"Für eine Phänomenologie des Fernsehens" I: Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Immanuel Kant und Günther Anders
Although Flusser does not explain and develop his philosophical and methodological claims on the first three pages of his mini treatise „Für eine Phänomenologie des Fernsehens“ (1997 <1974>), there is enough evidence for Flusser’s fundamentally phenomenological credo. The philosophers of Flusser’s implicit references can be unmistakably detected: Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Immanuel Kant and Günther Anders. On the one hand, Flusser appears to be strongly rooted in the phenomenological tradition. On the other, in a text on Husserl’s (late) philosophy written in 1986/87, Flusser reveals that he had changed his mind in the meantime turning to a sociology of media that dispenses with the phenomenological stance that was the main aim of his thinking on media in the 1970ies.
Deception and the “Magic” of “Technical Images” According to Flusser
Flusser’s theory of communication addresses the modern images – “technical images” – in the context of a general theory of deception generated by the different communication codes. “Technical images,” as the dominant communication code, imply, according to Flusser, a retrieval of magical forms of consciousness. Such a retrieval seems to be necessary as a result of that what McLuhan would term the overheating of the alphabet technology: lineal codes in their most salient form, namely scientific texts, do not offer any existential meaning, requiring a reversal to magical consciousness fostered by images.