of this is that human progress is progress in the direction of nothingness, leading through various
hierarchies that illustrate “experiences of nothingness.”775 Amplifying this even further is the
way Kafka’s “message”—the language of information theory pervades the essay—was
ultimately delivered: through his protégé, Max Brod, who disobeyed Kafka’s orders to destroy
his writings and published them anyway. This historical fact contributes to the reception of
Kafka’s message, heightening our doubt concerning its authenticity and leaving Flusser himself
771
Ibid.
772
Ibid., 152.
773
Flusser, “Waiting for Kafka” (1967), Writings, 152. One can also hear the echoes of
Heidegger’s concept of “authenticity.”
774
Ibid., 158.
775
Ibid.
219
in limbo: waiting for Kafka—or, more precisely, “an authentic answer to Kafka”776—while
looking for a way to escape the “incompetent bureaucratic apparatus” by confronting other forms
of apparatus.777
I have focused so far on German-language thinkers, but the last European I want to
mention is Spanish: José Ortega y Gasset.778 One might imagine that, since Flusser formulated an
idea of post-history, he might be drawn to Ortega’s “History as a System,” in which the Spanish
writer challenged Cartesian rationality, faith in science, the Western concept of “nature” and
history as a “science of the present” in need of a contemporary reassessment.779 Ortega also
questioned concepts like liberalism and nationalism, which would be important for Flusser. Near
the beginning of “In Search of Meaning,” however, Flusser writes that Ortega’s Revolt of the
Masses, which he read during his formative years in Prague, helped him discover “that vast
world vaguely called ‘Existentialism,’” and led him back to Nietzsche.780 Ortega’s “mass-man”
is a bourgeois-educated figure who is incapable of leadership, leading to a rudderless existence
and foreshadowing the existentialists. (Albert Camus called him, “after Nietzsche, perhaps the
greatest European writer.”)781 One could also imagine Ortega’s idea of a historical rupture
776
Ibid., 159.
777
Ibid., 154.
778
Flusser also mentioned, on occasion, the Spanish author Miguel de Unamuno.
779
José Ortega y Gasset, History as a System and Other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History,
trans. Helen Weyl (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961).
780
Flusser, Writings, 199. The material that makes up Revolt of the Masses was originally
published in 1929 as a series of articles in the newspaper El Sol, which foreshadows Flusser’s
own philosophical journalism. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1932).
781
Quoted in Pedro Blas Gonzalez, Ortega’s Revolt of the Masses and The Triumph of the New
Man (New York: Algora, 2007), 8.
220
having a lasting effect on Flusser’s thinking. In the last essay of Revolt of the Masses Ortega
wrote that, “Europe is now reaping the painful results of her spiritual conduct. She has adopted
blindly a culture which is magnificent, but has no roots.”782 Like Kafka the “prophet,” as Flusser
called him, Ortega was a prognosticator. Flusser himself grew famous in certain realms for
predicting a society glued to and communicating through its computer screens. Per Ortega’s
predictions, Europe’s character defects would shortly be exposed, and Flusser himself would be
profoundly affected.
Flusser and Information Theory: Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon
If the Nazis hadn’t occupied Prague, Flusser might have finished his degree at Charles
University and become a philosopher in the vein of the Vienna Circle—or even Husserl or
Heidegger. Instead, he ended up in Brazil, lecturing on communications. His oeuvre is most
often compared with those of Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard, but it is important to note
that Flusser’s earliest manuscripts, The Twentieth Century and Language and Reality, do not cite
information or media theory.783 And before considering McLuhan and Baudrillard, it seems
fruitful to consider two other figures: Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon. Wiener coined the
term cybernetics in the summer of 1947, from the Greek word kubernetes for “steersman”; the
word also appears in Plato’s The Alcibiades, meaning to self-govern.784 Wiener’s work in
782
Ortega y Gasset, Revolt of the Masses, 189-190.
783
The German edition of Wiener’s God and Golem was in Flusser’s library. A spreadsheet of
the library’s contents is available through the Vilém Flusser Archive website, accessed January
16, 2015, https://s3.amazonaws.com/arenaattachments/185810/49e7668ee095a7e96e5d87e67f1cfdd9.pdf.
784
Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
(New York: Wiley, 1948). In 1834, André-Marie Ampère used the term “cybernétique” to
describe the sciences of government in his classification system of human knowledge.
221
cybernetics stemmed from his research during World War II and the development of an
“antiaircraft (AA) predictor”: a device that used electrical networks and data from previous pilot
missions to predict the position of enemy aircraft. Although Wiener’s AA predictor wasn’t
employed in the war, it served as a prototype for subsequent feedback systems.785 Moreover,
Wiener felt that cybernetics, which he defined as “the science of control and communication in
the animal and machine,” could do everything from explaining human behavior to serving as a
model for the universe. Cybernetics set up a new understanding of the human-machine relation
in which self-regulating machines such as the AA predictor, which could self-correct, did not
differ from human intentionality.
One could cite many progenitors for cybernetics: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
scientists like André-Marie Ampère, who invented the galvanometer and worked with
electromagnetics; Charles Babbage, who invented a mechanical computer; the multiply authored
telegraph, which changed communications; British mathematician Alan Turing’s On Computable
Numbers with Reference to the Entscheidungsproblem (1937) and his 1936 Turing machine, a
proto-computer developed out of cryptology and his effort to decode German messages during
World War II; Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s theories of information, published in the
book The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949); Warren McCulloch, the
neurophysiologist whose brain theories contributed to cybernetics—also a founding member of
the American Society for Cybernetics; and the Hungarian-born mathematician John von
785
Instead of adopting Wiener’s AA predictor, the military adopted a geometric predictor
invented by Hendrik Bode that calculated a plane’s trajectory. See Peter Galison, “The Ontology
of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (1994):
228-266.
222
Neumann and other participants, such as Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, in the Josiah
Macy, Jr. Foundation Conferences.786
Many of these figures were already connected. Wiener taught Claude Shannon
mathematics at MIT. Shannon wrote a short review of Wiener’s Cybernetics for the Proceedings
of the Institute of Radio Engineers.787 During the war, Weaver headed the U.S. government’s
applied mathematics research division, which oversaw Wiener’s AA predictor project, and
Weaver helped Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication to become more accessible in
their co-authored book of 1949. Vannevar Bush, Wiener’s colleague at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, would head the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development
(OSRD) during World War II, which included the Manhattan Project. (Wiener had written to
Bush to see how he could help with the war effort.) Wiener and von Neumann were both in a
group called the “Teleological Society” in the forties, an early integrated research program that
harnessed neurology, mathematics, and engineering to study human intention alongside
machines.788 Wiener, along with Bateson, Mead, McCulloch, and von Neumann, would
participate in the Macy Foundation conferences, which attempted to integrate information theory
786
Started by Kate Everit Macy in memory of her father, Josiah Macy, Jr., the one hundred-sixty
conferences held between 1941 and 1960, were attended by various scholars and meant to
promote dialogue across scientific disciplines and restore unity to science. (The Macy
Foundation’s particular concern was the isolation of research in medical science; some of the
conferences were devoted to such topics as infancy, childhood, aging, blood clotting, blood
pressure, liver injuries, and so on.)
787
Claude E. Shannon, “Review of Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal
and the Machine by Norbert Wiener,” Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers 37 (1949):
1305. Wiener returned the “favor”—neither review was particularly long or effusive—with a
review of Shannon’s A Mathematical Theory of Communication in Physics Today (September
1950).
788
Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 248.
223
and feedback, applying them to fields like medicine, sociology, psychology, and anthropology.789
Von Neumann, along with Oskar Morgenstern, wrote a classic text on game theory, Theory of
Games and Economic Behavior (1944), which he initially described as the “mathematics of
incomplete information.”790 (Flusser did not cite von Neumann and Morgenstern, but he
frequently used the term “game theory.”)
In addition to cybernetics, Wiener helped popularize terms such as “information,”
“message,” “feedback,” and “control.”791 Cybernetics became an amalgamation of engineering,
computation, mathematics, and behavior psychology, and like Flusser’s view of apparatus,
Wiener’s theory was intermittently optimistic and nihilistic: cybernetics had the capability to
save, enslave, or destroy humanity.792 Cybernetics for Wiener was about control and command,
which influenced a wide range of thinkers, such as Baudrillard and Deleuze, who saw
mechanization as a way of controlling human society. For Flusser, however, borrowing from
cybernetics as well as Martin Buber, intersubjective relations were paramount. The universe of
technical images was cybernetic in that the images are composed of particles (“computed”), but
these did not have to work merely as mechanisms of control. Near the end of Into the Universe of
789
Ibid., 255.
790
James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, Flood (New York: Random House,
2011), 244. See also Oskar Morgenstern’s and John von Neumann’s Theory of Games and
Economic Behavior (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944); John von Neumann, The
Computer and the Brain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958); and Steve J. Heims,
John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and
Death (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980). The other important text in game theory, which
circulated particularly in the U.S. art world, which was more accessible and less technical or
mathematical is R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa, Games and Decisions (New York: John
Wiley, 1957).
791
See Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science,
Trans. M.B. DeBevoise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
792
Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 254.
224
Technical Images, Flusser describes the control scenario as a recalibration of Nietzsche’s will to
power, “interpreted as a negatively entropic disposition,” in which the superman is transformed
into a “cybernetic superbrain.”793 And yet, ever mindful of how new technology disrupts
relationships and society, he writes, “I believe, however, that the current tendency to read
Nietzsche as a prophet should be taken with a grain of salt, for otherwise, there is a risk of losing
one’s grasp of what is new in current developments.”794
Then there is the term “apparatus,” which was so central to Flusser’s philosophy. It
appears in Wiener’s writings, but generally in the common usage of the term: the AA predictor
was an apparatus—although it later became the prototype for the human nervous system in the
same way as for Flusser cameras became models of political and cultural apparatuses. Where this
comparison becomes particularly interesting is in the use of the term “black box.” For Flusser the
camera was the archetypal black box, along with the cinema and the theater—but then
apparatuses themselves became black boxes. Auschwitz was a black box; so was the media and
the family: “Every relation has innumerable emotional, cultural, economic, political, biological,
and ethical aspects that are inexhaustible. In sum: the family reveals itself as a black box never
entirely explainable, and graspable only if we concentrate our attention on its input and output. It
then reveals itself as cybernetically manipulable.”795 Compare this with Wiener’s use of the
“black box,” a term that originated as a descriptor for prosaic physical objects. Peter Galison
writes that black-speckled boxes were used in the MIT Radiation Laboratory during the war to
encase radar electrical equipment such as amplifiers, receivers, and filters. After the war, Wiener
793
Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 166.
794
Ibid.
795
Flusser, Post-History, 153. Italics in original.
225
used the term “black-box” to describe a unit “designed to perform a function before one knew
how it functioned.”796 Cybernetics treated humans and machines as interchangeable: humans
could be described as “behavioristic black boxes”797 and to others looking at Wiener’s work, the
human brain was a black box.798
Cybernetics became a model not just for humans, but also for all biological systems.
Darwin blurred the boundaries of human and animal; Wiener blurred human with machine.799
Flusser set out to examine Vampyroteuthis infernalis “from a cybernetic point of view,”
imagining the animal’s nervous system as a “network.”800 Moreover, Vampy served as a sciencefiction fable in which Western traditions might be overturned and taxonomy replaced by a “less
linear and more ‘cybernetic’ (informative)” model.801 The rise of biotechnology gave this a sense
of urgency, but it was also an epistemological issue: biology is a human-created science and to
rethink biology is to suggest a seismic shift: “the challenge is not biological but epistemological;
to rethink evolution not in ‘causal’ terms or ‘finalistic’ terms, but in ‘programmatic’ terms,”802
796
Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 246.
797
Ibid., 265.
798
In a 1951 letter to Wiener, W. Ross Ashby, who later authored a book titled An Introduction
to Cybernetics (London: Chapman and Hall, 1956) wrote: “When I consider how psychologists
have been trying to solve exactly this problem [what a human being is] for decades (if not
centuries), the black box being the brain, and when I think how little attention they have given to
the principles involved, my opinion of psychologists falls to a new low … For this reason I
regard it as highly complimentary when I saw that your study of the ‘black box’ problem is a
first step towards a scientific psychology!” Quoted in Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,”
252.
799
Ibid., 245-46.
800
Flusser, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, 34.
801
Ibid., 136.
802
Ibid.
226
using cybernetic theory rather than traditional natural philosophies. Wiener focused rather on
control: messages were not about knowledge acquisition, per se, but what you did with the
information once you received it.803 For Flusser, everything was always a philosophical question.
But where Wiener and Flusser particularly overlap is around the question of ethics, even
if neither used the term regularly or explicitly. Following the war, Wiener had a crisis of
conscience in which he saw his scientific work as a primary concern. Wiener wrote to a friend:
Ever since the atomic bomb fell I have been recovering from an acute attack of
conscience as one of the scientists who has been doing war work and who has
seen his war work a[s] part of a larger body which is being used in a way of which
I do not approve and over which I have absolutely no control. I think the omens
for a third world war are black and I have no intention of letting my services be
used in such a conflict. I have seriously considered the possibility of giving up my
scientific productive effort because I know no way to publish without letting my
inventions go to the wrong hands.804
For Wiener it was the world of Belsen and Hiroshima;805 for Flusser it was the apparatus
of Auschwitz: slightly different—and particularly in their sense of agency, since Flusser was a
holocaust survivor while Wiener was part of the war machine. Wiener would go on to write
books like God & Golem, Inc. (1966), based on a series of lectures at Yale, in which humans are
to machines as God is to Golem, the embryonic Adam; that is, creators that may or may not take
responsibility for their progeny: “We who make cyborgs are, in the end, like gods.”806 For
Flusser ethics underpins everything, since apparatus can be used either to enslave or exterminate
803
Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 256.
804
Letter to Giorgio de Santillana, October 16, 1945. Quoted in Galison, “The Ontology of the
Enemy,” 253. See also Wiener’s “A Scientist Rebels,” an open letter to a research scientist
published in The Atlantic Monthly 179 (January 1947): 46.
805
Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 254.
806
Norbert Wiener, God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics
Impinges On Religion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966), 95.
227
people, or in the cause of human freedom. Moreover, the intersubjective relationship of senders
and receivers echoes Buber’s description of the “I” and “Thou” relationship of humans to God:
we look into the face of the other (using technical image screens) and there we find God.
Looking briefly at Claude Shannon, where Wiener is associated with the term
cybernetics, Shannon is seen as the father of information theory. (Wiener used “information
theory,” too, but more broadly.)807 Both Wiener and Shannon were coming out of mathematics;
Wiener was briefly Shannon’s professor at MIT and they published somewhat qualified reviews
of each other’s books in professional journals. Shannon was employed by Bell Labs during the
war and involved in cryptology; he and Alan Turing both worked at Bell Labs in the U.S. during
1943 as cryptanalysts.808 Large portions of Shannon’s famous 1948 paper, “A Mathematical
Theory of Communication,” were derived from a declassified cryptography report. And although
Shannon said that he had been influenced by Wiener’s work during the war, they approached the
problem of information differently. Wiener was interested in feedback systems, filtering, and the
rate of transmission of information while Shannon was interested in messages, noise, and coding
problems.809 For Shannon, meaning could be divorced from semantic content. The important
issue was how much information could be transmitted over a noisy channel. Wiener filtered
signals representing messages (information) from noise while Shannon coded messages into
807
Ronald R. Kline, “What is Information Theory a Theory Of? Boundary Work among
Information Theorists and Information Scientists in the United States and Britain during the Cold
War,” The History and Heritage of Scientific and Technological Information Systems,
Proceedings of the 2002 Conference, American Society for Information Science and Technology,
ed. W. Boyd Rayward and Mary Bowden (Medford, NJ: Information Today, 2004), 15-28.
808
Gleick, The Information, 204.
809
Claude E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Information,” The Bell System Technical
Journal 27 (July, October 1948): 379–423; 623–656.
228
signals in order to transmit information in the presence of noise.810 “Entropy” was also a key
term for both scientists and one that has been widely confused and contested during its history.
Originating in thermodynamics, along with the rise of the steam engine in the 1860s, entropy
meant the unavailability of energy or its uselessness for work. But then it became its opposite:
the energy that can be converted into mechanical work—and a host of other definitions:
dissipation, disorder, and in information theory, a measure of uncertainty about a message.811 In
1948, Shannon wrote to Wiener about their equations for entropy, which differed by a sign:
I do not believe this difference has any real significance but is due to our taking
somewhat complementary views of information. I consider how much
information is produced when a choice is made from a set—the larger the set the
more information. You consider the larger uncertainty in the case of a larger set to
mean less knowledge of the situation and hence less information.812
Wiener agreed with this analysis. But how does this all relate to Flusser? In his writings,
Flusser used the vocabulary of cybernetics and information theory rather freely: messages, codes,
decoding, transmission, entropy. Flusser was using information theory to look at photography
and technical images. One could say that Roland Barthes was in the same territory since, in “The
Rhetoric of the Image,” he famously defined photography as a “message without a code”—
although Barthes stressed that the first message in a photograph yielded a “substance that is
linguistic” and the notion of denotative and connotative messages in the images similarly
revealed his allegiance with semiotics and structural linguistics.813 Some writers have drawn
parallels between semiotics and information theory, arguing that pragmatism in the United
810
Kline, “What is Information Theory a Theory Of?,” 17.
811
Gleick, The Information, 270-280.
812
Quoted in Kline, “What is Information Theory a Theory Of?,” 17. Italics in original.
813
Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” Image/Music/Text (New York: Hill and Wang,
1977), 33-37.
229
States, with its close ties to Rudolf Carnap and the Vienna Circle, served as a foundation for the
invention of the computer.814 However, the U.S. computational model synthesized information
theory, cognitive (behaviorist) psychology, and language science, while in France Claude LéviStrauss and Roland Barthes were using the linguistic model for anthropological work and
cultural studies, respectively.815 Applying the same tools to photography and technical images,
Flusser included definitions for “code,” “decode,” “entropy,” “information,” “memory,”
“program,” and “redundancy” in his lexicon at the back of Towards a Philosophy of
Photography. In “The Photograph,” he described photographs as images which “signify concepts
814
Brian Lonsway, Making Leisure Work: Architecture and the Experience Economy (London:
Routledge, 2009), 58. Lonsway writes that Wiener’s 1948 Cybernetics; or, Control and
Communication in the Animal and Machine, Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s 1949 The
Mathematical Theory of Communication, and Noam Chomsky’s 1955 Logical Structure of
Linguistic Theory all borrowed heavily from semiotic research. Moreover, “Cybernetics
advanced the objective theorization for human-environment as well as human-machine
interactions. Information Theory provided a semantic framework for the numerical encoding of
non-numerical (spatial, graphic, etc.) information. And semiotic patterns provided a mechanism
for the logical-symbolic interpretation of space as well as a theoretical framework for the
understanding of space, architecture, and cities as communication systems,” (ibid., 58-59).
815
Ibid., 59. This is not to say that Barthes was ignorant of information theory. In the
introduction to Elements of Semiology he wrote: “There is no doubt that the development of mass
communications confers particular relevance today upon the vast field of signifying media, just
when the success of disciplines such as linguistics, information theory, formal logic and
structural anthropology provide semantic analysis with new instruments.” Roland Barthes,
Elements of Semiology (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 9. The other thinker I would look at
more closely, if space permitted, would be Umberto Eco, since he employed both semiotics and
information theory—and, more importantly, Flusser cited him favorably (as opposed to Barthes,
whom Flusser felt got it “wrong” on photography). In The Open Work (1962), Eco cited Wiener
and Shannon and Weaver and applied information theory to thinking about Petrarch. But he also
argued that the penchant in contemporary poetics for audience participation, ambiguity, disorder,
and indeterminacy—characteristics of the “open work”—could benefit from the tools provided
by information theory. Eco cited Flusser’s friend Abraham Moles and his collection of essays
Information Theory and Esthetic Perception, in which Moles applied information theory to
music. See Umberto Eco, “Openness, Information, Communication,” The Open Work
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 44-83 and Abraham Moles, Information
Theory and Esthetic Perception (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968).
230
in a program” and rely on coding and decoding.816 He defined the photographer’s challenge as an
attempt to “oppose the flood of redundancy with informative images.”817 But the language and
philosophy of information theory works particularly well when applied to the transmission of
photographs, which prefigures our own era of the Internet and social media in which images
have become largely divorced from material supports (except, of course, in the art world). In
“The Distribution of Photographs,” Flusser writes that, while information disintegrates
progressively in nature, humans struggle against this “natural entropy” by receiving, storing,
passing along, and deliberately creating information, resulting in culture: “improbably formed,
informed objects.”818 Communication is divided into two phases: information is created then it is
distributed to be stored. The first phase is called dialogue; the second, discourse.819 Photographs
can be dialogic, but they can also be discursive. When photographs are not electromagnetic, they
become post-industrial because of their reproducibility (echoing Walter Benjamin). But once
they become electromagnetic, such as films and television, they can be processed by the receiver
as pure information and channeled—although photographs can slip from one channel to another:
from science to advertising or advertising to art. The channel determines how the photograph is
“coded.” The critic needs to be aware of this. Here is where Flusser overlaps with Barthes and
other writers in his call to highlight the systems in which photography exists, since channels
conceal their function; if critics fail to do this they end up “as a function of the channels.”820
816
Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Reaktion), 41.
817
Ibid., 65.
818
Ibid., 49.
819
Ibid., 49.
820
Ibid., 55.
231
Marshall McLuhan
As more than one writer has pointed out, Marshall McLuhan’s “medium”—as in his
famous catchphrase “the medium is the message”—is actually a reconfigured or renamed version
of the “channel” from information theory: Shannon’s channel capacity, computed
mathematically to measure the rate at which information can be transmitted over a noisy channel.
For McLuhan, this meant that the medium often overwhelms the “content” of the message,
which was not Shannon’s conclusion—or Flusser’s. In Flusser’s seventies writings, everyday
objects function as screens between the outer world, messages through which we can decipher
meaning by analyzing their phenomenological nature, while in the eighties technical images are
examined as “windows,” surfaces and screens.
McLuhan entered communications theory as a literary scholar trained at Cambridge, but
also as a Canadian looking at the spectacle of mass media developing just south of the border. In
the journal Explorations (1953-1959), which he edited with the radical anthropologist Edmund
Carpenter821 and in books like The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), The
Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1961), and Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man (1964), McLuhan and his collaborators lay the foundations for—some say
invented—media theory.822 Flusser claimed to have less in common with McLuhan than with
821
Stemming from the interdisciplinary Culture and Communication Seminar at the University
of Toronto, which ran from 1951 to 1953.
822
Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan, eds., Explorations in Communication: An
Anthology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); Marshall McLuhan, “Canada: The Borderline Case,”
The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1977), 226-48; The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961); The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man
(New York: Vanguard, 1951); and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1964).
232
Husserl or Buber; Ströhl and Janine Marchessault and Rainer Guldin have supported this claim,
arguing that McLuhan and Flusser were writing not only from “polar ends” of the Americas, but
also different theoretical ends.823 McLuhan was a “formalist,” theorizing the gradual
disappearance of the human body in the electronic age,824 while Flusser was interested in
feedback between objects and the phenomenological messages they provide.825 Marchessault and
Guldin point out that Flusser did reference McLuhan in the early seventies—particularly in his
communications seminars and resulting essays—although Flusser didn’t mention specific titles
and references to McLuhan thereafter increasingly disappeared.826
So where do McLuhan and Flusser overlap and where do they diverge? It seems
important to point out that they were both a) interested in communications and b) looking in
from the outside (or periphery) at the United States. McLuhan found a Canadian community of
like-minded individuals—George Grant, Harold Innis, and Eric Havelock—and Flusser taught
communications in Brazil and corresponded with Milton Vargas and Abraham Moles. Neither
were adopters of the media they wrote about, but both were seen as prognosticators—although
both insisted they were writing about the present rather than predicting the future. Both
collaborated with other writers and academics and saw artists as the carriers and translators of
823
Ströhl, “Introduction,” Writings, x.
824
Formalist in his “inability to engage in any meaningful way with political economy or
structures of power.” Janine Marchessault, “McLuhan’s Pedagogical Art,” Flusser Studies 06
(May 2008): 12.
825
Janine Marchessault and Rainer Guldin, “Introduction,” Flusser Studies 06 (May 2008): 6.
826
Marchessault and Guldin, “Introduction,” Flusser Studies 06: 2.
233
media society.827 McLuhan called artists the “antennae of society” and wrote that, where
ordinary people attempt to numb their perceptions against the impact of new experiences, artists
delight in novelty and study “the distortion of sensory life” produced by new environmental
programming.828 McLuhan even saw his own work as an art form,829 and Flusser saw the artist as
the greatest hope for reprogramming the apparatus, both of photography and society. (To
reiterate: Flusser also recommended McLuhan’s son Eric as an artist to the São Paulo Biennial
and organized a section of the 1973 Biennial around a communications, rather than a national
pavilions model.) Both McLuhan and Flusser were interested in cities, using them as metaphors
for their media theories and analyzing how electronic and digital media changed conceptions of
the urban landscape. For McLuhan, there was the famous “global village” in which the world
shrinks to the size (or conditions) of a village and which influenced thinkers like Henri
Lefebvre.830 For Flusser, the “wave trough” represented the new, immaterial image of the city, a
network of wires and cables that is not topographical or geographically locatable, and both
827
See Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village (New York,
London, Toronto: Bantam Books, 1968) and The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects
(Corte Madera, CA: Ginko Press, 2001)—and, of course, Flusser’s Vampyroteuthis infernalis.
