Vilém Flusser: An Introduction

6. Science as Fiction, Fiction as Science

Science as Fiction, Fiction as Science 109 6| The word fiction contains largely positive connotations when it appears in a literary or artistic context. The same word, however, continues to conjure up rather negative associations when it is understood as the antithesis of reality. Regardless, these two perspectives mix and blur. During the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries, consuming fictional works was considered a problem, as a world of dangerous illusions could capture the reader. The word fiction may also be used in scientific contexts. Scientific experiments fail to access certain experiences and areas of reality, either directly or at any time. Such phenomena may only be captured hypothetically. Moreover , the scientific hypothesis itself presents a form of deductive fiction. The physicist, for example, realizes his experiment using movement by excluding gravity or aerodynamic resistance: an exercise in fictional thinking. The poet experiences fiction as raw material from which she creates her own truth; the scientist, in contrast, plays with it as an instrument that facilitates the approach toward a truth. Flusser traverses all these ideas and connotations in the attempt to understand how we think, what we think, and why. 110 | science as fiction, fiction as science To think the world at all, we need to invent or reconstruct it by means of diverse fictions. In an unpublished letter to Maria L. Leão from 1983, he writes, “I share the distrust towards analogies . . . however, we would not comprehend anything without using models.”1 Flusserian Fiction In his essay “Da ficção”2 [Of Fiction], Flusser enumerates a range of assorted imaginations according to which the world is similar to deceptive fiction. The Platonists insisted that we merely perceive shadows; medieval Christianity thought of the world as a nightmare invented by the devil; during the Renaissance, humankind viewed the world as a dream, whereas in Baroque times, it was considered a stage; finally, during romanticism, the world appeared to constitute subjective representation. The fictive character of the world and hence of reality presents cause for lament in all these cases. Nonetheless, for Flusser, all imaginations listed earlier are appropriate; however, he questions the dismissive standpoints accompanying them. According to Flusser, we have to acknowledge the fictive character of the world, but we should not complain about it. Several apocalyptic philosophers—among them Jean Baudrillard—maintain that the sign has absorbed the signifier, making the former more real than reality: in some sort of diabolical fashion, the simulacrum has transformed reality to become its shadow. Flusser emphatically disagrees with this perspective and observes that the known world has always existed as a simulacrum and that reality as a whole cannot be ascertained. The virtual does not stand in opposition to reality but to an ideal of truth. The world as such is not a fiction, but the ensemble of ideational conceptualizations with which we are aiming to understand it is. We encounter illusions everywhere: as an ideal of truth or as the illusion about the end of all illusions. The science as fiction, fiction as science | 111 dissatisfactory evaluation we have come to associate with the idea of the simulacrum points to a long tradition reaching as far back as Plato. Likewise, one’s proverbial common sense considers every illusion a lie, even if it concerns the make-believe of a magician, fooleries, or fictitious narratives. Science, phenomenology , and cybernetics, on the other hand, acknowledge the impossibility of recognizing exhaustively the world’s fleeting appearances that can only be reconstructed by means of hypotheses and fictive designs. Whoever reproduces a phenomenon or object with the aid of a simulacrum or model merely identifies its partial elements—because every model, just as every metaphor, highlights certain characteristics while eclipsing others—but she learns something essential about it as well. We would like to consult Flusser’s example from his essay “Da ficção” to clarify what has been said so far. Is the table at which the reader is sitting real, or is it simply the fiction of a table? Although it may be a solid table that holds other books as well, Flusser points out that this idea is a fiction we can describe as the “reality of the senses.” Another point of view determines the table as an almost empty electromagnetic and gravitational field underneath other, equivalent and fluctuating fields called “books.” But this, too, is a fiction. We call it the “reality of exact science...