The Philosopher Who Predicted Our Post-Literate Art Moment

15:33J. M. (Josh) Kessler:So after he published the first book, Farroki, and I'm going to publish a paper in the fall on Flusser and Farroki to kind of flesh that out, because it's just so incredible and so interesting. And Farroki, of course, is a rather beloved artist, you know, died a little over a decade ago. A filmmaker turned video artist in some sense, like Flusser, sort of forced by circumstances, the dry up of funding in Germany for film led him towards the art world, video, two channel, you know, more than one channel video. after he read Towards the Philosophy of Photography, he was really galvanized. And so he and Flusser, they made this video.

16:16J. M. (Josh) Kessler:It's about 15 minutes. And they're sitting there looking at the front page of the newspaper, a build newspaper, a tabloid newspaper, and kind of analyzing the relationship between text and image, which is really central to both of them.

16:30Vilém Flusser:Yeah, yeah. And Faroqi, an artist who just all the work is about exploring the impact of different kinds of images on people's political consciousness and the way they think about the world in very unexpected ways. And you can really see the resonance with Flusser's writings, which engaged with the photographic image in this expansive philosophical way and really focused on how the images determined us as much as we determined images, correct?

17:03J. M. (Josh) Kessler:Yes.

17:04Vilém Flusser:You just mentioned towards the philosophy of photography, so let's go there. That is the first book that really galvanizes people. He's maybe best known as a philosopher of photography. So what is it about photography that captured his interest?

17:19J. M. (Josh) Kessler:Okay, I think he got dragged into photography. What happened in the 70s is that all of a sudden there was all this interest in photography. In the art world, you know, just in New York, we had this famous curator, John Tchaikovsky at MoMA and a great deal of interest, William Eggleston having a show at MoMA and all these kind of things. So all of a sudden, photography wasn't this marginal thing. It was very important. And it started being theorized. So as I quote in the book, a couple of days before his death, Roland Barthes says, there does seem to be a boom in photography theory, which is a sort of funny idea.

17:57J. M. (Josh) Kessler:But the other thing that's very funny about it is that most of these people were not photography specialists. Roland Barthes was not a photography specialist. Susan Sontag was not. Looking back earlier to the 1930s, Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin was not a phototheorist, but it just was, again, encroaching on the world. So the thing for Flusser that's very interesting is that he comes up with this idea to the technical image, which is any image generated by a technical apparatus. That sounds a little broad, but in the simplest sense, what it means is that he wasn't interested in photography.

18:33J. M. (Josh) Kessler:He was interested in technological images. So that could be film. It could be television. It could be video. It could be one of his favorite things, holograms, you know, which are very big in the 70s. Very 70s. He's always going back. He's like, the hologram, you know. But then a forward-looking too, AI, you know, vibe coding is essentially a technical image, you know. So using text to create images.

18:58Vilém Flusser:So as opposed to what though? I mean, I guess you talk about this in the book. Am I understanding right? He actually used the term manufactured image to refer to painting, right? Or to traditional artworks?

19:09J. M. (Josh) Kessler:Well, you know, a traditional image for him could be, you know, a painting or a drawing, something made by humans, other than his other big, big word is apparatus. You can go down to the rabbit hole with that one because it's a very popular term. Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Agamemnon, you know, all those people.

19:25Vilém Flusser:Well, but I guess so the question is, it's just counterintuitive to think of painting as the manufactured image. Am I getting this right? It's because you knew how it was made. You could see how it was made. And then the technical image are these black box images. So photography being maybe the first historically that appears where a technical device that you don't necessarily understand how it works appears. Is that the distinction?

19:50J. M. (Josh) Kessler:So the black box, and it's so funny because I feel like I'm seeing the term black box every single day now. All I do is sit around and read about AI right now. I'm going to lecture about Flusser and AI this summer in two places. And it's super exciting. I love it. I kind of just stayed away from the AI literature for a while. But once you go down the rabbit hole and it's a developing thing, I'll back up a little bit. So for Flusser, the black box was the camera. You know, literally, you can't see inside it. you don't know how it works or only the specialist knows how it works. The other thing you have to keep in mind is that when he was writing, not every single person was a photographer.

