Mass
The Greco-Latinate root of the word “mass” – including
its original meaning of “a lump of dough”
– is found in many languages. The metaphorical
use of the term appears most often in sociology:
in opposition to the individual and the elite, or,
in the Marxist sense, as revolutionary potential
or a momentary mass of people. These ranges
of meaning share the “concept of the many,” but
it is a many which – desubjectivized – can be
shaped from without (see the Greek massein, to
knead). This unilateral, extrinsic treatment appears
clearly in Vilém Flusser’s concept of mass
communication, in relation to the shaping of a
fundamentally diffuse public: “The mass continued
to be programmed by images, although
these images were increasingly infected by
texts; they persisted, so to speak, in the magical
consciousness.” (Medienkultur, 1997, p. 26; translated
from the German)
Biographically, the programmed mass plays a
decisive role as well for Flusser – in the matter of
its murderous irresponsibility vis-à-vis the machinery
of extermination, an irresponsibility that
seizes the individual and makes him part of the
mass. Flusser addresses genocide, mass murder;
its unreality renders him incapable of speaking
further about it (Bodenlos, 1992, p. 46). Massa
also meant metal: the “mechanizing massification
of Germany” (ibid., p. 45; translated from the
German). The subservient mass and the mechanization
of the industrial destruction machine
are prerequisite to its unspeakable product. By
contrast, Flusser’s image of “colonial Brazil,
with its […] sleepily polite masses” (ibid., p. 41;
translated from the German) is characterized by
the concept of mass from physics: mass is an
essential quality of a material body, the source
of its inertia and gravitation – the reason for its
resistance to changes in its current state of motion,
but also the cause of attraction.
Every student knows the formula for inertial mass: F = mia. Flusser wrote tirelessly against inertia. In a letter to Milton Vargas, he said, “I believe that human culture will slowly but inexorably enter into an entropic process (mass culture). My text is meant to be the ironic but afflicted testimony of a survivor.” (“Vorwort,” in: Medienkultur, p. 18; translated from the German) His unfinished magnum opus, Flusser’s “becoming human” project, is incompatible with the masses.
Original article by Konstantin Daniel Haensch