Vilém Flusser
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Vilém Flusser (May 12 1920 – November 27 1991) was a philosopher born in Czechoslovakia. He lived for a long period in Brazil and later in France, and his works are written in several different languages.
His early work was marked by discussion of the thought of Martin Heidegger, and by the influence of existentialism and phenomenology. Phenomenology would play a major role in the transition to the later phase of his work, in which he turned his attention to the philosophy of communication and of artistic production. He contributed to the dichotomy in history: the period of image worship, and period of text worship, with deviations consequently into idolatry and "textolatry".
Life
Flusser was born in 1920 in Prague into a family of Jewish intellectuals. His father, Gustav Flusser, studied mathematics and physics (under Albert Einstein among others). Flusser attended German and Czech primary schools and later a German grammar school.
In 1938, Flusser started to study philosophy at the Juridical Faculty of the Charles University in Prague. In 1939, shortly after the Nazi occupation, Flusser emigrated to London (with Edith Barth, his later wife, and her parents) to continue his studies for one term at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Vilém Flusser lost all of his family in the German concentration camps: his father died in Buchenwald in 1940; his grandparents, his mother and his sister were brought to Auschwitz and later to Theresienstadt where they were killed. The next year, he emigrated to Brazil, living both in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. He started working at a Czech import/export company and then at Stabivolt, a manufacturer of radios and transistors.
In 1960 he started to collaborate with the Brazilian Institute for Philosophy (IBF) in São Paulo and published in the Revista Brasileira de Filosofia; by these means he seriously approached the Brazilian intellectual community. During that decade he published and taught at several schools in São Paulo, being Lecturer for Philosophy of Science at the Escola Politécnica of the University of São Paulo and Professor of Philosophy of Communication at the Escola Dramática and the Escola Superior de Cinema in São Paulo. He also participated actively in the arts, collaborating with the Bienal de São Paulo, among other cultural events.
Beginning in the 1950s he taught philosophy and functioned as a journalist, before publishing his first book Língua e realidade (Language and Reality) in 1963. In 1972 he decided to leave Brazil. Some say it was because it was becoming difficult to publish because of the military regime. Others dispute this reason, since his work on communication and language did not threaten the military. In 1970, when a reform in the University of São Paulo made all lecturers of Philosophy members of the Department of Philosophy, Flusser, who taught at the Engineering School (Escola Politécnica), was dismissed; but it should be remembered that most members of the Department were critics of the military régime and considered Flusser as a rather conservative thinker. He lived in both Germany and the South of France. To the end of his life, he was quite active writing and giving lectures around media theory. He died in 1991 in a car accident, while visiting his native Prague to give a lecture.
Philosophy
Flusser's essays are short, provocative and lucid, with a resemblance to the style of journalistic articles. One of the difficulties that arise while reading Flusser is the lack of references, quotations or illustrations; his articles seem to be articulated with the originality and freshness of the new. (Cubitt 2004)
Flusser’s writings relate to each other, which means that he intensively works over certain topics and dissects them into a number of brief essays. His main topics interest were: writing, the technical image, photography, migration, philosophy, media and literature, and, especially in his later years, the philosophy of communication and of artistic production.
His writings reflect his wandering life: although the majority of his work was written in German, other texts are in Portuguese and French, with scarce translation to other languages. Because Flusser's writings in different languages are dispersed in the form of articles or sections of books, his work as a media philosopher and cultural theorist is only now becoming more widely known. The first book of Flusser to be translated into English was The Shape of Things, published in London in 1999. The following year his 1983 book Towards a Philosophy of Photography also became available in English, and other work has since been translated.
Flusser's archives have been held by the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and are currently housed at The Berlin University of Arts.
Philosophy of photography
Flusser describes a world fundamentally changed by the invention of the "technical image" and the mechanisms that support and define industrialized modern culture. He argues that whereas ideas were previously interpreted by written account, the invention of photography allows the creation of images (ideas) taken at face value as truth, not interpretation that can be endlessly replicated and spread worldwide. His essays identify players in this model (his lexicon includes the Apparatus -the camera-, the Functionary -the photographer-, and the Technical Image -the photographic surface-) and warn of rising illiteracy owing to an uncritical faith in photography's "reality." Flusser does not speak of specific photographs or images but of the larger forces at work in the increasingly technical and automated world.
