Table Of ContentUnderstanding 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
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First published in the United States of America 2022
Copyright © Aaron Jaffe, Rodrigo Martini, Michael F. Miller, and contributors, 2022
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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
