Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism The aim of each volume in Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism is to understand a philosophical thinker more fully through literary and cultural modernism and consequently to understand literary modernism better through a key philosophical figure. In this way, the series also rethinks the limits of modernism, calling attention to lacunae in modernist studies and sometimes in the philosophical work under examination. Series Editors: Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison Volumes in the Series: Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism Edited by Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism Edited by S. E. Gontarski, Paul Ardoin and Laci Mattison Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism Edited by Anat Matar Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism Edited by David Scott Understanding James, Understanding Modernism Edited by David H. Evans Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism Edited by Patrick M. Bray Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism Edited by Christopher Langlois Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism Edited by Ariane Mildenberg Understanding Nietzsche, Understanding Modernism Edited by Douglas Burnham and Brian Pines Understanding Derrida, Understanding Modernism Edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté Understanding Adorno, Understanding Modernism Edited by Robin Truth Goodman Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism Edited by Mark Steven Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism Edited by Aaron Jaffe, Rodrigo Martini, and Michael F. Miller Understanding Cavell, Understanding Modernism (forthcoming) Edited by Paola Marrati Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism Edited by Aaron Jaffe, Rodrigo Martini, Michael F. Miller BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2022 Copyright © Aaron Jaffe, Rodrigo Martini, Michael F. Miller, and contributors, 2022 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover designer: Eleanor Rose Cover image: “Einstein” (1974) Herbert W. Franke All rights reserved. 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ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4843-3 PB: 978-1-5013-8636-7 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4845-7 eBook: 978-1-5013-4844-0 Series: Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www .bloomsbury .com and sign up for our newsletters. Series Preface Sometime in the late twentieth century, modernism, like philosophy itself, underwent something of an unmooring from (at least) linear literary history in favor of the multi- perspectival history implicit in “new historicism” or, say, varieties of “presentism.” Amid current reassessments of modernism and modernity, critics have posited various “new” or alternative modernisms—postcolonial, cosmopolitan, transatlantic, transnational, geomodernism, or even “bad” modernisms. In doing so, they have not only reassessed modernism as a category, but also, more broadly, rethought epistemology and ontology, aesthetics, metaphysics, materialism, history, and being itself, opening possibilities of rethinking not only which texts we read as modernist but also how we read those texts. Much of this new conversation constitutes something of a critique of the periodization of modernism or modernist studies in favor of modernism as mode (or mode of production) or concept. Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism situates itself amid the plurality of discourses, offering collections focused on key philosophical thinkers influential both to the moment of modernism and to our current understanding of that moment’s geneology, archeology, and becomings. Such critiques of modernism(s) and modernity afford opportunities to rethink and reassess the overlaps, folds, interrelationships, interleavings, or cross- pollinations of modernism and philosophy. Our goal in each volume of the series is to understand literary modernism better through philosophy as we also better understand a philosopher through literary modernism. The first two volumes of the series, those on Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, have established a tripartite structure that serves to offer accessibility both to the philosopher’s principal texts and to current new research. Each volume opens with a section focused on “conceptualizing” the philosopher through close readings of seminal texts in the thinker’s oeuvre. A second section, on aesthetics, maps connections between modernist works and the philosophical figure, often surveying key modernist trends and shedding new light on authors and texts. The final section of each volume serves as an extended glossary of principal terms in the philosopher’s work, each treated at length, allowing a fuller engagement with and examination of the many, sometimes contradictory, ways terms are deployed. The series is thus designed both to introduce philosophers and to rethink their relationship to modernist studies, revising our understandings of both modernism and philosophy, and offering resources that will be of use across disciplines, from philosophy, theory, and literature, to religion, the visual and performing arts, and often to the sciences as well. vi Contents List of Figures ix Acknowledgments x Introduction Aaron Jaffe, Rodrigo Martini, Michael F. Miller 1 Part I Processing Flusser 1 “Does AI Have a Future?” Rita Raley and Russell Samolsky 15 2 Design/Shape Anke K. Finger 23 3 Vilém Flusser in Open Circuits: The Dialogic Capacity of Video Images Daniel Irrgang 30 4 Flusser and Ars Electronica: Between and Beyond Cybernetics Daniel Raschke 39 5 Flusser in the Light of Radiation Clint Wilson III 49 6 Games and Play: On Being Human in the Universe of Technical Images Nancy Roth 57 7 Flusser’s Philosophical Backgrounds Martha Schwendener 67 8 Vilém Flusser’s Quasi-Phenomenology Andreas Max Ströhl 75 9 Migrants, Flâneurs, Critics: Flusserian Irony and the Genealogy of Modern Cynicism Alexander B. Adkins 83 10 Vampyroteuthis Infernalis as Media Theory Geoffrey Winthrop-Young 94 11 Posthistory Today: Historical Time and Virality after Flusser Charles M. Tung 103 Part II Flusser’s Expanded Modernism 12 Demonologies Laurence A. Rickels 113 13 An Intersubjective Style Frances McDonald 123 14 “Naked Little Spasms of the Self”: In Search of an Authentic Gesture in Posthistorical Times Dominic Pettman 131 15 The ‘Pataphysical Span: Alfred Jarry and Vilém Flusser Judith Roof 141 16 Flusser’s New Weird Keith Leslie Johnson 151 17 A Philosophy of Refraction: Vilém Flusser’s Speculative Biology and the Study of Paramedia David Bering-Porter 162 viii Contents 18 Everything Quantizes Kate Brideau 172 19 Religious Telematics and the Archives of Memory K. Merinda Simmons 181 20 The Challenge of Vilém Flusser: Latinidad and Its Others John D. Ribó 190 21 On Synthesis and Synthetic Reality: Post/Modernism in Flusser’s Thinking Rainer Guldin 198 22 Fascism, Iconoclasm, and the Global Village Guy Stevenson 206 23 The Future of Writing David Golumbia 211 24 Vilém Flusser’s Linguistic Briefcase Tatjana Soldat-Jaffe 221 25 The Depressed Person and the Vampire Squid: Sonic Gestures in the Work of Vilém Flusser and David Foster Wallace Edward P. Comentale 233 26 Cannibalistic Animals: Posthuman Natures in Flusser and Benjamin Erick Felinto 245 27 Flusser’s New World Aaron Jaffe 255 Part III Flusser’s Toolkit 28 Anti-Apparatus Melody Jue 269 29 Apparatus Blake Stricklin 272 30 Automation Seb Franklin 275 31 Cybernetics Heather A. Love 279 32 Dasein’s Design Chris Michaels 283 33 Ecology Derek Woods 286 34 Ethics Annie Lowe 290 35 Etymology: Methodology as Adventure in the Bochum Lectures Andrew Battaglia 294 36 Surface and Simulation: Vilém Flusser and Jean Baudrillard Thomas Tooley 298 37 Technical Image: Opaque Apparatus of Programmed Significance Anaïs Nony 302 38 Writing Andrew Pilsch 305 39 Zetetic Maneuvers: Stalking the Continuum Adelheid Mers 309 Epilogue: Between Languages and Without Discipline: A Twentieth-Century Intellect Drafted for the Twenty-First Century Siegfried Zielinski, Translated by Daniel Raschke 314 List of Contributors 329 Index 336 Figures 3.1 Vilém Flusser during his talk on “Open Circuits—The Future of Television” 35 4.1 The panelists at the Philosophies of the New Technology symposium, Ars Electronica 1988 46 18.1 Drawn after still life by Pieter Claesz 174 23.1 Distracted boyfriend meme example by Reddit user dankiger 217 39.1 Flusserian diagrammatics 310