Does Writing Have a Previous? A Dialog with Martha Schwendener – Notes

Martha Schwendener is an artwork historian and critic attuned to the social lifetime of concepts. Her current e-book, The Society of the Screen: Vilém Flusser’s Radical Prescience (2026), traces Flusser’s mental trajectory by way of the ebb and circulate of his relationships with artists, poets, designers, publishers, and fellow thinkers, throughout lectures, exhibitions, publications, and personal correspondence. These exchanges unfolded through the conflicting codes Flusser sought to theorize, as conventional pictures, writing, and technical pictures collided inside a single cultural area. Discussing her richly illustrated e-book at Emmelines, a gallery positioned in a subway kiosk in New York City, Martha and I couldn’t assist however stage a model of this battle ourselves: How, as Flusser requested, “can an art gallery compete with the shop windows that surround it, and what relation is there between a cover and the contents of a best-seller?”

Between us was Flusser’s wager that writing doesn’t merely transmit historical past however produces the kind of consciousness that organizes occasions into one thing known as “history” within the first place. The dialog that follows approaches Flusser as a thinker for whom writing’s previous was not merely a retailer of inherited meanings, however the code that drew thought and motion onto the linear observe of historical past. Dialogue, for him, was a method that inherited code might be remade.

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William Wiebe: Your e-book emphasizes how Flusser’s philosophy was formed by his encounters with artists and thinkers and by his public life within the artwork world. How did using language by artists form his understanding of textual content and his personal writing follow?

Martha Schwendener: One consequential determine for Flusser was the designer and artist Karl Gerstner, whose company made the Swiss Air emblem, amongst different issues. Gerstner’s 1964 e-book Designing Programmes presents a framework for considering by way of language, programs, and data idea. In it, he talks about the whole lot from Gothic cathedrals to knitting as a kind of program: making one thing linear into one thing two-dimensional and even spatial by easy means. The program is contained within the knitting directions. In machine knitting, it’s a punched card, which brings us again to Jacquard looms and early computing. Then within the Seventies Gerstner printed Compendium for Literates, which is laid out horizontally. He’s writing about Saussure and language, however he’s additionally making language tactile and visible, asking how one reads textual content as a floor.

Concrete poetry issues right here too. Flusser knew Haroldo de Campos and Max Bense, whose philosophy of knowledge aesthetics was crucial to him. Bense’s concrete poem “Statistical Text” brings collectively artwork, language, and science. Flusser was very involved with C. P. Snow’s 1959 lecture on “The Two Cultures,” in regards to the rising divide between artwork and science, and he was attempting to carry these collectively. Concrete poetry was one of many locations the place that occurred for him.

And then there’s Mira Schendel, who was Swiss-Italian however ended up in Brazil, like Flusser. She labored extensively with textual content, together with typewriter drawings within the Seventies. When you take a look at her work from the Sixties and ’70s—the scrambled letters, her Graphic Objects sequence of suspended textual content items—you get a way that Flusser was seeing one thing in artists that was extra radical than what he was discovering within the philosophy neighborhood, although he was studying Wittgenstein, Carnap, the Vienna college, Heidegger. These artists gave him a method to consider language not as a linear instrument however as one thing spatial and floor primarily based.

Looking at this work now, after massive language fashions (LLMs), her letters can virtually appear token like: fragments that activate a system earlier than they settle into language. Flusser, who wrote about Schendel’s Graphic Objects and drawings on rice paper, known as these works “pre-texts”—taking part in with the thought of “pretext” (a fabricated motive or excuse) but in addition with the thought of letters earlier than they cohere into linear writing.

Flusser’s textual content Does Writing Have a Future? was initially launched in 1987 on a floppy disk, consistent with his competition that writing didn’t have a future. He felt like a later version, printed as a conventional e-book, was a failure.

WW: One of the essential dimensions of your e-book is that Flusser’s concepts are labored out alongside the artists he was involved with, not merely utilized to them after the very fact. Those supplies make the stress between writing and pictures tangible. How may we take into consideration that stress now that dialogue itself is turning into a dominant interface of computation?

MS: I believe the actual turning level for Flusser is the query of automation, the purpose when there’s not a human being on the controls. That’s what hyperlinks him to the current so strongly. The picture or textual content may be generated by a machine, however the immediate may be generated by a machine too. That’s the place one thing like vibe-coding turns into attention-grabbing—you don’t need to know the way to write code with a view to program. Language prompts are sufficient. Moreover, in present AI—which is to say, chatbots and LLMs—it’s not merely a human working an equipment, however an equipment starting to enter into dialogue with itself.

