ABSTRACT from Simone Osthoff for the Flusser Pop-up event, Unsettling the Apparatus
NOMAD: Itinerant, Traveler, Wanderer, Drifter, Gipsy, Tramp, Walker, Displaced Person, Refugee, Immigrant, Outsider, Expatriate. RELATED CONCEPTS: Exile, Diaspora, Citizen, Hospitality, Racism, Xenophobia, Bigotry.
Vilém Flusser felt at home in at least four languages and reflected upon his choice to not have a homeland by embracing the creative potential of migration in his philosophy without foundations. He reminded us that the experience of exile—either forced or volunteer; religious and existential—includes among others, the biblical story of man’s expulsion from Paradise and the existentialist story of man as a stranger in the world (to which we may add, besides historical diasporas, the separation between human and non-human, as well as our potential exile from ourselves).
Flussser examined what the experience of migration meant to him, and how it can make us conscious of our own habits and biases in essays such as “Exile and Creativity” and “Taking Up Residence in Homelessness.” He considered “home as the seat of most (perhaps all) of our prejudices—the judgments made before any conscious judgments.” And explained: “A home is the foundation of everyone’s consciousness, for it enables us to recognize the world. But it also dulls the senses, for it cannot be recognized, and we barely acknowledge its existence.” Elsewhere he asserts more forcefully: “More than anything, patriotism is a symptom of an aesthetic disease.”
I discovered Flusser in the 1990s through collaborations with Brazilian artists in Chicago, where I began to publish articles about Telepresence and Net Art. Artists working with technology then had to theorized their own works and create the context for their works to even be considered art. Women artists working with media in Brazil were even more invisible, and I began to tell that story. Later, I explored how documental archives were being used as media for art making, the way old films, interviews, and photographs were remixed to reimagine the past and question how histories are constructed. Flusser’s media theory offered great insights. The structure of his own archive interests me, as does other aspects of his philosophy, especially his 1960s Brazilian publications on language and his philosophy without foundations, Bodenlos, without firm ground.
Flusser’s multilinguism, his thinking in translation, which “posits that existential ‘uprooting’ is a condition of freedom,” can also be understood as a method that decolonizes thinking. His ethical stance is still rare, as he searched for an alternative to the dark side of Western Enlightenment. For a while, he believed that Brazil could offer an alternative model for Western culture, but in the early 1970s, under a technocratic and violence military dictatorship, (which he saw as “the first manifestation of a Brazilian homeland”), he changed his mind and moved back to Europe, where as a nomadic thinker, he theorized a telematic future as an antidote to the fascist intolerance towards difference. Today, in social isolation, we hear not only the birds sing more clearly, but unfortunately, also racism, xenophobia, bigotry and prejudice speaking with louder voices.