Abstract
The basis for an ‘emerging universe and emerging consciousness,’ Czech-born philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) wrote in 1985, ‘is the calculation of probability.’ That is, the use of mathematics and information theory to determine what would, could, and will happen. But make no mistake: the Flusserian universe is no dystopia. Rather, it is seeped in thick ambivalence; at once utopia and hell. On the one hand, the new universe of technical images, which has already begun to materialize, will ensure a ‘fabulous’ future society full of ‘creativity’. But on the other hand, Flusser admits, ‘I am horrified [of] the emerging universe. Thank God I will not experience it.’ (p. 128). These constitutive tensions run throughout the highly provocative and uniquely written Into the Universe of Technical Images.
Flusser’s ‘telematic’ universe was conceived in 1985. It consists perhaps entirely of what he terms ‘technical images’. Unlike ‘traditional images,’ where one can grasp the world and environment through magical action (p. 9), technical images are not surfaces but rather ‘mosaics assembled from particles’ (p. 6); particles assembled into visual images (p. 10). What exists between these particles? Voids or ‘intervals that hold the elemental points apart’ (p. 15). The technical universe is a cosmos of pure particles. Technical images begin as ‘raw’ particles, which, through the rubrics of information theory and cybernetics, are then sorted into a new order of ‘negative entropy’, as he terms it elsewhere.
However, technical images are not exclusively digital and this is where Flusser’s philosophy of technology is truly distinct from his contemporaries. The universe of technical images includes film, photography, television, video, computing, and even the typewriter. How is this possible? Recall first that the logic of computation existed long before the electronic computer. Second, all of these media involve technical sorting and ordering processes that transform raw materials—photons, electrons, or dye substances—into a new order and intelligibility. Technical images turn a ‘concept’ into a ‘visualization’ by making the abstract concrete. In distinction, traditional images, like paintings, depict the empirically perceived world more or less directly (they do not require any ‘keys’ for translation like a shutter release or keyboard). At the same time, Flusser suggest that electronic images are purer forms of technical images. ‘After the Information Revolution,’ he writes ‘contemporary films [will] resemble the cave paintings at Lascaux more closely than they do images of fractal equations of computer screens’ (p. 102). Electronic images are better technical images because their transcoding is more substantial.
It is on the level of interpretation, however, that images in the telematic universe mark a radical departure from conventional visual studies. Traditional images mean and explain things and this is why, they are the age-old friend of hermeneutics. In contrast, technical images cannot be grasped or interpreted for ‘meaning’ in the way that traditional images can. Instead, they are post-hermeneutic and consist of no tangible substrate; projecting organized particles into an empty field (p. 47). Thus, what a technical image means is also how it is structured—that is, the algorithmic protocols that condition its possibilities for visualization (p. 44). ‘To decode a technical image’ Flusser writes ‘is not to decode what it shows but to read how it is programmed’ (p. 48). The future requires these post-hermeneutic reading strategies that run along the surface of material relations, operations, and connections.
What then is the broader significance of the new telematic universe? For one, humans have less and less understanding and comprehension of the world. Behavior is ‘no longer dramatic but instead embedded in fields of relationships’ (p. 5); humanity has climbed the ladder ‘step by step’ from the concrete towards the abstract that has resulted in a situation where ‘what remains are particles without dimensions that can be neither grasped nor presented…’ (p. 10) And finally, we will become post-historical: ‘Current events no longer roll toward some sort of future but toward technical images. Images are … history’s obstruction.’ At the same time, technical images are necessary to exist in the new reality. Through them, we are able to ‘consolidate particles around us’ to make the ungraspable and invisible, visible (p. 16). If we have indeed become ‘a dreaming global brain controlled cybernetically through technical images’ (p. 125) then it is also only through these particle-orderings that we can enter its utopia: ‘Utopia means groundlessness, the absence of a point of reference’ (p. 3).
Flusser’s philosophy is not for everyone and definitely not for those who wince at the mention of ‘technological determinism.’ No, Flusser is not for those anthropologists or humanist cultural theorists who want to read about human agency and heroics. Flusser is however for those who, like myself, live to understand the world, its history, and inhabitants through the lens of media archaeology, and what Neil Postman once termed ‘media ecology’. The ‘telematic society is a school for freedom’ (p. 114), Flusser explains, and only after this techno-schooling will we be able to encounter a life that, for the first time, ‘deserves to be called “human”’ (p. 172).