828
“In social terms the artist can be regarded as a navigator who gives adequate compass
bearings in spite of magnetic deflection of the needle by the changing play of forces. So
understood, the artist is not a peddler of ideals or lofty experiences. He is rather the indispensable
aid to action and reflection alike.” Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing
Point: Space in Poetry and Painting (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 238.
829
“When I sit down to write about complicated problems moving on several planes, I
deliberately move into multi-sensual prose. This in an art form … a serious art form.” Interview
with Gerald Stearn in McLuhan: Hot & Cool (New York: The Dial Press, 1967), 285. Quoted in
Kalina Kukielko and Barbara Rauch, “Marshall McLuhan & Vilém Flusser: The New Model
Artists,” Flusser Studies 6 (2006): 3.
830
Marchessault, “McLuhan’s Pedagogical Art,” 7. Also see Janine Marchessault, Marshall
McLuhan: Cosmic Media (London: Sage, 2005) and Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
234
envisioned epic spatial models: McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy and Flusser’s universe of
technical images.
And then there was writing. Both McLuhan and Flusser theorized media in terms of
historical epochs marked by writing. At Cambridge, McLuhan worked with F.R. Leavis, the
literary critic and scholar associated with New Criticism and later cultural studies, and his
doctoral dissertation focused on Thomas Nashe, an Elizabethan poet and playwright who was
also a pamphleteer writing cheap printed works that could be widely disseminated, thanks to the
invention of the printing press. (McLuhan’s work is also often seen as a prototype for cultural
studies because it argued that mass media were as worthy of scholarly analysis as literary texts.)
McLuhan argued that the Gutenberg press changed the conditions of reading, writing, and
cognition and moved culture away from an oral mode to a visual one. History for Flusser was
marked by the invention of writing in ancient Mesopotamia, which brought on a long period of
“textolatry” broken only by the invention of photography and technical images. For both writers,
electronic media signaled the end of linear thinking, as Flusser argued in Does Writing Have a
Future?, where numbers in the form of computer code eclipsed writing.
So where do Flusser and McLuhan diverge? McLuhan was only nine years older than
Flusser, but he died in 1980, before Flusser published most of his technical image writings, in
which he actively distanced himself from McLuhan.831 “The medium is not the message,”
Flusser insisted in Kommunikologie; the eidos of the medium was less important than the way it
was used.832 McLuhan’s error, from Flusser’s standpoint, was in seeing the medium itself as
transformative technology: “McLuhan is wrong with his assumption that ampitheatrical media,
831
Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, 100.
832
Flusser, Kommunikologie, 272. Quoted in Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An
Introduction, 100.
235
like the press or TV, can transform the world into a cosmic village: they will transform it into a
cosmic circus.”833 Sjoukje van der Meulen argues that, while Flusser’s work is unthinkable
without McLuhan, Flusser believed that an entirely new form of critical theory, not just
“understanding” media, is crucial. She quotes a 1973 letter from Flusser to René Berger: “Maybe
one day we can make (the two of us) a communication theory of media against McLuhan: you
from the point of view of the media, and I from the point of view of the (phenomenologically
conscious) receiver.”834 Because, where McLuhan saw electronic media eradicating various
languages, Flusser was living in a different world: writing and speaking in multiple tongues and
arguing, in a classically postmodernist way, that language affects meaning. (Yara Guasque
suggests that Flusser might have read McLuhan in more than one language, although we don’t
have sufficient evidence of this.)835 Hence, Flusser’s approach to media was a subversive
reprogramming of apparatuses instead of one in which people were passive or active receptors of
“cool” or “hot” media that determined a unitary response. For McLuhan, writing in 1964,
language was the “technology of human extension,” separated by the Tower of Babel. But with
computers, we would soon be able to translate “any code or language into any other code or
language” and through technology achieve a “Pentecostal condition of universal understanding
833
Flusser, Kommunikologie, 274. Quoted in Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An
Introduction, 100.
834
Van der Meulen, “Between Benjamin and McLuhan”: 186.
835
Yara Rondon Guasque Araujo, “The City as a Medium in McLuhan and Flusser,” Flusser
Studies 6 (2008), accessed December 17, 2014,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/guasque-cityas-medium.pdf. Guasque writes that there was interest in McLuhan among the São Paulo
intelligentsia and includes in her bibliography the Portuguese version of Understanding Media.
See Marshall McLuhan, Os meios de comunicação como extensões do homem (São Paulo:
Editora Cultrix, 1975). Obviously, Flusser could have read McLuhan in German, French, and
English, as well. But he doesn’t mention him in the early bibliographies. There are no McLuhan
texts in Flusser’s library.
236
and unity.”836 Flusser felt this was wrong because it focused on the way computers could be
used: either discursively or dialogically. And Michael Darroch argues that McLuhan’s Catholic,
“Pentecostal” unity contrasts sharply with Flusser’s nomadic, migratory thinking. Instead,
Darroch compares Flusser to Derrida, for whom translation was the place where a constant play
and deferral of signifiers made fixed meanings impossible. Translation—one of Flusser’s
primary activities—points to the instability and impossibility of an “original” text or a common
origin of all languages.837
In the end, what most decisively distinguishes Flusser’s thought from McLuhan’s is the
work from the last decade of Flusser’s life. McLuhan was couched in the midcentury technology
of television, but Flusser had to be agile, converting to different languages and technologies as
he moved around the globe and inserted himself into different intellectual discourses. He was
hardly a young man when he became immersed in the world of digital technology,
biotechnology, networks, cyberspace, and artificial intelligence. If the city can be described as
“fractal” in “The City as Wave-Trough,” the human subject itself was disintegrating, becoming a
projection and merging with other species. Where McLuhan wrote about the global village,
Flusser imagined a “dreaming global brain controlled cybernetically through technical
836
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 83-84.
837
“In this sense, [Derrida’s] reading of the Babel narrative stands diametrically opposed to
McLuhan’s suggestion that linguistic variability can be resolved in a ‘Pentecostal condition of
universal understanding or unity’ made possible by computing technologies, and opposed, too,
for example, to Friedrich Kittler’s similar claim that through digital code ‘any medium can be
translated into any other.’” Michael Darroch, “Language, Translation, and the Telematic City,”
Flusser Studies 6 (2008): 5-6. Accessed December 17, 2014,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/darrochtelematic-city.pdf. Darroch is quoting from Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press), 2.
237
images.”838 Theorizing an end to linear thinking meant thinking about media in terms of time as
well as space, but also reconceptualizing the human subject in a world where it would no longer
be differentiated from other life forms, or technologies.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Jean Baudrillard
Flusser’s contemporaries were also defining themselves in contrast to McLuhan. Both
Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Jean Baudrillard launched attacks on McLuhan, although from
different positions. Enzensberger participated in the “Open Circuits” conference at the Museum
of Modern Art in New York in 1974 where Flusser presented “Two Approaches to the
Phenomenon, Television.” Where Flusser’s primary concern is the phenomenological nature of
television and how it provides a potential improvement over “traditional windows,”
Enzensberger approaches television from a class perspective as a tool for “controlling the
behavior of the population.”839 Much of what Enzensberger says echoes the arguments in his best
838
Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 125. More recent writers have challenged
McLuhan’s idea of the global village and representations of the internet as a disembodied space
in which nation, race, and gender were transcended. See Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and
Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005)
and Tara McPherson’s “U.S. Operating Systems at Midcentury: The Intertwining of Race and
Unix” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 2012), 591604. McPherson argues that operating systems recreated the social “modularity” of postwar neoliberalism and felt McLuhan promoted a “mystique of the media,” rather than seeing the ways in
which it supported capitalism, and how critical theory itself has function as an “operating
system.”
839
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Television and the Politics of Liberation,” The New Television,
a Public/Private Art: Essays, Statements, and Videotapes Based on “Open Circuits, an
International Conference on the Future of Television (1974), ed. Douglas Davis and Allison
Simmons (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1977), 248-261. Flusser and Enzensberger’s
section of the conference, “The Politics, Philosophy, and Future of Television,” also included
René Berger, Gerald O’Grady, Pierre Schaeffer, and John McHale. Flusser saved the handouts
from the conference and on a sheet of paper in the Flusser Archive in Berlin are brief notes—
three lines—on Enzensberger’s presentation that mention “monolithic control,” simulation,
238
known essay, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media” (1970), in which he argued that the media
was an industry that shapes consciousness, but which might be mobilized if wage earners took
control of the means of production—for instance, if they took tape recorders and cameras to
work and recorded events there or in places where social conflict occurs.840 Enzensberger was
concerned with a “reversibility of circuits”: if a socialist strategy was applied to the media, one
might be able to change network communications. Examples of this included a mass newspaper,
written and distributed by its readers or a video network of politically active groups.841 In these
suggestions, Enzensberger was more interested in cultural revolution led by the masses rather
than artists, as McLuhan and Flusser proposed.842 Recalling Bertolt Brecht’s “Theory of Radio”
(1932) and addressing American imperialism and the use of the media in Latin America, the
Nixon administration, Vietnam, and Fidel Castro’s appreciation for media’s revolutionary
potential, Enzensberger had nothing but scorn for the “symbolical expression” of artists.843 In
this reliance on form over activism, McLuhan was deeply implicated. Enzensberger argues that
the phrase “the medium is the message” tells us that the bourgeoisie holds the means of
production, but in an “ideologically sterile” state in which it doesn’t intend to make “socially
censorship, and feedback. English Correspondence Binder No. 55, Document No. 15, Vilém
Flusser Archive. I thank Daniel Irrgang for pointing this out to me.
840
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” New Left Review 64
(1970): 13-36. Reprinted in Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The Consciousness Industry (New
York: Seabury Press, 1974), 96-128; and in The New Media Reader, 261-288. I will be quoting
the latter source.
841
Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” The New Media Reader, 267.
842
“It is the desire for a new ecology, for a breaking down of environmental barriers, for an
aesthetics which is not limited to the sphere of ‘the artistic.’” Enzensberger, “Constituents of a
Theory of the Media,” The New Media Reader, 268.
843
Ibid., 269. As examples, he cited Warhol’s films, in which “everything can happen at once or
nothing at all,” and John Cage’s 1959 “Lecture on Nothing.”
239
necessary” use of them: “It wants the media as such and to no purpose.”844 Unlike Flusser,
Enzensberger felt that it was “extremely improbable” that writing would disappear in the near
future, even if it was an antiquated bourgeois medium, a “secondary technique” which became
merely a means of transcribing orally recorded speech.845 Enzensberger and Flusser often seem
worlds apart in their view of the media, although Flusser could also be skeptical of art and in
Enzensberger’s idea of a media controlled by the superstructure (Marx’s political systems,
religion, etcetera) one hears echoes of Flusser’s apparatus—only, divorced from Marxism or, as
Flusser would say, ideology. Enzensberger and Flusser do agree on the liberating potential of the
media, however. It was Jean Baudrillard, who responded directly to Enzensberger and who
wasn’t so optimistic.
Initially, Baudrillard also wrote from a Marxist position. Heavily influenced by Roland
Barthes, Umberto Eco, and Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Baudrillard
supplemented Marx with semiology to analyze postwar culture and consumer society. Marx’s
“use-value” of commodities now could be read in terms of “sign-value,” evident in everyday
signifying systems: the rules, codes, and logic of fashion, sports, and the media. In “Requiem for
the Media,” which appeared in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972),
Baudrillard criticized McLuhan as well as Enzensberger, arguing that: “There is no theory of the
media. The ‘media revolution’ has remained empirical and mystical, as much in the work of
McLuhan as with his opponents.”846 This is because McLuhan created a bourgeois political
844
Ibid., 271. Italics in original.
845
Ibid., 274.
846
Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,” For a Critique of the Political Economy of the
Sign, Trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981), 165. Originally published as
Pour une critique de l’economie politique du signe (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).
240
economy of signs and their production that extended the commodity form to all domains of
social life, creating a “class-bound theoretical discipline.”847 Enzensberger was similarly guilty,
since his theory was tied to “official” rather than “radical” Marxism, which saw the media as a
transmitter of content rather than as ideological in its very form and operation. (However,
Enzensberger accused the Left of being media phobic: in May 1968, rather than taking over the
French monopoly-run radio and television headquarters [ORTF], protestors in Paris regressed to
“artisanal” means by using hand-printed signs to distribute their slogans.)
For Baudrillard, the media are not co-efficients, but effectors of ideology: “they fabricate
non-communication” since they don’t allow for reciprocal modes of a communication: speech
and response.848 Anticipating the concepts he became most associated with, simulation and the
simulacra, Baudrillard writes that the existing communications theory model is “rooted in a
simulation model of communication. It excludes, from its inception, the reciprocity and
antagonism of interlocutors, and the ambivalence of their exchange.”849 Baudrillard proposes
instead using structural linguistics as the model for communications theory, since the arbitrarily
assigned signifier and signified in Saussure’s sign system can be more agilely exchanged. He
also cites symbolic exchange relations in which there is no transmitter or receiver and Eco’s
hypothesis about modifying codes (Baudrillard suggests the “smashed” codes of graffiti), but he
is ultimately pessimistic about media as a liberating force. For him, the “megasystems” of media
programming include circuits of “reversibility”—letters to the editor, polls, etcetera—but their
“very operation is censorship”; any attempt to unfreeze the system ends in deadlock, unless it
847
Ibid.
848
Ibid., 169. Baudrillard cites Roland Barthes, who in S/Z laid out a similar non-reciprocity in
realist literature between text producer and user, owner and customer, author and reader.
849
Ibid., 179.
241
“radically checkmates the dominant form.”850
Baudrillard would soon step away from Marxism, developing a theory of simulation and
the simulacra that was ardently pessimistic. Leading up to this were The Mirror of Production
(1973) and Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), which drew from Georges Bataille, Marcel
Mauss, and Alfred Jarry.851 His 1981 book Simulacra and Simulations, published in English in
1983 would most impact the U.S. art world, though.852 The first essay, “The Precession of
Simulacra,” opens with an allusion to Borges’s micro-short story “On Exactitude in Science,” in
which cartographers draw up a map so detailed that it covers the exact territory of their
Empire.853 For Baudrillard, the map as an allegory of simulation, which could be defined as the
“generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal”; a territory that “no longer
precedes the map.”854 Echoing Eco’s “Travels in Hyperreality” (1975), which looked at the
United States through holograms, superheroes, and amusement parks like Disneyland,
Baudrillard described the simulacrum—the copy with no original, in which signs of the real
850
Ibid., 183-184.
851
Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975), originally
published as Le miroir de la production ou l'illusion critique du matérialisme historique (Paris:
Casterman, 1973) and Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993), originally published
as L’échange symbolique et la mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).
852
Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New
York: Semiotext[e], 1983). Originally published as Simulacres et simulations (Paris: Galilée,
1981). “The Precession of Simulacra,” the opening chapter of Simulations, was included in the
popular U.S. anthology, Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis and
Marcia Tucker (New York: New Museum, 1984), which helped define the terms of so-called
postmodernism.
853
Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley
(New York: Penguin, 1998), 325.
854
Baudrillard, “The Precession of the Simulacra,” Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton,
and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), 2.
242
stand in for the real itself—as existing in a state of hyperreality.855 Experiences of entertainment,
information, and communication technology that are more intense and absorbing than everyday
life are examples of hyperreality—but they also structure human thought and behavior.856
In “The Ecstasy of Communication” (1983), which was reprinted in Hal Foster’s The
Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, another book that helped define postmodernism
for U.S. art audiences, Baudrillard argues that production and consumption have given way to
networks, contacts, feedback, and communication.857 The screen and the network are hallmarks
of our new existence: an “interrupted interface.”858 Rather than communication, however,
Baudrillard sees this as a “private telematics” in which the television is still paradigmatic.859 We
are no longer in a “drama of alienation” but an ecstasy of communication that is “obscene”;
speech is free, but we are less free than before. Nodding to McLuhan’s ideas of “hot” and “cold”
media, Baudrillard writes that “the message already no longer exists; it is the medium that
imposes itself in its pure circulation … the hot, sexual obscenity of former times is succeeded by
855
“Holography could prosper only in America, a country obsessed with realism, where, if a
reconstruction is to be credible, it must be absolutely iconic, a perfect likeness, a ‘real’ copy of
the reality being represented.” Umberto Eco, “Travels in Hyperreality,” Travels in Hyperreality,
trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 4.
856
For more recent writing on “the real” and reconsiderations of Baudrillard and other thinkers,
see Katerina Kolozova, Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2014). Also see “Katerina Kolozova on The Real in Contemporary
Philosophy” on the Columbia University Press Blog, March 28, 2013, accessed December 28,
2014, http://www.cupblog.org/?p=9763.
857
Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” trans. John Johnson, The Anti-Aesthetic:
Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 126-134.
858
Ibid., 126-127
859
Ibid., 128.
243
the cold and communicational, contractual and motivational obscenity of today.”860 In a
formulation overlapping with those of writers like Deleuze and Guattari, this produces a
schizophrenic subject who is “now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of
influence.”861 One can see the similarities with Flusser in terms of telematics and screens.
However, whereas for Flusser the screen was an intersubjective medium where we see the face
of the other—predicting communication platforms like Skype or FaceTime—for Baudrillard the
screen is the site of a “private telematics” in which the television is paradigmatic. Baudrillard’s
totalizing regime, the hyperreality of images, also sounds somewhat like Flusser’s universe of
technical images, although Flusser didn’t believe that images replaced the real. In fact, he
distinctly disagreed with Baudrillard’s diagnosis, arguing that the known world has always
existed as a simulacrum and that reality as a whole cannot be known.862
The similarities between Baudrillard and Flusser run deeper, however. Like Flusser,
Baudrillard had also written about objects: in 1968 he published The System of Objects. Unlike
Flusser’s phenomenological approach, Baudrillard’s analysis was from a Neo-Marxist
perspective, drawing on Freud and Saussure to offer a critique of the commodity in consumer
society, particularly of functional and non-functional and “schizofunctional” objects, which
aligned him with thinkers like Jacques Ellul, Jurgen Habermas, and Guy Debord.863 Both Flusser
and Baudrillard have visionary writing styles, heavy on irony, and both are given to
prognostication. Flusser called his writing “science fiction philosophy,” while Baudrillard’s has
860
Ibid., 131.
861
Ibid., 133.
862
See Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, 110.
863
Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 2006).
244
been called science-fiction hyperreality.864 (Baudrillard even served as inspiration for actual
science fiction: a copy of Simulations appears at the beginning of the movie “The Matrix.”)865
Both also worked in what later might be called a “para-academic” mode: often (particularly for
late Baudrillard) outside the academy.866 Both Flusser and Baudrillard critiqued history, or called
an end to it: Flusser’s rupture pivoted around text (history) and image (post-history) while
Baudrillard’s progressed from pre-modern (“primitive”) societies organized around symbolic
exchange to modern societies organized around production to postmodern societies organized
around media and simulation. For Baudrillard, television, cyberspace, and virtual reality were the
postmodern; technology (images and information) replaced capital and simulation and the play
of signs replaced the production of commodities.867 In Flusser, we saw the progression from
idolatry to “textolatry” and finally the world of technical images. In Baudrillard there are
successive phases of the image: first it is the reflection of a basic reality; then it “masks and
864
Writing about the the U.S. publisher Sylvère Lotringer and his press Semiotext(e), Tim
Griffin argues that Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, and Foucault sounded like “science fiction
in Europe but were the stuff of everyday life in the United States.” Tim Griffin, “Theoretical
Physic,” Artforum (April 2010), accessed January 5, 2015,
http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201004&id=25161.
865
Cusset, French Theory, 254, 259.
866
For instance, both Flusser and Baudrillard are included in a reading list for an ongoing “ParaAcademia” workshop at the Public School, itself a kind of para-academic organization (“a
framework that supports autodidactic activities”) that functions both online and in cities across
the globe. The “Manifesto” for The Para-Academia Series states “The para is the ‘alongside,’
that which comments on the official or normative. While academics debate the finer points of
Shakespeare and Kant, para-academics aggregate around shadow-commentators whose works do
not so much categorize (striate) and enlighten (bring light into) difficult terrain, but produce that
terrain, creating obscure spaces and nebulous discourses that are immune to traditional academic
approaches” accessed December 25, 2014, http://thepublicschool.org/node/3753.
867
Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (London and
New York: MacMillan and Guilford Press, 1991); The Postmodern Turn (New York: Guilford
Press, 1997); and The Postmodern Adventure (New York: Guilford Press, 2001).
245
perverts a basic reality”; then it “masks the absence of a basic reality”; and finally, under the
regime of hyperreality, “it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure
simulacrum.”868
Baudrillard was also a practicing photographer, although he claimed it was merely a
“diversion or hobby.”869 His writings on photography are also somewhat odd. Although he
participated in a 1978 French conference with Flusser on the image, he didn’t write much on
photography until later in the eighties.870 In essays like “Xerox and Infinity” and “Radical
Exoticism” he claimed photography’s “affinity with everything that is savage and primitive, and
with that most essential of exoticisms, the exoticism of the Object, of the Other,” but in keeping
with his theories of hyperreality, he constructed photography as an illusion, a fiction.871 He
wrote: “Today it is very hard indeed to find a subject—or even an object—that does not collude
with the camera lens,” and proclaimed the “great game” of photography over.872 And yet, he
attempts to spin a theory out of this, suggesting that, “photography is our exorcism. Primitive
868
Baudrillard, Simulations, 11. In the next paragraph, Baudrillard elaborates: “The transition
from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing marks
the decisive turning point. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notion
of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which
there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgment to separate true from
false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in
advance.” Ibid., 12.
869
See also “The Ecstasy of Photography,” Interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg, Jean Baudrillard:
Art and Artifact, ed. Nicholas Zurbrugg (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997), 32; Jean
Baudrillard, Fotografien 1985-1998 (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 1999).
870
French Conferences Binders 3 and 4, Vilém Flusser Archive.
871
Jean Baudrillard, “Radical Exoticism,” The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme
Phenomenon (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 151.
872
Ibid., 152.
246
society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors, we have our images.”873 Unlike Flusser,
Baudrillard does not factor the digital revolution into his formulations. However, in an interview
Baudrillard suggested that, if had he spent more time thinking about photography, it might have
affected his thinking around technology, a site that instigates an “inversion of the relationship
between the subject and the object.”874
For U.S. writers and artists in the eighties, however, Baudrillard’s apocalyptic vision was
key. This is another area where Baudrillard and Flusser overlap: both were adopted by the U.S.
art world—and particularly by Artforum magazine—except that Baudrillard became one of the
most important voices in U.S. art of that period while Flusser’s impact was minor. François
Cusset argues that, in the late seventies and early eighties, there was not much French art in U.S.
art magazines, but lots of French theory.875 According to Sylvère Lotringer, the 1983
873
Ibid., 153.
874
“I offer a very critical account of technology and of technology’s impact on the world. I’m
not the only one to do this—everyone speaks of technology this way. But now, having
reconsidered technology in terms of photography, I’m beginning to formulate another
hypothesis—I’m asking myself if technology isn’t the site of an inversion of the relationship
between the subject and the object. Rather than thinking of technology as the site of a subject
which, by means of technology, masters the world, captures the world and so on, I’m beginning
to wonder if—almost ironically or paradoxically—technology may not prove to be the site where
the world or the object plays with the subject. In other words, there’s a difference of vision. Let’s
say that the rather critical or pejorative vision of technology represents a first position. But now,
from a second position, I’m more interested in seeing technology as an instrument of magic or
illusion—an illusion of the world, but also a positive kind of illusion or play of illusion. Perhaps
this is the ultimate kind of playing with reality.” Baudrillard interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg,
“The Ecstasy of Photography,” Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artifact, 38.
875
Cusset, French Theory, 231. “From Soho, which was already on its way to becoming
institutionalized, to the improvised galleries and militant bohemian squats in the East Village, a
few key texts were being circulated: Barthes’s Mythologies, for an understanding of how brands
and labels functioned as social myths; The Mirror of Production (which had a significant impact
on the sociofeminist artist Barbara Kruger) and The Consumer Society by Baudrillard, to glean
the tools provided by a critical semiology; and even Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, to see
oneself reflected in his political theory concerning the margins of society,” (ibid., 234). The
247
promotional tour for Simulations attracted only a handful of students at universities, and so they
considered targeting curators and artists. Soon everyone was reading Baudrillard and “using him
in their work.”876 Cusset writes that this reception of Baudrillard represented an “American
understanding” or “reactivation” of his ideas, although it could be a “literalism.”877 For instance,
the relatively apolitical Baudrillard was made into a political figure through art that addressed the
AIDS crisis and threats against reproductive rights.878 His enthusiastic reception was also, from
Cusset’s perspective, “the beginning of a misinterpretation that was to leave its mark on the New
York art scene” and “remain in the annals of the tormented relationship between artistic practice
and theoretical discourse.”879 The New York art-world’s embrace of Baudrillard climaxed,
however, with two lectures—one at the Whitney Museum and one at Columbia University—in
1987, in which Baudrillard denounced his U.S. followers, claiming that simulation “couldn’t be
represented” and that U.S. artists were misrepresenting his ideas.880 Meanwhile, the collective
Group Material organized an exhibition at White Columns titled “Anti-Baudrillard (Resistance)”
strains of art most associated with French theory include Appropriation, Neo-Geo, and NeoExpressionism.
