Flusser on Writing: The Toronto Heritage and the Paradoxes of Writing after the End of Writing / Flusser e a escrita: A herança de Toronto e os paradoxos da escrita após o fim da escrita
The paper begins with a bibliographical survey of Flusser’s writings on writing, in preparation for an examination of his thesis of “the end of writing” after the advent of the digital media. It presents the following subtopics: (1) comparison of Flusser’s prophecy concerning the future of writing with Plato’s prophecy about the end of oral culture after the invention of writing. (2) Flusser’s conviction of the superiority of alphabetic over logographic writing and its roots in the Toronto School of Media Studies (Ong, McLuhan, Havelock), (3) Flusser's views concerning the fundamental antagonism between iconic and symbolic signs, (4) the influence of the Toronto School’s theory of the transformation of the consciousness of oral cultures through writing, (5) the performative paradoxes of writing after the end of writing.