You cannot select more than 25 topics Topics must start with a letter or number, can include dashes ('-') and can be up to 35 characters long.
thesis/notes/flusser_interview_notes.md

2.0 KiB

Vilem Flusser: On technical images, chance, consciousness and the individual

Vilém Flusser - Interview by Miklós Peternák in München, 17th October, 1991 (38')Vimeo link

Captured on pad

2 main turning points in the history of mankind:

  1. linear writing
  2. the technical image

The invention of writing was a social revolution

Before writing, power was in the hands of magicians, who made decisions in function of ritual and magical volumes

With writing, a new class of literary decision makers - the literati - came about e.g. priests, clerks

With this came a completely different way of experiencing the world

Magicians: the world was space in which time circled, by circling it put all the objects that had left their place into their just place; a world of crime and retribution

Magician knew how to avoid punishment, was capable of manipulating destiny

With writing, this put things back into their place

An historical experience of the world came about with the literati

Time no longer circulated, but became a univocal stream which flew form the past to the future, with all the objects swimming in the stream

Those with a experience of linear writing think in a discursive, logical, causal way

Causality took the place of destiny since the invention of linear writing

Masters of the code of linear writing could explain the world in causal, proto-scientific and later a scientific way

The greater part of society continued to live magically, in the cycles of the seasons, in the cycles of the feast

The literati lived historically and governed history in function of their consciousness and used society as a tool for achieving historical goals

"the invention of historical writing is a social revolution", but also a revolution on the level of consicenceness, as it is an emergence of historical from magical vision