876
Ibid., 235.
877
Ibid., 238-239.
878
A recently released book of Baudrillard’s writings, originally published in newspapers (and
published in French in 1985) covering François Mitterand’s rise to power as France’s first
Socialist president and the Socialist Party’s fraught alliance with the French Communist Party,
argues for a more “political” Baudrillard. See Jean Baudrillard, The Divine Left: A Chronicle of
the Years 1977-1984, trans. David L. Sweet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).
879
Cusset, French Theory, 235. What Cusset is referring to specifically is the championing of
Baudrillard by artists like Peter Halley, a painter who wrote and lectured on Baudrillard whom
Cusset describes as a “Baudrillard specialist,” (ibid., 239).
880
Cusset, French Theory, 238. Baudrillard had also been put on the masthead of Artforum as a
contributing editor, without being consulted—when he wasn’t even particularly familiar with the
magazine.
248
accompanied by a press release that argued Baudrillard was the figurehead for “leisure-class
theory” that was “operatively submissive,” in which activism is perceived as “illusory.” The
exhibition functioned as a form of resistance to such a stance, born of “necessity and genuine day
to day existence.”881
Baudrillard’s 1991 book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place was a symptom of his
“apolitical”—or perhaps tone-deaf—stance. In it, he argued that the war took place through the
mediation of television screens—that in the new era of war, the fight was basically virtual:
images rather than events were “real.” In some ways, the Gulf War reflected earlier
developments like the Vietnam War, the first televised conflict—but also subsequent wars in
which we see images on television that have become sanitized for a mass viewing audience.882
Ultimately, Baudrillard’s position seemed itself a kind of exhausted position. As one
biographical assessment states: “Baudrillard has had a particularly poor record as a social and
881
A press release accompanying the show stated: “A theoretical jungle surrounds us.
Overgrown from inactivity, this jungle harbors real dangers—the dissolution of history, the
disfiguration of any alternative actuality, and the attempt to disown practice. Activism is
perceived as illusory in an illusory culture. In this self-imposed confinement art becomes
comfortable, criticality becomes style, politics becomes idealism, and ultimately information
becomes an impossibility. Group Material refutes this operatively submissive philosophy with
this proposed exhibition, “Anti-Baudrillard (Resistance).” “Anti-Baudrillard (Resistance)” is a
collection of art objects and images that depict an undeniable political reality and form a picture
of widespread, international resistance. This resistance denies the self-indulgence of leisure-class
theory. It is resistance born from necessity and genuine day to day existence.” Press release for
“Anti-Baudrillard (Resistance)” at White Columns, February 6 - 28 1987, accessed December
27, 2014, http://www.whitecolumns.org/archive/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/93#.
882
Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton (Bloomington :
Indiana University Press, 1995). Originally published as La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu
(Mayenne, France: Editions Galilée, 1991).
249
political analyst and forecaster. As a political analyst, Baudrillard has often been superficial and
off the mark.”883
Flusser tended not to tie his theories to specific political events. The one contemporary
event he wrote about was the 1989 Romanian coup and televised assassination of Nicolae
Ceauşescu—not to claim that it was an illusion or didn’t take place, but to underscore what he
had previously argued: that text culture (“history”) was being eclipsed by image culture, marking
the beginning of post-history, and that the televised execution of Ceauşescu was evidence of this
unfolding, increasingly, on television.884 To reiterate, Flusser never had the same status as
Baudrillard did in the United States, however, and it is the French pessimism, or “apocalyptic”
thinking, that has been more influential in academia—at least until very recently, with the rise of
activism in the U.S. and movements like Occupy Wall Street. Baudrillard has served as a
precursor to newer strains of apocalyptic thinking, like Accelerationism, which I will discuss
shortly, particularly with his idea of “implosion” or “collapse”—a favored term amongst
contemporary theorists of social codes (economics, politics, culture, sexuality) prevailing under
883
“Jean Baudrillard” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, posted March 2007,
accessed December 26, 2014, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/#Bib. The entry
continues, “In an essay ‘Anorexic Ruins’ published in 1989, he read the Berlin wall as a sign of a
frozen history, of an anorexic history, in which nothing more can happen, marked by a ‘lack of
events’ and the end of history, taking the Berlin wall as a sign of a stasis between communism
and capitalism. Shortly thereafter, rather significant events destroyed the wall that Baudrillard
took as permanent and opened up a new historical era.” In an Artforum obituary following
Baudrillard’s death in 2007, Lotringer wrote, “Félix [Guattari] condemned his fatalism and
irresponsible politics, not realizing that Jean was political, if in very different ways: He was a
historian of the future, looking back from the end of the world at contemporary society.” Sylvère
Lotringer, “Passages: Jean Baudrillard,” Artforum (Summer 2007), accessed January 5, 2015,
https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=200706&id=15371.
884
Vilém Flusser, “Das Politische im Zeitalter der technischen Bilder,” Volkszeitung, August 17,
1990.
250
modern society. Nonetheless, Baudrillard has been left out of some of the initial surveys of that
literature.885
Paul Virilio and Gilles Deleuze
Two other French thinkers who ought to be mentioned in this context are Paul Virilio and
Gilles Deleuze. Flusser is often compared to Virilio, partly because Virilio, who trained as an
architect, was steeped in phenomenology and ideas of perception and the body—but also because
Virilio argued, as Flusser did in “War and the State of Things,” that military conflict drives
technological innovation and has epistemological effects.886 Virilio initially viewed this
phenomenon in terms of speed. In Speed and Politics (1977), he put forward the term dromology,
the phenomenon of speed, arguing that speed more than technology, per se, has impacted society
and history—and particularly the speed of transmission in technologies from transportation to
communication.887 Speed is not merely a theme; it’s a structuring principle in how we experience
885
Eight issues of the independent philosophy journal Collapse (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic)
have been published since 2005 and include writers like Nick Land and Reza Negarestani,
associated with Accelerationism. Also see #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Falmouth,
UK: Urbanomic, 2014).
886
Andreas Ströhl mentions Virilio in terms of phenomenology. See Ströhl, Writings, xii. Also
see Christiane Heibach, Literatur in Internet: Theorie und Praxis einer kooperativen Ästhetik
(Dissertation, University of Heidelberg, 2000), accessed July 23, 2015,
http://www.netzliteratur.net/heibach/heibach_diss.pdf.
887
Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, trans. Mark Polizzotti (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006).
Originally published as Vitesse et politique: essai de dromologie (Paris: Galilée, 1977). Later, in
an interview with Friedrich Kittler, he would state that contemporary global society had hit a
“wall of acceleration,” presaging the theoretical celebration of “accelerationism”—although
Virilio was talking about actual speed rather than the hastened demise of capitalism. Friedrich
Kittler interview with Paul Virilio in John Armitage, Virilio Live: Selected Interviews (London:
Sage, 2001), 97-98; quoted in Ian James, Paul Virilio (Abingdon, England and New York:
Routledge, 2007), 30.
251
space and the world.888 Virilio’s writing style even reflects this, since he often omits articles and
capitalizes significant terms, in the same way Flusser used quotation marks to emphasize
important words and phrases. In The Vision Machine (1988) and Negative Horizon (1984) and
later works like The Information Bomb (1998), Virilio focused on the way new technologies,
from television to satellites and video surveillance, change our understanding and experience of
space.889 Like Flusser, Virilio drew on phenomenology. However, if Flusser’s project initially
involved treating everyday objects as phenomenological interfaces, Virilio focused on how our
experience of space is inseparable from the positioning and movement of the body in relation to
its environment.890 This extended to art. Unlike Flusser, who was involved with art as a critic and
commentator (and, very briefly, a curator), Virilio was a practicing still life painter, early in his
life. However, unlike Flusser, who drew inspiration from abstract art (one senses this in Flusser’s
888
Ibid., 15. Other books published during Flusser’s lifetime and which intersect with Flusser’s
concerns are: Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Philip Beitchman (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1991), originally published as Esthétique de la disparition: essai sur le
cinématisme (Paris: Balland, 1980); War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick
Camiller (London and New York: Verso, 1989), originally published as Guerre et cinema (Paris:
Editions de l’Etoile: Diffusion, Seuil, 1984); The Lost Dimension (New York: Semiotext(e),
1991), originally published as L'espace critique: essai sur l'urbanisme et les nouvelles
technologies (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1984); and The Vision Machine, trans. J. Rose
(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press; and London: British Film Institute, 1994),
originally published as La Machine de vision: essai sur les nouvelles techniques de
representation (Paris: Galliée, 1988).
889
Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso,
2005). Originally published as La Bombe informatique (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1998). Virilio’s
approach earned him the wrath of Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, who argued in Intellectual
Impostures (1998) that Virilio’s understanding of space, based on his reading of Einstein and
Newton, was “confused” and “meaningless.” Other writers have countered that Sokal and
Bricmont overlooked the philosophical context of Virilio’s argument, which was based on
phenomenology and perception. See Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures:
Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science (London: Profile, 1998). Quoted in James, Paul
Virilio, 37.
890
James, Paul Virilio, 13.
252
descriptions of technical images as made up of abstract particles), Virilio eschewed abstraction,
drawing instead on Gestalt theories and arguing that “there is no abstraction, everything presents
a figure.”891 For Virilio, accelerated speed leads to a loss of immediate presence and alters lived,
bodily experience—the opposite of the Futurists who celebrated speed and technology. Instead,
speed leads to a “decline in existence” and a crisis of dimensions and representation.892 Like
Baudrillard, Virilio focused more on virtuality and the fact that new technologies separate the
visual from what we can touch, inaugurating an “aesthetic of disappearance,” in which stable
images like painting or sculpture give way to “unstable” images such as those of cinema, which
restructures our perception in ways we can’t always identify.893 The making of an image without
an object becomes a loss of spatial reference and embodiment.
Interestingly, both Virilio and Flusser compare television to a window in a house. But
where, for Flusser, television could potentially become an “improved window” for
communication, for Virilio television was an emitter of “false daylight” that alters our perception
of time and space and produces a misleading impression of proximity and a disconnect between
direct and indirect information and experience.894 An example arrived to support Flusser’s
argument two years before his death: the 1989 Romanian revolution, in which citizens took over
state-controlled television. (The events of December 1989 are depicted in Harun Farocki’s 1992
documentary film, “Videograms of a Revolution,” made from hundreds of hours of Romanian
891
Quoted in James, Paul Virilio, 18. Also see Virilio’s foreword in Paul Virilio, Negative
Horizon (1984), trans. Michael Degener (London: Continuum, 2005).
892
Quoted in James, Paul Virilio, 46.
893
See Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (1980), trans. Philip Beitchman (New
York: Semiotext(e), 1991).
894
Ibid.
253
footage.) By comparison, Ian James cites Scott McQuire’s example of the television coverage of
Nelson Mandela being released from prison in 1991 as “echoing Virilio”: the world’s major
networks showed up to broadcast Mandela’s release, but the event was delayed.895 Instead of a
celebratory event of political liberation, what was aired was “dead time”: a wasted moment of
global connectivity with broadcasters scrambling to fill empty space and time.
For Flusser, technology offered new forms of communication that could potentially lead
to the “reprogramming” or dissolution of repressive apparatuses. For Virilio, technology resulted
in a “market of synthetic perception”896 in which virtual reality dominates over actual
experience, leading to a diminished existence in phenomenological space and time.897 Moreover,
the screen, one of Flusser’s favorite motifs, in which we might encounter the face of the Other,
becomes for Virilio the site of spectacle. It is where an endless war driven by technology is
played out and “the attention of each is mobilized, whether he likes it or not. The horizon of the
control monitor supplants both the military communiqué and the press, that mainstream press
still necessary for analysis and reflection.”898
895
James, Paul Virilio, 61-62. Also see Scott McQuire, Visions of Modernity: Representation,
Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE
Publications, 1998). In support of Virilio, James also gives the example of military conflicts in
Iraq and how what one saw on television differed from what was experienced on the ground.
896
Virilio, The Vision Machine, 59.
897
This also relates to Virilio’s conception of war, laid out in Bunker Archeology, in which
concrete Nazi bunkers on the Atlantic coast of France built during World War II conveyed how
“real” space and territory were the sites of conflict. Now, war is ongoing, not temporally or
geographically confined. See Paul Virilio, Bunker Archeology, trans. George Collins (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 1994).
898
Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light, trans. Michael Degener (London:
Continuum, 2005). Quoted in James, Paul Virilio, 86.
254
The word “control” is also central to another French thinker with whom Flusser is rarely
compared, but who begs mention here.899 Gilles Deleuze is perhaps best known in U.S. art and
art history for his books co-written with Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Part II (1980),
which reconsidered the human subject and cultural structures, approaching them as networks of
control, and for his idea of “multiplicity,” outlined in multiple works, which laid the ground
work for writers like Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt.900 For artists and art writers, the most
popular of Deleuze and Guattari’s formulations has been the rhizome, derived from biology and
emphasizing the expanding roots of a plant as an organizational model rather than the historically
privileged genealogical tree. The rhizome was used to describe non-hierarchical, heterogeneous,
and decentered states and has been applied frequently to computer networks—although Deleuze
and Guattari actually used it to discuss books. I will not linger on Deleuze’s notions of the
rhizome or control here; instead, these will be discussed in the section on U.S. media theorist
899
Two exceptions in the Flusser literature that draw from Deleuze, although not significantly,
are Rainer Guldin’s essay on Flusser and film, “‘Mit Schere und Klebstoff’: Überlegungen zur
filmischen Techno-Imagination bei Vilém Flusser,” Flusser Studies 10 (November 2010): 1-24,
accessed August 10, 2015,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/guldin-mitschere-klebstoff.pdf, and Matthew Fuller’s “The Camera that Ate Itself,” Flusser Studies 4 (May
2007): 1-31, accessed August 10, 2015,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/fuller_the_ca
mera.pdf.
900
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert
Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983);
Originally published as French Capitalisme et Schizophrénie. L’Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Editions de
Minuit, 1972); A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Part II, trans. Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Originally published as
Capitalisme et Schizophrénie, tome 2: Mille Plateaux (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980). Also see
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New
York: Penguin Press, 2004) and Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
255
Alexander Galloway, who has drawn heavily from Deleuze. Rather, I want to propose some
connections with Flusser’s thought that might be fruitful for future study: Deleuze’s Difference
and Difference (1968), considered in philosophy circles his magnum opus;901 Deleuze and
Guattari’s attempt to fuse nature and culture and their emphasis on the nomadic character of
knowledge and identity; their book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975);902 Flusser’s
philosophy of the technical image in relation to Deleuze’s books Cinema I: The MovementImage (1983) and Cinema II: The Time-Image (1985);903 and Deleuze’s idea of the actual and the
virtual.904 Furthermore, although it is not central to this discussion, it is perhaps notable that
Deleuze and Flusser shared a comparable trauma in their youth. During World War II, Deleuze’s
901
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994). Originally published as Différence et répétition (Paris: PUF, 1968).
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls Difference and Repetition Deleuze’s “magnum opus.”
Accessed August 8, 2015, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/. James Williams calls the
book the “keystone” to Deleuze’s philosophy. See James Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s “Difference
and Repetition”: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2003). In the preface to the 1994 English edition, Deleuze wrote that thinking about difference
was central to all his subsequent work and laid the groundwork for ideas like the rhizome. See
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xv.
902
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Originally published as Kafka: pour une
literature mineure (Paris: Édition de Minuit, 1975).
903
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), originally published as Cinéma
I: l'Image-Mouvement (Paris: Minuit, 1983), and Cinema II: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989),
originally published as Cinéma II: l'Image-temps (Paris: Minuit, 1985).
904
See for instance Gilles Deleuze, “The Actual and the Virtual,” Dialogues II, trans. Eliot Ross
Albert (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press), 148-152. This is believed to be
the draft of an unfinished essay or chapter. Also see Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual:
Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002) and Rob
Shields, The Virtual (New York: Routledge, 2003) and "Virtualities," Theory Culture and
Society 23:2-3 (2006): 284-86.
256
brother was arrested by the Nazis in Paris for resistance-related activities and died on a train
while being deported to Auschwitz.
Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition might be seen as an analogue to Flusser’s On Doubt:
a similar, 1960s critique of Western philosophy and its grounding in the concept of reason. In the
same way as Flusser wanted to overturn Descartes’s cogito, a mode of thought based in certainty,
Difference and Repetition was a rewriting of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), with an
attempt to prioritize difference over identity.905 Deleuze’s goal was to reposition Kant’s universal
experience in actual, grounded, concrete experience—influenced, notably, by Husserl’s
phenomenology. Deleuze’s argument also involved critiquing Kant’s notion of genesis—an idea
also addressed in his book Bergsonism (1966), on the French philosopher who had written
Creative Evolution, and which serves as an analogue to Flusser’s critiques of evolution in
Vampyroteuthis infernalis and other texts. In Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze
and Guattari put forth a more complex critique of the nature-culture split that has been central to
Western thought for several centuries. Written in a visionary style, it echoes Flusser’s sciencefiction philosophy (with a similar interest in games and game theory), although with a FreudoMarxism that Flusser eschewed. “Everything is a machine,” Deleuze and Guattari write in the
opening section of Anti-Oedipus. “Celestial machines, the stars or rainbows in the sky, alpine
machines—all of them connected … There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a
process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producingmachines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species life: the self
905
See Keith Ansell-Pearson, Germinal Life: The Repetition and Difference of Deleuze (New
York and London: Routledge, 1999).
257
and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever.”906 In his preface
to Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault wrote that the book exhorts us to “prefer what is positive and
multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems” and
to “believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.”907 This is close to the Flusser
of Natural:Mind, but also the Vampyroteuthis infernalis, who inhabits the flows of the ocean’s
pelagic zone. Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari’s project in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateus
is to upend not just history, but the “bureaucrats of pure reason” of Western philosophy.908 In
doing so, they frequently mention the State apparatus and the Oedipal apparatus—even the
“perverse writing apparatus” of Kafka, who would occupy their interest in Kafka: Toward a
Minor Literature.909
Flusser’s relationship to Kafka has been discussed throughout this dissertation, as that of
a kind of “younger brother” to the earlier Prague writer. Deleuze and Guattari pick up from
Walter Benjamin’s essays “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death” and “Some
Reflections on Kafka,” in which Kafka’s rejection of traditional family ties and the state become
points of political interest.910 For Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka’s oeuvre is firstly “a rhizome, a
906
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert
Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 9.
907
Michel Foucault, “Preface,” Anti-Oedipus, xiil.
908
Gilles Deleuze, "Nomad Thought," in The New Nietzsche, ed. Donald B. Allison
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 148; Semiotext(e), Nietzsche's Return 3:1 (1978): 20.
Quoted in Brian Massumi’s “Translator’s Foreward: Pleasures of Philosophy,” A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Part II, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1987), ix.
909
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 3.
910
Walter Benjamin, "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death" and “Some
Reflections on Kafka,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, edited and introduced by Hannah
Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 111-140; 141-146.
258
burrow” that can be entered in multiple ways and “prevents the introduction of the enemy, the
Signifier and those attempts to interpret a work that is actually only open to experimentation.”911
He serves, then, as a device for disrupting the reign of structuralism and semiotics in French
cultural interpretation. Where Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis overlaps with Flusser is in the
frequent description of Kafka’s writing as a “machine of expression” that is capable of
disorganizing its own form and content: individual authors give way to a “collective machine of
expression.”912 Kafka accomplishes this by using animals who break down the nature-culture
divide, in stories such as “The Metamorphosis,” or more broadly in the “deterritorialization” of
language. Like Flusser, who felt that Kafka’s “inauthentic” German highlighted the absurdity of
apparatus, Deleuze and Guattari focus on how Kafka’s German becomes a mere written “paper
language,”913 a marginal position that begs a number of Flusserian-sounding questions:
How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or
not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are
forced to serve? … How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in
relation to one's own language? Kafka answers: steal the baby from its crib, walk
the tightrope.914
Deleuze’s two books on cinema, Cinema I: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema II:
The Time-Image (1985) should also be mentioned, although their approach differs considerably
from Flusser’s writing on the technical image. For Deleuze, cinema provides a model for
philosophy, much the way François Laruelle, an heir to Deleuze in contemporary French
philosophy, has used photography as a philosophical model, arguing that objectivity, as posited
911
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 3.
912
Ibid., 18.
913
Ibid., 19.
914
Ibid.
259
by traditional photography narratives, does not exist.915 Drawing from C.S. Peirce and Henri
Bergson, in Cinema I Deleuze argues that film is a “composition of images and signs,” a “preverbal intelligible context (pure semiotics).”916 What is important here, however, is his concept
of the “movement-image”: how cinema’s movement affects us perceptually. Rather than the
ancient succession of images in static pictures, with film we fuse with the light and movement of
the image such that, even when the film is over, we are still perceptually in motion. Hence,
although film is immaterial, it can affect us materially. In Cinema II, Deleuze expands upon this.
Only, now the movement-image is described in its postwar context as a “time-image”: the
“coexistence of distinct durations” whereby a single event can belong to “several levels” or
“sheets” of the past, coexisting in non-chronological order.917 These sheets of the past, mixed
with the present, result in the “virtual” and the “actual.” (Different from “virtual reality” in its
conceptual rather than technical nature.) The virtual is defined in Cinema II as a “series of
scattered images which form a large circuit,” that functions like a mirror image to the “actual”
present.918
Deleuze’s concepts of the actual and the virtual preoccupied him until his death. In a draft
for an essay titled “The Actual and the Virtual”—perhaps a chapter for a last, unfinished book—
Deleuze circles back to ideas put forward in Difference and Repetition, but also in the cinema
915
See François Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography, trans. Robin Mackay (London:
Urbanomic, 2011).
916
Deleuze, Cinema I, ix.
917
Deleuze, Cinema II, xii.
918
Ibid., 79.
260
books.919 If the virtual, in the sixties, was formed of “multiplicities” involving relations among
heterogeneous components, by the nineties the actual is that which “surrounds itself in a cloud of
virtual images,” and this cloud is “composed of a series of more or less extensive coexisting
circuits, along which virtual images are distributed.”920 Moreover, these “virtuals vary in kind as
well as in their degree of proximity from the actual particles by which they are both emitted and
absorbed.”921 Using the language of information theory and physics to describe how philosophy
functions, Deleuze intersects here with Flusser, who used the word particles to describe images,
as well as arguing that geography had been transformed into a topographical “wave trough.”
While the legacy of Deleuze has been more prominently absorbed into Laruelle’s “fractal”
philosophy, the interplay between Deleuze’s late formulations of the “actual object and the
virtual image”922 and Flusser’s trajectory from a phenomenology of objects to a theory of
immaterial images might be further explored. (This is particularly true in the age of internet
transmission and three-dimensional printing, in which images become objects, and vice versa).
Finally, their approach to critique: if Flusser felt that the Frankfurt School had turned into
the Ouroboros that has “eaten its own tail,” Deleuze was similarly bent on critiquing critique. In
Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), he argued that while critique restricts or undermines one thing,
it should also reveal or release another, getting at the genesis of what it critiques.923 Similarly,
919
Gilles Deleuze, “The Actual and the Virtual,” Dialogues II (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2007), 148-52.
920
Ibid., 148.
921
Ibid.
922
Ibid., 151.
923
“Kant merely pushed a very old conception of critique to the limit, a conception which saw
critique as a force which should be brought to bear on all claims of knowledge and truth, but not
on knowledge and truth themselves; a force which should be brought to bear on all claims to
261
while Flusser’s techno-utopianism has been criticized for being naïve or overly optimistic, he
argued for alternatives to the apparatus of reason and the sorts of technology that culminated in
Auschwitz: communications media as liberating, based in models like the televised Rumanian
revolution, rather than technology leading to totalitarianism, or a diminished phenomenological
existence.
German Media Theory and Friedrich Kittler
While Flusser was present in the U.S. art world, particularly with his “Curie’s Children”
column in Artforum, he was embraced more fully during his lifetime and after his death in
Germany. I have already stated that his writings are well represented in German photographytheory anthologies and Kunstforum devoted a long section to Flusser, memorializing his death.924
Virtually all the major monographs and publications on Flusser in German relate to media and
communications theory: Elizabeth Neswald’s Media Theology: The Work of Vilém Flusser
(1998); Oliver Fahle, Michael Hanke, and Andreas Zimmermann’s Technical Images and
morality, but not on morality itself.” Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson (London and New York: Continuum, 1986), 89. Originally published as Nietzsche et
la philosophie (Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1962).
