Writings (review)

Prague-born philosopher Vilém Flusser (1921-1991) is becoming increasingly influential in Europe and Latin America. Unfortunately, most of his writings are scattered throughout journals and hard-to-find books, and remain untranslated from the original German or Portuguese. This book, the first English-language anthology of his work, displays the wide range and originality of his ideas. Andreas Ströhl, director of the Goethe Film Institute in Munich, wrote an insightful and very readable introduction into the origins and evolution of Flusser's thought and selected 25 essays that cover practically all facets of his oeuvre.

In 1939, Flusser escaped from a death in the German camps when he fled to Brazil with his wife. His parents and sister stayed behind and were all killed. In São Paulo, he found a job in a motor factory and resumed his philosophy studies in the evenings and on weekends. Though he quickly became an enthusiastic believer in a great future for Brazil—an ideal that was cruelly shattered by the military coup in 1964—the fact remained that he was an exile with hardly any ties binding him to his home country. Deeply influenced by Husserl's phenomenological method in philosophy and by Buber's ethics, he developed a keen sense of forlornness—which he called "bottomlessness." This absolute lack of sense in life and the total and uncompromising solitude of a person before death did not lead him to a negative or cynical view of life; rather, they are the foundations of a philosophy of freedom and choice, of communication as a means to escape solitude and of history as a product of writing.

When Flusser became an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of São Paulo, he started his work on communication. His international breakthrough came with the publication of Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Fuer eine Philosofie der Fotographie). In this long essay, published in German in 1983, he analyses photography (and other communicative "surfaces") in an entirely different way from Sontag, Benjamin or Barthes. Flusser argues that "the task of a philosophy of photography is to analyse the possibility of freedom in a world dominated by apparatus; to think about how it is possible to give meaning to human life in the face of the accidental necessity of death." Instead of concentrating on the relationship between the image and reality, Flusser sees photography as a revolutionary step away from the domination of linear thinking that was established through the development of writing and that reached its full height in the Enlightenment and the Renaissance. If history is a function of writing, photography—and with it the other "surface" media like television, film, posters and advertising in magazines— is the real "end of history." It is "posthistorical." Long before Fukuyama identified the end of history as the end of the Grand Stories, the end of ideologies and the end of the Cold War, which are basically historical events in their own right, Flusser foretold the end of the "age of linear reasoning," which he equated with history. History is not a series of events, but the written image of the relationships of facts. Photography freezes events into scenes; it successfully reintegrates the image into a linear unfolding of events and a narrative of history.

In his essays, Flusser draws heavily on science as well as on the aforementioned philosophers. He frequently refers to entropy and negentropy, the laws of thermodynamics, quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg, cybernetics and Einstein. He freely mixes insights from those sciences on the border of philosophy with purely logical reasoning in the style of the early Wittgenstein. This makes for a very refreshing cocktail, certainly if you compare it with the overwhelming long drinks that are served by so-called postmodern media theorists who have had more of Baudrillard and Deleuze than a healthy stomach can take. Flusser is good reading...