Writings
by Vilém Flusser
Edited and with an introduction by Andreas Ströhl.
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis/London, 2002.
256 pp. Illus.. Trade 29.95 US$.
ISBN: 0-8166-3564-1.
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen,
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent
stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be
Prague-born philosopher Vilém Flusser (1921-1991) is becoming
increasingly influential in Europe and Latin America. Unfortunately,
most of his writings are scattered throughout journals and hard to find
books, and remain untranslated from the original German or Portuguese.
This book, the first English-language anthology of his work, displays
the wide range and originality of his ideas. Andreas Ströhl, director
of the Goethe film institute in Munich, wrote an insightful and very
readable introduction into the origins and the evolution of Flussers
thought and selected 25 essays which cover practically all facets of
his oeuvre.
Flusser escaped from a death in the German camps when he fled to Brazil
with his wife in 1939. His parents and sister staid behind and were
all killed. In Sao Paulo, he found a job in a motor factory and resumed
his philosophy studies in the evenings and the weekends. Though he quickly
became an enthusiastic believer in a great future for Brazil - an ideal
that was cruelly shattered by the military coup in 1964 - the fact remained
that he was an exile with hardly any ties binding him to his home country.
Deeply influenced by Husserls phenomenological method in philosophy
and by Buber's ethics, he developed a keen sense of forlornness - which
he called "bottomlesness". This absolute lack of sense in
life and the total and uncompromising solitude of a person before death
did not lead him to a negative or cynical view of life, rather, they
are the foundations of a philosophy of freedom and choice, of communication
as a means to escape solitude and of history as a product of writing.
When Flusser became an assistant professor of Philosophy at the University
of Sao Paulo, he started his work on communication. His international
breakthrough came with the publication of Towards a Philosophy of Photography
(Fuer eine Philosofie der Fotographie). In this long essay, published
in German in 1983, he analyses photography (and other communicative
'surfaces') in an entirely different way from Sontag, Benjamin or Barthes.
"The task of a philosophy of photography is to analyse 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."
Instead of concentrating on the relationship between the image and reality,
Flusser sees photography as a revolutionary step away from the domination
of linear thinking which was established through the development of
writing and which reached it full height in the Enlightenment and the
Renaissance. If history is a function of writing, photography - and
with it the other 'surface' media like television, film, posters and
advertising in magazines - is the real 'end of history'. It is 'posthistorical'.
Long before Fukuyama identified the end of history as the end of the
Grand Stories, the end of ideologies and the end of the Cold War which
are basically historical events in their own right, Flusser foretold
the end of the "age of linear reasoning" which he equated
with history. History is not a series of events, but the written image
of relationships of facts. Photography freezes events into scenes, it
successfully reintegrates the image into a linear unfolding of events
and narrative of history.
In his essays, Flusser draws heavily on science as well as on the aforementioned
philosophers. He frequently refers to entropy and negentropy, the laws
of thermodynamics, quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle of
Heisenberg, cybernetics and Einstein. He freely mixes insights from
those sciences on the border of philosophy with purely logical reasoning
in the style of the early Wittgenstein. This makes for a very refreshing
cocktail, certainly if you compare it to the overwhelming long drinks
that are served by so called postmodern media theorists who had more
of Baudrillard and Deleuze than a healthy stomach can take. Flusser
is good reading, profound and playful at the same time, wide ranging
in his subjects and surprisingly naive sometimes in his stance, but
always to the point, clear, final and inescapable.
Very few writings of Vilém Flusser have been translated. Neither
has he written comprehensive theories or closed systematic and exhaustive
treatments of problems in philosophy. He chose the essay as his form,
and he really excels at it. This collection is a must-read introduction
for all, professional media theorists and workers, philosophers and
artists, into the connected and networked world of one of the most original
and prophetic thinkers of last century.
Flusser died in a car crash in Chechia in 1991.
