Vilém Flusser - Böcker

Poised between hope and despair for a humanity facing an urgent communication crisis, this work by VilÉm Flusser forecasts either the first truly human, infinitely creative society in history or a society of unbearable, oppressive sameness, locked in a pattern it cannot change. First published in German in 1985 and now available in English for the first time, Into the Universe of Technical Images outlines the history of communication technology as a process of increasing abstraction. Flusser charts how communication evolved from direct interaction with the world to mediation through various technologies. The invention of writing marked one significant shift; the invention of photography marked another, heralding the current age of the technical image. The automation of the processing of technical images carries both promise and threat: the promise of freeing humans to play and invent and the threat for networks of automation to proceed independently of humans.

VilÉm Flusser was one of the most fascinating and original European thinkers of the late twentieth century. In this collection of his essays on emigration, nationalism, and information theory, he raises questions about the viability of ideas of national identity in a world whose borders are becoming increasingly arbitrary and permeable. Flusser argues that modern societies are in flux, with traditional linear and textual epistemologies being challenged by global circulatory networks and a growth in visual stimulation. Beyond globalization, Flusser's ideas about communication and identity are rooted in the Judeo-Christian concept of self-determination and self-realization through recognition of the other.

VilÉm Flusser was one of the most fascinating and original European thinkers of the late twentieth century. In this collection of his essays on emigration, nationalism, and information theory, he raises questions about the viability of ideas of national identity in a world whose borders are becoming increasingly arbitrary and permeable. Flusser argues that modern societies are in flux, with traditional linear and textual epistemologies being challenged by global circulatory networks and a growth in visual stimulation. Beyond globalization, Flusser's ideas about communication and identity are rooted in the Judeo-Christian concept of self-determination and self-realization through recognition of the other.

Ten years after his death, Vilém Flusser's reputation as one of Europe's most original modern philosophers continues to grow. Increasingly influential in Europe and Latin America, the Prague-born intellectual's thought has until now remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world. His innovative writings theorize—and ultimately embrace—the epochal shift that humanity is undergoing from what he termed "linear thinking" (based on writing) toward a new form of multidimensional, visual thinking embodied by digital culture. For Flusser, these new modes and technologies of communication make possible a society (the "telematic" society) in which dialogue between people becomes the supreme value.The first English-language anthology of Flusser's work, this volume displays the extraordinary range and subtlety of his intellect. A number of the essays collected here introduce and elaborate his theory of communication, influenced by thinkers as diverse as Martin Buber, Edmund Husserl, and Thomas Kuhn. While taking dystopian, posthuman visions of communication technologies into account, Flusser celebrates their liberatory and humanizing aspects. For Flusser, existence was akin to being thrown into an abyss of absurd experience or "bottomlessness"; becoming human required creating meaning out of this painful event by consciously connecting with others, in part through such technologies. Other essays present Flusser's thoughts on the future of writing, the revolutionary nature of photography, the relationship between exile and creativity, and his unconventional concept of posthistory. Taken together, these essays confirm Flusser's importance and prescience within contemporary philosophy.Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) was born in Prague and taught philosophy in Brazil. Andreas Ströhl is director of the film department at the Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes in Munich. Erik Eisel works for a software technology company in Southern California.

In Does Writing Have a Future?, a remarkably perceptive work first published in German in 1987, VilÉm Flusser asks what will happen to thought and communication as written communication gives way, inevitably, to digital expression. In his introduction, Flusser proposes that writing does not, in fact, have a future because everything that is now conveyed in writing-and much that cannot be-can be recorded and transmitted by other means. Confirming Flusser’s status as a theorist of new media in the same rank as Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and Friedrich Kittler, the balance of this book teases out the nuances of these developments. To find a common denominator among texts and practices that span millennia, Flusser looks back to the earliest forms of writing and forward to the digitization of texts now under way. For Flusser, writing-despite its limitations when compared to digital media-underpins historical consciousness, the concept of progress, and the nature of critical inquiry. While the text as a cultural form may ultimately become superfluous, he argues, the art of writing will not so much disappear but rather evolve into new kinds of thought and expression.

