Baruch Gottlieb

At stake is the limit of words in effecting and addressing our material conditions in the world. We human beings who are alive today experience literacy’s vexed legacy like never before. As foretold by Flusser, the printed text, and the linear, causal thinking it instructs and propagates has become obsolete. But as McLuhan warns, obsolescence does not mean the end, on the contrary, “if it works, its obsolete” the obsolescent technology is released from the culture’s reliance on it and freed to play all manner of new and old roles.

Text on a screen is indistinct from image on the instrumental level, and so it can no longer perform its “iconoclastic” function. Having become image, text use is becoming more emphatic, assertive, active and gestural. Text’s electronic translation also infuses it with an unprecedented urgency. As web ”pages” have become “streams”, intellectual engagement with coherent epistemics give way to the responsivity to and management of modulating flows of information. As such the scientific, analytic rigour assumed, not only with written text, but reflectively with causal arguments of all kinds is convoluted with gestural and other non-verbal or extra-verbal modes of expression.

For a few centuries, the printed word promised to release human knowledge from the fetters of tradition, convention and belief. The triumphs of modernity are the result of this irreverent hyper-literacy. The essential quality of print which produced such profound effects was its anonymity, its industrial uniformity, its standardization. The social status signalling which resided in calligraphic scripts was blasted away by print and a new age of general intellect augured, where every thought, regardless of origin, once expressed in type, had to be evaluated on its merits.

The reliability of industrial technology depends on scientific causality inscribed in the instrumental functioning. The principles of this causality are the historical product of an interactive process requiring unfettered scientific criticality. This unfettering was a painful process which accelerated with Gutenberg and Descartes. The protestant revolution with their mass-media vernacular Bibles ripped away the absolute power of the church. The Gutenberg Bible threw the gospel down in uniform lines of print to be analysed on its own merits, as Spinoza did, in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. The secularization of the world of knowledge was a violent process with political and economic ramifications we still feel today.

All through this process of modernization, text played an essential role, reflecting, analysing and synthesizing the transformations afoot, providing a “sounding board” for public debate, and political positioning. The paradoxes and contradictions, both revealed and produced by text were grappled with in that technology of the original sin of literacy which, for thinkers like Flusser and McLuhan was at the origin of the Western scientific tendency with its apparatus-nature.

Text permitted the protomodern person to be both inside and outside the transformation. Text provided as much a refuge into private contemplation as an intellectual toolbox with which to grapple with one’s conditions. The silent private sphere of the reader/writer, producing or consuming texts was extrapolated with the industrial revolution into theories of “the unconscious”. Psychology, the word had once been allegorical for philosophy, ironically split off an only indirectly accessible “psychic” dimension of experience from an explicit domain of rationality.

But just as “we have never been modern” we have also never been rational. One thing is certain, we have been writers, and readers. And we still are. As text is subsumed in speed-of-light informational flows, it turns out we have not abandoned text but, indeed, are using more text than ever before. Though, for practical reasons, voice-command is slowly becoming more common, contemporary social life involves more textual communication than ever. Many things we would once say on the phone, today we text. The provisionally persistent form of text permits us to manage myriad personal and professional streams of communication simultaneously.

Likewise, is scholarly writing going through a revolution overwhelmed by the ever increasing availability of scholarship. Scholarly texts are not only composed using algorithmic text generators trained on a historical corpus of scholarly texts but conversely are cross-referenced and analysed using search engines and other tools which can coalesce knowledge from vast datasets. Hyper-text, the name of the prototype of electronic philosophy produced by Bernd Wingert with Vilém Flusser at the dawn of the Internet age, has become everyday scholarship. But the new forms of philosophy Flusser and Wingert were sketching out with the Hypertext prototype have not yet emerged.

In his essay “orders of Magnitude and Humanism” Flusser warns his reader not to uncritically apply philosophical strategies developed in the world of human scale experience to knowledge derived from alien orders of magnitude through the use of various apparatus. This technical knowledge requires its own humanism, it must be humanized, as the title of his unfinished final book project indicated. Ironically for many of today’s scholars of technology, Flusser proposed no a-human or non-human theory of technical knowledge or technical aesthetics, rather he insisted that we elaborate new “humanisms'' which are able to bridge the epistemic rift which opens up between our experience and that gained through apparatus. This provides us with a bracing challenge, and a troubling suggestion. Since knowledge of the vast world of material flux is availed to us through human science, it cannot but be anthropomorphised, made analogous to human experience, and so the only way we know Nature, the cosmos, the vastness of material reality and the infinitesimalities of viruses and protons is to some degree through encounters with other human beings.

