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Communicology is Vilem Flusser's first thesis on his concepts of
technical images and technical imagination. In this foundational
text he lays the groundwork for later work, offering a
philosophical approach to communication as a phenomenon that
permeates every aspect of human existence. Clearly organized around
questions such as "What is Communication?," "What are Codes?," and
"What is Technical Imagination?," the work touches on theater,
photography, film, television, and more. Originally written in
1978, but only posthumously published in German, the book is one of
the clearest statements of Flusser's theory of communication as
involving a variably mediated relation between humans and the
world. Although Flusser was writing in the 1970s, his work
demonstrates a prescience that makes it of significant contemporary
interest to scholars in visual culture, art history, media studies,
and philosophy.
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Gestures (Paperback)
Vilem Flusser; Translated by Nancy Ann Roth
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R577
Discovery Miles 5 770
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Throughout his career, the influential new media theorist Vilem
Flusser kept the idea of gesture in mind: that people express their
being in the world through a sweeping range of movements. He
reconsiders familiar actions--from speaking and painting to smoking
and telephoning--in terms of particular movement, opening a
surprising new perspective on the ways we share and preserve
meaning. A gesture may or may not be linked to specialized
apparatus, though its form crucially affects the person who makes
it.
These essays, published here as a collection in English for the
first time, were written over roughly a half century and reflect
both an eclectic array of interests and a durable commitment to
phenomenological thought. Defining gesture as "a movement of the
body or of a tool attached to the body for which there is no
satisfactory causal explanation," Flusser moves around the topic
from diverse points of view, angles, and distances: at times he
zooms in on a modest, ordinary movement such as taking a
photograph, shaving, or listening to music; at others, he pulls
back to look at something as vast and varied as human "making,"
embracing everything from the fashioning of simple tools to mass
manufacturing. But whatever the gesture, Flusser analyzes it as the
expression of a particular form of consciousness, that is, as a
particular relationship between the world and the one who
gestures.
An imagination of possibilities, of miscalculations, of futures
off-kilter "Probability is a chimera, its head is true, its tail a
suggestion. Futurologists attempt to compel the head to eat the
tail (ouroboros). Here, though, we will try to wag the tail."
-Vilem Flusser Two years after his Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, the
philosopher Vilem Flusser engaged in another thought experiment: a
collection of twenty-two "scenarios for the future" to be produced
as computer-generated media, or technical images, that would break
the imaginative logjam in conceiving the social, political, and
economic future of the universe. What If? is not just an
"impossible journey" to which Flusser invites us in the first
scenario; it functions also as a distorting mirror held up to
humanity. Flusser's disarming scenarios of an Anthropocene fraught
with nightmares offer new visions that range from the scientific to
the fantastic to the playful and whimsical. Each essay reflects our
present sense of understanding the world, considering the
exploitation of nature and the dangers of global warming,
overpopulation, and blind reliance on the promises of scientific
knowledge and invention. What If? offers insight into the radical
futures of a slipstream Anthropocene that have much to do with
speculative fiction, with Flusser's concept of design as "crafty"
or slippery, and with art and the immense creative potential of
failure versus reasonable, "good" computing or calculability. As
such, the book is both a warning and a nudge to imagine what we may
yet become and be.
Poised between hope and despair for a humanity facing an urgent
communication crisis, this work by Vilem Flusser forecasts either
the first truly human, infinitely creative society in history or a
society of unbearable, oppressive sameness, locked in a pattern it
cannot change. First published in German in 1985 and now available
in English for the first time, "Into the Universe of Technical"
Images outlines the history of communication technology as a
process of increasing abstraction.
Flusser charts how communication evolved from direct interaction
with the world to mediation through various technologies. The
invention of writing marked one significant shift; the invention of
photography marked another, heralding the current age of the
technical image. The automation of the processing of technical
images carries both promise and threat: the promise of freeing
humans to play and invent and the threat for networks of automation
to proceed independently of humans.
Ten years after his death, Vilem Flusser's reputation as one of
Europe's most original modern philosophers continues to grow.
