Content Description
Looking back today on the start of the European "love of knowledge", of philosophy in other words, it appears to have taken place in the twilight of a media change, that is to say of a change from an acoustic medium to a visual-acoustic medium. We can perceive the peculiar quality of this twilight today, as we ourselves are experiencing a media change - from the stable medium of knowledge handed down in books with copyrights and authorship through to the unstable electronic movements of knowledge on the Internet.
In the work and archive of the publicist Vilém Flusser, structural similarities are to be found with the questions about media encountered by the Greek philosopher Plato. Plato records the teachings of Socrates, who is said not to have written anything at all. The work of the philosopher Plato records in written form a polemic against the writing down of thoughts. Two millennia later, Vilém Flusser defines the end of written culture. Flusser also stresses that the critique of Alex Bloch has improved the quality of his written work. Unlike Flusser, Alex Bloch did not want to write. He is a Brazilian Socrates, who, like Flusser, had to flee from Central Europe to South America.
Unlike the Greek philosophers whose thoughts are handed down in a limited number of manuscripts, and also unlike the philosophers of the new age, whose texts are stored in archives, Vilém Flusser's archive is a fount of different presentation techniques. Alongside written media such as typescripts, exchanges of letters and publications, the archive also contains video and audio cassettes. Thanks to the development of new media over the recent past, thought movements can now not only be conserved in text form, but also in the form of video recordings, live recordings of discussions and audio recordings of lectures. The archive's variety of media allows the differences between oral and written articulation of thoughts to be examined. This is a new factor in the history of philosophy. The Vilém_Flusser_archive in Cologne is now developing an intermedia publication project. The background to the project is, on the one hand, an initiative of the publisher Klaus Sander who has published two audio CDs of talks given by Flusser and, on the other hand, a research project at the Hochschule für Kunst und Gestaltung (Academy of Art and Design) in Zurich where software is developed which enables the collaborative opening up of sound archives.
In addition to the store of Flusser's audio documents, the inter-media publication project also intends to provide access to unpublished manuscripts. For example, Flusser collaborated in the construction of a "House of Colour" in Sao Paulo. This work is documented in extensive live recordings from a symposium to which Jean Novel and Alessandro Mendini were also invited. The preparations and epistemic posing of questions for the event are conserved in a bundle of letters. Flusser's call to depict and discuss the codification of colour as a challenge to science and the humanities can be clearly heard and read. Flusser's multilingual abilities (he spoke German, Portuguese, French and English, among others) calls for partners from the relevant cultures to work together on editing the documents. Inter-media publication is therefore an obligation, but also an opportunity for international cooperation between the continents, and within Europe.
Flusser also resembles his Greek ancestors in another way: he was forced to a life of wandering and exile. Working with his philosophy requires effort to think on an international plane and is also a balancing act between the written medium and oral speech. The distinction between the two is a constitutive element of Flusser's thought. He is a thinker of the transitional period, who points ways into the past of written philosophy and into a future of electronically-transmitted knowledge.
It remains to be seen whether the work of school philosophers such as Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Adorno should primarily be discussed in comparison with Plato, rather than the legacy of the vagabond philosophical story-teller and speculator Vilém Flusser. My aim now is not to compare the philosophical value of Plato and Flusser, but rather to point out, against the background of the long genesis of the historical text corpus of Plato, the opportunities of the current media shift, which can be developed by considering Flusser's biography and theories.
The biography of Flusser and his polemic against rigid systems and inflexible thinking correspond with expected changes in archiving. In the future, archives will no longer be dedicated only to the issue of handing down and protecting documents, but also to operational availability. In the course of the digitisation process, archives will break down protective walls and will become accustomed to permeable walls. For reasons related to his biography and to philosophy of science, Flusser favours the idea of the nomadic tent. The nomadic tent in the Jewish culture has thin canvases. The sounds of the world outside penetrate the inside almost unfiltered. The tent is light and easy to move.
Flusser and the archive changed location frequently. He studied philosophy in Prague until he had to leave there to escape the Nazis. He emigrated via London to São Paulo in Brazil, where he initially worked in business, until he realised that the plight of being a foreign language speaker was a big opportunity. Flusser saw in this emerging language a welcome opportunity to present abstract concepts relating to the philosophy of science and communication theory in an elegant way. He became a popular essayist whose style was imitated by younger authors, was promoted to professor of communication theory and worked as an adviser for the São Paulo Biennale. He is even said to have been offered a ministerial post, which he refused with the simple comment that a political position of this kind was dishonourable for a learned man. It was probably comments such as these that made his position in military-ruled Brazil so difficult that he was again forced to emigrate, moving on to France in 1972. Flusser died in 1991 in a car accident near the Czech-German border.
