Thus Spoke a Strange Computer / Paths – Programmes – Permissiveness
This contribution forms part of a larger work exploring the telematic culture in which we now live. It is both essay and programme (a complex system of inherent virtualities that will inevitably be realised via components of chance). It is concerned with freedom and the human spirit (matter and mind as energy in flux). It is a meditation on the unique form of thinking we call writing. Its ideas are both explicitly and implicitly communicated (though it is undoubtedly imperfect and at times contradictory). And in the interests of freedom and beauty, I shall say no more about it…
2. Devil may care: Flusser’s Journey Into Exile and Beyond Reason
Vilém Flusser’s second book, A história do diabo (“History of the devil”), was published in Brazil in 1965 but has yet to be translated into more widely current languages. The present paper aims to summarize the major arguments contained in that early work, situating them in the cultural and intellectual context of the time. Taking Flusser’s personal history of exile as its point of departure, the paper suggests that the issues raised by the book are prescient of important changes in Western thinking over the past thirty years – in particular, the paradigm shift from the rational certainties of modernity to a more fluid notion of ‘reality’ in post-modernity. Flusser’s pioneering grasp of material appearances as “structures of virtuality”, elaborated through language, is indeed prophetic of things taken for granted in the digital era. For the student of Flusser, this important early work provides an insight into the profound unity underlying the multiple facets of his thought and writings.