Increasingly influential in Europe and Latin America, the
Prague-born intellectual's thought has until now remained largely
unknown in the English-speaking world. His innovative writings
theorize-and ultimately embrace-the epochal shift that humanity is
undergoing from what he termed "linear thinking" (based on writing)
toward a new form of multidimensional, visual thinking embodied by
digital culture. For Flusser, these new modes and technologies of
communication make possible a society (the "telematic" society) in
which dialogue between people becomes the supreme value.The first
English-language anthology of Flusser's work, this volume displays
the extraordinary range and subtlety of his intellect. A number of
the essays collected here introduce and elaborate his theory of
communication, influenced by thinkers as diverse as Martin Buber,
Edmund Husserl, and Thomas Kuhn. While taking dystopian, posthuman
visions of communication technologies into account, Flusser
celebrates their liberatory and humanizing aspects. For Flusser,
existence was akin to being thrown into an abyss of absurd
experience or "bottomlessness"; becoming human required creating
meaning out of this painful event by consciously connecting with
others, in part through such technologies. Other essays present
Flusser's thoughts on the future of writing, the revolutionary
nature of photography, the relationship between exile and
creativity, and his unconventional concept of posthistory. Taken
together, these essays confirm Flusser's importance and prescience
within contemporary philosophy.Vilem Flusser (1920-1991) was born
in Prague and taught philosophy in Brazil. Andreas Stroehl is
director of the film department at the Goethe-Institut Inter
Nationes in Munich. Erik Eisel works for a software technology
company in Southern California.
With an introduction by Hubertus von Amelunxen Media philosopher
Vilem Flusser proposed a revolutionary new way of thinking about
photography. An analysis of the medium in terms of aesthetics,
science and politics provided him with new ways of understanding
both the cultural crises of the past and the new social forms
nascent within them. Flusser showed how the transformation of
textual into visual culture (from the linearity of history into the
two-dimensionality of magic) and of industrial into post-industrial
society (from work into leisure) went hand in hand, and how
photography allows us to read and interpret these changes with
particular clarity.
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Post-History (Paperback)
Vilem Flusser; Translated by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes
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R632
Discovery Miles 6 320
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Is there any room left for freedom in a programmed world? This is
the essential question that Vilem Flusser asks in Post-History.
Written as a series of lectures to be delivered at universities in
Brazil, Israel, and France, it was subsequently developed as a book
and published for the first time in Brazil in 1983. This first
English translation of Post-History brings to an anglophone
readership Flusser's first critique of apparatus as the aesthetic,
ethical, and epistemological model of present times. In his main
argument, Flusser suggests that our times may be characterized by
the term "program," much in the same way that the seventeenth
century is loosely characterized by the term "nature," the
eighteenth by "reason," and the nineteenth by "progress." In
suggesting this shift in worldview, he then poses a provocative
question: If I function within a predictable programmed reality,
can I rebel and how can I do it? The answer comes swiftly: Only
malfunctioning programs and apparatus allow for freedom. Throughout
the twenty essays of Post-History, Flusser reminds us that any
future theory of political resistance must consider this shift in
worldview, together with the horrors that Western society has
brought into realization because of it. Only then may we start to
talk again about freedom.
Vilm Flusser was one of the most fascinating and original European
thinkers of the latter half of the twentieth century. In this
volume, a collection of his essays on emigration, nationalism, and
information theory, he raises questions about the viability of
ideas of national identity in a world whose borders are becoming
increasingly arbitrary and permeable. Flusser argues that modern
societies are in flux, with traditional linear and literary
epistemologies being challenged by global circulatory networks and
a growth in visual stimulation. He posits that these changes will
radically alter the ways cultures define themselves and deal with
each other. Not just theories of globalization, however, Flusser's
ideas about communication and identity have their roots in the
Judeo-Christian concept of self-determination and self-realization
through the recognition of the other.Vilm Flusser (1920-91) was a
German-Jewish philosopher from Prague who fled to Brazil in 1940.
In 1963 he was appointed professor of philosophy of communication
at Sao Paulo University; while there he also wrote a daily
newspaper column. In 1972, he moved to France, and wrote books in
both German and Portuguese, including The Shape of Things: A
Philosophy of Design, Toward a Philosophy of Photography, and From
Subject to Project: Becoming Human."