But such encounters cannot be merely philosophical, they are necessarily materially conditioned, if nowhere else than in the physical limits and needs of the participants. Therefore there can never be disinterested philosophy, nor can there be disinterested science, only the confessions of intentionality can be indefinitely postponed so as to appear to be immaterial, but it is merely suspended there in a network of assumptions. The examination of the material predicates for scientific and philosophical thought are often considered orthogonal to the content of the thought itself. But Flusser’s “new humanism” compels us to address the challenge of plumbing the crosshairs of the orthogon, the zero-dimension. Inevitably, for this reader, this requires a biography of the technical apparatus which affords humanity this alien knowledge. Through the biography in the stories or history, poly-history of human activities recorded in and enacted through the apparatus we can criticise the apparitions and dispositions of alien reality the apparatus affords us.

Inevitably we must then acknowledge that the power unleashed by knowledge at the largest and smallest scales, does not disrupt but is still constrained to pre-existing distributions of power. Concerns about how genetic modification, fissile radiation, nanotechnology or artificial intelligence may affect the human condition, necessarily, in the short term, reconcile to general conditions about the social distribution of political agency. In other words, the powerful wield any new technology to serve their purposes,paramount of which is perpetuating their privilege. All other effects of the introduction of new technical affordances devolves from this first imperative.

Flusser, like McLuhan, attempted to take a Macchiavellian view of technological progress , in that whatever forms emerge will serve better those already in power. The question for both was how to elaborate new cultural and intellectual forms which would be empowered as well, and allow more people to actively inform their prospects. Both Flusser and McLuhan warned of the disappearance of the distinction between private and public sphere, between private reflection and political encounter. Acknowledging the radical egalitarian pretences of democracy as the technical product of literacy and understanding that the power which technology avails us is made up of other people, Flusser, in a surprising passage, even reveals a feminist dimension to his critique of liberal modernity. Responding to his friend Abraham Moles’ reactionary contention that human liberty and true democracy is increasingly constrained by technocracy, Flusser states:

“[For the] republic, the market-place to work at all, it has an economical bases (sic) in slavery and oppressed women. Democracy in the Greek village is founded on slavery. The Market serves to exchange goods and ideas. Goods are exchanged in order to verify their exchange value, to “normalize” them. Ideas are exchanged in order to “normalize” them. That is why for the Greeks “government” is synonymous with “steering”: “Kybernein” and to govern means to normalize values, (including the so-called Supreme Good and Evil) on the market. All this is possible because there are women and slaves who labor without any values. This basic fact has not changed ever since the neolithic village, and is, in my view, the reason why government practices are costly and unrealistic. They are costly because it costs to maintain the women and slaves laboring, but the cost is of course less than the costs of liberating the slaves would be, and they are unrealistic because they substitute the reality of slavery by the fiction of representation.“ - Letter to A. Moles 21. April 1979 / FA Cor_111_MOLES2013-03-26 (16)

Flusser, like McLuhan or Spinoza back at the dawn of the Gutenberg age, was pessimistic about the prospects for general democracy. In post-history, the private and the public fuse together into a totalitarian “global village” and the “oppressed women” disappear again into the category human being. Flusser would not further develop the rich vein of feminist techno-politics put forth a few decades later by Silvia Federici. From him there would be no call for a women’s strike. Trapped between his disavowed marxism and anti-autoritarian enlightenment liberalism, he eventually gravitated towards retrieving a kind of secularized rabbinical practice of itinerant dialog.

The Gesture of Writing

Because every act of translating the world into words is, in principle, forever incomplete, it is necessarily instrumental, in that it serves a purpose, and this purpose is defined by the moment at which the translation breaks off. Causal argument as gesture is defined as much by how it begins and ends than by its content. The gestures of beginning and ending arguments involve extra-verbal actions. A human being translating the world into words produces a semantic sequence. This semantic sequence need not completely comprehend the world since the world is already there in the body of the person producing it. Every human body is a microcosm of the world which produces words. Once words are divorced from the productive body and transferred to another medium, for example paper or screen, the apparence of the world in the words is interrupted and the consumer of the words experiences an alienation. The materiality of the medium on which the words appear is related in a different way to the world of which the words refer than to the formulator of the words. All manner of exciting freedoms and terrifying pitfalls result from this interruption such as democracy and racism: the ur-Pharmakon recounted of Socrates in the Phaedrus.

