I am happy to announce that Vilém Flusser’s Communicology, edited and translated by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes and with a foreword by N. Katherine Hayles, will be published this December in the Sensing Media book series that I co-edit with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun for Stanford University Press!
There are already some great endorsements of the book:
“Flusser is a painter of oblique strokes, dismantling familiar perspectives. Never less than entertaining, Communicology refreshes, challenges and blasts open unexpected vistas.”
—Seán Cubitt, University of Melbourne
“If you are in search of Flusser the media theorist, indeed, if you are seeking to understand how information works, Communicology is it. Flusser teases out the kinds of fundamental questions that are at the core of the human experience.”
—Anke Finger, University of Connecticut
“Communicology is a central work for any appraisal of Flusser’s thinking, and an innovative and singular introduction to media theory.”
—Erick Felinto, State University of Rio de Janeiro
“Communicology is an important work for the study of media theory in general and, more specifically, Flusser’s own communication theory.”
—Rodrigo Petronio, Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation
To these I wanted to add a few more detailed notes, as series co-editor, on why this book, written in the late 1970s, might be of interest to readers today:
Communicology: Mutations in Human Relations is an important entry in the oeuvre of Vilém Flusser, the Czech-Brazilian thinker whose work has in recent years become an important point of reference in discussions within media theory, philosophy of technology, and posthumanism, among others. The significance of Communicology within this larger body of work is at least fourfold: 1) it is perhaps the clearest statement of Flusser’s theory of communication as involving a variably mediated relation between humans and the world, and hence an existential relation that has entered into a period of crisis with the transition from a textual-literary code to the media of “technical images” (such as photography, film, television, and digital imaging processes); 2) as the most systematic statement of this theory, which provocatively covers human communication from prehistoric to contemporary forms (from early uses of images to the rise of alphabetic writing to scientific and popular forms of technical media), the book provides essential context and background for more well-known but more narrowly focused works, such as Into the Universe of Technical Images (English translation published in 2011 with University of Minnesota Press); 3) it furthermore provides one of the most accessible entry points into Flusser’s work, and may thus also serve as a useful introduction for readers not yet familiar (and it should be emphasized that Flusser’s work, despite the increasing frequency with which he is cited, still remains only vaguely understood, in part because key works such as this one are not yet available in English); 4) finally, it offers a provocative view of a media situation that, while aimed at diagnosing and confronting political-communicational crises of the late 1970s (when it was composed), has uncanny resonances with our own “post-truth” era.
This is to say that Flusser’s Communicology is of interest for historical and theoretical reasons alike, and that it is capable of speaking to both specialized, academic readerships and broader, uninitiated audiences as well. As a historical document, it records an attempt to come to terms with changes happening in the moment—changes involving a massive and indeed global transformation of the technical infrastructures of mediated communication, which the author sees as the very infrastructures of perception and of thought. As such, the effort to think or take stock of these changes is radically precarious, without a stable foundation; notions of causality and truth are up for grabs, and with them the meaning not only of specific communications but of human existence itself. Flusser’s theory of communication is clearly informed by existentialism (an influence that peeks through in occasional references to Heidegger or Sartre, for example), but it is even more centrally informed by cybernetics and information theory: by the notion of feedback, for example, which is both exemplified in Flusser’s analyses of humans’ “programming” by the codes of traditional and technical media but which also, from a formal perspective, challenges the autonomous place or standpoint from which Flusser is able to theorize such processes—a challenge of which Flusser is fully aware, and which he incorporates into his vision of a new media regime, or a new humanity, bootstrapping itself into existence. Remarkably, however, Flusser is able to communicate this complex image without detailed technical discussions of the underlying philosophical and information-theoretical models; his analysis of the existential stakes of the shift in communication and the rise of technical images is accomplished instead by way of a subtly self-reflexive method: eschewing the scholarly apparatus of footnotes and the careful documentation of philosophical debates, Flusser nevertheless maintains precision and clarity by resorting to technical images of his own. The many diagrams that populate the book are not simply illustrations of his ideas; rather, they are “technical images” in the precise sense that Flusser defines them: images that mediate concepts and hence begin to overcome the crisis of conceptual thinking that, he claims, plagues our world. In other words, while Flusser is describing these images as part of his attempt to gain a foothold and establish communication with the reader, he is also providing a tacit education in the deciphering of technical images—or helping to inculcate the foundations of the “technical imagination” that he is convinced we so desperately need if we are to survive and find meaning in the contemporary world.
Accordingly, Communicology is directly and literally engaged in the project of “sensing media” that names the book series in which it appears, and it is the directness of its attempt that will make it of broad interest and appeal, beyond the specialist discourses in which Flusser’s name is already familiar. Of course, many of the specifics of the book—including, centrally, its discussions of photography, film, and video from a point in time before they were so radically transformed by digital, interactive, and networked media—will seem dated. Nevertheless, it is in terms of the broad and compellingly provocative picture painted of a world in transition that Flusser’s book remains of contemporary theoretical interest. It is impossible to read his diagnosis of the crisis precipitated by an explosion of technical images, and our lack of agreed upon means for coding and decoding them, without thinking about our current “post-truth” moment. Indeed, the erosion of shared codes with which to communicate, the political turmoil that ensues when communication breaks down, and the return to a pseudo-magical form of consciousness: all of these resonate strongly with contemporary social media bubbles, the rise of “meme magic,” and fascist-leaning movements like Qanon. My point is not that Flusser was prophetic, or that he saw any of this coming (at least not in the forms that it actually took), but I do want to suggest that the urgency of developing a “technical imagination” is more pressing than ever, and that Flusser’s book is extremely useful in terms of impressing upon its readers that urgency. Furthermore, its proposals for developing the needed imagination (or imagistic literacy) are, for all their limitations, occasionally quite inspired and can, at the very least, provide a baseline for further media-philosophical attempts. Indeed, Flusser understands his book as provisional at best, and he ends it with a modest plea for readers to improve upon his attempts and to take up the “commitment to communication” that he sees in peril.
In sum, Communicology will be of great interest to specialists in media philosophy and posthumanism, but it also has the potential to reach broader audiences, including non-specialist readers interested in our current media-technical and political predicament.
The book will be out in December 2022, but it is available now for pre-order through Stanford University Press.
