Marxism
Vilém Flusser makes it quite clear that he has
read Karl Marx. In the essay “Einbildungen”
[Imaginations] (Lob der Oberächlichkeit, 1993)
he describes the difference of “realness” between
the computer (postindustrial, post-Marxist)
image and that which it might represent in
the physical world of things. Labor (which he associates
with Marx) will only be necessary until
technical images can be produced which have
a density of particles approximating to that of
conventional reality. Therefore, the technical
image will render Marxism obsolescent. Further,
as Flusser sees Marxism as the last bastion of
linear/causal political-historical thought, his
notion of post-history specifically questions the
contemporary validity or usefulness of Marx’s
concepts.
Not unusually for his generation, as a young intellectual
in Prague Flusser was drawn to leftist
thinking, but already in his autobiography Bodenlos
[No Firm Ground] (1992), Flusser sees a profound
failure in Marxist humanism. The millions
of deaths under Joseph Stalin tainted Marxism
forever and compromised its humanist pedigree.
Enlightenment humanism, the great spirituality
of causal, linear thinking, was completely discredited
having unexpectedly produced its antithesis
in the cutting-edge technologies of mass
murder employed by the Nazis. Marx represents
for Flusser an apotheosis of such linear thought
in the Platonic tradition through Immanuel Kant;
thought which is at once preserved and annihilated
in the visual poetry of technical images.
Nevertheless, Flusser remains ambivalent as to whether the obsolescence of the linear and causal reasoning epitomized in Marx heralds more favorable auspices for humankind. “Of course, no doubt, that the apparatus of the Communist party was a terribly oppressive apparatus. […] But now that the apparatus was destroyed, chaotic situations menace us.” (“On Technical Images, Chance, Consciousness and the Individual” [1991], in: “We Shall Survive in the Memory of Others,” 2010).
Original article by Baruch Gottlieb