The world translated into semantic sequences of words is resonant in the words. The words are moments of epistemic contact between the producer, consumer and world to which the words refer. But the purpose of translation of world to word cannot be merely figurative, it is inter-subjective, it exists in a political relation between producer and consumer and materially elaborates these social bonds in the togetherness of a conversation. In the mutual presentness of spoken exchange, a conversation, the world and the resonant words which unite the conversants are one. The content of the conversation is thus a gestural performance through which each is informed or transformed through the experience. The experience includes, but is not limited to, cognition. In the conversation, conversationalists stand in for the world, one is subject to the world through another human and participation in a verbal performance and informance. The effects of this encounter inform each subject when they pass out of any performance into other relations to the world.

The purpose of communication is information, “to put the form in” as Flusser put it. To change the other and effect some change in the other. This may be understood also as a reordering of attentivities and energies. When we meet each other and converse, we give orders. The objective is instrumental, if for no other reason than that which determines the conclusion of the conversation. Why should the conversation end? The reason for the ending determines the purpose of the conversation, although this purpose may not be fully explicit to any of the participants. Emerging out of the world as individual avatars of the world with the urgency of mortality, what Spinoza called the finite conatus, we experience in the conversation a liminal politics whose purpose is at best mutually self-serving, instructive and ordering, giving a purpose. As anthropos limns on physis, the culmination of the conversation produces social order.

This social order is substantively disrupted by technology, which transits individual finitude with infinitudes of persistent significance. Though nothing ever really interrupts the material flux of physis, events in the anthropic real, informed by mortality and finitude, distinguish themselves in endings, and thereby produce their purposes and politics. The limits of texts and images are even more political. As Borges famously recounted, a description or depiction can go on ad absurdum. Indeed, it is difficult to determine where the absurd begins… probably at the culmination of the political purpose of the gesture of describing or depicting. This politics is of course economics in the limited materiality of the text, or image: page paper screen, or the limit of the speakers’ physical capacity to persist, in a war of attrition with the material circumstances whereby their capacity to converse is reproduced. Every conversation is negentropic, to a greater or lesser degree, producing and communicating information against the tendency to dissolution. An inherent, radically social politics is simultaneously in the materiality of the image or text which is different from that in a living interlocutor. The radical abstraction of language to text of course extends individual conatus to that of the whole social form capable of interpreting the text.

This is finally the dialectic we must learn to navigate on the interminable edge of post-histoire. Our words are insufficient for our purposes, but they are all we have. Flusser also warns us not to lose cognizance of the literary, causal, scientific pedigree and predicate to the contemporary affordance of networked computation and technical images. Its not really post-histoire, its better thought of as most histoire, with the history embedded into everything we use. We will never be rid of “histoire” just as we will never be rid of “modernity” post-modernity simply means the modernist, specializing tendency has slipped under the surface of experience, most-modernity.

As such we are locked in an interminable, Spinoza would say indefinite, tradeoff between the rationalizing, critical analytical purpose of texts and the communizing, coalescing, holisitifying instrumentailty of images. Flusser, as a writer, is painfully aware of this tension, as he violently hammered out his texts and letters on old manual typewriters.

However Flusser, like Spinoza before him and Haraway and Barad in our day, struggled with the sticky dialectical position of the textual tradition itself. Writing a text affirms a commitment to a human reader. Regardless of the cosmic or infinitesimal scale of the contemplation, there is no getting away from a certain anthropomorphic rescaling which conforms the subject to human scale. Vampvroteuthis Infernalis, through the absurdist taxonomies and images of Louis Bec is a boisterous ballet on the pin head of this problem: how to speak of the non-human, of the inhuman, maintaining its sovereignty and its difference, yet do so in a way that communicates with other humans? Because the goal is as much to convey an idea as to provide a basis to convene and exchange about the idea. Writing then is ineluctably social. So perhaps the real vanity is to eschew the pressing contemporary conditions of the reader in the interest of cosmic truth.

Posto Zero

Flusser heralded the age of post-history. By this he meant that the notion of history generated by univocal linear lines of text, composed in causal arguments in an inexorable process which proceeds from the past through the present into the future, was over. Implied here is that linear texts were no longer adequate to describe or understand our situation, they never really were, but as they were the most powerful knowledge technology for several centuries, they were forced into action in circumstances for which they were, as we will see, never quite appropriate.