20:25J. M. (Josh) Kessler:Now we're all carrying around these phones. Of course, we don't know how they work. We only get sort of small indications of like, I'm changing the operating system on you and things look different, but only specialists and experts actually know how it works. So there's a lack of transparency, opaqueness that kind of thing and now they talk about it with the algorithm you know they're always talking about algorithms as a black box and a lot of the ai stuff and social media and whatever the other thing that's very funny you know when i mentioned in the beginning that i was drawn to him his design writings like huge shout out to the design writings but meta and youtube you know they just lost this lawsuit not around content but around design their platforms are designed to be addictive, et cetera.

21:13J. M. (Josh) Kessler: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. You know, you bring it into the house and then it changes your life.

21:30Vilém Flusser:From the chapter on design from your book, he has a quote that really struck me. That was, we can choose either war and an elegant user-friendly life in the midst of good objects or everlasting peace and a squalid, inconvenient life in the midst of badly functioning objects. So picking up on the idea that a lot of technological change has been driven by conflict and war, innovation demanded for the most awful reasons. But it's a very bleak view. And I think in general, the black box idea had political implications for him, right? It's one of the things that makes his theory of photography specific, that the apparatus idea represents these image-making devices as determining us as much as we determine them.

22:25Vilém Flusser:And then when they're black box objects that we don't have any understanding of the actual process of production, that affects our relationship to ourselves, to power and so on. I'm paraphrasing a lot of things from the book, but help me out here.

22:42J. M. (Josh) Kessler:Well, he's really good in the kind of keyword sense, like apparatus, black box. What happens if you don't kind of get into that black box and deal with it is you become a functionary. and he also often says functionaire yeah he says functionaire quite a bit but he means a functionary and his classic functionary uh from his own you know from history you can kind of see why is adolf eichmann you know who is a nazi operative and uh whatever and hana are had written about him but it's the person you know she canality of evil yes she coined the term the desk murderer, you know, the person who's just kind of signing off, sitting at their desk, signing off.

23:24J. M. (Josh) Kessler:So he's concerned that if you don't have techno imagination, if you don't know how to decipher technical images, then you just become a functionary, the apparatus, you know. So that is the bright side is that, you know, how do we do this? And people are talking about this all the time now, you know, in terms of how you legislate for better AI or get guardrails, as they call it. So yeah, it is a dark view and for good reason. He lived through multiple regimes in which technology was used in very devastating ways.

24:01Vilém Flusser:So one of the things about the apparatus idea is that it is accustoming users to relate to forces that they don't really understand. And that's one part of his analysis. And then the other part of his analysis is how photographic imagery or technical images create the conditions for us for a post-historical condition. And maybe you could explain that, because I think that might also resonate very much right now with our current discussions about media is the way the change in media regime towards a more image-driven regime changes the way people think about the structure of information itself, how you relate to the past and everything else.

24:46J. M. (Josh) Kessler:So he saw this in this very deep historical view, you know, that linear writing was invented circa 3 ,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, that general area, the eastern Mediterranean. And, you know, the more you learn about that, it was radical. For a long time, writing was only the province of scribes. Regular people could not read or write. And so that's part of what he's talking about is this kind of revolution. And then the second revolution from his standpoint is this kind of switch back to images and images taking over text and then technical images. But what it has to do with is that history is linear thinking, you know, that you lay down these lines, you create this story, but it also works on your consciousness in terms of linearity, causality, all this stuff.

25:38J. M. (Josh) Kessler:This is a whole other topic, but he was very influenced by Heidegger, you know, and Heidegger, of course, a complicated figure in terms of his Nazi affiliations. But Flusser was, you know, yet another Jewish philosopher like Derrida, who is very influenced by Heidegger and this idea of kind of breakdown of causality and, you know, just this changing historical consciousness. So linearity starts to give way with the technical image in a very real sense. Like when we were talking about concrete poetry, you don't read it in a linear fashion. You read it in a very different way, which is scanning.

26:16J. M. (Josh) Kessler:And so, for instance, now we talk about it quite a bit with the algorithm. On Instagram, there used to be the chronological feed, and then they switched it over to the algorithm, which is kind of like scrambling linearity. And so there's quite a bit of it. Maybe you remember, I know you and I both really like the recent film with Brian, you know, which is different every time you see it, but certain things recur. And at the very end, a clip that seems to appear every time I saw it, at least where he says that we're in a period where linearity has disappeared. I was like, oh, my gosh, everybody's talking about this.

26:51J. M. (Josh) Kessler:It's a kind of fuzzy concept, but it's not.

26:54Vilém Flusser:So basically he thought that because you received information all at once in an image instead of through a text where things were laid out step by step, that it was training your brain to receive history and code data in a nonlinear way. That affected people's relationship to history and causality and logic and so on. Did he think that was a good thing?

