Flusser’s Selfies
Gesture is a concept through which Vilém Flusser tackles one of phenomenology’s most challenging and enduring complexities: the body. However, this paper argues that he does not do so through a thorough, philosophically complex, and methodologically succinct theorising of the body. Instead, it provides the provocation that Flusser demonstrates the body’s place within phenomenology through the creation of a series of written self-portraits, in which the function and arrangement of perception operate in a mode most readily recognised in the contemporary media form known as the selfie. These selfie-essays do not simply articulate where a body sits within the phenomenological method but also provide detailed methodological consideration of how the body is articulated in perception and how its movements arrange perception (like a selfie-taker seeing him/herself in a mirror). This paper does so by situating Flusser’s Gestures within the phenomenological work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and then conducting a formal analysis of Flusser’s selfies. I then demonstrate how this theorising allows us to extend Flusser’s work on gesture, the body, and phenomenology into his work on the apparatus and the technical image via the sinuous and slippery concept of affect [Gestimmtheit]; ultimately raising questions of freedom and how the arrangement of structures of perceptions plays against deterministic misreadings of his apparatus theory.