Apparatus
The term apparatus, and the investigation of its
underlying general concepts, permeates both
directly and indirectly Vilém Flusser’s entire
oeuvre. It is perhaps the most recurrent concept
in his thought. The first use of the term in
his texts dates from the manuscript of his first
monograph, Das zwanzigste Jahrhundert [The
Twentieth Century] (1957, p. 122), and the genealogy
of the term in Flusser’s intellectual universe
can be clearly traced as a confluence between
elements from works by Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, José Ortega y Gasset, Martin Heidegger,
and Franz Kafka.
Within Flusser’s work, the meaning of the term
apparatus underwent several mutations throughout
the four main phases of his literary production.
In the 1950s the concept emerged first as an
amalgam between the image of the alchemical
homunculus of Goethe’s Faust II and Ortega y
Gasset’s concept of technical apparatus; during
this phase, the apparatus thus emerged as ontologically
distinct from humanity. In the 1960s
the apparatus became fused with cybernetics
theory. Flusser also compared it to Friedrich
Nietzsche’s Übermensch (A História do Diabo,1965, p. 131) and stated that the apparatus is not
res extensa (Até a Terceira e Quarta Geração, 1965,
p. 311). In the late 1970s Flusser established the
concept of apparatus within his emerging communications
theory, and it became entwined with
the concepts of post-history, technical images,
and technical imagination (Mutations in Human
Relations, 1977/1978, published as Kommunikologie,
1996; Pós-História, 1983). In the 1980s the
apparatus took on an organic form in the image
of the vampyroteuthis infernalis (Vampyroteuthis
Infernalis, 2011) and subsequently after it became
a black box (Towards a Philosophy of Photography,
1984; Into the Universe of Technical Images,
2011).
In a general sense, the final version of Flusser’s apparatus, in its sociopolitical and philosophical dimensions, does not have a hard core and does not function in a linear, historical fashion. Instead, it functions automatically without aim, postindustrially, according to a program (post historically), constantly metamorphosing via a feedback loop between apparatus and functionaries of the apparatus. Vilém Flusser’s concept of apparatus therefore posits the degree of importance of the apparatus upon the types of ontological relations that we establish with it, both as a model and an instrument.
Original article by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes in Flusseriana