924
Hubertus von Amelunxen and Wolfgang Kemp, eds., Theorie der Fotografie IV, 1980-1995
(Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2000); Peter Geimer, Theorien der Fotografie. Zur Einführung
(Hamburg, Germany: Junius, 2009); Bernd Stiegler, Theoriegeschichte der Photographie
(Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006) and Texte zur Theorie der Fotografie (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam,
2010); See also Texte zur Theorie der Fotografie, ed. Bernd Stiegler (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam,
2010) and Hilde van Gelder, Photography Theory in Historical Perspective: Case Studies from
Contemporary Art (Chichester, UK and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). The
appreciations in Kunstforum were written by Florian Rötzer, Michael Bielicky, Jochen Exposure,
Dietmar Kamper, Elisabeth Brockmann, Louis Bec, Gottfried Hunter, Volker Rapsch, Andreas
Müller-Pohle, Felix Philipp Ingold, Peter Strasser, Harry Pross, Hans-Joachim Müller, Abraham
Moles, Karl Gerstner, Peter Weibel, David Frankel, Hermann J. Sottong, Friedrich Kittler,
Daniela Goldmann, Fred Forest, Irmgard Zepf, Norbert Bolz, Crystal Woodward, and Bernd
Wingert. Kunstforum International, no. 117 (1992): 68-111.
262
Communicology: The Media Theory of Vilém Flusser (2009); and Andreas Ströhl, Vilém Flusser:
Phenomenology of Communication (2013).925 Oliver Bidlo’s Vilém Flusser: Introduction (2008)
and Nils Röller and Silvia Wagnermaier’s Absolute Vilém Flusser (2003) are also related mostly
to media and communications theory.926 Two exceptions are Rainer Guldin’s Philosophy
Between Languages (2005), which reads Flusser through the practice and philosophy of
translation, and Marcel René Marburger’s Flusser and the Arts (2011), the self-published
dissertation of a former supervisor of the Flusser Archive in Berlin.927 Flusser’s archive is in
Berlin and currently overseen by the German media theorist and scholar Siegfried Zielinski. In
Zielinski’s books such as Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archeology of Hearing and
Seeing by Technical Means, one can see the influence of Flusser—particularly Flusser’s idea that
“media” can be everything from everyday objects to technical images and stretch back, past the
industrial revolution to ancient tools.928 Zielinski has also developed the concept of
“variantology,” which opens up media and communications studies to art, music, theology,
925
Elizabeth Neswald, Medien-Theologie: Das Werk Vilém Flussers (Cologne, Weimar, and
Vienna: Böhlau, 1998); Oliver Fahle, Michael Hanke, and Andreas Zimmermann, eds.,
Technobilder und Kommunikologie. Die Medientheorie Vilém Flussers (Berlin: Parerga, 2009);
Andreas Ströhl, Vilém Flusser (1920-1991). Phänomenologie der Kommunikation (Cologne,
Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau, 2013).
926
Oliver Bidlo, Vilém Flusser: Einführung (Essen, Germany: Oldib Verlag, 2008); Nils Röller
and Silvia Wagnermaier, eds., absolute Vilém Flusser (Freiburg, Germany: Orange Press, 2003).
927
Rainer Guldin, Philosophieren zwischen den Sprachen: Vilém Flussers Werk (Munich:
Wilhelm Fink, 2005) and Marcel René Marburger, Flusser und die Kunst (Cologne, 2011; selfpublished dissertation).
928
Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archeology of Hearing and Seeing
by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Entwerfen und Entbergen: Aspekte
einer Genealogie der Projektion: 10 Jahre International Flusser Lectures (Cologne, Germany:
König, 2010); Audiovisionen: Kino und Fernsehen als Zwischenspiele in der Geschichte
(Reinbek bei Hamburg, Germany: Rowohlt, 1989); and Veit Harlan: Analysen und Materialien
zur Auseinandersetzung mit einem Film-Regisseur des deutschen Faschismus (Frankfurt,
Germany: R.G. Fischer, 1981). See also Siegfried Zielinski, [… After the Media] (Minneapolis:
Univocal, 2013).
263
natural science, and other fields, and overlooked precedents, particularly in the Middle East.
Flusser’s essays are included in two volumes of Variantology.929 I will return to Flusser’s
enduring influence on contemporary German media and communications theory momentarily.
First, however, I will provide some background.
Phil Gochenour, who translated one of Flusser’s essays for Leonardo, compares Flusser
to media theorists like Niklas Luhmann, Norbert Bolz, Heinz von Foerster and Ernst von
Glasersfeld. Luhmann—who studied at Harvard University with Talcott Parsons, a sociologist
interested in the work of Norbert Wiener—developed a strain of systems theory, while Bolz, like
Flusser, predicted the disappearance of the book in the wake of the digital revolution. Heinz von
Foerster and Ernst von Glasersfeld were associated with the radical constructivist movement and
second-order cybernetics, which argues that knowledge is non-transferable and humans are
essentially closed-circuit beings.930 Von Foerster is perhaps the most apt of these comparisons,
929
See the Variantology series edited by Zielinski and others: Siegfried Zielinski and Silvia M.
Wagnermaier, eds. Variantology – On Deep Time Relations Of Arts, Sciences and
Technologies (Cologne: Walther König, 2005); Siegfried Zielinski and David Link, eds.,
Variantology 2 – On Deep Time Relations Of Arts, Sciences and Technologies (Cologne:
Walther König, 2006); Siegfried Zielinski and Eckhard Fürlus, eds., Variantology 3 – On Deep
Time Relations Of Arts, Sciences and Technologies in China and Elsewhere (Cologne: Walther
König, 2008); Siegfried Zielinski and Eckhard Fürlus, eds., Variantology 4 – On Deep Time
Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies in the Arabic-Islamic World and Beyond (Cologne:
Walther Koenig, 2010); Siegfried Zielinski and Eckhard Fürlus, eds., Variantology 5 –
Neapolitan Affairs: On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies (Cologne:
Walther Koenig, 2011). Volumes 4 and 5 include Flusser essays: Vilém Flusser, “Means and
Seas,” Variantology 5 – Neapolitan Affairs: On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and
Technologies (Cologne: Walther Koenig, 2011), 245-253; and Vilém Flusser, “Image and Text,”
Variantology 4 – On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies in the ArabicIslamic World and Beyond (Cologne: Walther Koenig, 2010), 107-116.
930
Phil Gochenour, Introduction to Vilém Flusser, “The City as Wave-Trough in the ImageFlood,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 320-21. Luhmann wrote more than seventy
books and nearly four hundred articles, most of which have not been translated into English. An
essay by Flusser appeared in Zeichen der Freiheit (Bern, Switzerland: Benteli, 1992) along with
Niklas Luhmann and Charles Daniel; Norbert Bolz, Weltbürgertum und Globalisierung (Munich:
Fink, 2000); Medien (Opladen, Germany: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1987).
264
since he knew or worked with a variety of the postwar figures already mentioned: John von
Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Gregory Bateson, and Margaret Mead.931 Gochenour suggests as
other possible touchstones the Chileans Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, who studied
biology and cognition.932
The German media theorist with whom Flusser is most often compared, however, is
Friedrich Kittler. Flusser met Kittler, who started off as a literary scholar, at the Ars Electronica
festival in Linz, Austria in 1988, where Baudrillard and von Foerster were present for a
conference on new technology, as well.933 Following that meeting, Kittler invited Flusser to the
University of Bochum. It would be Flusser’s first—and, unfortunately, his last—guest
professorship in Germany. At the time, Kittler was a young professor who had just published
Discourse Networks 1800-1900 (1985) and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986).934 Influenced
by sixties pop and counter-culture and French poststructuralism, Kittler was an anomaly for a
931
Ernst von Glasersfeld, Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning, (Bristol,
PA: Falmer Press, Taylor & Francis Inc., 1995) and Heinz von Foerster and Albert Müller, et al.,
The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name: Seven Days with Second-Order Cybernetics
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). Also see the Radical Constructivism website,
accessed December 29, 2014, http://www.radicalconstructivism.com/.
932
Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of
the Living (Dordecht, Germany: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1980) and The Tree of Knowledge:
The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Boston: Shambhala, 1987).
933
The proceedings were published as Philosophies of the New Technologies, with essays by
Jean Baudrillard, Hannes Böhringer, Vilém Flusser, Heinz von Foerster, Friedrich Kittler, Peter
Weibel. Or: Ars Electronica. Jean Baudrillard, Hannes Böhringer, Vilém Flusser, Heinz von
Foerster, Friedrich Kittler, Peter Weibel, Philosophien der neuen Technologie (Berlin: Merve
Verlag, 1989).
934
Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Mettleer, with Chris Cullins
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). Originally published as Aufschreibesysteme
1800/1900 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1985). Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,
Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1999). Originally published as Grammophon, Film Typewriter (Berlin: Brinkmann and Bose,
1986).
265
German academic: using thinkers like Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault in the context of media
scholarship, Kittler was accused of promoting nonsense; incomprehensible “Derridada.”935
Kittler’s shift from literature to media wasn’t accidental. During Goethe’s era, German
literature was partially the product of a new common German language, which came with a
multitude of political (and burgeoning nationalist) associations: Harold Innis, Walter Ong, and
McLuhan all argued that media have their own “messages” and biases which must be accounted
for, and Kittler was coming out of a specifically German position with regard to methodology: a
critique of the hermeneutic tradition exemplified by his thesis advisor Gerhard Kaiser and books
like Manfred Frank’s What is Neostructuralism?936 However, where Frank felt that French
theory was promoting the “dream of a subjectless machine,” Kittler picked up Lacan’s idea of
human consciousness as a camera that captures and stores images, even when no one else is
present. He was also interested in Lacan’s references to circuits and feedback, the mainstays of
cybernetics and information theory.937
Flusser was older and working in a more “para-academic” mode. But both were exploring
what might be called “technological epistemologies.”938 For instance, one of the major sections
935
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, “Translators’ Introduction,” Gramophone,
Film, Typewriter, xvi.
936
Manfred Frank, What Is Neostructuralism? trans. Sabine Wilke and Richard Gray
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Originally published as Was ist
Neostrukturalismus? (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1984).
937
Winthrop-Young and Wutz, “Translators’ Introduction,” Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,
xviii-xix. They also mention George Landow’s Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary
Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) as a North
American version of French poststructuralism informing literary theory.
938
The Flusser-Kittler connection has only recently begun to be explored, even in Germany, with
projects like “Flusser-Kittler: Mediations,” a seminar at MetafluxLab in Berlin in 2012 and 2013,
accessed December 29, 2014, http://metafluxlab.net/index.php/mediations.html.
266
of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter is given over to an exploration of the typewriter, and Flusser
had written about the typewriter as a phenomenological medium that serves as an interface
between us and the world.939 (It should also be pointed out that McLuhan had a chapter on the
typewriter in Understanding Media to which Kittler was responding—but Heidegger also
meditated on the typewriter, and Nietzsche was the first German professor of philology to use a
typewriter, which Kittler considers in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.)940 One senses in Kittler
and Flusser a similar antipathy toward McLuhan, albeit with a grudging acknowledgment of the
Canadian’s contribution to communications theory and his idea of technology as prosthesis.
However, in attempting to add rigor to McLuhan’s “medium as message” idea, Kittler turned to
recent French theory—Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida—while Flusser looked to earlier models
like Husserl, Heidegger, and Buber. Kittler is also more like the apocalyptic French writers
already mentioned, declaring that, “understanding media—despite McLuhan's title—remains an
impossibility precisely because the dominant information technologies of the day control all
understanding and its illusions.”941
And yet, Kittler and Flusser agree about memory and storage as places where machines
and the human body converge. As Kittler wrote, “blueprints and diagrams, regardless of whether
they control printing presses or mainframe computers, may yield historical traces of the unknown
939
Vilém Flusser, “Why Do Typewriters Go ‘Click?,’” The Shape of Things (London: Reaktion,
1999), 62-65. Originally published as “Warum eigentlich klappern die Schreibmaschinen?,” Vom
Stand der Dinge (Dusseldorf: Bollmann, 1993).
940
Kittler discusses Nietzsche’s Malling Hansen ball typewriter at length in Gramophone, Film,
Typewriter—a machine that prompted Nietzsche to say, “Our writing tools are also working on
our thoughts.” Quoted in Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, “Translators’ Introduction,”
Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, xxix. Also see Marshall McLuhan, “The Typewriter: Into the
Age of the Iron Whim,” Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1994), 258-264; Martin Heidegger, Parmenides (Frankfurt: V. Klosterman, 1982).
941
Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, xl.
267
called the body. What remains of people is what media can store and communicate.”942 Kittler
and Flusser might also be seen in partial agreement around the importance of war and
technology. For Kittler, war is the “father of all things”: the origin of most technology. (This puts
him closer to writers like Miguel De Landa.)943 Flusser wrote that to be anti-war was to be antidesign, because, as he points out in “War and the State of Things,” progressive design stems
from war; the goal of good design is to kill effectively: to reiterate, the technicians had to
apologize to the Nazis for their gas chambers not being good enough—i.e., not killing their
‘clients’ quickly enough,” revealing “what is lying in wait behind the notion of good design.”944
There is also an interesting overlap between Flusser and Kittler in thinking about writing.
As Winthrop-Young and Wutz point out, one of Kittler’s early essays, “Authorship and Love,”
looked at romantic literature from the perspective of the body. Manuscripts such as Dante’s tale
of Paolo and Francesca, which was meant to be read aloud, represent for Kittler a different
“body-medium” from works like Goethe’s tale of Werner and Lotte, which was intended to be
read by the solitary reader.945 Kittler would not, as Flusser did, predict an end to writing. In fact,
in a later essay, Kittler disagreed with him about the nature of writing and its linearity:
Media theorists, specifically Marshall McLuhan and, succeeding him, Vilém
Flusser, draw an absolute distinction between writing and the image that
ultimately rests on concepts of geometry. They contrast the linearity or onedimensionality of printed books with the irreducible two-dimensionality of
images. Simplified in this manner, it is a distinction that may hold true even when
942
Ibid.
943
Ibid., xli.
944
Flusser, “War and the State of Things,” The Shape of Things, 34.
945
Winthrop-Young and Wutz, “Translators’ Introduction,” Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,
xviii. See Friedrich Kittler, "Autorschaft und Liebe," Austreibung des Geistes aus den
Geisteswissenschaften: Programme des Poststrukturalismus (Paderborn, Germany: Schöningh,
1980), 142-173.
268
computer technology can model texts as strings, as it does today. But it suppresses
the simple facts emphasized long ago and, not coincidentally, by a nouveau
romancier, Michel Butor: the books used most often—the Bible, once upon a
time, and today more likely the telephone book—are certainly not read in a linear
manner.946
But Kittler and Flusser both used information theory to analyze how writing is
approached as a medium, and periodized. What interested Kittler was the Mediengründerzeit, a
term derived from Gründerzeit, or the early days (literally, “founders time”) in the first decades
of the Second German Empire, founded in 1871, which coincided with the age of technological
media.947 Edison was Kittler’s primary touchstone. For Flusser, history and post-history were
marked by the advent and impending end of writing. Furthermore, in terms of their respective
writing styles, Flusser’s para-literary, science fiction philosophy was developed partly through
working as a journalist, engaging with concrete poetry, and channeling Kafka and João
Guimarães Rosa. Kittler pushed the boundaries of German academic writing, employing the
jump-cuts of cinema and using free association and automatic writing. Kittler’s writing drew
criticism, being called a “theoretical fantasy literature” that read as if he was writing “not to
communicate, but to amuse himself.”948 Kittler has been adopted recently within U.S. academia,
particularly following the translation of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter in the late nineties. In
terms of Flusser’s German legacy, he continues to exist through the work of people like
Zielinski, which I will discuss further in the next section.
946
Friedrich Kittler, “Perspective and the Book,” trans. Sara Ogger, Grey Room, no. 5 (Autumn
2001): 38-52. One thinks here of Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book, which Flusser agreed to
review for Artforum—and never did, because of his death—and which considers the telephone as
a primary instrument for the Nazis, but also alongside Heidegger’s notion of “the call.”
947
Ibid., xxvii.
948
Ibid., xxxii.
269
Donna Haraway and Technological Feminism
The last contemporary thinker I want to mention is one who is also rarely seen in the
Flusser literature, although I think she and her peers very much belong there. Donna Haraway is
best known for her 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” a critique of the second wave “goddess”
feminism that placed women within or in alliance with nature, and against technology. Like
Flusser and many so-called postmodern writers, Haraway based her essay on fiction and irony,
arguing that this was a “rhetorical strategy and a political method” adopted to show how “the
boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.”949 That is to say,
contemporary science fiction was full of cyborgs, creatures who are both animal and machine,
but, ultimately, “we are all cyborgs … chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine
and organism.”950 Haraway’s motive was to move feminism away from a regressive, essentialist
direction in which women were seen as tied to the earth and sexual reproduction, and toward a
post-gender society. Technology, rather than being merely patriarchal and repressive, might be
used as a liberating model in which “nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be
the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The relationships for forming
wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the
cyborg world.”951
Flusser wasn’t a feminist. This was not to say he was not a feminist, but that he was an
Old World intellectual who didn’t think in terms of gender. In the essay “Our Dwelling” in Post949
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology and socialist-feminism in the
late twentieth century,” The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy
(London: Routledge, 2000), 291. Originally published as “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Socialist
Review 80 (1985): 65-108.
950
Ibid., 292.
951
Ibid., 293.
270
History, for instance, Flusser considers how the historical migration of peoples has been built
upon exploitation, particularly of women of color:
If we contemplate the suffered [sic] faces of these young women of color, we
recognize in them the triple rape of which they are victims; by their own men, by
the society in which we take part, and by apparatus. We recognize thus in such a
face, our own past: our own crimes. The face of the future has traces of our past.
And that is the real reason why we, the “bourgeois,” are on the move. We are
running away from our past. Our past chases us. The waves of babies with sick
bellies that spring from the uteruses of the young women of color propel us
toward progress.952
Over all, Flusser’s thinking runs more toward a merger of humans and technology that is
similar to Haraway’s. He is generally not thinking of a gendered (or post-gendered body); in fact,
he is often thinking backwards from the body to the machine. “Machines are simulated organs of
the human body,” he writes in “The Lever Strikes Back” in The Shape of Things.953 For him,
thinking forward is imagining how computer code can bridge the cultural gap between East and
West, as well as human and robot.954 And yet, in the same way as feminists have both mined and
critiqued Foucault, who was interested in the origins and loci of power, Flusser’s writings on
photography and apparatus are similarly pertinent for feminism inasmuch as they hold the idea of
power at their center:
It is not the person who owns a photograph who has power but the person who
created the information it conveys. It is not the owner but the programmer of the
information who is the powerful one: neo-imperialism. The poster is without
value; nobody owns it, it flaps torn in the wind yet the power of the advertising
agency remains undiminished nevertheless - the agency can reproduce it. This
obliges us to revalue our traditional economic, political, moral, epistemological
and aesthetic values.955
952
Flusser, “Our Dwelling,” Post-History, 69. Italics in original.
953
Flusser, “The Lever Strikes Back,” The Shape of Things, 51.
954
Flusser, “Design as Theology,” The Shape of Things, 75.
955
Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 52.
271
The text where one can draw particularly distinct parallels between Flusser and Haraway,
however, is Vampyroteuthis infernalis. If Flusser’s text on the giant squid was an attempt to
“overcome anthropocentrism,”956 Haraway’s cyborg feminism was a way of short-circuiting
gender domination—but also the distribution of power amongst the species. In “A Cyborg
Manifesto,” she argued:
Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they
are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of
nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries
have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and
reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in
ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science.
Biological-determinist ideology is only one position opened up in scientific
culture for arguing the meanings of human animality. There is much room for
radical political people to contest the meanings of the breached boundary. The
cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal
is transgressed.957
Haraway was still concerned with what “counts as nature,” in this essay, as well as with
the “transgression” (a very postmodernist term) of boundaries. Cybernetics is mentioned several
times in the essay, as well as feedback between different polarities—which might eventually be
dissolved. The polar nature of Haraway’s essay was one caveat: N. Katherine Hayles has
criticized her cyborg for being “not networked enough”—which is to say, concerned enough with
relations between humans, animals, gender, and technology.958 (For her part, Haraway has
rejected the term “posthuman,” which Hayles has adopted.)959 Peter Galison critiqued Haraway
956
Flusser, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, 31.
957
Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 293.
958
N. Katherine Hayles, “Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere,” Theory, Culture &
Society 23, nos. 7-8 (2006): 159. Italics in original.
959
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature
and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
272
on the grounds that her reading of cybernetic feedback was more utopian than what Norbert
Wiener had outlined in his human-machine relationship, which “saw power and control as
absolutely central to the very definition of cybernetics.”960
But Haraway would move away from the cyborg project into something different:
companion species. In books like Primate Visions (1989) and When Species Meet (2008), she
would enact something similar to what Flusser attempted in his para-biological essay: bringing
together species in a way in which neither dominated.961 Haraway’s later work has placed her
alongside writers like Peter Singer, Foucault in his biopolitics, late Derrida, Bruno Latour and
Carolyn Merchant, as well as feminists like Hayles and particularly Rosi Braidotti.962 Rather than
technology, Haraway saw “animality itself which deconstructs political coherence, stability, and
positioning, uprooting the political from its roots in Enlightenment humanism.”963
In addition to their concern with animals, however, it is important to stress both
960
Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy,” 260.
961
Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
962
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San
Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980); Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans.
David Willis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Bruno Latour, The Politics of
Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2004); Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary
Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) and “Posthuman, All Too
Human: Towards a New Process Ontology,” Theory, Culture, and Society 23 (7-8) (2006): 197208. See also Margret Grebowicz and Helen Merrick, Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with
Donna Haraway (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Joseph Schneider, Donna
Haraway: Live Theory (London: Continuum, 2005); David Bell, Cyberculture Theorists: Manuel
Castells and Donna Haraway (New York: Routledge, 2007); Nick Mansfield, Subjectivity:
Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway (New York: New York University Press, 2000);
Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2013) and Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze, eds., Biopolitics: A Reader (Durham, NC
and London: Duke University Press, 2013).
963
Grebowicz and Merrick, Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway, 96.
273
Haraway’s and Flusser’s adoption of science fiction as a model for rethinking history, science,
and gender. Some writers have argued that, along with Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson,
Haraway helped legitimize science fiction and its study in the eighties,964 and that her writing
attempts to create the same “cognitive estrangement” in order to reevaluate normative
conceptions of science, nature, and the human.965 In Primate Visions (1989), Haraway borrowed
from the science fiction of author Octavia Butler, whose Xenogenesis series featured an AfricanAmerican Lilith and her children, who were saved by extraterrestrials that were able to unify
their own genders and share genes with other species. This is similar to what Flusser imagines in
Vampyroteuthis infernalis and essays like “Cows,”966 and “On Memory” (1990), in which
“electronic memories” force us to see memory as a process involving computer hardware, as
well as our bodies.967 In the same way as Haraway hoped the cyborg would trigger a
reconceptualization of gender, nature, and species, Flusser writes in “On Memory” that “the most
pernicious ideology was the one that led us to believe that we have (or are) something opposed to
nature. The invention of electronic memories has given us a critical distance from this ability; we
may now expect a more conscious use of it.”968
Flusser and Artists
Among the artists who read and digested Flusser’s writings, there are many in the
964
Ibid., 123.
965
Ibid., 128.
966
Flusser, “Cows,” Artforum (September 2013): 375-377.
967
Flusser, “On Memory (Electronic or Otherwise),” 399.
968
Ibid.
274
European and Brazilian art world. In his book, Flusser and the Arts, Marcel Marburger looks,
generally quite briefly, at many of the things I have discussed here: Flusser’s relationship with
the São Paulo Bienal and artists like Samson Flexor and Mira Schendel; his move from
communications into technical image theory and participation in “Open Circuits: An
International Conference on the Future of Television” (1974), the conference at MoMA that
included critics, curators, and media theorists, as well as artists; his involvement and
relationships with René Berger, Fred Forest, Max Kozloff, Joan Fontcuberta; and his writing on
photography for journals like European Photography, as well as “Curie’s Children” for
Artforum. Perhaps most importantly, Marburger points out that Flusser essentially confined
himself to the visual arts—although he did remark occasionally on the fact that he had focused
nearly exclusively on the visual aspect of technical images rather than thinking of sound, too.969
Flusser also had an impact on so-called new media artists like Fred Forest, for whom he wrote
“The Sociological Art of Fred Forest” in 1975. I have also outlined some of his correspondence
with artists in the sixties and seventies. In this chapter I am more interested in how Flusser’s
technical image writings impacted art—and vice versa. I will focus on a few examples to
highlight how his ideas have been adopted, illustrated, celebrated—even misused—by artists.
The Flusser Archive in Berlin holds a great deal of correspondence with artists and
curators like Joan Fontcuberta, Joachim Schmid, Gottfried Jäger, Peter Weibel, Eduardo Kac,
George Gessert, and Max Kozloff. Kozloff would serve as the liaison between Flusser and
Artforum, but as I have written, the art used to illustrate Flusser’s “Curie’s Children” essays was
969
Marcel René Marburger, Flusser und die Kunst (Cologne, 2011; self-published dissertation).
Flusser’s writings are rarely included in histories of music and sound, but The Salzburg Festival,
July 27-August 30, 2011, included Flusser’s “The Gesture of Listening to Music” in their
magazine (17-23). Moreover, Flusser Studies 17 (June 2014), edited by Marta Castello Branco,
Annie Goh, and Rodrigo Maltez Novaes, was devoted to “Music and Sound in Vilém Flusser’s
Work.”
275
generally North American (and very specific to the arguments I laid out in the Baudrillard
section of this dissertation). There was little evidence of conversation between U.S. artists either
about their work and Flusser’s writings or little of Flusser’s writings in their work, as opposed to
the Peter Halley situation in which Baudrillard accused Halley of misusing or misreading his
work.
