Philosophy of Language by Vilém Flusser (review)

Philosophy of Language is the title for a series of lectures that media thinker Vilém Flusser delivered at the Brazilian Institute of Philosophy and the Institute of Technology for Aeronautics. But the title, as Flusser admits in his first lecture, "is really a pleonasm" since "philosophy [itself] is a critique of linguistic activities" (9). For Flusser, language determines the conditions of our reality and our existence. Citing Kant and his critique of pure reason, Flusser notes how "the structure of the external world is precisely the structure of our intellect, and the structure of our intellect is the structure of our languages" (40). If there are limits on what we can know, then there are limits to what we can communicate. Yet Flusser proposes a different project in his series of lectures. He notes how "limitations are always present" for the intellect, but "these limitations always crumble against the intellect's attack" (41). His philosophy of language pushes thought past the linguistic borders of what one can say.

Thought seeks to inform the not-yet articulable. Flusser calls thinking "a negentropic process," since "it eliminates noise and increases information" (132). Thinking, then, reverses the second law of thermodynamics. Contemporary physics might find our world moving increasingly toward disorder, but Flusser notes "there are islands in this universe that denote an inverse tendency." In one lecture, Flusser identifies cybernetics as one of the islands preoccupied with negative entropy (118). Mathematician Norbert Weiner, along with others concerned with the future of control and communication theory, coined the term cybernetics in 1946. Two years later Weiner published Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine, where he provided the early blueprints for digital communications. While Flusser only briefly mentions cybernetics in Philosophy of Language, new information technologies become more prominent in his later writing on photography and the "technical image." He writes in Towards a Philosophy of Photography how our thinking will have to "adopt a cybernetic structure such as that programmed into our apparatuses," which "are in the process of robotizing all aspects of our lives" (2000, 71). The danger of the black-boxed apparatus is its tendency to automate thought.

In one of the last lectures collected in Philosophy of Language, Flusser admits that his "interest in the study of language is motivated…by this attempt to prevent the loss of the intellect" (127). He tells the attendees of the 1965 lecture that they are currently at a "transitional moment," where the dominant prosaic discourse has reached a level of exhaustion. While the prose sentence might establish our "situations of reality," it relies on a syntactical arrangement that limits what one can communicate. Flusser notes how our discourse makes the "emergence of new virtualities" impossible (95). This limitation seems especially obvious in our programmed world where communication apparatuses prompt us with automated text. As Flusser will later write, "language can nowadays be 'apparatusized': 'Word processors' can replace writers" (2000, 28).

An "apparatusized"//automated language, then, reverses language's tendency to increase information. We can only say or realize what the program allows. Yet Flusser identifies more islands where we might find negative entropy. In the lectures, he repeatedly notes how "poetry always provides new subjects to be discussed, that is, doubted and transformed into situations of reality" (96). Flusser here is perhaps closest to Édouard Glissant, who imagines a "passage opening onto the archipelago of language" in his 1997 book, Poetics of Relation (84). Glissant defines a "poetics of relation" that remains "open, multilingual in intention, [and] directly in contact with everything possible" (1997, 32). The islands in the Caribbean, Glissant notes, offer "a natural illustration of the thought of Relation," where "creolization" opens "a new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open" (1997, 34). An errant language//thinking are likewise essential for Flusser in Philosophy of Language. A note to every book published from the Flusser Archive Collection connects his "singular writing process" to his biography as a migrant thinker. Glissant...