How far apart are humans from animals-even the "vampire squid from
hell"? Playing the scientist/philosopher/provocateur, Vilem Flusser
uses this question as a springboard to dive into a literal and a
philosophical ocean. "The abyss that separates us" from the vampire
squid (or vampire octopus, perhaps, since Vampyroteuthis infernalis
inhabits its own phylogenetic order somewhere between the two) "is
incomparably smaller than that which separates us from
extraterrestrial life, as imagined in science fiction and sought by
astrobiologists," Flusser notes at the outset of the expedition.
Part scientific treatise, part spoof, part philosophical discourse,
part fable, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis gives its author ample room
to ruminate on human-and nonhuman-life. Considering the human
condition along with the vampire squid/octopus condition seems
appropriate because "we are both products of an absurd coincidence
. . . we are poorly programmed beings full of defects," Flusser
writes. Among other things, "we are both banished from much of
life's domain: it into the abyss, we onto the surfaces of the
continents. We have both lost our original home, the beach, and we
both live in constrained conditions." Thinking afresh about the
life of an "other"-as different from ourselves as the vampire
squid/octopus-complicates the linkages between animality and
embodiment. Odd, and strangely compelling, Vampyroteuthis
Infernalis offers up a unique posthumanist philosophical
understanding of phenomenology and opens the way for a
non-philosophy of life.
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Artforum // Essays (Paperback)
Vilem Flusser; Edited by Martha Schwendener; Contributions by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes
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R790
Discovery Miles 7 900
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Groundless (Paperback)
Vilem Flusser; Translated by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes; Designed by Chagrin
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R603
R500
Discovery Miles 5 000
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In Language and Reality, originally published in Sao Paulo, Brazil,
in 1964, Vilem Flusser continues his philosophical and theoretical
exploration into language. He begins to postulate that language is
not simply a map of the world but also the driving force for
projecting worlds and enters then into a feedback with what is
projected. Flusser's thesis leads him to claim, in a seemingly
missed encounter of a dialogue with Wittgenstein, that language is
not limited to its ontological and epistemological aspects but
rather is at the service of its aesthetic. Traversing a diverse
area of research and ruminations on cybernetics to poetry, music,
the visual arts, religion, and mysticism, Language and Reality can
be viewed as a vital transitional work in Flusser's emerging
thought that will eventually lead to his works in the 1970s and
1980s concerning what we would later consider media theory, design,
and digital culture.
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Immaterialism (Paperback)
Vilem Flusser; Designed by Chagrin
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R237
R192
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Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (Paperback)
Vilem Flusser; Foreword by Abraham A. Moles; Translated by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes
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R634
R547
Discovery Miles 5 470
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"Science is interesting precisely because it relates to me. It is a
human function just as much as breathing is: it is an existential
interest. And an entirely objective science would be uninteresting,
inhuman. The search for scientific objectivity is revealing itself
in its continual advancement not as a search for "purity," but as
pernicious madness. The present essay demands that we give up the
ideal of objectivity in favour of other intersubjective scientific
methods." ---- "De te fabula narratur." Thus starts this
paranaturalist treatise by Vilem Flusser. Author of the seminal
Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1984) and "Ins Universum der
Technischen Bilder" (1985), Flusser introduces us here to an
infernal creature from the oceanic abysses, our long lost relative,
who slowly emerges, not from the oceans, but from our own depths to
gaze spitefully into our eyes and reflect back at us our own
existence. ---- Originally published only in German in 1987, this
version has been edited and translated by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes,
Ph.D. candidate at the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, under
the supervision of Prof. Dr. Siegfried Zielinski, from the
original, unpublished and extended Brazilian-Portuguese version of
the manuscript recently found at the Vilem Flusser Archive at the
Universitat der Kunst, Berlin. This edition is also accompanied by
a selection of previously unpublished excerpts from Flusser's
correspondence with Milton Vargas and Dora Ferreira da Silva, with
whom he discussed the development of the present text.
