Reading Flusser: An Abecedarium
This is a memoir of the writer's reading relationship to Flusser over roughly twenty years. It represents an effort to sift through a wide variety of tangled thoughts and associations to locate those topics and approaches characteristic of Flusser that remain most promising, that is, have potential to stimulate further research or new interest. Although it does characterise Flusser's work broadly as an ongoing engagement with alphabetic writing, its history, relationships with other communicative codes, identity with history as such, conflict with other codes, it does not draw any one overall conclusion. Flusser's ongoing impact is rather seen to emerge from the distinctive way the writing engages its reader -- questioning, challenging, often persuading. Reading Flusser includes observations about the specific effects of Flusser's writing on this reader in particular, about recent research that confirms or amplifies certain pivotal ideas in the broader framework of his thought -- particularly with respect to reading and writing, and some evidence of how his thinking enters into at least one reader's perceptions of contemporary events. The abecedarium, an archaic poetic form that gathers aspects of a topic around specific words or phrases and presents them in alphabetical order, seems suited to compressing a diversity of material into an orderly form.
How to Face the Terror of Reason: From Philosophy to Literature
This paper explores the relationship of philosophy and literature, and the role of irony in the search of a possible way out of the hell of the apparatus created by the terror of reason. Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa from The Metamorphosis and Jaroslav Hašek’s Švejk from The Adventures of Brave Soldier Švejk pre-figure the future and are in a way are ironical brothers of Vilém Flusser.
Golem, Roboter und andere Gebilde. Zu Vilém Flussers Apparatbegriff
This essay attempts a systematic genealogic reconstruction of Flusser’s concept of apparatus from Portuguese texts of the early 1960ies up to the Bochumer Vorlesungen held in the summer of 1991 shortly before Flusser’s death. As with many other instances from Flusser’s work the concept of apparatus is decidedly interdisciplinary in nature, positioning itself on the border of philosophy, sociology, history, literature, the arts, cybernetics and technology. This fundamental ambivalence becomes particularly visible in the use of the German word ‘Apparat’ and its many derivatives, as for instance ‘Verwaltungsapparat’, ‘Fotoapparat’ or ‘Messapparat’, subsuming under the same heading the photographic camera, Kafka’s impenetrable bureaucratic apparatus and the perfectly operating apparatus of Auschwitz. Over the course of many years Flusser combined different textual sources to fashion his view of the apparatus. Many of them stem directly from the history Prague. Apart from Kafka’s novels, Karel Čapeks R.U.R, as well the figure of the Golem as it appears in the legend of Rabbi Löw, would also have to be mentioned. Flusser’s concept of the apparatus is, furthermore, connected to the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger and Giorgio Agamben.