Flusserstudies.net

A New Way of Reading Called Computing (from “Does Writing Have a Future?”

Vilém Flusser

In this short excerpt from “Does Writing have a Future” Flusser narrates a familiar historical-technical moment, the moment when the tradition of thinking based on linear causal arguments becomes supplanted by a mosaic form of synthetic thinking through the assembly of bits. After the world is exposed by rational science to be meaningless and all belief is rendered absurd, computation, (the synthesis of meaning through bits) is invented to re-establish meaning in the gesture of reassembling meaning itself and thereby belief. In other words, where the truth of existence is exposed by science, making criticism obsolete, criticism returns in the subjective reassembly of bits into meaning. Once again on the brink of the abyss, Flusser offers his readers an apocalyptic panacea in a renewed commitment to subjectivity.

Das Märchen von der Wahrheit: Glossen und Philosophiefiktionen / Posto Zero

Vilém Flusser

Orthonature / Paranature

Vilém Flusser

Hercule Florence: un photographe avant l’appareil

Vilém Flusser

Hercule Florence (1804-1879) was a citizen of the Principality of Monaco and like Niépce and Talbot one of the inventors of photography around 1830. But, since he was living in a small city in the interior of Brazil, his invention of an original technique for developing and fixing images remained unnoticed and has been totally neglected by the European historians of photography. Moreover, he was the inventor of the word “photography” in 1833, six years before the word was used in Europe. There are some similarities between his life and Flusser’s: he arrived in Brazil at the age of 20 and was not recognized by the European centers of culture. The story of Hercule Florence is thus an occasion to reflect on the importance of naming and to demonstrate the power of the apparatus (political and economic) in the development of photography from the very beginning. Florence is probably the only photographer before the apparatus.

Der Sisyphos des Camus oder die Ablehnung des Selbstmordes / O mito des Sisifo de Camus

Vilém Flusser

Le sandwich postmoderne / On Sandwiches: a Post-Modern Reflection / Vom Sandwich: eine post-moderne Überlegung

Vilém Flusser

Para uma fenomenologia da immigração

Vilém Flusser

Altweibersommer

Vilém Flusser

Orthonature Paranature

Vilém Flusser

Sabonetes / Verseifung von Fetten / Saponification des graisses / Saponification of Fats

Vilém Flusser

In the early 1980s, Flusser wrote a Portuguese, a German, and a French version of “Saponification”, in which he combined a satire of a totalitarian political ideology with a satire of pseudo-scientificity. The narrator is a fictional Commissioner from the Planning Department of Justice writing on behalf of the Minister of Justice in Mexico City on March 7, 2001. The addressee is the Laboratory of Organic Chemistry in the Global Institute for Technological Research. They are all functionaries in an anonymous political superapparatus. The political ideology which in this future dystopia has conquered the whole world is vaguely Marxist. As the narrator points out, the differences between the industrialized western world and the poorer parts of the globe need a quick effective global response in order to achieve a fair distribution of the goods. In attempting to quantify the inter-worldly and inner-worldly relationships a single parameter has been chosen: the amount of fat stored in the human body. In the first of  the four worlds that make up the international situation, one can make out a secondary tendency to lose weight, which, however, cannot override the basic tendency towards obesity. The second world is in a transitional stage between lack of fat and obesity. In the third world, the majority of the bodies stores only the minimum of fat which is needed for their functioning on the lowest level. And finally in the fourth, the bodies are skeletal and do not dispose of the necessary energy for any movement. The international trade relations cannot be used as a model for a global redistribution of fat. The excess fat of the first world is undigestible, the second world only focuses on the absorption of fat from the third and fourth world and the excess of fat of the third world is drained by the fat bodies located there. This basically means that there is no actual fat to be redistributed and that the whole argumentation is to no avail. Despite this, the narrator suggests a series of possible but ultimately useless solutions leading the whole argumentation ad absurdum.