Attachment and Homelessness in the Age of Digital Communication

Vilem Flusser’s life and work closely intertwine in their negotiation of a central tension — between on the one hand coming to terms with the reality and necessity of change, whether it be emigration and a literal displacement, or the wholesale transformation of media technology in the digital age, and on the other hand a desire to form deep attachments, whether in the search for a new humanism or in the profound hope that a new and meaningful form of communications can emerge from technical advances in media. Flusser’s considerable volume of work, written mostly in German and Portuguese, has not been available to English readers until this new translation and compilation of this wide-ranging collection of essays published by Minnesota. While Flusser is most widely regarded for his writings on the possibility for communication in a digital age, his work is also deeply informed by and participatory in the philosophic tradition.

So where might one locate Vilem Flusser? In an autobiographical essay entitled, “In Search of Meaning (Philosophical Self-Portrait),” Flusser attempts to sketch the outlines of the various influences that gave rise to his mode of thought. His Marxist roots are foundational in his thinking, but Flusser was much more captivated by the “persuasive power and internal beauty” of Marxism than by its ideological commitment, which he found impossible to sustain through the tumultuous events of the Second World War and its aftermath (199). His Marxist influence is evident throughout his writings, for instance in the consistent desire he reveals for a set of structural conditions in which one can be truly creative and in the shades of utopia that color the post-historical claims of his later writings. Flusser was also deeply influenced by Wittgenstein — an attraction to structuralism in which he found an “inherent mysticism”(199). The phenomenological writings of Husserl were also profoundly influential; a couple of flirtations with Nietzsche might well be responsible for the existential yearning and deep humanism one finds in Flusser’s work.

Flusser’s life was one marked by dramatic displacements both borne of necessity and taken by choice. Born in 1920 in Prague, he lived the comfortable life of the middle class Jewish intellectual until the Nazi threat forced him to flee, first to London and then in 1940 to Sao Paulo, Brazil. His parents, grandparents and sister were murdered in the concentration camps and the bonds of family, friendship and work that tied him to Prague were brutally dissolved. In Brazil, where he was to spend the next thirty years of his life teaching philosophy and communications at the University of Sao Paulo, he embarked on a project which he called the search for the New Man, or the creation of a more humane society (198). In 1972 Flusser moved again and left his adopted country behind for another. This time he went back to the Europe he had never completely left behind, to the town of Robion in southern France. There he became increasingly interested in exploring the relationship between migration and attachment to homeland, and began his explorations on the new communication technology of the time, both its dangers and possibilities. When he died in a car crash on a slick road in 1991 after a triumphant return to Prague, where he had given a celebrated lecture the previous night, he left behind a body of work on the philosophy of language, on the concept of the homeland, but most famously on the possibilities and pitfalls of communication in what he referred to as a post-historical age.

Andreas Strohl’s compilation of Flusser’s essays provides an intriguing glimpse into an immensely varied and comprehensive corpus. For the purposes of this essay, three areas emerge as particularly compelling and worthy of exploration. First and foremost among these: Flusser’s writings on communication and his hope for a new humanism in the digital age with the advent of new technologies that connect us all. Second, his writings on the end of history and the...