Die Geste Mensch. Vilém Flussers Kulturtheorie als kommunikationsphilosophischer Zukunftsentwurf

Vilém Flusser worked as a philosopher, author and university teacher in four countries. A native Czech, born in Prague in 1920, he died as a Brazilian citizen in a car accident in 1991 near Bor u Tachova, Czechoslovakia. Flusser experienced his last-minute escape from Nazi-occupied Prague in 1940 and the loss of almost all his family through deportations into death camps as a permanent crisis of an existential “bottomlessness“. In Brazil, he engaged himself in the creation of a new society, progressive and utopian at the same time. As a reaction to the dooming failure of that project he moved to France in 1973, after three decades in São Paulo. His oeuvre is scattered over four languages and many publishing houses, who have marketed Flusser as a media theorist in rather unbalanced and biased ways. Consequently, the reception of Flusser as a phenomenologically oriented theorist and critic of culture has remained marginal. However, 18 years after his untimely death, Flusser’s reputation as an original philosopher in his own right is growing – especially in Brazil, Central Europe and most recently also in the English-speaking world. In his texts, Vilém Flusser focused on the epochal paradigm shift from a culture of “linear thinking“ towards new ways of communication with technical images and digital codes. Flusser conjures up the hope that the implementation of the new technologies of communication enable a “telematic“ society that allows for the recognition of the Other in dialogues. The dissertation aims at a critical overall view of Flusser’s thinking in its entirety – the first endeavour of this kind. Its explicit objective is to reposition Flusser as a communications phenomenologist whose intention is to affect society and its further development. A biographical introduction to Flusser is followed by a study of various terms and aspects central to his thinking. Critiques of Flusser are evaluated in depth as well as the history of his reception. The thematic complexes of medial codes, of dialogues and of the apparatus as well as Flusser’s specific concept of “humanisation“ are dealt with in detail. In this approach the phenomenology of media, the philosophy of communications and questions of cultural anthropology are put in the context of an analysis of the Czech-German and Jewish Habsburg-Austrian environment that proved to be fertile ground for the development of Flusser’s interests and theses. Flusser can be regarded as one of the last representatives of the short but amazingly rich intellectual blossoming of the Jewish-Czech-German culture that was put to a sudden halt by the German invasion into Prague in 1939. Taking into account the massive impact these cultural traditions of Old Central Europe had on Flusser, the text argues that in the development of Flusser’s thinking a projection of the Prague past onto the Brazilian future can be recognized. The source of this projection also sheds light on the consequences Flusser drew from the failure of the “Brazil Project“ in the early 1970s. Flusser’s thinking in his late period aims at the development of a theory of technical images as the centerpiece of a more comprehensive theory of culture. The theory of techno-images thus becomes a critique of the “general apparatus of culture and the position of human beings in it“, because the “present cultural revolution is not ideological but technical“. In the course of his life Flusser changed from a political cultural activist into a phenomenological cultural theorist reformulating traditional philosophy under medial conditions as a philosophy of communications. The purpose of this endeavour was to develop a description of the creation of meaning not only in individual processes but also within a wider social context. The latter was to a large extent based on Martin Buber’s concept of “dialogical life“, substantially refined and de-theologized by Flusser. From this perspective, the creation and circulation of new information in society is a cultural necessity, and it can only be achieved through dialogue. Due to the situation Flusser found himself in, in the face of a post-historical society threatened by a process of massification through discourses, the philosopher of culture was forced to act as a communicologist. However, he had to be more than a mere theorist of the media: both a theorist of culture and a philosopher. The connection between the creation of meaning for individuals through dialogue on the one hand and the functioning of society on the other is to be considered the paramount contribution of Flusser’s thinking. Flusser strove for a theoretical foundation for the organisation of present and future culture and for the preservation of its potential to further develop under the condition of structures of communication dominated by apparatus.