In 1939, a young Vilem Flusser faced the Nazi invasion of his
hometown of Prague. He escaped with his wife to Brazil, taking with
him only two books: a small Jewish prayer book and Goethe's
"Faust." Twenty-six years later, in 1965, Flusser would publish
"The History of the Devil," and it is the essence of those two
books that haunts his own. From that time his life as a philosopher
was born. While Flusser would later garner attention in Europe and
elsewhere as a thinker of media culture, "The History of the Devil"
is considered by many to be his first significant work, containing
nascent forms of the main themes that would come to preoccupy him
over the following decades.
In "The History of the Devil," Flusser frames the human
situation from a pseudo-religious point of view. The phenomenal
world, or "reality" in a general sense, is identified as the
"Devil," and that which transcends phenomena, or the philosophers'
and theologians' "reality," is identified as "God." Referencing
Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" in its structure,
Flusser provocatively leads the reader through an existential
exploration of nothingness as the bedrock of reality, where
"phenomenon" and "transcendence," "Devil" and "God" become fused
and confused. So radically confused, in fact, that Flusser suggests
we abandon the quotation marks from the terms "Devil" and "God." At
this moment of abysmal confusion, we must make the existential
decisions that give direction to our lives.
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On Doubt (Paperback)
Vilem Flusser; Translated by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes; Edited by Siegfried Zielinski
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R589
Discovery Miles 5 890
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In On Doubt, Vilem Flusser refines Martin Heidegger's famous
declaration that "language is the dwelling of Being." For Flusser,
"the word is the dwelling of being," because in fact, in the
beginning, there was the word. On Doubt is a treatise on the human
intellect, its relation to language, and the reality-forming
discourses that subsequently emerge. For Flusser, the faith that
the modern age places in Cartesian doubt plays a role similar to
the one that faith in God played in previous eras-a faith that
needs to be challenged. Descartes doubts the world through his
proposition cogito ergo sum, but leaves doubt itself untouched as
indubitable and imperious. His cogito ergo sum may have proved to
the Western intellect that thoughts exist, but it did not prove the
existence of that which thinks: one can eliminate thinking and yet
continue being. Therefore, should we not doubt doubt itself? Should
we not try to go beyond this last step of Cartesian doubt and look
for a new faith? The twentieth century has seen many attempts to
defeat Cartesian doubt, however, this doubt of doubt has instead
generated a complete loss of faith, which the West experiences as
existential nihilism. Hence, the emergent emptying of values that
results from such extreme doubt. Everything loses its meaning. Can
this climate be overcome? Will the West survive the modern age?
In 1963 Vilem Flusser presented a series of lectures at the
Brazilian Institute of Philosophy (IBF) in Sao Paulo concerning the
philosophy of language. The resulting ten essays would eventually
be published in 1965 in the annual magazine of the Brazilian
Institute of Technology and Aeronautics (ITA), and published here
for the first time in book form. Flusser prepared each lecture as a
response to the dialogs that followed the preceding lecture,
thereby expanding and explicating his philosophy of language in an
intense dialogical process. Despite the fact that the other side of
the dialogue was not recorded, it becomes clear to the reader that
the resulting discussions and polemics generated by the lectures
progressively and profoundly changed Flusser's intended trajectory
for the course. This kind of philosophy in fieri was in part the
result of a group effort between all of those present, and
subsequently synthesized by Flusser in every essay. As a result of
this experience, Flusser adopted this dialogic method as an
integral part of his future work.
Vilem Flusser was one of the most fascinating and original European
thinkers of the latter half of the twentieth century. In this
volume, a collection of his essays on emigration, nationalism, and
information theory, he raises questions about the viability of
ideas of national identity in a world whose borders are becoming
increasingly arbitrary and permeable. Flusser argues that modern
societies are in flux, with traditional linear and literary
epistemologies being challenged by global circulatory networks and
a growth in visual stimulation. He posits that these changes will
radically alter the ways cultures define themselves and deal with
each other. Not just theories of globalization, however, Flusser's
ideas about communication and identity have their roots in the
Judeo-Christian concept of self-determination and self-realization
through the recognition of the other.
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