Though today the primacy of linear texts fades. And though the cultural tendency away from text and towards images may imply a return to “epic” pre-historical consciousness, historic causality is still very much at work in the industrial technologies we depend on every day. Thus post history is just as much most-history, where historical processes are instenified within the surfaces of not post-modernity, but most-modernity. This is particularly ironic for the printed word which had its heyday from the 15th to 20th centuries as the technical anchor for intellectual endeavour.

The uniformity of type pretended a radical egalitarianism of cultural expression, an “even playing field” where all statements could be cooly judged on their merits. For science, again, this was its emancipation, even the least known researcher from the most far flung university could garner attention if their theory was sound. But in the human sciences such standards of impartiality proved impossible to maintain, though every effort was expended to approach the asymptote. Flusser suffered deeply from this failure of reason to prevail over injustice or for justice, despite the obvious virtues it displayed in the successes of science. The limits of reason were not only disappointing, they were dispiriting, and these eventually flung Flusser into a sort of celebration of the end of the age of print and a quixotic embrace of various post-print technologies which were emerging, whereby the legacy of rationality and criticality could find a new purpose and redeem its devastation.

The WMD argument, used to goad the world into an illegal war with a small country called Iraq is a symptom and an exacerbant of the de-legitimization of causal argument we can observe popularly today. Ostensibly “parliamentary” in character, the arguments for the invasion of Iraq followed several idioms of scientific analysis, satellite photos, chemical analysis, historical analysis, and the conclusion was definitive, the offensive was launched. At one point the talking stops and the actions begin. In this case the talking was a mere formality of ritual convention since the actions to be taken had already been determined behind the scenes. As has become evident in subsequent revelations, all rational argument in this case was merely formal without content, a gesture of deference to the conventions of international diplomacy.

The delegitimization and obsolescence of rational argument occurs here as the relevant texts disappear from the surface of experience, inscribed in the background operations of the apparatus. The UN security council chamber, where Powell’s fateful speech took place, is a component of the apparatus UN, which performs a variety of functions pertaining to the global government of the world. For everyone who has ever had anything to do with the UN, it is immediately explicit that this is an apparatus, based on texts. Colin Powell instrumentalized this text-based institution in order to mobilze armies for an illegitimate invasion. Somewhere the critical, objective analytical safeguards expected of institutions based on texts were subordinated to the will of the apparatus who wanted war with Iraq.

This corruption of reason, whereby rational formulations are used idiomatically and gesturally justify the unjustifiable, is, of course, time-honoured practice, but as techno-science availas ever greater orders of magnitude of transformative power in the hands of human beings, this corruption takes on a more threatening dimension. In the case of justifying the invasion of Iraq, the content of rational argument is purely formal and gestural. The corruption of reason is even more profound as the meta-rational scientific conventions and techniques of image-making were also instrumental in drumming up the case for invasion. Flusser alludes to this consummate subordination of both rationality (textual argument) and meta-rationality(scientific evidence in technical images) to a gestural performance sanctioning war, with an anecdote he often retold whereby an airforce pilot who is also a gunman wearing a helmet which allows him to direct and fire guns from the air as he pilots a helicopter, emerges from the airship to meet a group of journalists. Forgetting he still has the gun-pointing helmet on, he narrowly avoids killing the journalists by removing his helmet at the last minute.

This anecdote accentuates the sense of urgency Flusser wished to generate about the technical condition which was intensifying rapidly. The “journalists” here, sorry scribes in an age of technical images are saved at the last minute by the consciousness of the pilot who was not merely part of the military apparatus but also a human being. Despite the ever-intensifying alienation of our technical conditions, human beings with human sensibilities and biographies, embedded in social relations conditioned by other human beings at human scale.

For Flusser, the pivot of post-history occurs where, through computation, a zero-dimension of informational “bits” are abstracted out of the forgoing “one-dimension” of linear, causal scientific texts. These bits can then be recomposed into “technical images” which are, according to Flusser, uniquely appropriate to meaningfully engage with our technical condition. There is a well-discussed paradox here, where the zero-dimensional bits are themselves the products of and are reproduced by the scientific tradition which is based on one-dimensional texts. As Flusser repeatedly stresses, technical images are not like the old iconic images, they are images of texts, to criticize technical images it is not sufficient to unroll them into texts, one must also criticize the texts which produce and reproduce them on the technical level. On the other hand, if the specialist knowledge required to criticize technical texts is not available, a more cybernetic, heuristic approach is proposed whereby one treats the technical image as the product of a black box apparatus, and criticizes this apparatus by “playing with and against” it.

