They are all Auschwitz: The Impact of the Brazilian Military Dictatorship on Flusser’s Communication Theory
This essay argues that Vilém Flusser’s experience with Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985) not only shaped his personal narrative but was also crucial for his theoretical thinking, especially his later theoretical production, particularly his contribution to Communication Theory. By exploring an unpublished corpus of correspondence from the Vilém Flusser Archive in São Paulo, along with complementary essays and published texts, this essay seeks to bridge the gap between Flusser’s personal experiences under political repression and his theoretical assertions. Methodologically, the article adopts an exploratory qualitative approach. It categorizes extensive letter exchanges with figures like José Bueno, Miguel Reale, and others associated with the Brazilian Institute of Philosophy (IBF), the epicentre from which the ideological and legal defence of the 1964 coup emanated . This triangulation between private correspondence, unpublished essays, and Flusser’s published work provides a framework for analysing his nuanced engagement with repression and the notion of the apparatus. The results indicate that although Flusser’s published writings on the Brazilian context are relatively ambiguous, his correspondence unveils a thinker deeply affected by the repressive climate. His cautious yet critical stance against the military apparatus is based on his original notion of politics as a communicational phenomenon – emphasizing the continuous rearticulation of social relationships and advocating transformative dialogue.
The Online/Offline Distinction Will Dissolve
This paper argues that the internet typifies an ongoing restructuring of the social understanding of space and time, with regard to telecommunication, which grounds the offline/online distinction. Bernard Stiegler’s foundational concept of technics (re)frames the humanity-technology relationship as that which constitutes time via externalization of memory. This reframing initiates an investigation into how new age internet technologies recalibrate these spatiotemporal relations. Concepts such as ‘hybrid space’ go to show how space as a physical phenomenon begins to accord to digital programming, as seen with the case of locationally aware cell phones that organize and inform one’s approach to space. In Flusser’s notion of ‘technical image’ the linear historical time is supplanted by circular time. The last part of the paper is dedicated to Romeo Alquati’s notion of ‘valorizing information’ as a measurable economic exchange between human and machine that is objectified in the commodity.
Sabonetes / Verseifung von Fetten / Saponification des graisses / Saponification of Fats
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.