Flusserstudies.net

Communication and education for otherness: photographic expeditions as an exercise in the pedagogy of intersubjectivity

Roberta DabdabNorval Baitello JúniorLucia Leão

The main purpose of this article is to reflect on how Flusser's thought can contribute to the development of communication and education projects in awareness of otherness. As such, it presents relations between the “pedagogy of intersubjectivity,” designated by Flusser in his first articles and classes in Brazil, and an experiment in anthropo-ecological nature and intersubjective construction: the photographic expeditions with the young people of the collective “Nofotofake” in the Heliopolis favela conducted by Roberta Dabdab.

Manipulating a dead world. Vilém Flusser and the clashes with the (concept of) “objectivity”

Ana Catarina SantilliNorval Baitello Júnior

The purpose of the article is to consider how the objective view, which has guided our way of conceiving and acting in the world for so long, may be related to the sustainability crisis we are currently experiencing. Our intention is to reflect on the importance of the intersubjectivity proposed by Vilém Flusser in the formation of an ecological outlook that favors a way of being in the world that is better able to deal with the impending crisis. As such, the complex thought proposed by Edgar Morin, the education for autonomy defended by Paulo Freire and the archetypal psychology of James Hillman, in line with Flusser's ideas, offer certain opportunities to think about more intersubjective ways of apprehending and orienting ourselves in the world. This discussion intends to contribute to an evaluation of the way we educate our children and our young people and to suggest a more ecological pedagogy, which is essential for humanity to deal with one of the main challenges of our century.

O inóspito: uma pequena arqueologia do conceito de espaço no pensamentode Vilém Flusser

Norval Baitello Júnior

The article proposes an archeology of the concept of space in Vílem Flusser’s thinking. To do so, it reflects on the inhospitable, which refers to space and spatiality. In its Latin etymology, the word comes from hospitalitas, and carries the meaning “condition of the outlandish”, the traveler, the enemy, the nomad. Thus, we think about the inhospitable as a quality of space that houses the hostile, subjecting us to the condition of foreigners who feel the hostility in the space we inhabit. For Flusser, humanity has gone through three major catastrophes, all related to the concept of space. The first is the hominization, a result of the abandonment of the treetops by an animal that came to terms with the ground, making itself more vulnerable to predators. The second is the civilizing process, which ocurred ten thousand years ago, when nomadic man sits and stays earthbound; space is limited and increasingly filled up with others, the guests, who are at heart, hostile. It is the problem of the other. After those ten thousand years of a sedentary lifestyle, our home became so inhospitable that we went back to being nomads; we are confronted by the inhospitable “within ourselves”, subsequently, inaugurating the third catastrophe.

Vilém Flusser e a Terceira Catástrofe do Homem ou as Dores do Espaço, a Fotografia e o Vento

Norval Baitello Júnior

Vilém Flusser’s contribution to modern Media Theory might have found a possible synthesis in his text “Nomadic Reflections” presented in one of the ‘Kornhaus-Seminare’ organized by Harry Pross, on the subject of Euronomadism. Flusser presents a division of the history of humankind into three great catastrophes: humanization, civilization and a third catastrophe, still nameless. This last one that is occurring now will turn humankind back to nomadism. Wind, the desert, granules and emptiness become again decisive categories for the communicative behavior of humankind, already perceivable through photography and technical images. Things and their materiality lose in value, non-things and their immateriality gain in value.