27:15J. M. (Josh) Kessler:I think part of what I like about him is it wasn't a good thing or a bad thing. It's like, this is how it is. And that is part of why, you know, he's been kind of celebrated. There were other people like Baudrillard and people like that who were very negative, pretty nostalgic. Fluser's a little bit less nostalgic. I mean, you know, he had to keep picking up and moving. And one of the things that I really love about him is his kind of endless curiosity. He was just interested in new ideas and what was going on instead of the kind of hand-wringing, not a very nostalgic person.

27:50Vilém Flusser:The third part of the Technical Images trilogy, as you already mentioned, is called Does Writing Have a Future? Which was my entry point into his writing because I really wanted to know the philosophical answer to that question. What was his answer? Again, I think that's something that's very prescient in his writings now. He was writing that quite some time ago, and it really sort of feels we're living with that prophecy in this moment.

28:11J. M. (Josh) Kessler:Absolutely. Well, the thing is the first version, the first edition of Does Writing Have a Future was published or however you want to call it, released on floppy disk. And it came with this whole instruction. So like, welcome. And then the second edition was a paper cover book that he had to write a little. I think he wrote a postscript rather than a forward that he says, this is a failure, you know, because I'm talking about the end of writing and here's the paper book. But he did think it was going to go away. And whenever people push back on that, I mean, I have multiple examples just from my own life.

28:50J. M. (Josh) Kessler:You know, I write for the New York Times. And when I first started writing reviews for the Times, the Friday gallery reviews, we would have 10 reviews and one image. Today, we have three reviews and each one has an image. There always have to be images, images, images. The writing, hate to say it, is a little secondary, you know?

29:13Vilém Flusser:Well, the reason I actually read originally, does writing about the future, because I gave a lecture 12 years ago called Post-Descriptive Criticism, where I was exactly making the argument that we were still writing about art in a way inherited from pre-internet times, and the internet images were just so much more available that maybe we could think about using them in a more creative way, just because the technical means of change, people were very mad at me about that essay because there is something about giving up on the process of analyzing images. If you're just immersed in just images, if it's just images of artwork, you do lose something.

29:49J. M. (Josh) Kessler:I feel like I

29:50Vilém Flusser:wrestle with that in his writing, that he's trying to move beyond inherited ways of thinking that maybe don't fit the technical landscape that we're immersed in anymore. But kind of what you're losing is logic and causality and history. And I just wonder, does he have an answer of how we preserve some of the good things about that kind of critical consciousness that writing has given us in a post-literate world?

30:20J. M. (Josh) Kessler:It's funny because with the writing, you know, the students writing the essays with ChatGPT, it's like, forget about it. The whole thing's crashed, you know, We got to rethink everything. But one of the things that as I've been doing this, and I was alone with Flusser in this country for quite a while, there are a few people who knew about him, but I'd have to explain. But one of the questions people always say, oh, was he in the Frankfurt School? I say he was not in the Frankfurt School. Sorry. That's a whole other story. But he was also against the idea of critique to some extent. And he was prescient in that as well, because there are people like Bruno Latour, you know, talking about sort of like post-critique, he would describe it as an Ouroboros eating its own tail.

31:03J. M. (Josh) Kessler:So the idea of critical consciousness, I think he was a little bit less married to that. And quite simply, again, it just is, you know, and I think about that when we're talking about the disappearance of writing, there are just so many articles. What are we going to do in the humanities if writing disappears? People have to write, they have to write. And it's like, well, I don't know what to tell you. You know, I kind of think of it also just in the most simple, simple ways, like when they discovered that children couldn't tie their shoes anymore because they had Velcro attaching the shoes. It's like, that just is, you know, we can be nostalgic for tying our shoes, but things give way.

31:42J. M. (Josh) Kessler:And so I think for him, the question, because he was always directed towards philosophy, is how does it change consciousness? You know, How as philosophy is a human endeavor and that we have to philosophize this new thing instead of grasping on to critique or linear thinking or linearity.

32:04Vilém Flusser:Like nostalgia for a time that's not coming back, trying to think what's going on now. Look at the images that are actually determining people. Well, what is the techno imagination? because that is, in essence, as I understand it, that is his critical project to try and answer the question, what you can do or what you can bring, how things could be a little bit better or a little bit worse in relationship to this situation.