The case of Spanish photographer and curator Joan Fontcuberta is particularly fruitful
after thinking of Haraway, however, since his work in the eighties was concerned primarily with
truth in photography and its application in scientific fields. With a background in
communications and advertising (similar to his U.S. “Pictures” counterparts in the seventies and
eighties), Foncuberta grew up under the reign of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, an
experience which he cited as a major influence on his work. His series Herbarium (1984)
included everyday objects photographed to look like exotic plants, while Fauna (1987) was
premised on a fictional “lost” archive of the German zoologist Dr. Peter Ameisenhaufen. In
Constellations (1993) Fontcuberta photographed insects and other debris stuck to the windshield
of his car, which looked like abstract images of outer space. Later series centered on faked
histories or fabrications of fictional space missions, mermaid fossils, military photographs,
historical figures, and Google images.970 Although inspired by Michel Foucault, Fontcuberta was
also clearly thinking about Flusser’s ideas of apparatus and photography’s role in creating both
political and natural histories, as well as supporting dictatorial apparatuses like Franco’s regime.
While Norbert Wiener’s “black box” originated in storage cases for radar and other military
equipment, for Flusser and Fontcuberta, both of whom had lived under repressive dictatorships,
the black box had overtones of the geladeira or “refrigerator”: the torture device used by the
970
This information was drawn from the Joan Fontcuberta entry on Oxford Art Online, which I
wrote in 2013, accessed January 5, 2015, www.oxfordartonline.com.
276
Brazilian government (although possibly invented in Britain or the United States) in which a
person was placed in a five-by-five foot windowless box where the temperatures were turned
down to freezing or up to intolerable heat.971 While Fontcuberta is in certain ways a traditional
photographer—taking black and white photographs and exhibiting through the gallery and
museum apparatus—his application of Flusser, if one might call it that, is to disrupt the
comfortable “truth” of photography, starting with his own images and theoretically infecting any
image the viewer might subsequently see.
It is not entirely clear how Fontcuberta and Flusser met.972 As I have described above,
Fontcuberta asked Flusser to speak at the “Photographic Springtime” festival in Barcelona in
March 1984 and Flusser agreed to do so, either in Portuguese, “slightly adapted to Spanish” or in
English, French, or German, with Spanish interpolations.”973 The two remained friends
afterwards. Flusser wrote to Foncuberta in English and Foncuberta responded in English or
French, over a dozen letters between 1984 and 1988. Sometimes they addressed each other as
“Dear Friend.” Foncuberta, also a writer and curator, included a few lines about Flusser’s photophilosophy in the Spanish encyclopedia Suplemento Annual Enciclopedia Universal EspasaCalpe (1981-1982) and photographed Flusser’s portrait during Flusser’s visit to Barcelona for
971
Darren J. O’Byrne, Human Rights: An Introduction (Harlow, UK and New York: Longman,
2003).
972
Fontcuberta had known Müller-Pohle since the seventies and had been a guest editor for a
1980 issue of European Photography devoted to Spanish photography. “According to
Fontcuberta, they probably met at a symposium in the University of Aix-en-Provence where
Flusser held a speech and later on again through Andreas Müller-Pohle.” Andrea Soto Calderon
and Rainer Guldin, “To Document Something Which Does Not Exist: Vilém Flusser and Joan
Fontcuberta: A Collaboration,” Flusser Studies 13 (May 2012): 5. Accessed January 5, 2015,
http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/calderonguldin-to-document.pdf.
973
Letter from Vilém Flusser to Joan Fontcuberta, German Conferences Binder, No. 22, Flusser
Archive.
277
the “Photographic Springtime” festival in 1984. In a letter dated January 1, 1986, Flusser wrote,
along with New Year’s salutations, “Angelo Schwarz [photography critic and historian] just left
here, and he told me that you are one of the most important photographers, because you
understand what photos are about: to document something which does not exist. Do you
agree?”974 Flusser wrote the introduction to Fontcuberta’s German and English edition of
Herbarium (1987)—as well as two unpublished essays, “Releaser” and “Counter-vision” for
Foncuberta’s journal PhotoVision and a short philosophical fiction titled Bibliophagus convictus
which he intended for Artforum and for which he asked Fontcuberta to create some photographs.
Flusser uses the introduction to Herbarium to exercise his ideas on multiple fronts; luckily, they
dovetail nicely with Fontcuberta’s work. The short essay starts:
“Information” has become a crucial concept in various and quite distinct
disciplines. And one may easily observe how these distinct disciplines tend to
converge in that concept. For example, both biology and photography are
basically concerned with information. Biology may fundamentally be considered
the study of successive changes in genetic information from the beginnings of life
on earth up to the present. This study is now beginning to give way to a
technology “gentech” – which may in the future allow us to manipulate genetic
information and ultimately produce entirely new species of plants and animals,
including new “homo” species.975
Here one can see evidence and echoes of Flusser’s interest in information theory and how
it inspired the technical image writings—but also the concerns around history and biology
expressed in Vampyroteuthis infernalis and in biotechnology that would manifest in “Curie’s
Children.” (Although Flusser sees biology and photography as entirely distinct, many
974
Letter from Vilém Flusser to Joan Fontcuberta, Artists Correspondence Binder, No. 66, Vilém
Flusser Archive.
975
Vilém Flusser, “Introduction,” Joan Fontcuberta: Herbarium (Göttingen, Germany:
European Photography, 1985), 1.
278
photography scholars contest this notion.)976 Even though Fontcuberta’s plants are “not real,”
Flusser sees a way in which they are similar to biology, since new genetic information comes
about by error, “some defect in the transmission of information from one support to another.”977
Mutations give rise to new species, but now they are being manipulated such that “nature”—new
species of wheat or cherries or yeast—are “artificial.” The difference represented by
Fontcuberta’s photographs, then, is that they are symbolic rather than useful, operative, or
pragmatic. And this, Flusser writes, “poses an epistemological problem: Is there any sense in
holding to the idea that the models of biological information are ‘truer’ than Fontcuberta’s
pictures? Or, is botany not a kind of reasonable (i.e., bourgeois) Fontcuberta?”978 Flusser
concludes that, given sufficient time, nature will produce the kind of plants Fontcuberta
photographs. So, his photographs not only problematize the category of “scientific knowledge,”
but also highlight “our present tragic disappointment with science and with nature.”979
976
Georges Didi-Huberman, “Photography—scientific and pseudo-scientific,” History of
Photography: Social and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Jean-Claude Lemagny and André Rouillé
(Cambridge University Press, 1987), 71-75; Ann Thomas, ed., Beauty of Another Order:
Photography in Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Diana Donald and Jane
Munro, eds., Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2009); Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in
Victorian Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
977
Vilém Flusser, “Introduction,” Joan Fontcuberta: Herbarium, 1.
978
Ibid., 2.
979
Ibid. In addition to Fontcuberta, there is the New Zealand photographer Boyd Webb, who
staged tableaux, which he photographed, not unlike artists like James Casebere. Flusser wrote
about his staged space photographs in European Photography: “One laughs because the picture
shows, in its comic way, what one actually knows already: all of the scenes which magicians
believe, and all of the events in which historians believe, have been staged … But magicians and
historians ‘forget’ that it is ourselves (people like Boyd Webb) who did that staging … This is
why the picture is not a simulation, not a metaphor, but a conclusive proof of the fact that all the
pictures we make of the world and of ourselves are nothing but simulations and metaphors
(staged scenes) – be those pictures ‘artistic’ ones or ‘scientific’ ones.” Flusser, “Boyd Webb:
279
Flusser’s last meeting with Fontcuberta was in September 1991, when Flusser,
Fontcuberta, and Müller-Pohle attended the Third Israeli Biennale of Photography in Harod and
went on a day trip through the occupied territories and into Jerusalem. Fontcuberta reportedly
gave to Müller-Pohle negatives of the few pictures he had taken of Flusser on this occasion.980 In
1997, Fontcuberta also dedicated his book The Kiss of Judas: Photography and Truth (El Beso
de Judas. Fotografía y Verdad) to the memory of Flusser.981
Few artists had such a rich affiliation with Flusser—except, of course, Andreas MüllerPohle. Müller-Pohle was a photographer, but he was best known as the editor of European
Photography and the publisher of Flusser’s photography and technical image writings in the
eighties. He was absolutely instrumental in facilitating Flusser’s texts to appear in German; he
gave Flusser a forum and the support—critical and editorial, if not financial—for Flusser to write
and publish Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Into the Universe of Technical Images, and
other texts. Fontcuberta said in an interview, “If Vilém was a teacher to me, he was a guru for
Andreas.”982 Flusser also wrote a text for Müller-Pohle’s Transformance (1980-1981) series,
black and white photographs made by holding a camera and waving a hand blindly. The idea is
interesting even if the blurry photos, which show parts of a woman’s body, an oblique landscape,
or the slice of a room, aren’t particularly scintillating. Flusser began his essay, also titled
“Transformance,” with this observation:
The camera dictates a particular and specific coordination of eye and hand, of
Vom Inszenieren/On Staging” (German and English versions), European Photography 38 (April
1989): 39.
980
Calderon and Guldin, “To Document Something Which Does Not Exist,” 6.
981
Ibid., 1-2.
982
Ibid., 8.
280
intention and act, of theory and practice. It dictates that the photographer first see,
then act; that he first look in the camera and through it at the world, then press the
button. In this way, the camera poses two distinct problems of coordination: for
the manufacturer of the camera, its programmer, the problem is how to coordinate
photographer and camera; for the photographer himself the problem is how to
coordinate eye and hand within the camera program.983
Remember, Flusser’s edict for the photographer was to change the camera’s program—
and for the photo critic to acknowledge the make of the camera and the photographer’s
“intention” rather than judging the image itself (as I have just done). Flusser follows up his
analysis this way:
Müller-Pohle's photographs are on a level of being other than that of photographs
made according to the usual photo-program. In the normal picture-making
process, the photograph tends hypothetically to be “perfect” as soon as the shutter
is released … Müller-Pohle uses the opposite criterion … “Gestalt” by way of
using the camera as it has been programmed has deferred to a search for these
things by way of contemplating the photographs only after they have been made.
Eye-hand has become hand-eye.984
One could argue that street photographers use the same process of “contemplating”—or
editing—photographs after they have been made. My point, however, is to acknowledge how
Flusser attempted to put his own philosophy into practice as a photography critic, particularly
around ideas of program and apparatus.985 He did this for other artists, too, publishing
criticism—generally “reflections” rather than critical reviews—in Camera Austria, Kunstforum,
983
Vilém Flusser, “Transformance,” Flusser Studies 10 (November 2010): 1-7. Originally
published in the book Andreas Müller-Pohle: Transformance (Göttingen: European
Photography, 1983) in German and English, both versions written by Vilém Flusser. Also
available at Andreas Müller-Pohle’s website, accessed January 5, 2015,
http://www.muellerpohle.net/texts/project_texts/flussertransformance.html.
984
Ibid., 5-6.
985
Flusser ends his short essay on Müller-Pohle’s work with this statement, which highlights
both apparatus and human freedom: “Thus, Müller-Pohle's photographs subvert: they subvert the
ontology of photographs. And they subvert the normal meaning of ‘freedom.’ This book, then,
opens a perspective onto what life in a world dominated by cameras and similar machines might
be: a deliberate, creative informing of the accidental products of apparatus.” Ibid., 7.
281
and European Photography on artists like Roland Günter, Jiří Hanke, Paolo Gioli, Boyd Webb,
Lizzie Calligas, Henri Lewis, Herlinde Koelbl, Herbert W. Franke, Nancy Burson, Astrid Klein,
Gerd Bonfert, and Bernard Plossu.986 For European Photography, he also reviewed the nowclassic art film by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, “The Way Things Go” (1987), in which
objects are set up in a chain reaction, thinking about how the objects are “programmed,” making
the film into a “machine.”987 Similarly, in his review of Gerd Bonfert, who manipulated
photographs of his own body so that they looked distorted, almost like the figures in Francis
Bacon paintings, Flusser asked, “What is ‘information?’” He continued: “Bonfert submits the
information available within the photo to a processing which renders it improbably, and he then
‘imagines’ this new information in the photo. Thus: he transforms his own body into something
improbable (something which is no longer a ‘condition,’ but has become a ‘product’).”988
I would like to single out a few more artists, starting with Nancy Burson, whose work
dovetails beautifully with Flusser’s writings. Burson began using new computer technology in
the seventies to manipulate photographs digitally, merging faces to create composites of
politicians, celebrities, people of different nationalities and ethnicities and genders—as well as
animals and humans. Along with computer scientists Richard Carling and David Kramlich,
Burson designed a computer program that would track the aging process in faces, which she
986
Taken from Klaus Sander’s Sources, widely considered the most comprehensive Flusser
bibliography. Flusser’s column for European Photography was titled “Reflections,” and looked
at the work of a single photographer, generally that dovetailed with the arguments and concerns
he’d laid out in the technical image trilogy of books.
987
Vilém Flusser, Review of “Der Lauf der Dinge. Ein Film von Peter Fischli und David Weiss.
T&C Edition, 1987 (Cologne: Dumont Verlag, 1990),” European Photography 45 (January
1991): 46-48.
988
Vilém Flusser, “Gerd Bonfert: Einbildungen/Im-maginations” (German and English
versions), European Photography 36 (November 1988): 40. The text would later be reprinted in
a catalogue of Bonfert’s work: Gerd Bonfert: Photosynthesen (Cologne: Salon Verlag, 2008).
282
exhibited in museums, and which the Federal Bureau of Investigation used to locate missing
children.989 In “Nancy Burson: Chimeras,” originally published in European Photography and
later in the book Photography After Photograph: Memory and Representation in the Digital Age,
Flusser mused that Burson’s photos were “chimeras” of a new world: fabulous beasts, like the
Chimera in ancient Greece, which Homer described as having a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a
serpent’s tail—except of the digital variety, created out of pixels, by the computer, and
exhibiting both “telematic” and “biotechnical” tendencies.990 The first tendency dissects the
world into bits of information; the second, into genes which can be rearranged. Because her
works are photographs, they are models for future genetic manipulations. They show us what we
might become.
Following that line of thinking, Flusser was also in contact with the Brazilian artist
Eduardo Kac, who taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and would later—that is,
nearly a decade after Flusser’s death—create Alba, the GFP Bunny (begun 1999; born 2000), a
rabbit who was genetically altered to glow in the dark. Produced in collaboration with the French
scientist Louis-Marie Houdebine, the rabbit was bred using the GFP gene found in jellyfish.
When exposed to black light, she would glow a fluorescent green. The art work created a minor
scandal, although Kac, using what sounds like pure Flusserian logic, declared to the The Boston
989
Nancy Burson, Richard Carling, and David Kramlich, Composites: Computer-Generated
Portraits (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1986). Also see Nancy Burson and Michael L. Sand,
Faces: Nancy Burson (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 1993) and Seeing and Believing: The Art of
Nancy Burson (exhibition catalogue, New York: Grey Gallery and Study Center; and Houston,
TX: Blaffer Gallery, 2002).
990
Vilém Flusser, “Nancy Burson,” Photography after Photography: Memory and
Representation in the Digital Age, ed. Hubertus von Amelunxen, Stefan Iglhaut, and Florian
Rötzer (Amsterdam: OPA, 1996), 150–55. Originally published in German as “Nancy Burson:
Chimären/Chimaeras” (German and English versions), European Photography, no. 33 (January
1988): 46.
283
Globe in 2000, “It is a new era, and we need a new kind of art … It makes no sense to paint as
we painted in the caves.''991 In 1991, Kac had contacted Flusser about something else. At the time
he was teaching Computer Holography at SAIC and he wanted Flusser—who, one will
remember, was a hologram enthusiast and used them as examples of technical images in his
texts—to know that Towards a Philosophy of Photography (or Filosofia da Caixa Preta, the
Brazilian version) was one of the few books he had brought with him to Chicago. Kac also
alerted Flusser to a recent essay he had published in Leonardo and an exhibition of his work at
the Holography Museum in New York.992 Flusser gamely wrote back, informing Kac that he was
a member of the Holographic Society in Osnabrück (in Lower Saxony, Germany) and that he
was very interested in Kac’s holographic activities.993 Kac responded that he had set up a
holographic studio and apparently sent Flusser a text he had written on Baudrillard’s
“Hologrammes.”994 Kac was inspired by communications theory and networks and in the
eighties created a “telerobot” named Ornitorrinco that could be remote controlled. But Kac
seems to overlap in particular with Flusser’s ideas around biogenetics: he even included
Flusser’s essay “On Science” in his book Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond (2006).995 The
991
Eduardo Kac quoted in Gareth Cook, “Cross Hare: Hop and Glow; Mutant bunny at heart of
controversy over DNA tampering,” The Boston Globe, September 17, 2000, available on
Eduardo Kac’s website, accessed January 5, 2015, http://ekac.org/bostong.html.
992
Letter from Eduardo Kac to Vilém Flusser, January 17, 1991, Artists Correspondence Binder,
No. 133, Vilém Flusser Archive.
993
Letter from Vilém Flusser to Eduardo Kac, February 10, 1991, Artists Correspondence
Binder, No. 141, Vilém Flusser Archive.
994
Letter from Eduardo Kac to Vilém Flusser, February 27, 1991, Artists Correspondence
Binder, No. 139, Vilém Flusser Archive.
995
Vilém Flusser, “On Science,” Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond, ed. Eduardo Kac
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 371-372. Originally published in Artforum (October 1988):
9.
284
opening paragraph of that seems, in retrospect, like a shockingly literal template for Kac’s work:
Why is it that dogs aren’t yet blue with red spots, and that horses don’t yet radiate
phosphorescent colors over the nocturnal meadows of the land? Why hasn’t the
breeding of animals, still principally an economic concern, moved into the field of
aesthetics? … at the same time that the farms of North America and Western
Europe are today producing more food than we can consume, we also, not
coincidentally, have learned techniques that ultimately make conceivable the
creation of plant and animal species according to our own program. Not only do
we have mountains of butter and ham, rivers of milk and wine, but we can now
make artificial living beings, living artworks. If we chose, these developments
could be brought together, and farming could be transferred from peasants, a class
almost defunct anyway, to artists, who breed like rabbits, and don’t get enough to
eat.996
Many other artists could be read “through” Flusser in this way, some of whom were
either in brief contact, like Joachim Schmid and Gottfried Jäger, or had a more significant
relationship with Flusser, like Peter Weibel, who later became more of a scholar than an artist
himself. Another U.S. artist who has often been discussed alongside Flusser is Lynn Hershman
Leeson, whose work around video and invented identities, and her writing, was included in a
volume with Flusser.997 One might also cite the Düsseldorf School of photographers—students
of Bernd and Hilla Becher such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, and Candida
Hofer—whose work might seem to use Flusser’s apparatus theory to fertile ends, although there
is scant evidence that Flusser was read by these artists during their formative years, if at all.
(Marcel Marburger notes that it is odd that Flusser didn’t know of the work of artists like
Andreas Gursky.)998 I am thinking particularly about the way in which Gursky’s photographs
marking the sites and circulation of global capital, like the trading floor of the Chicago Board of
996
Ibid.
997
Künstliche Spiele, eds. Georg Hartwagner, Stefan Iglhaut, Florian Rötzer (Munich: Klaus
Boer, 1993).
998
Marburger, Flusser and the Arts, 90-91.
285
Trade, a luxury Prada Store, or a more humble store—represented in a digitally fabricated
image—where every product is purportedly ninety-nine cents, represent the apparatus of global
capitalism; or Candida Hofer’s photographs of libraries and other cultural institutions; or Thomas
Struth’s portraits; or Thomas Ruff’s photographs of the cosmos.
Three other artists I want to discuss before moving to the current relevance of Flusser and
his growing popularity and influence amongst younger artists are Harun Farocki, Peter Weibel,
and Christopher Williams. To me, Farocki and Williams in particular represent two poles of
Flusser’s influence during his lifetime. Farocki was a writer, artist, and documentary filmmaker
who was particularly concerned about the apparatus of photography and cinema. He made films
that analyzed how the Vietnam War was delivered to people via images (The Inextinguishable
Fire, 1969; Something Becomes Visible, 1982). He also looked back at World War II in films
like Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988), a montage of aerial shots taken by
Americans of Auschwitz in 1944 in order to bomb factories nearby—showing how “visible” the
camps were in what was later framed as a “hidden” history.
Farocki was aware of Flusser and engaged directly with him. In 1986, he made a twelve
minute video, Impact Images: A Conversation with Vilém Flusser, in which the two men sat
across from each other at a table in front of a ground-floor window.999 As pedestrians pass
outside, they discuss the front page of the tabloid newspaper Bild Zeitung. Smoking a pipe and
wearing two pairs of glasses (one propped on his bald pate, in lieu of bifocals) Flusser offers an
analysis of the front-page layout: photographs “penetrate” the text (the arm of a person who has
999
Harun Farocki and Vilém Flusser, Schlagworte – Schlagbilder. Ein Gespräch mit Vilém
Flusser (1986), also translated as “Catchphrases – Catchpictures: A Conversation with Vilém
Flusser,” available to watch online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjhx1eALE3E.
Accessed January 5, 2015. The interview-artwork is not unlike a similar project, Martha Rosler
Reads Vogue (1982) in which U.S. artist Rosler analyzes an issue of Vogue magazine, but with a
feminist bent.
286
been shot giving the letters a “corporal character”); graphic obstacles are created to break up the
linearity of writing. Our eyes move erratically around the page, scanning what Flusser calls a
“deliberately manufactured chaotic situation.” It is a “kitschy” presentation, a “typical example
of demagogy” in which presumably shared values are presented through photographs and text.
However, the images and text work on a double level: “we” (readers and the newspapers)
supposedly deplore violence—yet this assumption allows the paper to present “killing and
hatred” with impunity, to satisfy a salacious interest. At the end of the video, Flusser breaks the
fourth wall, pointing out that he and Farocki are discussing the newspaper on video, to broadcast.
They need to urge viewers to employ their own critical faculties: otherwise he and Farocki are
just implicating themselves.
Crista Blümlinger argues that the work functions as a “dialogic portrait,” using technical
images to discuss Flusser’s theory of images. Farocki wrote an appreciative review of Flusser’s
Into the Universe of Technical Image the following year.1000 A later work, Videograms of a
Revolution (1992) is also sympathetic to Flusser’s thinking. Made with Andrei Ujica from
hundreds of hours of footage shot during the 1989 Romanian revolution, the documentary runs
over two and a half hours long. Flusser had written that what we see in live broadcasts of the
Romanian revolution is not the traditional formula in which images serve as documents or
“snapshots” of the historical process. Instead, images cause events to occur.1001 Farocki and
Ujica’s film illustrates this in a visceral and captivating way. What one sees in Videograms of a
Revolution is the power of the camcorder: ordinary Romanians covertly videotaping
1000
Crista Blümlinger, “Harun Farocki, 1944-2014: The Image Scout,” Radical Philosophy 188
(2014): 69-70, accessed January 5, 2015, http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/obituary/harunfarocki-1944-2014. Harun Farocki, “Vilém Flusser: Das Universum der technischen Bilder,”
Zelluloid 25 (1987), quoted in Blümlinger, “Harun Farocki.”
1001
Vilém Flusser, “Das Politische im Zeitalter der technischen Bilder,” Volkszeitung, August
17, 1990.
287
demonstrations and making pronouncements to camera. Different types of camerawork are
highlighted: amateur footage videotaped from a student dormitory; an official state camera
pointed at the sky when protests erupt in a public space; a camera recording the Ceauşescus
fleeing in a helicopter from an urban rooftop. Cameras themselves become “characters”: they are
smuggled out of a repair room in the state television station and later we are told a camera is
“waiting in the elevator,” almost like a person. Moreover, broadcast networks become
instrumental as the state television quickly sides with the revolution. Inside the television station,
revolutionaries proclaim, “We are victorious! The TV is with us!”
The idea of a liberated camera is underscored as activists drive around the streets of
Bucharest, filming people celebrating. “Make room for the TV people!” a voice announces to a
square filled with thousands of people, indicating that history cannot be made (or caused)
without television. The resignation of the old government is broadcast, as well as arrests of
former government leaders. Near the end of the film, people assemble in front of a television and
a voiceover describes how film used to record history, but then a “flip” occurred: now, “if film is
possible, history is possible.” The announcement finally comes on television: on December 25,
1989, Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu were tried by the military and found guilty of genocide,
subversion of state power, destruction of public property, subversion of the national economy,
attempting to flee the country, and embezzling money from foreign banks. They were sentenced
to death and examined by a doctor (on television) and the evening news announced that, “the
sentence was passed and carried out by firing squad.” The corpses are shown on television.
“That’s him! There’s Elena!” the group assembled before the television exclaims. Then: “That’s
it, then. Turn it off.”
