To Hear
The Old Testament injunction against images is
issued by a God who says of himself, “I am that
I am” (Exodus 3:13–16). This God expresses himself
in thunder and lightning, but also in language.
Man and God thus share a medium through which
they can address each other. In this medium, the absolute can also be called into question: for
example, the sounds used to say “God” are also
used to identify other objects. The phonetic components
of the word “God” are also found in the
word “dog.” God is thus subject to humans’ linguistic
improvisation, yet at the same time everything
becomes divine through language, for it
sanctifies everything that can be said. Thoughts
such as these, elaborated by the historian of religion
Gershom Scholem in his studies on Jewish
mysticism, “impregnated” Vilém Flusser’s thinking,
providing him with a background against
which to conceptualize sign processes in the variety
of their materialities.
The aurally perceptible sign constitutes a difference between the Jewish tradition, the tradition of Jerusalem, and the Greek tradition, Athenian thought, whose gods were made visible as statues. The Old Testament God is a God who speaks and writes; he is aurally and visually perceptible in letters, despite his prohibition of images. Language and writing contain an incommunicable component in which God’s omnipotence conceals itself from humanity’s machinations. What the secularized thinker Flusser inherits from this tradition is the element of the incomplete inferability of language and writing. That Flusser conceives both sign systems as expressions of human capability does not stand in opposition to the hope that these signs will enable the formulation of utopia. But for Flusser, these utopias are no longer messianic. Rather than waiting for the help of a transcendental principle, they nurture the hope – Auschwitz and Hiroshima notwithstanding – that humans, by taking a dialogical stance, will become more human with the help of technology.
Original article by Nils Röller