How far apart are humans from animals-even the “vampire squid from hell”? Playing the scientist/philosopher/provocateur, VilÉm Flusser uses this question as a springboard to dive into a literal and a philosophical ocean. “The abyss that separates us” from the vampire squid (or vampire octopus, perhaps, since Vampyroteuthis infernalis inhabits its own phylogenetic order somewhere between the two) “is incomparably smaller than that which separates us from extraterrestrial life, as imagined in science fiction and sought by astrobiologists,” Flusser notes at the outset of the expedition.Part scientific treatise, part spoof, part philosophical discourse, part fable, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis gives its author ample room to ruminate on human-and nonhuman-life. Considering the human condition along with the vampire squid/octopus condition seems appropriate because “we are both products of an absurd coincidence . . . we are poorly programmed beings full of defects,” Flusser writes. Among other things, “we are both banished from much of life’s domain: it into the abyss, we onto the surfaces of the continents. We have both lost our original home, the beach, and we both live in constrained conditions.”Thinking afresh about the life of an “other”-as different from ourselves as the vampire squid/octopus-complicates the linkages between animality and embodiment. Odd, and strangely compelling, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis offers up a unique posthumanist philosophical understanding of phenomenology and opens the way for a non-philosophy of life.

Throughout his career, the influential new media theorist VilÉm Flusser kept the idea of gesture in mind: that people express their being in the world through a sweeping range of movements. He reconsiders familiar actions-from speaking and painting to smoking and telephoning-in terms of particular movement, opening a surprising new perspective on the ways we share and preserve meaning. A gesture may or may not be linked to specialized apparatus, though its form crucially affects the person who makes it.These essays, published here as a collection in English for the first time, were written over roughly a half century and reflect both an eclectic array of interests and a durable commitment to phenomenological thought. Defining gesture as “a movement of the body or of a tool attached to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation,” Flusser moves around the topic from diverse points of view, angles, and distances: at times he zooms in on a modest, ordinary movement such as taking a photograph, shaving, or listening to music; at others, he pulls back to look at something as vast and varied as human “making,” embracing everything from the fashioning of simple tools to mass manufacturing. But whatever the gesture, Flusser analyzes it as the expression of a particular form of consciousness, that is, as a particular relationship between the world and the one who gestures.

Communicology is Vilém Flusser's first thesis on his concepts of technical images and technical imagination. In this foundational text he lays the groundwork for later work, offering a philosophical approach to communication as a phenomenon that permeates every aspect of human existence. Clearly organized around questions such as "What is Communication?," "What are Codes?," and "What is Technical Imagination?," the work touches on theater, photography, film, television, and more. Originally written in 1978, but only posthumously published in German, the book is one of the clearest statements of Flusser's theory of communication as involving a variably mediated relation between humans and the world. Although Flusser was writing in the 1970s, his work demonstrates a prescience that makes it of significant contemporary interest to scholars in visual culture, art history, media studies, and philosophy.

Communicology is Vilém Flusser's first thesis on his concepts of technical images and technical imagination. In this foundational text he lays the groundwork for later work, offering a philosophical approach to communication as a phenomenon that permeates every aspect of human existence. Clearly organized around questions such as "What is Communication?," "What are Codes?," and "What is Technical Imagination?," the work touches on theater, photography, film, television, and more. Originally written in 1978, but only posthumously published in German, the book is one of the clearest statements of Flusser's theory of communication as involving a variably mediated relation between humans and the world. Although Flusser was writing in the 1970s, his work demonstrates a prescience that makes it of significant contemporary interest to scholars in visual culture, art history, media studies, and philosophy.

In Language and Reality, originally published in Se3o Paulo, Brazil, in 1964, Vile9m Flusser continues his philosophical and theoretical exploration into language. He begins to postulate that language is not simply a map of the world but also the driving force for projecting worlds and enters then into a feedback with what is projected. Flussers thesis leads him to claim, in a seemingly missed encounter of a dialogue with Wittgenstein, that language is not limited to its ontological and epistemological aspects but rather is at the service of its aesthetic. Traversing a diverse area of research and ruminations on cybernetics to poetry, music, the visual arts, religion, and mysticism, Language and Reality can be viewed as a vital transitional work in Flussers emerging thought that will eventually lead to his works in the 1970s and 1980s concerning what we would later consider media theory, design, and digital culture.