I would posit Farocki as the “good” adopter of Flusser’s theories: using the lessons of
288
Towards a Philosophy of Photography and other texts to show how apparatuses can be
reprogrammed for liberation, making us not just functionaries of the apparatus but active
programmers. (More recent analyses have compared Videograms of a Revolution to the last
moments of Saddam Hussein’s life, recorded with a telephone camera before he was killed, as
well as to documenters of police brutality and state violence.)1002 The other European artist who
was significantly influenced by and associated with Flusser in the eighties and early nineties is
Peter Weibel, who started out working with performance and film—particularly the concept of
“expanded cinema” proposed by Stan VanDerBeek, based partially on McLuhan’s writings—
enlarging this to include photography in a book he co-edited titled Extended Photography (1981)
and other digital media.1003 Weibel is currently the director of ZKM/Center for Art and Media in
Karlsruhe, Germany, a major center of new media arts where a traveling Flusser exhibition,
“Without Firm Ground: Vilém Flusser and the Arts: An Exhibiton” commenced in 2014.1004
Weibel is not prominent in the U.S.; his short video, “Casablanca II” (1983), in the collection of
1002
Ronald Jones, “Harun Farocki,” Freize 106 (April 2007), accessed August 17, 2015,
http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/harun_farocki/. Other examples included in Jones’s article
are George Holliday’s videotaping of the Rodney King beating—and more recently, the phonerecording of multiple examples of police brutality.
1003
Peter Weibel and Anna Auer, eds., Erweiterte Fotografie/Extended Photography (Vienna:
Vienna Secession, 1981). For more on VanDerBeek’s idea of expanded cinema, see Stan
VanDerBeek, “‘Culture: Intercom’ and Expanded Cinema: A Proposal and Manifesto,” The
Tulane Drama Review 11, no. 1 (Autumn 1966): 38-48. For more recent writings on
VanDerBeek, see David Curtis, A. L. Rees, Duncan White and Steven Ball, eds. Expanded
Cinema: Art, Performance, Film (London: Tate Publishing, 2011) and Stan VanDerBeek: the
Culture Intercom (exhibition catalogue. Houston, TX: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and
Cambridge, MA: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2011).
1004
See the biography at Peter Weibel’s website, accessed January 22, 2015, http://www.peterweibel.at/. The exhibition opened August 14, 2015 at ZKM and will open on November 18, 2015
at Academy of the Arts in Berlin on November 18, 2015. The exhibition includes art and texts by
Flusser, Fred Forest, Joan Fontcuberta, Mira Schendel, Andreas Müller-Pohle, Harun Farocki,
Louis Bec, Samson Flexor, Nam June Paik, Abraham A. Moles, Brothers Quay, Haroldo de
Campos, and others.
289
the Museum of Modern Art in New York, dovetails more with the concerns of U.S. artists in the
eighties, particularly around appropriation, mass media, and consumer culture, since it uses
digital techniques to manipulate scenes from the classic Hollywood film “Casablanca.”1005 But
Weibel and Flusser were both central players in the emerging new media discussions of the
eighties, and Weibel has become, in many ways, more of a curator and theorist of digital and
interactive art than a practicing artist. Flusser and Weibel were at conferences together as early
as 1981, and a binder in the archive is partially devoted to their correspondence.1006 Flusser and
Weibel participated in the same discussion on September 14, 1988, about philosophy and new
technologies at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria in 1989; Flusser spoke about “Memories” and
Weibel about “Territory and Technology.”1007 But Weibel had been involved in Ars Electronica
1005
MoMA website, accessed January 22, 2015,
http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A31069&pag
e_number=1&template_id=1&sort_order=1.
1006
Both Flusser and Weibel presented at “Kritik und Fotografie, 2. Teil,” October 1981, in
Vienna. See also Correspondence Binder, No. 94, Peter Weibel and Kurl Jechke, Vilém Flusser
Archive. In a recent interview with journalist Florian Rötzer, another figure associated with
Flusser, Siegfried Zielinski states, “In the 1980s, you [Rötzer] were an important part of a
traveling intellectual circus (in a positive sense), that met frequently at various places in Europe
and Germany and discussed the most current developments in thinking around media and with
media. Baudrillard and Virilio were there, as were Friedrich Kittler, Gerburg Treusch-Dieter,
Otto Rössler, Peter Weibel, Dietmar Kamper and Flusser. (“Du warst in den 1980er Jahren
wichtiger Teil eines intellektuellen Wanderzirkuses (positiv gemeint), der sich in immer kürzeren
Abständen an verschiedenen Orten Europas und Deutschlands traf und die aktuellesten
Entwicklungen im Denken über die Medien und mit Medien diskutierte. Baudrillard und Virilio
waren dabei, Friedrich Kittler, Gerburg Treusch-Dieter, Otto Rössler, Peter Weibel, Dietmar
Kamper und Flusser.”) Prepared question by Siefried Zielinski in an interview with Florian
Rötzer, Forum zur Genealogie des MedienDenkens 1: Siegfried Zielinski in Grespräch mit Peter
Weibel, Joachim Paech, Thomas Elsaesser, Florian Rötzer, Elisabeth von Samsonnow, Hans
Ulrich Reck, Boris Groys (Berlin, 2012-2013), eds. Daniel Irrgang and Clemens Jahn (Berlin:
University of the Arts, 2013), 108.
1007
Vilem Flusser, “Gedächtnisse,” Philosophien der neuen Technologien (Berlin: Merve, 1989),
41-56; Peter Weibel, “Territorium und Technik,” Philosophien der neuen Technologien, 81-112.
Baudrillard and Kittler were also included in this discussion and publication.
290
before, and continued writing about art, technology, the body, and virtual space.1008 In a 1989
essay in conjunction with Ars Electronica, published in Kunstforum, Weibel and Gerhard
Lischka wrote about interactive art using terms derived from information and cybernetic theory:
systems, networks, knots, interaction, participation.1009 More importantly, they quote Flusser
from Into the Universe of Technical Images, writing about the new ability to “envision” with
technical images. The entire section is worth quoting:
This is exactly what is new in the emerging power to visualize, what is new about
the consciousness that is dawning: scientific discourse and technical progress are
seen as essential but no longer interesting in themselves, and we seek adventure
elsewhere, in visual constructs.
The inquiry into visualization therefore needs to be transferred from the
gesture of the one who presses the buttons to the consciousness of the envisioner,
as I tried to do with regard to writing with a typewriter. And there we found that
the gesture of pressing buttons is the same in both cases but that envisioning
requires a different consciousness. For this is about opaque apparatuses, not
transparent machines. Envisioners don’t stand over apparatuses the way a writer
stands over a typewriter; they stand right in among them, with them, surrounded
by them. They are bound much more tightly to the apparatus than a writer to the
machine. Envisioning is far more functional than writing texts. It is a programmed
procedure. When I write, I write past the machine toward the text. When I
envision technical images, I build from the inside of the apparatus.1010
What Weibel and Lischka are picking up on—and what seems like the particular
province of artists like Weibel, who was involved in performance and participation in the
1008
Peter Weibel, “Zur Geschichte und Ästheik der digitalen Kunst,” Ars Electronica
(catalogue), (Linz, Austria, 1984): 1-40. Also available at Weibel’s website, accessed January
22, 2015, http://www.peterweibel.at/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=76&Itemid=34.
1009
Gerhard Johann Lischka and Peter Weibel, “Polylog: Für eine interactive Kunst,”
Kunstforum, no. 103 (September-October 1989): 65-86. Also available at Weibel’s website,
accessed January 22, 2015, http://www.peterweibel.at/images/stories/pdf/1989/0320_POLYLOG.pdf. See also Weibel and Lischka, eds., Im
Netz der Systeme. Eine Dokumentation anlässlich der Ars Electronica, Vol. 103 (1989).
1010
Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 36. The same passage is in Lischka and
Weibel, “Polylog,” 80-81 and Flusser, Ins Universum der technischen Bilder (Göttingen,
Germany: European Photography, 1985), 33.
291
sixties—is the way that technical images take the creative “gesture” and relocate it in a
relationship between apparatus and body: one is no longer taking a picture (paraphrasing
Flusser’s example of the writer and the typewriter), but acting “from the inside of the apparatus.”
This would be important for artists working with digital media and wanting to activate a
“different consciousness.” But it has political overtones, as well. Weibel served as the editor for
the Merve book that collected texts on television’s role in the Romanian revolution; in the same
section as Flusser’s essay on television is Weibel’s own essay on “Media as Mask:
Videocracy.”1011
Christopher Williams, a decade younger than Farocki and Weibel, but in the same
generation as the Düsseldorf School (Andreas Gursky was born in 1955; Williams in 1956), is a
U.S. photographer who has channeled Flusser in ways that are canny, but feel sometimes at odds
with the aims of Flusser’s project. Williams was not closely engaged with Flusser, although he
now teaches at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, which puts him vaguely in Flusser territory. In
North America, he is seen as an ur-conceptualist who tracks the histories of images and
deconstructs (and reconstructs) their production. Over the course of his career he has (re)made
journalistic images, science images, and publicity images. Increasingly, he has created images
that painstakingly replicate the processes, fetishization, and look of advertising images and blur
1011
Vilém Flusser, “Fernsehbild und politische Sphäre im Lichte der rumänischen Revolution,”
Von der Bürokratie zur Telekratie: Rumänien im Fernsehen, ed. Peter Weibel (Berlin: Merve,
1990), 103-114; Peter Weibel, “Medien als Maske: Videokratie,” Von der Bürokratie zur
Telekratie, 124-149. Interestingly, however, Weibel and Edith Decker curated an exhibition the
same year, “The Disappearance of Distance: Telecommunications and Art,” for which they
commissioned a Flusser essay—that, due to issues of space and funding, they did not ultimately
include in the catalogue. Vom Verschwinden der Ferne: Telekommunikation und Kunst, ed. Peter
Weibel and Edith Decker (exhibition catalogue, Deutsches Postmuseum, Frankfurt, October 2,
1990 – January 13, 1991); Cologne: DuMont, 1990). The German Postal Museum, now the
Museum for Communication, deals with a history of the post, telecommunications, and general
communications.
292
the divide between advertising products such as cars or dishwashing liquid, and art-cum“product.” There are overlaps with Fontcuberta and his Foucauldian, archeological project,
except Williams studied in California in the seventies with Michael Asher, often associated with
Institutional Critique, and Williams’s reading of Flusser leans in that direction. For instance, in a
2007 interview, Williams described how the Kodak reflecting guides or color bars that appear in
some of his photographs refer to the idea that the gallery is just one site among many potential
sites where these images could be seen. Williams continues:
Within the art context, we focus on the print within the museum or gallery as the
primary site of encounter, but especially now advertising, magazines, catalogues,
websites or postcards also take on an important function. The Kodak three-point
reflection guide was copyrighted in 1968, which was a way for me to include the
idea of a moment of social change within this particular photograph. The guide is
both a referent to the photographic industry and to the kind of determinants within
the photographic program that Vilém Flusser describes in Towards a Philosophy
of Photography (1983).1012
Here is a very flimsy reference to 1968; quite different from Farocki. But Williams also
uses Flusser to acknowledge how the photography program works differently within different
apparatuses: museum, advertising, politics, and so on. Williams continues: “My thinking about
photography is in part indebted to Flusser, who saw photography as a kind of institution with
rings of determination, serving programs of institutions beyond it and functioning itself to
program and perpetuate the production of photographs.”1013 Like Farocki, Williams is an
eminently articulate artist. However, there is a difference. Over time, his work has grown slicker
and glossier, like the Düsseldorf School easel-size photographs that simultaneously “critique”
global capital and exist as prized commodities themselves, highly valued by the art market in a
1012
“Christopher Williams in Conversation with Mark Godfrey,” Afterall: A Journal of Art,
Context, and Enquiry 16 (2007): 66.
1013
Ibid., 68.
293
way (art) film simply is not. In this sense, Williams’s works are illustrations of Flusser’s
apparatus rather than an attempt to actually disrupt the photography program. He is, in a sense,
threading the image back through the same apparatuses that privilege slick, glossy, seductive
photographs. By the time of his career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
in 2014, his rhetoric had ossified to the point where it sounded like a mannered version of
Flusser. In a 2014 statement in Artforum, he said:
I’ve worked almost my whole life as an artist to distance myself from the kind of
role models traditionally associated with the idea of the photographer. Instead I
have established a more mobile position, which allows me to move freely through
the various aspects of photographic production, display, and distribution; I can
alternately assume the position of camera operator, picture editor, exhibition
designer, graphic designer, etc. For this exhibition, I wanted to thematize the
conventions of display within the context of a monographic museum survey
exhibition. A retrospective is, by its nature, a backward-looking form, putting on
show that which has been, a condition that it shares with the basic material
conditions of photography.1014
Simultaneously congratulating himself for his “mobility” and criticizing the “backwardlooking” (read: backward) form of the monographic museum exhibition, Williams claimed in the
same statement that he wanted to “destabilize” and “denaturalize” the survey show using
multiple means: displaying small chunks of wall taken from different venues (there were three:
Chicago, New York, and London) and exhibiting these in different exhibition sites; eschewing
wall labels and hanging pictures at lower heights than usual to intensify “awareness of the
different modes of presentation,” and ridding the exhibition catalogue of everything but the bar
code and museum logos to “emphasize the book’s position as an object within a commercial
system of display and circulation.” Finally, the exhibition was titled “The Production Line of
Happiness” to “underline or highlight the cruel set of relations set in place by the managers of
1014
Christopher Williams, “500 Words (As Told to Catherine Taft),” Artforum.com, July 24,
2014, accessed January 5, 2015, http://artforum.com/words/id=47543.
294
culture.”1015
But this rings hollow. If Flusser’s ultimate goal was “human freedom” and his benchmark
for evil apparatuses was Auschwitz, Williams’s efforts seemed like child’s play: rearranging the
chairs at a party rather than disrupting the apparatus of a signal institution—namely MoMA,
founded by scions of robber barons with trustees on its board who represent the highest echelons
of today’s fractal, immaterialized capitalism. An essay by Flusser was actually included in the
MoMA catalogue: “Photo Production (lecture given at the École Nationale de la Photographie,
Arles, February 23, 1984).”1016 Flusser starts the lecture in a manner that sounds applicable to
Williams’s deadpan approach:
I shall define ‘photograph’ as an image which is produced and distributed through
apparatus, and which, being an image, carries information on its surface. Thus I
shall be concerned, in this lecture, with the production of this information. This
requires a cursory consideration of ‘communication.’”1017
Given not long after he wrote Towards a Philosophy of Photography, the lecture
encapsulates many of Flusser’s ideas about photography, particularly concerning the camera as a
black box (hardware) that contains a program (software), and the role of the photographer.
Flusser’s description of the photographer dovetails in many ways with Williams selfpositioning—which is likely why this essay was included in the catalogue. Flusser stated:
For the true photographer the camera is a tool for the production of improbable,
unforeseen, unpredictable situations, for information production. This is his
typically human commitment. The world outside is for him a mere pretext. He
does not aim at “documenting” the world, but at giving the world a new meaning,
1015
Ibid.
1016
Vilém Flusser, “Photo Production (lecture given at the École Nationale de la Photographie,
Arles, February 23, 1984),” Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness
(Exhibition catalogue, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art, and Yale
University Press, 2014), 120-123.
1017
Ibid., 120.
295
to be used by others in subsequent information production. He is not really
interested in the world outside, but in hidden camera virtualities which he is trying
to discover. This is characteristic for the apparatus situation: not to “know” the
world, nor to “change” it (to work), is human commitment from now on, but to
give the world new meanings (a posthistorical situation, where work is relegated
to automatic machines, and where man is free to propose meaning to the world
and his existence within the world).1018
Here, unlike the bid for “human freedom,” the “true commitment of the photographer” is
to supply models for others, to “inform” others, to struggle against apparatus and automation.1019
In this sense, Flusser would probably applaud Williams’s application of his theory, since it puts
human intention at its core, rather than liberation (pace Enzensberger). However, as I will argue
in the next section, there are other, perhaps more urgent ways Flusser’s writings can be seen as
relevant to the present moment.
Flusser and the Current Moment
In “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” Enzensberger wrote that, “revolution in the
conditions of production in the superstructure has made the traditional aesthetic theory unusable,
completely unhinging its fundamental categories and destroying its ‘standards.’”1020 That was in
1970. On September 11, 2014, U.S. film and cultural theorist Steven Shaviro wrote on Twitter,
“the theory toolbox of the twentieth century (From Freud to Adorno to Foucault) is unable to
grasp the dilemmas we face in the twenty-first.”1021 So why look to someone like Flusser?
Current interest in Flusser, including my own, could be partly explained by a renewed interest in
1018
Ibid., 122.
1019
Ibid.
1020
Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” 271.
1021
Steven Shaviro, Twitter, September 11, 2014, accessed January 6, 2015,
https://twitter.com/shaviro/status/510068204681842688.
296
art and theory of the nineteen-eighties.1022 I will also point back to a statement made by Mark
Poster, which I quoted in the first chapter, in which he cited Foucault, Lacan, Althusser, Lyotard,
Habermas, and Judith Butler and wrote that “the list could be extended considerably of major
theorists from the nineteen-seventies onward who either paid no attention at all to the vast
changes in media culture taking place under their noses or who commented on the media only as
a tool that amplified other institutions like capitalism or representative democracy.”1023 Flusser,
with his emphasis on media and technology, was an exception. And unlike the case of
Baudrillard, many of his prognostications have come true. The idea of seeing the “face of the
other” in the surface or screen of the technical image sounded somewhat far-fetched in the
eighties (although the capability for video conferencing existed from the near beginning of
telephone technology), but we see it now in applications like Skype and FaceTime, and similar
kinds of communication in social networks like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and others—the
politics of which I will discuss momentarily. One of the earliest versions of this technology
happened less than a decade after Flusser died: the peer-to-peer distribution revolution set off by
1022
A couple of examples include Artforum’s April 2003 issue on the eighties and renewed
interest in artists like Gretchen Bender and Lynn Hershman Leeson. Also see John Rajchman,
“Unhappy Returns: The Po-Mo Decade,” Artforum (April 2003), accessed January 16, 2015,
https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=200304&id=4461 “John Rajchman on Vilém Flusser’s
‘Curie’s Children’ (1986-1992),” Artforum (September 2012), accessed January 16, 2015,
https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201207&id=32019. See also my review of Gretchen Bender’s
exhibition, “Past and Future, Scrolling By: Gretchen Bender’s Work is Displayed at the
Kitchen,” The New York Times, September 6, 2013, accessed January 16, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/arts/design/gretchen-benders-work-is-displayed-at-thekitchen.html?_r=0.
1023
Mark Poster, Introduction to Vilém Flusser’s Does Writing Have a Future? trans. Nancy
Ann Roth (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xi.
297
the music-sharing application Napster, which was often framed as a music-industry development
instead of a major shift in the nature of communications and technology.1024
As I mentioned above, Flusser has continued to have traction in German media studies.
Within the orbit of the Flusser Archive in Berlin, two recent publications demonstrate this. An
Archive(s) (2014), conceived of by Siegfried Zielinski, is a collection of keywords and concepts
fundamental to an “anarchaeology and variantology of the media” that rethink media “ecology”
and the Enlightenment-scientific approach to technology.1025 The idea of a media archeology
rather than an ecology obviously comes largely from Foucault, and entries in the book are
dedicated to important terms developed by him: archeology, archive, discourse, apparatus,
genealogy, biopolitics.1026 (Zielinski actually borrowed the idea of “deep time” in media from the
paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who used it to describe geological time.)1027 But Flusser’s
influence can also be felt throughout the book, from the first paragraph of the “Preface,” which
mentions his idea of the “screen effect,” to Hans Belting’s entry on perspective. According to
Belting, perspective is about looking through pictures: Flusser’s focus on screens and
“superficiality” indicates a shift in media, perception, and epistemology.1028 Moreover, as
Zielinski writes in one of his entries:
1024
Joseph Menn, All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster (New York:
Crown Business, 2003); John Alderman, Sonic Boom: Napster, Mp3, and the New Pioneers of
Music (New York: Basic Books, 2002); David Arditi, iTake-Over: The Recording Industry in the
Digital Era (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
1025
Claudia Giannetti, “Preface,” An Archive(s), Claudia Giannetti, ed. (Oldenburg and Cologne,
Germany: Edith Russ House for Media Art and Walter Konig, 2014), 13.
1026
Konstanty Szydlowski, “Michel Foucault,” An Archive(s), 76-77.
1027
Baruch Gottlieb, “Stephen Jay Gould,” An Archive(s), 81-82.
1028
See Claudia Giannetti, “Preface,” An Archive(s), 12; and Hans Belting, “Perspective,” An
Archive (s), 130-131.
298
The tradition of European modernism is cool and calculating. Thought through to
the end, with respect to the relationship between the living (bios) and the
mechanical (techne), which issued from divine reason (logos), it gives rise to the
following hierarchy: at the pinnacle aion, self-moving time without beginning or
end, the inexhaustible meta-machine that creates and maintains everything that
moves.1029
In this short passage one can see many Flusserian ideas: the separation of nature and
culture in modern European thought; the subsequent critique of logocentric Reason; the
questionable hierarchy of humans above animals; and the importance of techne. In another recent
German publication, released by the University of the Arts in Berlin, where the Flusser Archive
is located, Zielinski interviewed a number of writers and thinkers about the geneaology of media
thought; mentions of Flusser recur frequently.1030 However, rather than linger on Flusser in
Germany, I want to address how his writings overlap with contemporary U.S. media theory.
U.S. Media Theory: Lev Manovich, Alexander Galloway, and Branden Hookway
Flusser’s focus on mass media when other critics and theorists were ignoring it mirrors,
to some extent, the situation in art history. However, art history has recently undergone a shift in
interest from “medium” to “media.” In recent decades art historians have turned to figures like
Kittler and Lev Manovich, whose book The Language of the New Media (2002) uses McLuhan’s
method of reading new media through old (or vice versa), by focusing on film and photography
1029
Siegfried Zielinkski, “Beast Machines,” An Archive(s), 54-55.
1030
Forum zur Genealogie des MedienDenkens 1: Siegfried Zielinski in Grespräch mit Peter
Weibel, Joachim Paech, Thomas Elsaesser, Florian Rötzer, Elisabeth von Samsonnow, Hans
Ulrich Reck, Boris Groys (Berlin, 2012-2013), ed. Daniel Irrgang and Clemens Jahn (Berlin:
University of the Arts, 2013) and Forum zur Genealogie des MedienDenkens 2: Siegfried
Zielinski in Grespräch mit Hans Belting, Wolfgang Ernst, Harmut Winkler, Henning Schmidgen,
Claus Pias, Sybille Krämer (Berlin, Summer 2013), ed. Daniel Irrgang, Konstantin Daniel
Haensch, and Inger Neick (Berlin: University of the Arts, 2013). The other thinkers who are
mentioned frequently are Baudrillard, Foucault, McLuhan, and Virilio.
299
and how their formats prefigured the rectangular frame of new media.1031 It should be noted that
The Language of the New Media was itself coming out of the first generation of Internet culture
when, as Alexander Galloway observed, “the conditions of the production and distribution of
knowledge were rather different than they are today.”1032 But Manovich has also been merciless
in his criticism of the art world as a new-media backwater:
[In] the 1990s the U.S. art world proved to be the most conservative cultural force
in contemporary society, lagging behind the rest of the cultural and social
institutions in dealing with new media technologies. (In the 1990s a standard joke
at new media festivals was that a new media piece requires two interfaces: one for
art curators and one for everybody else.)1033
Manovich argued that art and new media have different logics: art is based on solo
authorship and exclusive distribution (through galleries, museums, auction houses) while new
media are collective, collaborative, and given to network distribution.1034 Manovich’s utopian
recounting of new media could be disputed—except that he seems to do that himself several
paragraphs later in the same text when he claims that the computer scientists who invented
programming, graphical human-computer interfaces, hypertext, computer multimedia, and wired
and wireless networking—he names J.D.R. Licklider, Douglas Engelbart, Ivan Sutherland, Ted
Nelson, Seymour Papert, and Tim Berners-Lee—“are the important artists of our time, maybe
1031
Lev Manovich, The Language of the New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
1032
Alexander R. Galloway, “What is New Media? Ten Years After The Language of New
Media,” Criticism 53, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 377. See also Alexander R. Galloway, McKenzie
Wark, and Eugene Thacker, Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014). In the introduction Galloway, et al.
consider the question “what is new media,” citing Friedrich Kittler’s “What’s New about the
New Media?,” Mutations, ed. Rem Koolhaas, et al. (New York: Actar, 2001), 58– 69.
1033
Lev Manovich, “New Media from Borges to HTML,” The New Media Reader, 14.
1034
Ibid.
300
the only artists who are truly important and who will be remembered from this historical
period.”1035
In a more recent text, Software Takes Command (2013), Manovich further diagnoses
what he sees as art’s problem. Including Clement Greenberg in his discussion of medium/media,
and finding Greenberg’s notion of medium-specificity untenable, as it was applied to painting,
Manovich argues for a “aesthetics of hybridity.” He defines software as a “metamedium,” citing
Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg’s “Personal Dynamic Media” (1977), which used the term
“metamedium,” and which posited a model for computers that could be used “by human beings
of all ages,” and create active rather than passive users. One might also look at Kay and
Goldberg’s colleague at MIT, Seymour Papert, who described in 1980 the differences in writing
and digital coding in a manner that prefigured Flusser: “In print writing, the tools you generate
are rhetorical; they demonstrate and convince. In computer writing, the tools you generate are
processes; they simulate and decide.”1036
Where Manovich might be seen to correspond with Flusser is around the idea of
interfaces, to which he devotes a section in The Language of New Media.1037 Manovich looks at
the computer interface in rather formalist terms, describing how its rectilinear nature “remained
1035
Ibid., 15.