32:27J. M. (Josh) Kessler:It's the ability to decipher. That's his term. I think it's important that it has the word cipher in it. You know, we're moving very quickly here today, but his work, as opposed to some other people, was very based in things like information theory. And that's one of the things that I was attracted to by it is that you had this whole tech information theory, Claude Shannon, those kind of people running parallel to art history rather than directly involved. And here, you know, when I went in the archive, you know, and I saw there sitting there copies of radical software from the early 1970s, and then you open it up and realize he cribbed a lot of language from the radical technology people who were like, how do we liberate technology?

33:10J. M. (Josh) Kessler:And so techno-imagination, deciphering technical images, being able to analyze them, read them, and then also create them. How would we put that in the old terms, you know, that it might be with photography that you understood how a photograph was made, you know, and that was something that is central to photography. Is it about truth or is it mystifying or, you know, what sort of tricks are photographers using? That was, of course, Photoshop and all that. Now, of course, you know, AI imagery, et cetera, you know, and you get this thing. It's almost kind of ageist with students who will try and like, I can decipher AI images better than you because you're old, you know, that kind of thing.

33:52J. M. (Josh) Kessler:But it is very interesting and, you know, deep fakes and all that kind of stuff. I mean, we're dealing with it in the present moment.

33:59Vilém Flusser:Is it like basically a form of media literacy or technical literacy where the ability to look at an image not as a magical thing, but to be able to understand the technical processes behind it and what they mean and how they interlock with society?

34:14J. M. (Josh) Kessler:Yes. And also not an aesthetic thing. So again, Karun Faroqi, where they would have really vibed, had that idea of the operational image, images that were not aesthetic, but that were used by the military industry. And in a sense, when you're watching, you already said this, but it's exactly right. When you're watching Faroqi's work, you get this uncanny sense. It's so Flusserian. And it's not as if he got all these ideas from him. They just really thought along the same lines. Yeah. And so when you're watching, for instance, let's just say parallel one through four, one of Farochi's last projects, you know, and he's just taking apart the video image and describing like, this is how they used to represent water or trees or nature.

35:02J. M. (Josh) Kessler:And this is how they do now. And then there's a whole section on the subject, you know, human subjects in video game space. Okay. Video games, what do we care? Well, we're right in the middle of, you know, Iran putting out AI videos with Lego and the U.S. military using Call of Duty, almost like foreign policy.

35:22Vilém Flusser:Those hero and farrochi, that final quadrilogy or whatever is so amazing. And just looking at video game images and teasing out all these, their connections, all these bigger things, talking about how the video game structure where you control this empty vessel is very much like a Greek mythical structure where the hero is this vessel for the community to manifest itself through. Amazing works. Good talk about them all day. You said it's not an aesthetic thing. He did kind of have an artistic program for artists, right? Which is kind of like pushing against what the program of the apparatus. Yeah.

35:56Vilém Flusser:That's correct. Yeah. Which is the apparatus is the general technical thing and the program is what it asks you to do. You are programmed by it. And so he did think that artists should. There is a kind of aesthetics there, maybe even a kind of a critical aesthetics, that the artist should push against the program.

36:11J. M. (Josh) Kessler:Right. So, for instance, with the Farochi in one of the parallel videos, one of the four of them, he's testing the limits of space. Like, where's the edge of the space in the video game? You know, that's not normal video game behavior, but that's in a sense, you know, you go in, you do first person shooter or whatever. But that is pushing against the program. You pick up a video game, they've got specific ideas in terms of the way that you're going to use it. But an artist in particular, so artists would be the people who would be prone to pushing against the program, are going to test drive it in a sense.

36:51J. M. (Josh) Kessler:In a way, coming up in art history and both of us being around so much art, this is what they talk about with artists working against the grain. Just the simplest thing, Jackson Pollock not using the paintbrush and instead using the paintbrush stirrer to drip. You know, you could go on forever in terms of the history of modern art and people working against the grain. And then how do you do that with something, you know, that is a kind of black box technology?

37:18Vilém Flusser:So technology changes fast. Maybe I think one of the reasons why his writings might be resonant now is because I think people are really feeling that they're being programmed in a new way by technological forces around them. But on the other hand, he is dead and not here to theorize the most recent developments. So for people who are wondering, why go back to this figure for now? I mean, what is his relevant to all the technology that you've been referencing?