In On Doubt, VilÉm Flusser refines Martin Heidegger’s famous declaration that “language is the dwelling of Being.” For Flusser, “the word is the dwelling of being,” because in fact, in the beginning, there was the word.On Doubt is a treatise on the human intellect, its relation to language, and the reality-forming discourses that subsequently emerge. For Flusser, the faith that the modern age places in Cartesian doubt plays a role similar to the one that faith in God played in previous eras-a faith that needs to be challenged. Descartes doubts the world through his proposition cogito ergo sum, but leaves doubt itself untouched as indubitable and imperious. His cogito ergo sum may have proved to the Western intellect that thoughts exist, but it did not prove the existence of that which thinks: one can eliminate thinking and yet continue being.Therefore, should we not doubt doubt itself? Should we not try to go beyond this last step of Cartesian doubt and look for a new faith? The twentieth century has seen many attempts to defeat Cartesian doubt, however, this doubt of doubt has instead generated a complete loss of faith, which the West experiences as existential nihilism. Hence, the emergent emptying of values that results from such extreme doubt. Everything loses its meaning. Can this climate be overcome? Will the West survive the modern age?

An imagination of possibilities, of miscalculations, of futures off-kilter  “Probability is a chimera, its head is true, its tail a suggestion. Futurologists attempt to compel the head to eat the tail (ouroboros). Here, though, we will try to wag the tail.” -VilÉm Flusser Two years after his Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, the philosopher VilÉm Flusser engaged in another thought experiment: a collection of twenty-two “scenarios for the future” to be produced as computer-generated media, or technical images, that would break the imaginative logjam in conceiving the social, political, and economic future of the universe. What If? is not just an “impossible journey” to which Flusser invites us in the first scenario; it functions also as a distorting mirror held up to humanity. Flusser’s disarming scenarios of an Anthropocene fraught with nightmares offer new visions that range from the scientific to the fantastic to the playful and whimsical. Each essay reflects our present sense of understanding the world, considering the exploitation of nature and the dangers of global warming, overpopulation, and blind reliance on the promises of scientific knowledge and invention. What If? offers insight into the radical futures of a slipstream Anthropocene that have much to do with speculative fiction, with Flusser’s concept of design as “crafty” or slippery, and with art and the immense creative potential of failure versus reasonable, “good” computing or calculability. As such, the book is both a warning and a nudge to imagine what we may yet become and be.

An imagination of possibilities, of miscalculations, of futures off-kilter  “Probability is a chimera, its head is true, its tail a suggestion. Futurologists attempt to compel the head to eat the tail (ouroboros). Here, though, we will try to wag the tail.” -VilÉm Flusser Two years after his Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, the philosopher VilÉm Flusser engaged in another thought experiment: a collection of twenty-two “scenarios for the future” to be produced as computer-generated media, or technical images, that would break the imaginative logjam in conceiving the social, political, and economic future of the universe. What If? is not just an “impossible journey” to which Flusser invites us in the first scenario; it functions also as a distorting mirror held up to humanity. Flusser’s disarming scenarios of an Anthropocene fraught with nightmares offer new visions that range from the scientific to the fantastic to the playful and whimsical. Each essay reflects our present sense of understanding the world, considering the exploitation of nature and the dangers of global warming, overpopulation, and blind reliance on the promises of scientific knowledge and invention. What If? offers insight into the radical futures of a slipstream Anthropocene that have much to do with speculative fiction, with Flusser’s concept of design as “crafty” or slippery, and with art and the immense creative potential of failure versus reasonable, “good” computing or calculability. As such, the book is both a warning and a nudge to imagine what we may yet become and be.

The first English-language translation of Vilém Flusser's final series of lectures: the definitive introduction to his methods and ideas in new media theoryIn summer 1991, shortly before his death, Vilém Flusser gave a series of lectures as guest professor at Ruhr University Bochum at the invitation of Friedrich Kittler. Flusser intended for these lectures to be the definitive introduction to his "communicology," the study of human communication and the means by which acquired information is saved, processed, and passed on. In Thinking Further, Aaron Jaffe and Michael F. Miller have curated "fragments" from these lectures – first published in German in 2008 – to present the most exciting and timely parts of Flusser's foundational contributions to what is now known as media studies.These fragments capture Flusser's engagements with a wide range of theories, approaches, and interventions, including ecocriticism, posthumanities, game theory, cybernetics, and translinguistic exchanges. Offering sustained engagements with the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Michel Serres, and Jean Baudrillard, Thinking Further models possibilities for thinking through and clarifying the most obscure and obdurate implications of technology and modernity.As they demonstrate Flusser's contextual positionality and antiuniversalism, the writings presented here also underscore the pleasures and the power of his aphoristic style. Focusing less on Flusser-as-philosopher and more on his role as wry sage at the end of history, Thinking Further is a comprehensive but approachable introduction to his boundary-transcending exploration of the possibilities for communication, writing, and the human condition.Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

