Vilém Flusser: An Introduction

Introduction: Vilém Flusser’s Atlases

Introduction: Vilém Flusser’s Atlases xv In a short text titled “My Atlas,” Vilém Flusser recounts conversations with a fictitious grandfather, a writer, concerning this grandfather’s treasured atlases: “The first atlas served him to localize an event he wanted to describe. The second served to acquire an overview of all the events. In that sense, and thanks to these two atlases, he could simultaneously dive into the world and surface again.” But a crisis of orientation ensued, creating a plethora of atlases: they began to explode into different directions at the end of the twentieth century. The resulting and overwhelming variety undermined the atlases’ very purpose of providing reliable direction because, according to Flusser, they exploded “in different directions at the same time: in one they obtained colors . . . in another the atlases began to zoom. . . . A third direction of this explosion was the covering of one map with another. . . . In yet another direction history exploded into geography and there were historical atlases.” This crisis presented a considerable challenge for the grandfather: “He leafed through these atlases and he noticed how history could be skimmed (blätterbar) rather than continue to flow. History now looked like a badly projected film: Events began to xvi | introduction disintegrate in that scenes suddenly leaped.”1 For the grandfather, this new, colorful landscape of atlases became an imaginative play with history, but it also plunged him into abysmal chaos. In the end, to find his bearings within all these wonderful but confusing possibilities of mapping the world and its history, he purposefully returned to his own old and outdated atlases in search of meaning and balance. Prague and European modernism in their urban expressions presented a first atlas for the young Vilém Flusser—Prague was the center of his world, his gauge for geopolitical and sociohistorical dimensions and his instrument for learning languages and their cultures. Flusser and his family experienced Prague at a time when not only the city and the first Czech Republic took new shapes; central and Western Europe, too, coexisted within constellations that stood for redefined borders and new beginnings among the destruction and turmoil following World War I. There was a new world, a new atlas, surrounding this new republic. Not one envisioned by the Germans; one that, in 1919, brought forth the League of Nations and that began to challenge the power structures between colonial powers and colonies, between empires and vassal countries. At the time of Flusser’s birth, on May 12, 1920, the republic was barely one and a half years old. The new president, Thomas G. Masaryk, had embarked on his transatlantic journey from New York to London , moved on to France and Italy, and declared on December 22, 1918, in Prague, as documented in his autobiography from 1927, Die Weltrevolution, “We have built our state.” For the young Flusser, Prague was home; it was multiplicity, it was inclusion, it was borderless in its wholeness, it was Flusser’s introduction to modernity and modernism. But Prague, so soon, turned into the opposite of home: it was division, exclusion, it was an introduction to fascist modernity and modernism; Prague fell apart. The literal and metaphorical border crossings Flusser introduction | xvii was forced to experience beginning in 1939 are closely intertwined with his realization that this seemingly intact universe of Prague, this artwork of the past, would never reemerge as one. In Flusser’s mind and memory, this home became incomplete and fragmented. Flusser’s entire oeuvre mirrors such fragmentation: his biography , his books, and his essays are marked by incompletion and border crossings. And although the texts as a whole create the network of his ideas, we should also read them as fragments in the modern sense: as piecemeal, as a constant endeavor, and as his occasionally desperate resistance to boundaries, totality, and totalitarianism. For Flusser never returned to his old atlases, like his fictitious grandfather; he plunged with fervor into the new, colorful landscape of atlases to engage fully in the imaginative play with history and ideas precisely because he, ultimately, embraced the abyss of chaos. Certainly his entire work, though marked by doubt and doom throughout, bespeaks an optimism that accentuates possibility and creativity. Introducing Flusser This is the first English-language introduction to Vilém Flusser (1920–91). Though other collections of his texts, most notably The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design, edited by Martin Pawley...