Culture
“It has become entirely impossible for us to behave
naturally, but if we attempt to do so anyway,
it is doubly dissembling.” (“Vorderhand,” in: Vom
Subjekt zum Projekt, 1994, p. 256; translated from
the German)
Ever since the first anthropoid ape fell out of a
tree and began to walk upright with the help of
levers, culture has been her or his true nature.
“Any anthropology that would distinguish between
the natural and artificial in us is based
on a misunderstanding.” (ibid., p. 258; translated
from the German) As defective creatures,
human beings create an artificial environment
– technology and culture – that becomes their
nature. “The developing human being is by origin
a historical being and lives under cultural
conditions.” (ibid., p. 233; translated from the
German) Vilém Flusser does not distinguish between
culture and society nor between the foundations
of the two: art and technology.
In the absence of any meaning provided by metaphysics,
human beings have to create meaning
themselves. As mortal creatures whose nature is
culture, they hope to achieve immortality by leaving
their traces behind in memories. “In their futile
struggle against death, they bury information
in objects in order to preserve them in cultural
storage. Culture is a memory in which human beings
hide from oblivion. […] Human beings want
[…] the information to pile up in the memory of
‘culture’ for as long as possible.” (“Gespräch,
Gerede, Kitsch,” in: Nachgeschichte, 1993,
pp. 226–227; translated from the German)*
“Culture” means “the device by which information
acquired is stored so that it can be retrieved.
[…] That is how I have de ned culture,” Flusser
explains, “so that communicology is competent
for it.” (Kommunikologie weiter denken, 2009,
p. 35; translated from the German) He explicitly
pursues “communicology as cultural critique.”
“We assume the structure of communication
in general to be the substructure of culture and
society.” (ibid., p. 36; translated from the German)
That accounts for the necessity of a phenomenology
of communication: “We […] try to
tear open the belly of culture in order to see
which communicological switches are concealed
within it.” (ibid., p. 35; translated from the German)
* Editorial note: This passage does not exist in the English edition.
Original article by Andreas Ströhl in Flusseriana