1036
See Lev Manovich’s discussion of the Dynabook, invented by Kay, Goldberg, and others
working at Xerox Paolo Alto Research Center (PARC) in Software Takes Command and Alan
Kay and Adele Goldberg, “Personal Dynamic Media” in The New Media Reader, 393-404. Also
see Seymour Papert quoted in The New Media Reader, 392. The other overlap with Kay,
Goldberg, Papert, and Flusser is in their emphasis on learning and children: children were the
“user communities” for computer pioneers of in seventies and Flusser acknowledged in Does
Writing Have a Future? that children would learn new media more easily and adults would have
to “go back to kindergarten.” Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future, 155.
1037
Manovich, “The Interface,” The Language of New Media, 62-115.
301
true to the modernist values of clarity and functionality.”1038 He also considers how work and
leisure tend to coalesce around the same interfaces and how interfaces change notions of form
versus content, making content “free-floating” instead of imbedded in their material sources. He
still thinks of the interface as “another medium,”1039 however, or a “new cultural metalanguage,
something that will be as significant as the printed word and cinema” rather than a restructuring
of consciousness.1040
The writer who has both picked up the concept of the interface in philosophical terms and
acknowledged Flusser as a precursor is Alexander Galloway, author of Protocol: How Control
Exists After Decentralization (2004) and The Interface Effect (2012), in which he considers how
interfaces can either facilitate or impede communication.1041 From 1996 to 2002, Galloway was
involved with rhizome.org, a platform for new media arts, signaling his interest not only in
digital media, but also the work of Deleuze and Guattari.1042 In 2008, Galloway delivered the
25th International Flusser Lecture, “The Unworkable Interface,” which served as groundwork for
1038
Ibid., 63
1039
Ibid., 89.
1040
Ibid., 93. Mark B.N. Hansen argues in New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2004) that Manovich’s argument in The Language of the New Media, which opens
with a consideration of the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, is overinvested in the cinematic—
hence, he cannot think beyond the linear frame.
1041
Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2004) and The Interface Effect (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012). Rhizome was
founded by Mark Tribe in the spring of 1996; Galloway joined soon thereafter, in the fall of
1996, and worked at Rhizome until 2002.
1042
The organization is “An affiliate in residence at the New Museum in New York.” See the
rhizome website, accessed January 23, 2015, http://rhizome.org/about/?ref=footer.
302
his subsequent book. 1043 Like Flusser, Galloway’s notion of interfaces includes windows and
doors—phenomenological media—as well as video games, software, television, paintings, and
other types of images.1044 He criticizes Manovich’s idea of the interface as a medium, instead
moving into Flusserian territory (also citing Gérard Genette’s idea of thresholds as “zones of
indecision”) by considering the interface as a zone where objects and identities meet and which
structures interaction.1045 For Galloway, however, the interface is immanently political. From the
beginning, he has viewed networks and interfaces through the filter of thinkers like Deleuze and
the idea of control. In recent years, Galloway has become a commentator and analyst of
contemporary French philosophy1046 (and the pessimism traditionally associated with French
1043
“The International Flusser Lectures is a project by the Vilém Flusser Archive, initiated at the
Academy of Media Arts in Cologne in 1999, and continued at the University of Arts, Berlin,
since 2007. The idea behind the project is to keep the intellectual legacy of Vilém Flusser
present, and to help transferring it into current scientific discourses. Selected lectures are
published in German language (or exceptionally in English) by Walther König, Cologne. Current
editors are Siegfried Zielinski with Daniel Irrgang and Marcel René Marburger. Former editors
were Silvia Wagnermaier and Claudia Becker. Some texts were edited in cooperation with
Thomas Hensel and Hans Ulrich Reck.” Quoted from the Vilém Flusser Archive website,
accessed January 7, 2015, flusser-archive.org.
1044
Galloway, “What is New Media?,” 379. It is important to point out that interfaces is the
operative term here; other writers, like Manovich, have focused on software as the important new
media term; Kittler and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun have suggested that hardware is just as—if not
equally—important; Tiziana Terranova and Eugene Thacker lean toward networks; and Geert
Lovink and Yochai Benkler toward social media. One might also see Manovich’s distrust of
digital interactivity and ideology as a product of his upbringing in the Soviet Union, in which he
imagines the Internet as a communal apartment in the Stalin era where there is “no privacy,
everybody spies on everybody else” and there is an “ever present line for common areas such as
the toilet or the kitchen.” Lev Manovich, “On Totalitarian Interactivity (Notes from the Enemy
of the People)," Manovich.net, accessed January 6, 2015, http://manovich.net/content/04projects/015-on-totalitarian-interactivity/14_article_1996.pdf. Quoted in Galloway, “What is
New Media?,” 381.
1045
Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge, UK and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1997).
1046
Alexander R. Galloway, French Theory Today: An Introduction to Possible Futures (New
York: Public School New York/Erudio Editions, 2011).
303
thought): his thinking has shifted away from the art-activist platform and toward arguing that
networks are even tighter forms of control.1047 Compared to pyramidal hierarchies, he argues,
networks appear flimsy, ineffective and disorganized—but their asymmetry is precisely what
makes them so robust. The Cold War model of decentralized systems of targets eventually
became so hegemonic that the “distributed network is the new citadel, the new army, the new
power.”1048 In fact, for Galloway, the idea that networks have the potential to disrupt rigid
structures and do away with hierarchies must be “resolutely resisted.”1049 Galloway cites
Foucault’s concept of biopower,1050 late Deleuze,1051 and the “political failure” of bi-directional
and emancipated media (Bertolt Brecht and Enzensberger) as touchstones at a moment when
1047
Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2014). One might also look at the early Deleuze in terms of his overlap with
both Flusser and Laruelle. See Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990). Originally published as Logique du sens (Paris, Éditions de Minuit,
1969).
1048
Alexander Galloway, “Protocol,” Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2007): 317-320. It is
important to note that Galloway is talking here about “the technology of organization and control
operating in distributed networks,” Ibid., 317. But there is some overlap with his argument and
Flusser. Galloway writes that protocol exists in contemporary computer networks as well as
biological and bioinformatics networks, such as those Flusser wrote about in Vampyroteuthis
infernalis and the “Curie’s Children” series in Artforum.
1049
Ibid., 318.
1050
“A new form of total saturation or organization, one that penetrated not only the institutions
of modern life, but also the very networks of human interaction, be they domestic, familial,
sexual, or even intra-human at the level of ‘raw’ biology.” Ibid., 318.
1051
In his references Galloway cites Deleuze’s Negotiations (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1990), a book that tracks Deleuze’s trajectory from 1972 to 1990, Anti-Oedipus, and
essays like “Control and Becoming” and “Postscript on Control Societies.” In a 2015 interview,
Galloway also distinguishes between the Deleuze of “subjectivity” and the Deleuze of “control.”
http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/forget-deleuze. For another recent view of control,
see Seb Franklin, Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).
304
“interactivity is one of the core instruments of control.”1052 One could argue that asymmetry and
de-hierarchization, in of themselves have been fetishized, and that structurelessness itself can
contain its own tyranny.1053 But Galloway’s reigning argument is that asymmetry—the “very
tools of the former Left”1054— has been colonized by power.
One can see Flusser’s terms everywhere in Branden Hookway’s Interface (2014), even if
Hookway does not cite Flusser.1055 Hookway, who wrote a dissertation on the airplane cockpit,
arguing that it is the “paradigmatic twentieth-century environment”—a dissertation from which
this book emerged—describes the interface as both “ubiquitous and hidden from view,”1056 a
“form of relation,” and a liminal or “threshold condition.”1057 Like Kittler and Zielinski, he uses
Foucault as a touchstone for doing an archeology of the media, looking back to the eighteenth,
nineteenth, and mid-twentieth century origins of terms: James Thomson (the interface and fluid
dynamics); James Clerk Maxwell (who used “interface” rather than “surface” in his theoretical
physics); Lord Kelvin (fluidity, turbulence, and control); Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener
(entropy and control); and Michael Serres (turbulence). Most important here is the fact that,
1052
“This is the political tragedy of interactivity, that what was so liberating for Enzensberger is
today the very site of informatics exploitation, regulation and control. Today, interactivity means
total participation, universal capture.” Galloway, “Protocol,” 319.
1053
See Jo Freeman’s classic essay critiquing models of the 70s women’s liberation movement,
“The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 17 (1972-73): 151-165. In
the same way feminists have suggested that women arrived at many of Foucault’s arguments in
the sixties, Freeman offers a critique of social networks formed around a politics of liberation—
and gendered forms of power—that are often ignored by media theorists—except for Haraway
and N. Katherine Hayles, and in more recent years by Chun, Nakamura, and others.
1054
Galloway, “Protocol,” 320.
1055
Branden Hookway, Interface (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2014).
1056
Ibid., ix.
1057
Ibid., 5.
305
throughout the book, Hookway compares the interface to screens, surfaces, topology, apparatus,
and game theory—terms all central to Flusser’s philosophy. (He also argues that the interface is a
locus of power and control, but not as vigorously as Galloway; rather, for Hookway, it’s a
“disputed site.”)1058 Hookway’s notion of apparatus differs from Flusser’s in that it is grounded
in figures like Agamben, Lewis Mumford, and Foucault and his ideas about games are drawn
from writers such as Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois. His approach to games and technology
is not dissimilar from Flusser’s, however, in that “becoming the user of an interface is like
becoming the player of a game” (literally, when applied to video games).1059 Where Hookway
particularly recalls Flusser, however, is when he explores the etymology of terms related to the
interface and invokes Heidegger. “Interface,” Hookway explains, comes from the roots “inter-”
(connoting relations that take place within a bounded spatial or temporal field) and “-face”
(countenance, appearance, or bringing about).1060 This is reminiscent of Flusser’s concern with
“seeing the face of the other” in the technical-image screen. Citing Agamben’s use of
Heidegger’s Gestell or “enframing”—technology as a kind of positioning—in “The Question
Concerning Technology” (1954), Hookway argues that the interface differs from apparatus in
that it is “relational”: entirely dependent on context, on the positioning of human to machine, and
thus reframes ideas of freewill (Flusser’s “human freedom”).1061 Hookway also cites Heidegger’s
1058
Ibid., 24.
1059
Ibid., 32.
1060
Ibid., 7-12.
1061
“This is not to say that the interface is context-independent, but rather precisely the opposite.
While the overall operation of the interface as a form of relation is common to all of the various
contexts of its instantiation, the event of its operation is in each instance defined and directed
toward the actual and particular in the context or field in which the interface is situated … the
interface actively produces behavior coherence or embodied intelligence, whether material or
social, ludic or political, or as derived from the human sensorium or the workings of the
306
idea of readiness-at-hand (Zuhandenheit), discussed in “The Question Concerning Technology”:
the quality of technology “being at our disposal,” and how this highlights a new phenomenology
of experience: we might not know how an interface works, but we know how to use one and we
particularly know when it breaks down.1062 In other words, the interface sets up what Flusser
would call an epistemological or philosophical problem: it changes human experience and our
being in the world. Flusser did not live long enough to engage actively with interfaces or write
about them, but his use of similar terms and sources, such as Heidegger and phenomenology,
seems significant.
Flusser and Contemporary Art
European and Brazilian artists have continued to engage with Flusser or use his theories
in some way to shift our understanding of art, culture, and society (or at the very least, the
camera apparatus). They visit the Archive in Berlin, organize or contribute to conferences and
symposia, curate exhibitions, and publish projects in Flusser Studies—and the Flusser Archive is
organizing an exhibition that will open in Berlin this year and tour several European cities,
including artists and describing Flusser’s migratory trajectory across continents and the art
world.1063 However, we are only on the cusp of artists in North America discovering Flusser in
any significant way and employing his writings to greater ends. I have mentioned artists like
machine.” Ibid., 56-57. Hookway also dips into phenomenology, as one can see here, although
through Merleau-Ponty rather than Husserl.
1062
Moving briefly beyond the interface, Hookway mentions Hubert L. Dreyfus’s critique of
artificial intelligence, What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (New York:
Harper and Row, 1972), which cites Michael Polanyi, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger. Hookway,
Interface, 129.
1063
The plans for this exhibition were being finalized and not announced publically at the time of
this writing, in January 2015.
307
Christopher Williams, a U.S. artist who recently relocated to Germany; another artist of his
generation who mentioned Flusser in writing, although he hasn’t done much else, is John Miller,
who cited Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography in a 2006 article on conceptual artist
Douglas Huebler in Artforum.1064 Miller considers Huebler’s Variable Piece #70, (In Process)
Global, 1971 (1971-present), in which the artist proposed to photograph every human on the
planet and read this through Flusser’s ideas of program, game theory, and apparatus. Miller
wonders, given the implicit failure of the project, if this turns Huebler into just another
functionary of the camera program, or if it implies something else for the artist and photography:
The role is performative and mimetic, nothing less than mummery.
Documentation is only the pretext for such a charade—Huebler does not and
cannot fully enact all the elements in the camera’s program. His enactments are
reduced to gestures.1065
Miller looks at Allan Sekula’s essay “Reading an Archive: Photography between Labor
and Capital” (1983), which argues that photography constructs an “imaginary economy” that
represents imaginary relations between people, and compares this to Flusser’s idea of magic in
which photography eroded the linear history constructed by writing with images that promote
magical thought, which confuses cause and effect (does the cock crow because the sun rises or
does the sun rise because the cock crows?). What one realizes in reading this essay is that Flusser
is a canny choice for reading Huebler. Sekula’s “political” art and writing announce themselves,
but Huebler’s work seems to be apolitical. Or is it? Miller concludes the essay with a nod to
Flusser’s essay “The Photograph as Post-Industrial Object,” which he has mentioned previously
in the text:
1064
John Miller, “Double or Nothing: John Miller on the Art of Douglas Huebler,” Artforum
(April 2006), accessed January 9, 2015, https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=200604&id=10617.
1065
Ibid.
308
What is perhaps most compelling about Huebler’s particular approach to
photography—and Variable Piece #70 especially—is that its internal
contradictions so clearly sharpen the larger contradictions of the entire
photographic enterprise in the postindustrial era. The surface blandness of a world
filled with more or less interesting objects shows itself to be nothing less than a
topology for localized ideological struggle and ongoing economic
transformation.1066
A handful of younger artists—mostly in photography—have also adopted Flusser.
Walead Beshty mentioned him in a 2008 essay that considered abstraction and the image—that
is, both the rise of abstraction in post-millennial art photography and the idea of photography as
itself an abstraction.1067 Beshty quoted a passage in Towards a Philosophy of Photography that
considers the universe of technical images as a place where every action loses its historical
character and turns into a magical ritual—an “apocalyptic perspective,” in Flusser’s words,
which resonated with Beshty, who wrote: “This is the apocalyptic becoming of the technological
image in the form of the photograph, an inescapable conflation of the concrete with the likeness,
an abstract gleaming dystopia where the real is a priori an image, and vice-versa.1068
Photographer Arthur Ou has organized two editions of a conference titled “The
Photographic Universe” at Parsons School The New School of Design, which use Flusser’s idea
as an umbrella for thinking about photography at this “pivotal” moment in history.1069 And Ou
and the photographer Shannon Ebner are putting together a book for which I am writing an essay
1066
Ibid.
1067
Walead Beshty, “Abstracting Photography,” Words Without Pictures (New York: Aperture,
2010), 292-315. Originally posted on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s website for the
project “Words Without Pictures,” April 2008.
1068
Ibid., 302.
1069
“The Photographic Universe,” Parsons The New School of Design, March 2 – 3, 2011,
accessed January 9, 2015, http://www.newschool.edu/parsons/public_programs.aspx?id=61010.
See also “The Photographic Universe II,” April 10-11, 2013, accessed January 9, 2015,
http://photographicuniverse.parsons.edu/.
309
on Flusser and Norbert Wiener. In mainstream journalistic art writing, Flusser has been
mentioned three times in The New York Times: the first, unsurprisingly, was by an artist. In a
2007 article on his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, photographer Barry
Frydlender said: “The Czech philosopher Vilem Flusser wrote that photographs were like dams
to stop up history … I’m trying to reintroduce and redirect the flow.”1070 Two more recent
citations were put there by me in 2014, while I was writing this dissertation.1071
Flusser’s writings continue to be of importance for designers and graphic design
theorists—particularly in design-heavy countries like the Netherlands and in Scandinavia. They
have also made their way into more interdisciplinary practices. Kenneth Goldsmith, a poet who
has essentially followed the tenets of Appropriation, included a facsimile of Flusser’s typewritten
manuscript for the essay “The Gesture of Writing” in his entry for a book project titled Possible
Content for 18 Pages: A performance research project about writing.1072
What is important to remember is that it is not just the photographer who can alter the
program of the camera—or the critic. The Einbildungskraft, or envisioner—the philosopher of
photography—is imperative, too, since, as the last sentence of Towards a Philosophy of
Photography argues, “such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution
1070
Barry Frydlender quoted in Leslie Camhi, “Fragments of Israel, Assembled Into a Whole,”
The New York Times, May 13, 2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/arts/design/13camh.html?pagewanted=1.
1071
Martha Schwendener, “Creative Deconstruction of Books,” a review of “Odd Volumes:
Book Art From the Allan Chasanoff Collection” at the Yale University Art Gallery, The New
York Times, December 7, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/nyregion/a-review-of-oddvolumes-book-art-from-the-allan-chasanoff-collection-in-new-haven.html. Martha Schwendener,
Review of Christopher Williams at David Zwirner, The New York Times, November 14, 2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/arts/design/christopher-williams.html.
1072
Possible Content for 18 Pages: A performance research project about writing, ed. Franz
Thalmair (Exhibition project for This Page Intentionally Left Blank, Akbank Art Center,
Istanbul, March 19 – May 17, 2014).
310
left open to us.”1073 This is one area where Flusser might be fruitful for future generations of
photography scholars. If so-called revolutionary artists have looked toward deconstructing the
medium or the conditions of authorship, or towards adding revolutionary content to their work,
applying Flusser to writing about photography might be a way of thinking about technical
images in the current age. One of the operative questions within art these days is, how can the
apparatus be changed in an age dominated by the art market? I have already described how
Christopher Williams’s illustration of apparatus is in some ways the equivalent of Peter Halley’s
application of Baudrillard’s idea of simulation: thoughtful, but ultimately in concert with the
institutional art system rather a challenge to its program. There are other avenues, however, and
it is with these that I will conclude this dissertation.
1073
Ibid., 82.
311
Conclusion
We are, in many ways, living in the world Flusser envisioned. Engulfed in a universe of
technical images and unmoored by climate change, environmental disasters, and political
upheavals that have spurred mass migration, we are on the cusp of developments that will change
what it means to be human. We need new theories, not only for photography, but also for
communication and living. One might ask: Why do we need theory? How will that solve any of
these crises? However, as writers from bell hooks to Edward Said have pointed out, theory
allows us to observe the world from new perspectives and ask how we might change it.1074 It
allows us to make predictions based on possible outcomes and consequences. And Flusser was
an avid prognosticator. He was prone to poking fun at theory, accusing it of being “detached”
from the world and its phenomena, but he was also committed to theory as a form of ethics.1075
He wrote that if we do not find a solution to “the ethical problems of design, then Nazism, the
Gulf War and similar events will go down in history as merely the opening stages of a period of
destruction and self-destruction.”1076 Similarly, in a world dominated by automated, programmed
and programming apparatuses, a philosophy of photography was “the only form of revolution
left open to us.”1077
1074
bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992); Edward
Said, “Traveling Theory,” The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1983), 226-247. See also Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) and After Theory (New York: Basic Books,
2003).
1075
Flusser, “Design as Theology,” The Shape of Things, 71.
1076
Flusser, “The Ethics of Industrial Design,” The Shape of Things, 69.
1077
Flusser, “Why a Philosophy of Photography is Necessary,” Towards a Philosophy of
Photography (Reaktion), 81-82.
312
In this dissertation I have tried to show how Flusser might open up new horizons for
photography theory by considering not only images, but apparatuses and communication
structures. Although Flusser died before the popularization of the Internet and social media, he
was prescient in imagining how we would see ourselves “in the face of the Other” through
technological screens and how we are bedazzled by the “magic” of technical images. He
predicted a society of people communicating via screens and that writing would be eclipsed by
computer code. Given current discussions around electronic publishing, it's clear that Flusser was
not erroneous, just premature.
What Flusser opens up, for me, is a world in which art and images can be considered
based on methods drawn from multiple disciplines and in which technology becomes integral
rather than secondary to the process. There are other art historians who have taken this approach,
such as Jonathan Crary, David Joselit, and Christiane Paul. I have also considered media
thinkers such as Friedrich Kittler, Lev Manovich, and Alexander Galloway. But there are
scholars, critics, artists, and writers working today whose work supports, if not Flusser directly,
than his general arguments.1078 The idea that technology structures human experience has been
picked up by Bernard Stiegler.1079 Subjectivity and objects—or things (versus Heidegger’s
distinction with “objects”)—have become central to several strains of contemporary philosophy,
1078
For a broader analysis of French thought contemporaneous with Flusser and its relationship
to technology, see Arthur Kroker, The Possessed Individual: Technology and the French
Postmodern (Montreal and New York: New World Perspectives and St. Martin’s Press, 1992).
1079
As Mark Poster writes, for Flusser, writing as a medium encourages a specific form of
temporality: “The medium and the character of time are particular. This suggests that each
medium might have an associated, special form of temporality. Flusser’s media theory thereby
accounts for the specificity of each information technology.” Mark Poster, “Introduction,” Into
the Universe of Technical Images, xv-xvi.
313
from the “Thing Theory” of literary critics like Bill Brown1080 to Object-Oriented Ontology
(OOO) and Speculative Realism, which extend Heidegger’s philosophy to critique
anthropomorphically-centered thought.1081 (In 2013, Graham Harman, one of the central figures
of OOO, gave the 35th International Flusser Lecture in Berlin, titled “Heidegger and McLuhan:
An Imaginary Encounter,” later published as The Revenge of the Surface: Heidegger, McLuhan,
Greenberg.)1082 Accelerationism, a related philosophy, shares with Flusser a kind of outsider
1080
Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003). See also the Critical Inquiry devoted to “Things”: Critical
Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001). Brown’s thinking comes partially out of Heidegger, borrowing
the distinction between “objects” and “things” from Heidegger’s essay “The Thing,” originally
delivered as a lecture in 1950, which argues that the fundamental nature of a jug is not its
material presence but the way it shapes the void inside it. Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,”
Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 163180. For a more recent consideration, see Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (Durham, NC and
London: Duke University Press, 2010).
1081
Graham Harman’s 1999 doctoral dissertation "Tool-Being: Elements in a Theory of Objects”
extended Heidegger’s thinking, taking his analysis of tools (particularly the hammer we become
aware of only when it breaks) in Being and Time, and extended this argument into what would
become the philosophy called Speculative Realism. See Graham Harman, Tool-Being:
Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago: Open Court, 2002). See also Graham
Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago: Open
Court, 2005); Graham Harman, "The Current State of Speculative Realism," Speculations IV
(2013): 22-27; Levi Bryant, "Politics and Speculative Realism," Speculations IV (2013): 15-21;
Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism
and Realism (Melbourne, Australia: Re:Press, 2011). The French philosopher most often
associated with Speculative Realism is Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the
Necessity of Contingency (London and New York: Continuum, 2008).
1082
The April 8, 2013 lecture, “The Revenge of the Surface,” was later published in German
under the title Die Rache der Oberfläche: Heidegger, McLuhan, Greenberg (Berlin: Walther
König, 2014). Also available online, accessed January 7, 2015,
http://dar.aucegypt.edu/bitstream/handle/10526/3640/harman-1.pdf?sequence=1. Harman
considered three thinkers who shared a “common opposition to the priority of the surface”:
Heidegger read through phenomenology, McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” and
Greenberg’s view of canvases and surrealism. Flusser is not mentioned at all, but his approach to
surfaces (technical image screens) and his grounding in objects, as well as his debt to Heidegger
and McLuhan strengthen the connection and the choice of Harman to deliver a lecture in this
series
314
status that has proven attractive to artists and thinkers looking for radical alternative models.
Influenced by science fiction (the term comes from Roger Zelazny’s 1967 science fiction novel
Lord of Light), and similarly speculative,1083 some of its central figures have produced work
similar to Flusser’s: Nick Land theorized cyberspace in the nineties, while Reza Negarestani
gained attention for his “theory-fiction” book Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous
Materials (2008), a mini-history and philosophy of oil that might be compared to Flusser’s
Vampyroteuthis infernalis.1084 And while Accelerationism’s ethos—centered on crisis,
catastrophe, and the “accelerated” end of capitalism—contrasts with Flusser’s provisional
optimism, their interest in the Anthropocene, an era in which humans cannot be seen as apart
from the natural world, mirrors the nature-culture dialectic Flusser was trying to erode.1085
François Laruelle is another philosopher concerned with eroding the binary nature of
traditional philosophy in an attempt to produce a new utopian thought. Although Laruelle
1083
“The term ‘accelerationism,’ was initially coined by Roger Zelazny in his 1967 science
fiction novel Lord of Light, and taken up as a critical term by Benjamin Noys in The Persistence
of the Negative (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 4-9. Noys continues his
meditation on accelerationism in Malign Velocities: Acceleration and Capitalism (London: Zero
Books, 2014).” Ibid., 8, footnote 1. Mackay and Avanessian’s #Accelerate#: The Accelerationist
Reader also includes texts by science fiction author J.G. Ballard and the editors cite, but do not
include texts by dystopian cyberpunk writer William Gibson.
