Artificiality, Artwork, Artifice
Artifício, Artefato, Artimanha [Artificiality, Artwork/
Artifact, Artifice] is the title of a series of
lectures given in Brazil by Vilém Flusser at the
18th International São Paulo Biennial in 1985,
which consisted of three lectures: “O Homem enquanto Artifício” [Man as Artificial Being];
“A Vida enquanto Artefato” [Life as Artifact];
“A Artimanha da Vida Humana” [The Artifice of
Human Life]. The series has a dialectical structure,
with the third lecture as the synthesis of
the other two lectures. This trilogy is filled with
indirect references – never explicit and always
open to interpretation – to Karl Marx, Friedrich
Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, and possibly Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, the latter’s thought reinterpreted
by Flusser in a radical way that highlights
the antithetical and negative character of
his thought.
The three concepts together describe anthropology:
the human being as an animal that
modifies objects so he/she can change himself
or herself. The human being finds resistance in
every object, and thus is forced into a never-ending
cycle of using a different technique: the technique
changes the object, the changed object
changes the technique, the changed technique
changes the subject, and the changed subject
changes the technique, and so on. Thus far, this
is classic Critical Theory, which Max Horkheimer
had already formulated incisively in his Eclipse
of Reason (1947). In Flusser’s work, however, the
cycle as a whole is continually transformed, because
the changes in the subject are not mere
adaptations to technology. On this basis, he
criticizes the Judeo-Christian reification of human
subjectivity, and redefines it as an endless
process of nihilism.
Flusser continues with a critique of bourgeois ontology, with its historical origins in crafts, the statement that it needs to be left behind, and the assumption that this process is already happening in biotechnological manipulation (re-information) of living matter. According to Flusser we are heading towards a total “artificialization” of life, where life and the living become art: art not in the sense of producing an “artwork,” but understood as a strategy of human freedom to evolve through manipulation of information – as a prototype this can be found in contemporary antiart, for instance, in the poiesis of the hacker.
Original article by João Borba in Flusseriana