37:49J. M. (Josh) Kessler:Well, I would say for one thing, it's not just nostalgia, but it's not like, you know, with philosophy here, we mentioned Heidegger, you know, who is for many people, including myself, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century is that you get a sort of sense of where we are coming from. But also, there are a lot of people that people are going back to. So for instance, Baudrillard, people are very interested in this idea of simulation. It's not that he just theorized it in the 80s and it went away. We just described, when I'm watching the Iranian Lego animation, it's like, there's Baudrillard right there.

38:26J. M. (Josh) Kessler:We're living in the simulation. Similarly, Judith Butler, she's still alive. And so people say, can you please comment on gender in this really fraught era around a lot of changes with gender, but also some of those in the same way that, you know, the technology we're talking about in gender, the developments in endocrinology and things like that fundamentally change people's ability to change their gender. A third person I'll mention would be Octavia Butler. People are really going back to her and saying, look, this person thought of Afrofutures, but also predicted a burning Los Angeles and a president who said, make America great again.

39:05J. M. (Josh) Kessler:And it's that kind of science fiction thing. You can't make this up. So there's a way in which when you look back to this writing, first of all, it's great writing, but at the same time, you sort of see it.

39:16Vilém Flusser:Writing does have a future then.

39:17J. M. (Josh) Kessler:No, it's sort of funny because I'm like, sure, I'll get on board with that. Or does reading have a future? But also remember the other thing. You know how many people say to you all the time? We're doing a podcast right now. They say I listen rather than read. So as many people said, the new aural audio future.

39:35Vilém Flusser:Yeah, I mean, I wrestle with that all the time. And there's a lot of audio wallpaper out there that I think is post-historical, post-critical. And one of the reasons I want to have you on, because I'm interested in critical people. I'm interested in how you make this, what you get out of having put an argument together from beginning to end and thinking about causality and stuff.

39:57J. M. (Josh) Kessler:I am not ready to give up history and criticality is what I'm saying.

40:01Vilém Flusser:Yeah. So the last question, I guess, is you are a well-known art critic. We've known each other for years. I've known your writing since you were at the Village Voice when you would have the big part of the page. And sometimes when I was a baby art critic, I'd get to have the little box in the corner. We've both lived through, as you alluded to, the media transforming the internet and then social media and now artificial intelligence transforming how words and images function. And our job is in a certain sense to look at images and figure out what to say about them in words or what to do with them cognitively.

40:36Vilém Flusser:So you've spent all this time thinking about Flusser, who's all about this. And you also every week go out, look at art and try and write about it. how has the research into this philosophy affected the way you think about writing about art?

40:51J. M. (Josh) Kessler:It's funny because I started off as an art historian, you know, before I wrote criticism. And so in that sense, I am always thinking art historically. And criticism is a whole other thing. There's a lot of hierarchies. Where's the best place to write? The academics kind of look down on the critics, et cetera. One thing, it's not so much inspiration, but it's sort of validation is that Flusser wrote for the newspaper for most of his life. And part of it was the literary supplement. And then in Europe, they have, you know, the Fliton. They just have a different approach to the newspaper. And he really felt you could philosophize in the newspaper.

41:34J. M. (Josh) Kessler:And so whenever I sit down to write a review, I think, you know, you do have this platform, you know, have this opportunity. We're under a lot of pressure to make the reading accessible, et cetera. Things you can say, things you can't say. And yet somebody like him, he just did it wherever he could, you know, the newspaper, an art catalog, anything. And so it's that idea that when you do put, I was going to say pen to paper, but you put your hands on the keyboard, you do have this opportunity to, in a sense, philosophize. And I'm really only interested in the art that has that kind of capability.

42:12You know, I'm not interested in art stars or who's popular.

42:17J. M. (Josh) Kessler:I'm not really interested in all that. I'm interested in the same stuff that drew him in, which was, you know, how does it relate to human cognition and our experience of being here and our experience of the contemporary moment, our experience of certain media. And, you know, that can be technology, but it can also be, you know, know, when you're like, wow, the kids are really doing a lot of knitting and ceramics, you know, that kind of thing. I mean, it means something. What does it mean? I think in some sense, it's that curiosity and the kind of rigor that he would bring to anything that really influences me more than anything.

42:50Vilém Flusser:Well, fantastic. Martha, thank you so much for talking to me about the Society of the Screen. I hope people check out the book. It gives you, as you just said, a great sense of mission about what images can do. Thank you. That's it for this week's episode. The Art Angle is produced by Sonia Manalili with contributions from Kate Brown, Ben Davis, Caroline Goldstein, and Naomi Rae. Thanks for listening and see you next week.