Vilém Flusser: An Introduction

1. Migration, Nomadism, Networks: A Biography

Migration, Nomadism, Networks: A Biography 1 1| In a 1991 interview with Patrick Tschudin in Robion, France, Vilém Flusser defined biography not as the chronology of a life but as a list of networks: “A biography cannot be about some sort of ‘I.’ And it seems to me that anyone who tries to describe his own life history has never lived. Rather, I think that a biography consists of the listing of networks through which a current of experiences was run” (FM, 89). Although a list of networks does not necessarily exclude the notion of chronology, one network followed by another, Flusser rejected the belief that throughout our life stages, we might always be able to connect with some past version of ourselves. What makes us assume that we can link our aged selves to the baby or toddler who crawled on its mother’s lap? Flusser, for one, did not “think that there is any relationship between the I who is talking to you now, who is linked to you . . . and the little brat from Prague” (FM, 89). In this first chapter, we will attempt to list some of the many networks within which Flusser found himself or within which—later in life—he chose to operate and live. They shall serve to present a certain chronology, and they are themselves an expression of Flusser’s life as continuous and simultaneous essays, his preferred 2 | migration, nomadism, networks genre of putting his thoughts into writing, as well as expressions of his identity as a migrant and nomad, biographically as well as intellectually. However, as networks, they include voices other than his own, most especially that of his wife, Edith Flusser, née Barth, whose interviews we occasionally cite here.1 The networks themselves can be assembled in four clusters or cycles Flusser himself set up in the German version of his autobiography Bodenlos: “monologues, dialogues, discourses, and reflections.” In the French version, Flusser categorized his life’s networks in slightly different terms: “Passivité. Disponibilité. Engagement. Dégagement.” Rainer Guldin, who has called attention to the difference between these two versions, recognizes that those cycles carry both chronologic and synchronic meaning for Flusser: “In both versions the four parts represent not so much different phases of life to be passed through successively; rather, they signify an equal amount of specific possibilities to encounter the world; they are intertwined possibilities within a complex network of relations.”2 This chapter will present to the reader the chronology of Flusser’s networks in lieu of a strictly conventional biography; in doing so, we shall weave in aspects of his work that are closely related to his biography, the essay, and the epistemological positions from which he observed the phenomena he encountered, that of the migrant and expellee and, ultimately, the intellectual nomad. Correspondingly, the networks—and the chapter—are structured according to the cities or towns that facilitated his relations to those close and distant. For cities represented networks to Flusser as well. He viewed them as projects “in which identity and difference. . . give rise to one another.” He also valued them as dislodgments of the self: The notorious Self is seen as a knot in which different fields cross. . . . The notorious Self shows itself not as a kernel but migration, nomadism, networks | 3 as a shell. It holds the scattered parts together, contains them. It is a mask. From this it follows that the city can no longer be a place in which individuals come together but, on the contrary, is a groove in fields where masks are distributed. The self does not come to the city in order to come together with others but, on the contrary, just the opposite. It is first in the city that the self arises as the other of the others.3 Prague Possibilities abounded for Vilém Flusser when he was born on May 12, 1920. His mother, Melitta (née Basch), came from a noble family, and his father, Gustav, was an intellectual and a businessman (the latter by default, thanks to his father-in-law) who had entered politics in Tomáš G. Masaryk’s new Czech Republic. The year of Flusser’s birth was far from serene, though, as the new republic tried to establish itself as an independent political entity while a plethora of diverse groups fought or coexisted along ethnic, linguistic, or political lines: The spring and summer...