But this is not enough, or at least the accelerating progress of technology does not provide time for the humanisation Flusser imagines would be required to ensure a good outcome. Since he cannot only have little expectation that the acceleration will be attenuated he can do little but warn his readers,

In both cases, we discover that the point of origin of technical images, at the zero dimension point, there is ineluctably a human figure. In the early 70’s shortly before he left Brazil for France, he was offered a newspaper column in the daily “Folho do Sao Paulo” which he called Posto Zero (the view from Zero). His assistant at the time, the artist Gabriel Borba, who’s drawings also grace the first 4 columns published, recalls that Flusser was engaging with the “observer effect” established in particle physics research whereby the influence of observation method, including apparatus and observer need to be factored in to the interpretation of the resultant data.

Flusser’s first column in the Posto Zero series was titled “Sythesis” and elaborates the difference between a bourgeois “Picassoean” Carnaval and Brazilian Carnaval. European bourgeois carnival is one where the trappings of pre-modern, pagan carnality are merely assumed or performed while European individuality is preserved, whereas, Brazilian carnaval involves a total loss of persona and subordination to the festivities. Flusser closes the short essay writing that for the bourgeois, carnaval is about putting on a mask, whereas the authentic Brazilian carnaval involves removing the mask. Written from deep within the military dictatorship, this column seems to be a veiled attack on the Brazilian elites confronting their Euro-chauvinist cultural appropriation with their inevitable subordination in the “real Carnival” to come.

Here Flusser seems to be condemning the doomed Enlightenment humanist project as manifested in one of its more miserable guises as the rationale behind the military dictatorship in Brazil in the 1970s. He invokes an apocalyptic groundswell of noumenal indigenity whereby the masks will fall and the common humanity, at best, or mere existence in the most extreme Hegelian sense would be experienced. What the time frame for this revelation might be is left open.

Humanization

As he returned to Europe to settle in France, Flusser began to articulate his communicological model of a messianic redemption of the modernist project in dialogue. Ironically for one who wrote in “the Gesture of Writing” that his lonely hammering at the typewriter was for no greater purpose than to allow him to think. This thinking ineluctably has a social telos. The reason he had to use so much physical power that, as Louis Bec once recounted to me, he would slowly push an enormous marble table across the room during the course of the day, was not merely the existential angst being worked through within him, it was also the fact that he was typing through multiple sheets of carbon copy, a detail inexplicably left out of “the Gesture of Writing”, but one which is well known to anyone who has studied at the Flusser Archive. As the stacks of correspondence attest, Flusser’s philosophical practice was intensively dialogical, combative, gestural, and playful.

Flusser is both the hyper-modern hyper-alienated “thinker” formulating and reformulating his private response to the world, but also the hyper-networked and engaged participant in the intellectual lives of others, and it is certainly the latter which nourishes and sustains the former. Like every thinker since Gutenberg and maybe since Plato, Flusser struggles with the dialectic between private and public, between individuality and anthropomorphism. The solution he gravitates to in his later years is a most-modern retrieval of pre-modern rabbinical practice of private rumination, punctuated by spontaneous and ritual encounter and exchange.

Having weathered adventures into inhuman territory, of Auschwitz and the deep sea, Flusser returns to reaffirm anthropomorphism as the only path available to us to understand our circumstances. That we have no way of understanding the world as it is, except through the avatar of other human beings. That the individuality of the modern “person” is only gestural dis-guise provisionally coalescing on the entropic edge not only of common humanity but of cosmic material flux, eventually having its only form in “the memory of others”.

For this reason Flusser’s moral and philosophical solution to adequately address the alien dimensions of knowledge brought forth and availed to us through technology is in the face of the other human being. In the final chapter of his Post-histoire, Flusser pleads for the retrieval of a private mode… of publishing, which is another way of reclaiming the modern institution of the private individual, but now acknowledging its public predicate. This hyper-modern or most-modern condition of accelerated technological and scientific progress produces here what McLuhan would call a “flip” or “retrieval of the pre-modern mode of dialogical thinking, and, ironically, a “return” as he writes to “being Human”.

Flusser’s post-historical post-politics is an interpersonal one. In the end he puts all his faith in ephemeral and informative encounters in pairs or small groups. The large sweeps of global or national politics are now out of scope of what can and must be accomplished more locally, even if this “locality” takes place on a platform provided by industrial meta-corporations invoking a highly systematizes hyper-modernist hyper-rational global production chain, and instrumentation based on causal, historical scientific principles. This is Flusser’s anarchism, a playful critical commitment to what is at hand (zuhanden), a certain shuttering off of the big historical, political questions of his time which have become so much cosmic radiation.