Eighteen years after the death of Socrates, Plato began recording the latter's philosophical thought in the form of dialogues. This temporal distance and the dramaturgy of the dialogues raise doubts about the dividing-line between the Platonic Socrates and the historical Socrates. Plato's writings and other texts that were deemed to be Platonic were not collected in written records until a hundred years after Plato's death. Included among them were texts of which the authenticity was disputed in the 19th century, 2400 years later, on the basis of historical-critical methods. This big time lag also shows the change in the criterion "authenticity". The nineteenth century, we can conclude with McLuhan and with the more recent research of Martin Giesecke, argues using criteria that were determined by letterpress printing. The criteria of the Platonists a hundred years after the death of the master differ from these. Their standard was the discussed learned opinion, and they passed on whatever they found appropriate for the teaching of Platonic ideas. Although there were already doubts about the authenticity of parts of the text corpus they put together, the Corpus Platonicum, in ancient times, the collections and copies once assembled were passed on right up to the nineteenth century. The order of the texts, or the organisation of the components of Plato's text corpus, was altered when the transmission medium changed from papyrus to parchment.
The sources put together by Klaus Sander on the written work of Flusser show that the texts are a reservoir of thoughts that he combined himself and in cooperation with publishers as required. A large number of individual articles published by Flusser in the supplement of the newspaper "O Estado de São Paulo", for example, form the chapters of the book "Da Religiosidade" [On Religiosity], published in 1967. The archive and the sources can be used to address the question of the authenticity of the texts. The texts written by Flusser have therefore been established, but insufficient attention has been paid to the transmission of the dynamic-dialogic and therefore oral theory of Flusser. In addition, there remains a discrepancy between the extant texts and the published texts, which leads to different views of the corpus in different countries: In Brazil Flusser is known as a philosopher of science and a philosophical writer, while in Germany he is regarded as a theoretician of photography and technical illustrations. His reception in Germany is closely linked to the commitment of publishers, who wanted and to some extent were forced to feed current debates. As a result of this, fragmentary views of the corpus of Flusser are circulating. I believe that these views can be modified and supplemented through the publication of compact discs . His legendary lecture entitled "Heimat und Heimatlosigkeit" [Homeland and Homelessness], which appeared in 1999 on CD, highlights the connection between media technology and the ethical question of dealing with the different and the foreign. The CD allows people to hear that Flusser's media theory can be situated within the framework of a principally ethical question.
Secondly, the Internet can be used for a re-edition of the thought movements of the nomad.
Just as the order of Plato's texts was altered as a result of the change from papyrus to parchment, the digitisation of the sound documents provides the opportunity for a new configuration of Flusser's thought. This relates not only to the change of medium, but also to the sensory forms of transmission. While texts are aimed primarily at our sense of sight and CDs at our sense of hearing, the computer offers the chance for hybrid perception and processing using both senses. Last autumn, the Cologne Academy of Media Arts (Kunsthochschule für Medien) digitised the sound documents with Flusser's original voice and saved them temporarily on CDs, and in a second step it enabled compression of these recordings in Real Audio format. This was part of the "Connective Interfaces" project at the College of Design and Art (Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst) at Zürich. In this project, software for working with acoustic documents is being developed. Acoustic data from Flusser's estate is being used for beta testing the software. The program allows the sound documents to be divided up into sections which can then be assigned keywords, comments and links. At a later stage, these sections are to be exchanged between different editors.
In terms of passing on Flusser's heritage, a program like this provides a special opportunity to re-adjust views of Flusser's thought and to publish them in another project entitled "Intermedia Publishing". It is conceivable that the editors will divide up the sound document resources in accordance with their own interests, thereby developing new angles on Flusser's work. The reception of Flusser as a theoretician of technical illustration may be complemented by the edition of talks on philosophy of religion, ethics and philosophy of science. These editions can be published on the Net, on CD and on DVD. This is one of the possibilities that the "Intermedia Publication" project aims to implement. The editing work may also compensate for biased views in different countries. The editing work can therefore be comprehended as a "recreatio continua", or a continuous re-creation. Just as Flusser tended to use thought modules, computer-aided editions can recombine and publish sound modules of Flusser in accordance with the interests of the thinker in terms of ethics and philosophy of religion. This form of publication may show that the theory of new media was for Flusser a way to re-formulate the philosophy he inherited, using the conditions of digital communication between humans.
Sceptics need not worry about the faithful transmission of the nomad's work. Thanks to cooperation with the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne, the Cologne Academy of Media Arts will save and store the originals of Flusser's texts appropriately. In addition, the sound documents will be saved independently of the editing work, so that in the event of disputes about the transmission of Flusser's work, data on different media can be consulted. The Archive is pleased to receive any information about sound and video documents at the following e-mail address: flusser@khm.de .