1084
Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne,
Australia: Re.Press, 2008). Artist Pamela Rosenkranz included Cyclonopedia in her entry for
“Books: Best of 2009” in Artforum, suggesting the way in which Negarestani, like Flusser, found
a forum and audience in the U.S. art magazine, as opposed to traditional philosophical journals.
See Pamela Rosenkranz, “Books: Best of 2009,” Artforum (December 2009).
https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=200910&id=24237. Accessed January 8, 2015.
1085
Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, "Introduction," #Accelerate#: The Accelerationist
Reader (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014), 7. See also Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An
Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Bloomsbury, 2010); Peter Wolfendale, ObjectOriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014); Steven
Shaviro, The Universe of Things (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); and
Tristan Garcia, Form and Object: A Treatise on Things (Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
315
responds very much to French strains of philosophy—reacting to and rejecting Deleuze and
Alain Badiou, among others—many of the terms discussed in Alexander R. Galloway’s recent
book Laruelle: Against the Digital (2014) echo Flusser:1086 Laruelle’s interest in art (essays on
James Turrell and August von Briesen); photography, framed for philosophical purposes as
“non-photography” in the books The Concept of Non-Photography (2011) and Photo-Fiction, a
Non Standard Aesthetics (2012);1087 and his formulation of philosophy as science fiction1088 or a
“black box.”1089 Similarly, when Galloway writes that, for Laruelle, “utopia is a technique, not a
story or a world,” one senses an intersection with Flusser.1090 Both attempt to redefine the human
subject: for Laruelle it is a “generic” human in which positions of privilege and the subaltern are
erased; for Flusser, the subject becomes a “project”—both projected and under development—as
1086
Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2014).
1087
François Laruelle, The Concept of Non-Photography (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2011);
Photo-Fiction, a Non Standard Aesthetics (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2012); and “A Light
Odyssey: La découverte de la lumière comme problème théorique et esthétique” (Poitiers: le
Confort Moderne, 1991). Also see Alexander R. Galloway’s “Laruelle and Art,” continent 2.4
(2012): 230-236. François Laruelle, “A Light Odyssey: La découverte de la lumière comme
problème théorique et esthétique” (Poitiers: le Confort Moderne, 1991), 8.
1088
See Galloway, Laruelle, 160. He cites Laruelle’s book Struggle and Utopia at the End Times
of Philosophy (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2012). It should be noted that Univocal, a small
independent press founded by artists who attended the European Graduate School (EGS), has
also published translations of Flusser’s Portuguese texts, translated by their EGS classmate,
Rodrigo Maltez Novaes.
1089
François Laruelle, “Du noir univers [The Black Universe],” La Décision philosophique 5
(1988): 107-112.
1090
Galloway, Laruelle,
316
described in the late essays published posthumously as From Subject to Project: Becoming
Human (1994).1091
I have offered several reasons why, despite having a column in Artforum, Flusser has
generally been excluded from North American discourse. But history is beginning to catch up
with Flusser. He is now being cited in English as well as German photography histories and
anthologies, from Hilde van Gelder and Helen Westgeest’s Photography Theory in Historical
Perspective (2011) to Jay Emerling’s Photography: History and Theory (2012) and Oxford Art
Online’s entry on photography theory.1092 As I mentioned in Chapter 3, terms like “magic,”
which Flusser employed frequently in his photography writings, have become central to
contemporary artists and curators: Charlotte Cotton’s just-published survey of contemporary
photography, Photography is Magic (2015) has a title that would’ve been unthinkable two
generations ago.1093 And many of Flusser’s prognostications have materialized: we do live in a
world where people spend large amounts of time looking at screens; we are surrounded and
controlled by apparatuses; and we increasingly describe ourselves as knots or nodes in a network
rather than individuals in an existential landscape.1094
1091
Vilém Flusser, Vom Subjekt zum Projekt. Menschwerdung (Bensheim and Düsseldorf:
Bollmann, 1994).
1092
Hilde van Gelder and Helen Westgeest, Photography Theory in Historical Perspective
(Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
1093
Charlotte Cotton, Photography is Magic (New York: Aperture, 2015). Cotton cites Flusser
twice in the introduction—another sign of how his theories are becoming more present in current
U.S. photography discourse—but in the context of “apparatus” rather than magic. See Cotton,
Photography is Magic, 9.
1094
Aside from Tiziana Terranova’s Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (Ann
Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2004), one recent text that addresses networks is Christopher Vitale’s
Networkologies: A Philosophy of Networks for a Hyperconnected Age – A Manifesto
(Winchester, UK, 2014).
317
Part of embracing Flusser’s theory, however, means rethinking terms like “criticality”: as
a form of imagination rather than Frankfurt School-derived “critique.” In “Towards a Theory of
Techno-Imagination” (1980), recently published in Philosophy of Photography, Flusser wrote
that developing new faculties for criticism should be based on “knowledge of those theories on
which cameras are based,” which would apply “to all ideologies of all apparatuses.”1095 One of
the new photography theorists who might be realizing Flusser’s concept of techno-imagination
(or Einsbildungsgraf) is Ariella Azoulay, who argues not that photography is voyeuristic or a
formal “index,” but that it sets up a “civil contract” in which the subject and the viewer of the
photograph co-exist in a world beyond national borders—particularly in her examples where one
group (Israelis) exist as “citizens” while inhabitants of the same territory (Palestinians) are
treated as stateless subjects.1096 Within Azoulay’s theory of photography, looking into the “face
of the other” becomes a profoundly political act, one in which we regain some sense of power
while looking at photographs rather than merely participating in a voyeuristic spectacle.
But if Flusser was a techno-optimist of sorts, theorizing an expanded vision of
photography, criticism, and intersubjective relations, wasn’t he wrong on many counts? Haven’t
we descended into an “abyss” in which apparatuses control our every move and interaction?
From Flusser’s perspective, the worst outcome—mass genocide facilitated by programmed
apparatus—had already happened. Some might see his vision, based on World War II atrocities
and drawing from Martin Buber and Heidegger, as a throwback to various forms of Old World
humanism—or a new kind of humanism. Instead of returning to anthropocentric humanism,
however, Flusser, like Donna Haraway, prefigured more recent theorists like Rosi Braidotti,
1095
Finger, Guldin, and Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, 199.
1096
Ariella Azoulay, Civil Contract of Photography (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2008) and
Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography. London/New York: Verso, 2012.
318
whose book The Posthuman (2013) seeks to recreate a post-Humanities world with post-gender
subjects and species.1097 Similarly, in Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and
Mediation (2013), Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark, consider
“alien” forms of communication: “not so much a post-media condition but rather a nonmedia
condition … not so much a reinvigorated humanism, no matter how complicated or qualified it
might need to be, but rather a glimpse into the realm of the nonhuman.”1098
To place this in the contemporary political moment, Flusser’s theories seem particularly
appropriate at a time marked by climate crisis, global uprisings, and migration, as well as a
backlash against the idea that apparatuses constitute an infallible control society. The possibility
of a control scenario, what he called an “imperialism of information,” existed for Flusser.1099 But
he suggested two divergent possibilities: one moving towards a “centrally programmed,
totalitarian society of image receivers and image administrators,” and the other “toward a
dialogic, telematic society of image producers and image collectors”—the second one being a
“positive utopia.”1100 In “The Photograph as Post-Industrial Object” (1986), Flusser imagined a
dialogic society in which “everybody will become capable of collaborating in the elaboration of
1097
Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013).
1098
Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark, Excommunication: Three
Inquiries in Media and Mediation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 21.
1099
Flusser, Into the Universe of Images, 155.
1100
Ibid., 4. While I am not going to address Flusser’s idea of a telematics society, in this essay,
he defines it as “The technology that would enable the current discursive circuitry into dialogical
circuitry … an amalgam of telecommunication and informatics,” ibid., 79. He also writes that a
“telematics society would be a dialogic game in systematic search of new information,” ibid., 94.
319
information (within the limits imposed by automation)” and democracy had become “technically
possible for the first time since the industrial revolution.”1101
This sounds quixotic, but individuals do participate in social media, in the production of
information, and even in revolutions and the fall of totalitarian regimes.1102 Where the circulation
of written texts in the postwar period, such as Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968)
and Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Black Skin, White Masks (1967), are often
linked with liberation movements in the global South, social media has been cited as central to
recent uprisings in, for instance, China, the Mediterranean, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy
movement in North America.1103 In Into the Universe of Technical Images, Flusser argued that,
unlike Che Guevara or Ayatollah Khomeini, who appeared in spectacular images that turned
them into “entertainers,” the true revolutionaries of our age do not actually appear in images, but
through them, creating new dialogues, relationships, information, and consensus. The new
1101
Flusser, “The Photograph as Post-Industrial Object,” 331.
1102
This is significant with regard to “control” scenarios and Flusser’s theory of photography and
technical images: “The cultural criticism of the Frankfurt School is an example of such secondorder paganism: Behind the images it uncovers secrete, super-human powers at work (e.g.
capitalism) that have maliciously created all these programs instead of taking it for granted that
the programming proceeds in a mindless automatic fashion. A thoroughly disconcerting process
in which, behind the ghosts that have been exorcised, more and more new ones are summoned
up.” Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Reaktion), 64. However, van der Meulen
points out that Flusser’s focus on technology and the idea that whomever controls the apparatus
controls society “ultimately links Flusser to Marx’s materialist analysis of capitalism, which
assumes that power is in the hands of those who control the technological modes of production,
although in Flusser’s books adapted to the context of technology and the media of contemporary
information society.” Van der Meulen, “Between Benjamin and McLuhan,” 204.
1103
Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972); Frantz
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008) and The Wretched of the Earth
(New York: Grove Press, 2004). See also Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780:
Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); National
Liberation: Revolution in the Third World, ed. Norman Miller and Roderick Aya (New York:
Free Press, 1971); and The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, ed. David A. Snow,
Sarah A. Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004).
320
“revolutionaries can manipulate the images so that the people begin to glimpse the possibility of
using these images to initiate previously unimaginable interpersonal relationships.”1104 Flusser
witnessed this in the 1989 Romanian revolution, but a recent parallel might be drawn with the
Egyptian revolution of 2011, which writer and photographer Ahmad Hosni described as
“inexorably linked” to Facebook, such that the role social media played in “initiating and
maintaining a chain of mobilization, politicization, polarization, and eventual monopolization
surpassed any role played by any single political individual or entity.”1105 Manuel Castells
reached a similar conclusion in Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the
Internet Age (2012), in which he posited the argument that recent movements, from the Arab
Spring to Occupy Wall Street began on the Internet and spread throughout the world, creating a
“space of autonomy”—a bit like Azoulay’s citizenship of photography—where people around
the world could create new forms of political participation.1106 Similarly, in the introduction of
1104
Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 66-67.
1105
Ahmad Hosni, “Seen in Action: Notes on Politics and Aesthetics on Facebook,” Afterimage
40, no. 3 (November 2012), 8-11. Another text with a positive outlook on activism and social
media is Christian Fuchs, Occupy Media! The Occupy Movement and Social Media in Crisis
Capitalism (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014). See also The Social Media Reader, ed. Michael
Mandberg (New York: NYU Press, 2012); Paulo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social
Media and Contemporary Activism (London: Pluto Press, 2012).
1106
Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age
(Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012). Castells ideas and writings overlap with Flusser’s in more
than one area. See also Manuel Castells, The Rise of Network Society (Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell, 1996); The Power of Identity (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997); End of Millennium
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998); Cities in the Telecommunications Age: The Fracturing of
Geographies (New York and London: Routledge, 2000); Reading Digital Culture (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2001); Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro (Oxford, UK
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Communication in History: Technology,
Culture, Society (Boston: Allyn and Bacon/Pearson, 2011).
321
this dissertation, I mentioned the current migrations from Africa and the Middle East and the use
of social media to communicate and organize.1107
There are alternative possibilities, of course: the use of social media for gruesome ends,
such as the Islamic State, which has used Facebook and YouTube to broadcast executions and
recruit members.1108 There is, too, the case of Edward Snowden, who uncovered the abuses of
the National Security Agency with regard to surveillance and communications technology.
Flusser predicted the disparate uses of re-programmed apparatus. As he points out in his
“Warning” at the beginning of Into the Universe of Technical Images, all these possibilities
constitute a “utopia”: a “fabulous society” filled with alternative possibilities, not just for the
definition and interpretation of images, but for new forms of consciousness, politics, and
society.1109 In his essay “To Instruct,” in Into the Universe of Images, he wrote:
A button pressing is under way, a noise that is becoming steadily quieter. The
critics confirm that each time a button is pressed, an order goes to some medium
to send out an image. They have the impression of having stumbled into the
center of contemporary decision making, and this is in a double sense of
“decision.” First, the senders appear to subjugate the society by attracting a higher
and higher proportion of the people, turning them into functionaries. Second, the
senders appear to use their buttons to prescribe what happens to the society, what
1107
Boryana Dzhambazova, “Facebook Group’s Push for Safe Land Passage for Migrants
Founders,” The New York Times, September 19, 2015, accessed October 3, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/world/facebook-groups-push-for-safe-land-passage-formigrants-founders.html?_r=0.
1108
Jacob Siegel, “ISIS Is Using Social Media to Reach YOU, Its New Audience,” The Daily
Beast, August 31, 2014, accessed January 19, 2015,
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/31/isis-s-use-of-social-media-to-reach-you-itsnew-audience.html. This also harks back to what was called “guerrilla video,” like the use of the
RAF (Red Army Faction) in Germany videotaping their kidnap victims reading statements. See
Gerd Condradt, “Video Guerilla,” An Archive(s), ed. Claudia Giannetti (Oldenburg and Cologne,
Germany: Edith Russ House for Media Art and Walter Konig, 2014), 168.
1109
Ibid., 3-4.
322
it is to do. This impression is mistaken because under current conditions, the
concept “decision” demands rethinking.1110
This “rethinking” corresponds, however, to a shift in critical thought: a move toward
philosophical pragmatism,1111 the “post-critical,”1112 and away from the apocalyptical media
theorizations of writers like Virilio and Baudrillard.1113 Identifying a crisis is one thing, but
imagining a future is another. What made Norbert Weiner an enduring figure in the information
age was his own crisis of conscience after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki concerning
the “great engineer who never thinks further than the construction of the gadget and never thinks
of the question of the integration between the gadget and the human beings in society.”1114
Flusser’s writing preceded what has been called an “ethical turn” in philosophy.1115 And while
Sjouke van der Meulen calls his political theory “amateurish,” she notes that Flusser is one of the
1110
Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 69.
1111
Molly Nesbit, The Pragmatism in the History of Art (Pittsburgh: Gutenberg Periscope, 2013).
1112
Hal Foster, “Post-Critical,” October 139 (Winter 2012): 3-8; Bruno Latour, “Why Has
Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30
(Winter 2004): 225-248.
1113
It is important to note that, rather than being a standard list of texts, the bibliography for
Flusser’s “The Photograph as Post-Industrial Object” includes at the end this note: “I wrote its
last part in preparation for a discussion between Jean Baudrillard and myself on German
television, scheduled to take place on Februrary 26, 1986.” Flusser, “The Photograph as PostIndustrial Object,” 332. There is no evidence, in the archive or elsewhere, that this conversation
ever took place.
1114
Ibid., 71.
1115
See my essay “Ethical Criticism” in The Brooklyn Rail (May 3, 2013), accessed January 5,
2015, http://www.brooklynrail.org/2013/05/art/ethical-criticism. See also Jacques Rancière, “The
Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics,” Critical Horizons 7:1 (2006): 1-20 and earlier texts like
Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory, ed. Todd F. Davis
and Kenneth Womack (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2001).
323
few authors in the eighties to propose a concrete model.1116 For Flusser, the nature of choice and
destiny had changed and decisions were determined in new ways:
We must neither anthropomorphize nor objectify apparatus … Freedom is
conceivable only as an absurd game with apparatus, as a game with programs
…Whether we continue to be ‘men’ or become robots depends on how fast we
learn to play: we can become players of the game or pieces in it.1117
Within art criticism and art history, pessimistic strains of theory have usually reigned.1118
However, a recent issue of Artforum with a special section devoted to risk and crisis—and which
included Flusser’s essay “Cows”—signaled a shift. In the introduction, Artforum editor Michelle
Kuo placed crisis-thinking within an antiquated system of imperialist humanism, questioning
whether systems of global control are seamless and totalizing:
to believe that such systems can’t fail—that they are infinitely powerful,
adaptable, resilient, that even their collapse is premeditated—is to presume a kind
of humanistic faith in man-made techniques of control. It is, in other words, to
assume yet another kind of technological determinism: one that fails to
understand the unexpected risks and ruptures, the accidents that may render
received wisdoms about power and agency and causality obsolete … we should
1116
Van der Meulen stresses, “[Towards a Philosophy of Photography] ultimately intersects with
philosophy, or more precisely with ethics, because according to Flusser the essence of
photography touches on the question of ‘freedom’ in the modern sense of the word since Kant’s
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.” Van der Meulen, “Between Benjamin and
McLuhan,” 197. See also Chris Bateman, Chaos Ethics (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014),
written by a game designer and self-professed “outsider philosopher.”
1117
Vilém Flusser, Post-History, 25-26. The other thinker Flusser might be aligned with is
Gregory Bateson, who was similarly interested in applying cybernetics and information theory to
human and “communicational” problems. See particularly Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology
of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (Northvale,
NJ and London: Jason Aronson, 1972).
1118
A recent, celebrated example might be Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends
of Sleep (London and New York: Verso, 2013), which posits sleep as the only remaining refuge
or form of resistance left in the networked, instrumentalized, expanding, and non-stop world of
twenty-first-century capitalism.
324
question any simplistic assumption of an all-seeing, omnipresent governmental or
financial power.1119
Kuo cites Michael Serres, the philosopher of science who has questioned the concept of
human mastery around similar poles. For writers like Kuo and Serres, there is still the possibility
of human agency. Flusser relied on older terms, like “freedom,” arguing that “human freedom no
longer consists in being able to shape the world to one’s own desires (apparatuses do this better)
but to instruct (program) the apparatus as to the desired form and to stop (control) it when this
form has been produced. Here a new freedom arises, which apparatuses are supposed to
serve.”1120 This “new freedom” has been greatly challenged. Over twenty years ago, Manual
DeLanda argued that once “synthetic intelligence does make its appearance on the planet, there
will already be a predatory role awaiting it,”1121 and recent theorists like Gregoire Chamayou and
Derek Gregory have applied this to the use of military robots and drones.1122 Flusser, for his part,
questioned the intelligence of machines:
Apparatuses are, in fact, exceptionally fast idiots that forget nothing, but they are
idiots nevertheless. Therefore, although individual receivers and functionaries
1119
Michelle Kuo, “High Risk: Art, Environment, Crisis,” Artforum (September 2013), accessed
January 5, 2015, http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201307&id=42632.
1120
Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 73. See also Grégoire Chamayou, Drone
Theory, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: The New Press, 2015). Originally published as Théorie
du drone (Paris: La Fabrique, 2013) and Derek Gregory, “Drone Geographies,” Radical
Philosophy (Jan/Feb 2014) accessed March 24, 2014,
http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/drone-geographies and his excellent blog,
www.geographicalimaginations.com.
1121
Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
1122
Gregoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone (New York: The New Press, 2015); Derek
Gregory. Also see Derek Gregory’s excellent blog, “Geographical Imaginations: War, Space and
Security,” accessed October 3, 2015, http://geographicalimaginations.com/category/drones/.
325
cannot take control of the apparatus, the society as a whole could. This is what the
“unspectacular new revolutionaries” are trying to do.1123
And this is where a theory of photography comes in. As Flusser wrote in Towards a
Philosophy of Photography, the basic structures of our existence are being transformed: “We are
not dealing with the classical problem of alienation, but with an existential revolution of which
there is no example available to us. To put it bluntly: it is a question of freedom in a new context.
This is what any philosophy of photography has to concern itself with.”1124 We have new
theories of photography proposed by Azoulay—or perhaps Horst Bredekamp and his Bildakt,1125
which uses the technical image as a basis; and artists like Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, Walid
Raad and others whom I have discussed in this dissertation. And we are living in a moment in
which the semiotic or text-derived analysis of writers like Barthes or Krauss, and the focus on
hermeneutics, representation, and reproducibility are giving way to an emphasis on apparatuses,
gestures, immanence, and ontology1126 —which partly explains why Flusser and Laruelle wrote
books on photography that don’t analyze specific, individual images.1127
1123
Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 76. Furthermore: “In a telematics society, we
will in fact be replaced, step by step, by automata as producers and critics of information, but we
will maintain the right to say no. Human beings’ negatively entropic opposition to nature will
proceed automatically, but not necessarily with their automatic participation. All human
decisions will become unnecessary in the future and will have a disturbing or dysfunctional
effect when they do occur, but they will always have the potential, theoretically at every
moment, to stop everything. And this command to stop, this veto right, this right to say no is the
negative decision we call ‘freedom.’” Ibid., 122.
1124
Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Reaktion), 79.
1125
Horst Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010).
1126
Galloway, Laruelle, 165-66.
1127
See also Geoffrey Batchen’s “Disseminating Photography,” The Brooklyn Rail (February
2013), which begins, “Picture a history of photography freed from the tyranny of the photograph.
No longer confined to static objects or specific technologies, this history would instead engage
the photographic image in all its various manifestations, wherever and in whatever form they
326
Art and theory can work together. “Where is there space for human freedom?” Flusser
asks at the end of Into the Universe of Technical Images, answering his own question: “Freedom
is playing against the camera” with the “so-called experimental photographers” providing “a
model for freedom in the post-industrial context in general.”1128 This, of course, puts the same
onus on artists that earlier thinkers, from Greenberg to Adorno, did: to imagine a progressive,
avant-garde society. The new touchstone might be the activist or hacker (or “hacktivist”) who
reconfigures the program of apparatus.1129 But increasingly, the hacker-artist might be any
citizen—or non-citizen—who participates in the universe of technological images. I have argued
here for a new study of photography drawn from, and perhaps merging with media theory.
However, both fields have put out a call for a new type of theory. In 1997, Geoffrey Batchen,
who had used Foucault’s archaeologies and Derrida’s deconstruction in an attempt to “disrupt
prevailing views of photography,”1130 wrote that, while postmodernist theory displaced the
“nature/culture opposition erected by a modernist formalism,” it failed to address the “modern
economy of power-knowledge-subject” within photography and, in fact, “reproduces at every
level the same logocentric economy that sustains both formalist and broader formations of
have appeared. As a consequence, dissemination, rather than production, would become our
study’s guiding logic.” Accessed October 3, 2015,
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2013/02/artseen/disseminating-photography.
1128
Ibid., 80-81.
1129
Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Anchor
Press/Doubleday, 1984); Linus Torvalds, Pekka Himanen, and Manuel Castells, The Hacker
Ethic (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 2001); McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
1130
Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1997), 202.
327
oppression such as phallocentrism and ethnocentrism.”1131 More than a decade later, Batchen
would write:
It is fair to say that we are now at a moment that sees itself as being after
postmodernism but has yet to attract the burden of a proper name or the
motivation of an enabling politics. The invention of such a politics and with it a
mode of critical writing that is appropriate for the times in which we live therefore
remains the most pressing task to face the present generation of photography’s
interlocutors.1132
Similarly, Alexander Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark have written that
“media theory requires not only a reconsideration of the object in question but also an upheaval
at the level of method. In other words: not just a theory of the rhizome but a rhizomatic
theory1133 … not so much a tactical media as a tactical media theory, one which poses just
enough questions to get us going on a new path.”1134
Scholars in Europe, from Kittler to Michel Frizot, have deemed Flusser’s “radical”
thinking generative. We are left to decide, of course, whether Flusser’s photo-philosophy is, as
one writer has suggested, more of a provocation than a prescription.1135 As his editor Andreas
Müller-Pohle put it shortly after his death, Flusser’s project was an investigation that reached far
beyond photography, with the camera serving as a “prototype for the ontologically conditioning
apparatuses of postindustrial society—an analysis that ultimately aims at the ethics of
1131
Ibid., 200-201.
1132
Geoffrey Batchen, Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera
Lucida (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 21.
1133
Galloway, Thacker, and Wark, Excommunication, 4.
1134
Ibid., 9.
1135
Emerling, Photography: History and Theory, 196.
328
photography.”1136 But it also provided a road map for the larger arenas of ethics, politics, and
society, as well as our relationship with the environment and other species. I hope this
dissertation continues that project in the present, and promotes its appraisal into the future.
1136
Andreas Müller-Pohle, “Der Tod des Anderen: Über Vilém Flusser,” Kunstforum
International, no. 117 (1992): 85. Quoted in Sjoukje van der Meulen’s “Between Benjamin and
McLuhan,” 187.
329
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