I am writing this blurb on the exact day of Vilém Flusser’s 100th birthday. Flusser was one of the very first prophets of our situation today – today in the most literal meaning possible. In the 1970s, he began to describe a future society based on a net dialogue in which images would be permanently exchanged and permutated. The actors in this big dialogue, less concrete than the dialogue itself, would be scattered all over the world, physically distanced from each other but interconnected through electronic dialogical channels. The interfaces would be screens and keyboards, and “subjects“ would be extrapolations from this exchange, their tiny bodies reduced to big brains and fingertips but not much else.
Today, Flusser’s both utopian and dystopian vision has largely become true. However, the more physical world has not disappeared. His vision must be seen as a reaction to the catastrophes of linear, historical thinking, a rejection of a paradigm that – in his eyes – has of necessity led to the gulags, the holocaust and Hiroshima.
This is where Flusser differs from Hannah Arendt, who never turned her back on enlightenment or the linear, historical, and political paradigm as such. What both philosophers have in common though is a strikingly similar analysis of what it was that brought the dismal and dire situation upon us that we found ourselves in in the middle of the 20th century (and, for that matter, even more so today). At the core of this analysis is the metaphor of the apparatus. Both thinkers based their notion of the apparatus largely on H.G. Adler’s book Theresienstadt 1941–1945. Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft (1955), in which the author likens the workings of a concentration camp to that of a machine.
Flusser picked up on Arendt’s development of this subject into the core question of human responsibility. But his definition of an apparatus was much wider than Arendt’s. Like Franz Kafka, he equated social apparatus (like a company, the army, the church) with mechanical ones (like the car, the photo camera, television) and the media (television, newspapers, the telephone).
To Flusser, an apparatus is a black box peopled by operators who function in function of a program. But the programmers have long disappeared, and the apparatus keeps going only because of its own inertia …
There is no freedom inside the apparatus, but there is also no way out. And anyway, there is no life outside the apparatus, and nothing is happening there. All you can do to assert some limited kind of self-determination is try to playfully use the apparatus to play against the intention of its programmers.
Andreas Ströhl, May 20th, 2020