Culture in the Abyss

Detail from Cover

Vilém Flusser’s Vampyroteuthis Infernalis was first published in German in 1987, although the original manuscript was penned in Portuguese beginning in 1981. For those unaware of Flusser’s work, it should be noted that he had no “native” language as such. As a Jew born in pre-war Prague, his first spoken language was Czech, although he apparently seldom used it, and never publicly. His “native” written language was German, though he switched to Portuguese after seeking asylum in São Paulo, Brazil in 1940. Over the course of his career, he also produced a great deal of work in English and French. I should also add that much of Flusser’s best output—some of it no more than a page or two—has only come to light decades after his death due to the dedicated efforts of the Flusser Archive in Berlin. Needless to say, dissemination and translation across the four or more languages Flusser used, not to mention translation into other languages, has proven slow and arduous. Consequently, readers are only now coming to appreciate the full breadth and depth of his theory.

In this review, I will only cover the translation of the Brazilian Portuguese version of Vampyroteuthis Infernalis. (A separate translation from the German first edition appeared from the University of Minnesota Press in September 2012.) Vampyroteuthis Infernalis may not be seen as the most important work in Flusser’s oeuvre, and indeed it is an odd, rather slippery little book. But to my mind, it may yet prove to be the central node of Flusseriana, that which links together all other threads of his theory. And not just “his theory,” given that the book may tie together a wide array of threads currently lumped together under the unfortunately named rubric of “posthumanism.”

The title character of Flusser’s slender volume is a cephalopod, the vampire squid (scientific name Vampyroteuthis infernalis). When Flusser wrote the book, little was known about the creature, although it was clear that the beast was not a squid despite its name and not an octopus despite its inclusion in the order of octopoda. (To avoid confusion, I will henceforward refer to the animal as a “vampyroteuth.”) The vampyroteuth belongs to its own genus, akin to another poorly understood creature known as Homo sapiens. This happy accident of phylogenetic nomenclature serves as a pretext for Flusser to explore analogies and dichotomies between the epistemology of human beings and the epistemology of vampyroteuthes.

Vampyroteuthis Infernalis divides into three main sections, as if an extended syllogism. The first section interrogates relations between anatomy and objectivity (scientific knowledge). With characteristic humor (e.g., “Some species of octopi are snacks” or “We belong to the Phylum Chordata, that of animals hung by an internal coathanger”), Flusser seeks to position vampyroteuthes as “our antipode, not only geographically and existentially, but phylogenetically.” His overall strategy in this section is to demonstrate that vampyroteuthes have developed the capacity for thought and mind by analogy with respect to humans rather than homology. Aside from a few lower-order functions (nervous reflexes, cellular structure, etc.), it should be patently obvious that vampyroteuthes are “Other.” Whereas our bodies have a line as an axis of symmetry between right and left, the cephalopod body spins around a spiral axis: its head has curled around to join with its foot; the foot pushes through the head to form a mantle and a cluster of tentacles; its head, brain, mouth, stomach and anus have all fused, freeing “the foot for grasping and sucking in the world.” Whereas our brains evolved as a knot of nerves at one end of a linear spine, the vampyroteuthian brain evolved in the center of its body as a circle surrounding its perceptional, digestive, and sexual organs.

These observations position the author to make what I consider to be the most significant claims of the work. Human epistemology places humans at the...