The first English-language translation of Vilém Flusser's final series of lectures: the definitive introduction to his methods and ideas in new media theoryIn summer 1991, shortly before his death, Vilém Flusser gave a series of lectures as guest professor at Ruhr University Bochum at the invitation of Friedrich Kittler. Flusser intended for these lectures to be the definitive introduction to his "communicology," the study of human communication and the means by which acquired information is saved, processed, and passed on. In Thinking Further, Aaron Jaffe and Michael F. Miller have curated "fragments" from these lectures – first published in German in 2008 – to present the most exciting and timely parts of Flusser's foundational contributions to what is now known as media studies.These fragments capture Flusser's engagements with a wide range of theories, approaches, and interventions, including ecocriticism, posthumanities, game theory, cybernetics, and translinguistic exchanges. Offering sustained engagements with the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Michel Serres, and Jean Baudrillard, Thinking Further models possibilities for thinking through and clarifying the most obscure and obdurate implications of technology and modernity.As they demonstrate Flusser's contextual positionality and antiuniversalism, the writings presented here also underscore the pleasures and the power of his aphoristic style. Focusing less on Flusser-as-philosopher and more on his role as wry sage at the end of history, Thinking Further is a comprehensive but approachable introduction to his boundary-transcending exploration of the possibilities for communication, writing, and the human condition.Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

Introduction by Martin Pawley.This book presents for the first time in English an array of essays on design by the seminal media critic and philosopher Vilém Flusser. It puts forward the view that our future depends on design. In a series of insightful essays on such ordinary ‘things’ as wheels, carpets, pots, umbrellas and tents, Flusser emphasizes the interrelationships between art and science, theology and technology, and archaeology and architecture. Just as formal creativity has produced both weapons of destruction and great works of art, Flusser believed that the shape of things (and the designs behind them) represents both a threat and an opportunity for designers of the future.

With an introduction by Hubertus von AmelunxenMedia philosopher Vilém Flusser proposed a revolutionary new way of thinking about photography. An analysis of the medium in terms of aesthetics, science and politics provided him with new ways of understanding both the cultural crises of the past and the new social forms nascent within them. Flusser showed how the transformation of textual into visual culture (from the linearity of history into the two-dimensionality of magic) and of industrial into post-industrial society (from work into leisure) went hand in hand, and how photography allows us to read and interpret these changes with particular clarity.

Is there any room left for freedom in a programmed world? This is the essential question that VilÉm Flusser asks in Post-History. Written as a series of lectures to be delivered at universities in Brazil, Israel, and France, it was subsequently developed as a book and published for the first time in Brazil in 1983. This first English translation of Post-History brings to an anglophone readership Flusser’s first critique of apparatus as the aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological model of present times. In his main argument, Flusser suggests that our times may be characterized by the term “program,” much in the same way that the seventeenth century is loosely characterized by the term “nature,” the eighteenth by “reason,” and the nineteenth by “progress.” In suggesting this shift in worldview, he then poses a provocative question: If I function within a predictable programmed reality, can I rebel and how can I do it? The answer comes swiftly: Only malfunctioning programs and apparatus allow for freedom. Throughout the twenty essays of Post-History, Flusser reminds us that any future theory of political resistance must consider this shift in worldview, together with the horrors that Western society has brought into realization because of it. Only then may we start to talk again about freedom.

In 1963 Vile9m Flusser presented a series of lectures at the Brazilian Institute of Philosophy (IBF) in Se3o Paulo concerning the philosophy of language. The resulting ten essays would eventually be published in 1965 in the annual magazine of the Brazilian Institute of Technology and Aeronautics (ITA), and published here for the first time in book form. Flusser prepared each lecture as a response to the dialogs that followed the preceding lecture, thereby expanding and explicating his philosophy of language in an intense dialogical process. Despite the fact that the other side of the dialogue was not recorded, it becomes clear to the reader that the resulting discussions and polemics generated by the lectures progressively and profoundly changed Flussers intended trajectory for the course. This kind of philosophy in fieri was in part the result of a group effort between all of those present, and subsequently synthesized by Flusser in every essay. As a result of this experience, Flusser adopted this dialogic method as an integral part of his future work.