The Philosopher Who Predicted Our Post-Literate Art Moment

They just lost this lawsuit, not around content, but around design. Their platforms are designed to be addictive, etc. That's very Flusserian, you know, again, that design is deceptive, but it's also how is it deceptive?

It's kind of like a Trojan horse. I'm Ben Davis and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News. The average metropolitan person now is exposed to more media in a single day than someone a few generations ago would absorb in a lifetime. Amid the deluge of hot takes and commentary on today's image culture and its effects on our brains, many people have also been looking back to an older figure for guidance, one who seems to have been something of a prophet.

I'm talking about the philosopher Willem Flusser. Born in 1920 in Prague, Flusser lived a fascinating life, working in Brazil for decades before returning to Europe where he died in 1991. In his writings of the 1980s, Flusser created a unique body of theory about how new genres of media were giving birth to a new form of consciousness, one defined by images over the written word. Flusser thought this transformation would reshape the world, and he developed a whole

vocabulary to think about it. Concepts like the technical image, the apparatus, and techno-imagination. These have had a huge impact on media studies and yet remain under-known. Long in the works, but now just in time to serve as a guide, Martha Schwendener's

The Society of the Screen, Willem Flusser's Radical Prescience, is just out from MIT Press. Schwindener is a teacher, an art historian, and a longtime art critic for the New York Times. The Society of the Screen tackles what Flusser's wide-ranging and experimental body of thought means for art today

and how his theories might help us find a way through our media-saturated moment. Martha Schwindener, thanks for joining me to talk about your new book. Thank you. Well, let's start with the basics.

What drew you to villain Flusser? Who is this guy? What interests you about him? Well, it's funny how I found him.

he found me. I was writing an essay in my capacity as a critic for an exhibition in Wisconsin, small museum, and they were having a show of functional art objects. And so I was reading an anthology of design theory, and I stumbled across this essay called About the Word Design, and it was by Flusser. And it was his standard way of writing. It was pretty short, maybe eight

paragraphs, but it was really subversive, really smart, really funny. He was talking about design as sort of like deception and cunning, you know, that the lever is meant to trick gravity and all this kind of stuff. I was like, wow, I've never heard of this person. This is incredible. And then later I found his photography writings and there was a trilogy towards the philosophy of

photography, 1983, into the universe of technical images, 1985. And does writing have a future? or 1987. So long story, I'd been in grad school in my early 20s. I was going back. I thought, okay, I'm going to specialize in photography because then I can do kind of visual studies or media studies, you know, cell phones and photography. And that's where I started getting

into Flusser. He wasn't particularly well-known in this country. That also makes it a really good dissertation topic. Well, I wanted to ask you about that. I mean, he's very famous in Germany. I know you mentioned in the book that he's sort of a theory rock star overseas. Do you have a theory about why he's less famous in the United States?

Well, one is that he was part of the German media studies scene that includes people like Friedrich Kittler and then later Siegfried Zielinski, who was a director of the Flusser Archive. Part of it is translation. So it wasn't translated fully. In fact, only Towards the Philosophy of Photography was translated out of that trilogy. There are other things too, though. He did, oddly, you know, it's like, why wasn't he here? He was here. He was writing for Art Forum

under Ingrid Sushi from 1986 to 1992. That's a whole interesting story in itself. So like you said, he is probably most famous for the Technical Images Trilogy, which is from the 80s, but maybe we should go through some of the formative parts of his life. So he's from Prague, right? And loses his family in the Holocaust. So I'd say that's one of the formative parts of his

story. Yeah. So he was born in 1920 in Prague, had this childhood, probably a little bit romanticized, but it was in the First Republic of Czechoslovakia. And it was a good place. He was Jewish, so it was a good place to grow up at that time. It was liberal. And then that all got ripped away, you know, in 1939 when the Nazis came in. And he left with his future wife and her family,

and they made their way up to London and then down to travel, why Brazil? It was one of the few places that was accepting Jews. And then found out a little bit later that his family had been killed in the camps. So completely devastating, very young man. And then they had three children. So he was, you know, working and as he called it, working during the day and

doing philosophy at night and then slowly kind of making his way into the philosophy community, but also the art community in Brazil. And he lived for three decades in Brazil from the 40s to the 70s. I find that a very fascinating period of his story. And he was an active philosopher, active in the art scene. He worked with Sao Paulo Biennial early on, wrote for the newspaper,

So maybe just lay that out. How did that moment in Brazil affect his thinking? Yeah. Well, the paradox is that he wanted to be in the U.S. And you go to the archive there, he's always writing some university in the U.S. He wants to come here. He thought this is the center of ideas.

The funny thing is that Brazil was actually a center of ideas. One thing is in abstract art. And, you know, at this point, it's such an important part and almost cliche of art history. Oh, abstraction in the 20th century.

But in Brazil, it was important because it was kind of above language in a sense.