This additionally will get us to his distinction between “technical” and “synthetic” pictures. Flusser begins utilizing the time period “techno-images,” then later “technical images” within the Seventies, at which level he’s referring to pictures produced by technical apparatuses—movie, tv, video, satellites. Still later, in correspondence with the Swiss poet and scholar Felix Philipp Ingold, who actually pressed him on these phrases, Flusser begins referring to “synthetic images.” “Technical” stays tied to the digital camera and the operator—pictures generated by a technological equipment—whereas “synthetic” belongs extra to the rise of computer systems and automation. That distinction additionally adjustments the artists Flusser is taking a look at: Someone like Joan Fontcuberta stays near the technical picture, whereas Harun Farocki, together with his curiosity in automation, factors extra immediately towards the artificial.

There’s additionally the “image flood,” or Bilderflut, which was a significant time period in German discussions of the day. For occasion, within the early years of social media, folks used to rely what number of pictures have been uploaded to Facebook or Instagram every day. Now they don’t even hassle.

WW: It’s simply “billions and billions served.”

MS: Exactly. And this fluctuation can also be necessary. For Flusser, the universe of technical pictures will not be static however continually shifting: The pictures are being changed by different pictures. If you stroll by way of Times Square or a subway station, you anticipate ads to alter over time. It can be unusual in the event that they stayed the identical. Flusser’s universe of technical pictures—which pulls from each McLuhan’s “global village” and the biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s “Umwelt,” or “surrounding environment”—is scrolling, shifting, circulating. It is much less The Society of the Spectacle than a tsunami of visuality. I additionally see “Umwelt” talked about continuously in present AI literature.

WW: Speaking in an artwork gallery inside a subway kiosk, surrounded by store home windows, signage, and ads, appears to literalize this collision of codes. What is Flusser getting at when he discusses how the battle between codes is lived existentially earlier than being understood theoretically?

MS: He was at all times fascinated by this system of the equipment. If you don’t perceive this system, you change into a functionary of it. That utilized to pictures, tv—and now algorithms. If you’re not conscious of how social media works, you simply change into a functionary. You purchase stuff, like stuff, hate stuff—no matter this system induces.

WW: Flusser typically insists that our confusion of codes leads us to ask the improper questions. Instead of asking what sort of consciousness mass media produces, we ask whether or not artists can redirect it away from sinister functions, or whether or not media might be made extra human. How did he suppose artists have been higher capable of ask the fitting questions?

MS: He thought artists have been among the many folks finest capable of work towards this system. Not solely towards this system of portray or of pictures but in addition towards the bigger equipment. In his 1984 essay “Photo Criticism” for European Photography —which was edited by Andreas Müller-Pohle and was an extremely necessary platform for Flusser—he lays out what he thinks the right method for a photograph critic can be, to indicate how the photographer is a functionary of assorted apparatuses, even whereas struggling to emancipate themself from that operate. The critic would present

society to behave more and more uncritically in direction of the almost omnipresent photographic pictures that operate as fashions for conduct, attitudes, and values. They would present the digital camera and the media complicated to be solely minor cogs in a big programming equipment on its method in direction of establishing an computerized totalitarianism.

And they might make “explicit the complex co-implications between man and apparatus that result in photographs.” This criticism would additionally ask: What kind of digital camera produced the {photograph}? Where on this planet, by which strategies, towards which cultural, political, and historic backgrounds? That jumps out now, after we discuss LLMs, that are largely developed by Western tech firms from coaching knowledge that’s overwhelmingly in English.

WW: Something comparable appears to occur with generated texts. The questions we ask of them—whether or not they’re correct or inaccurate, inventive or spinoff, important or sycophantic—can conceal the truth that generated textual content will not be merely one other type of writing, however a distinct code relation altogether. It presents itself as a line of thought whereas functioning because the floor of a program. The hazard is that we proceed asking literary or hermeneutic questions of one thing structured by one other order of operations.

MS: This additionally brings us to Flusser’s engagement with post-hermeneutics. Flusser is a part of a broader world of thinkers—Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino—who’re shifting away from the concept that texts or pictures are solely there to be interpreted. After the Sixties and ’70s, he wasn’t writing as a lot about portray or language philosophy, which was his unique mission, as he was about “new media.” When he thinks about programming, the artist could be a programmer—is a programmer, however now with technological apparatuses

WW: I ponder if he would say that AI generalizes the place of programmer or artist? Flusser distinguishes between two sorts of revolutionaries: the scientists and programmers who invent devices of chance—cameras, computer systems—and the artists who make inconceivable conditions out of technical pictures. So are all of us turning into programmers or artists—or functionaries?

MS: I believe that’s the query. It’s not nearly realizing the way to use a instrument. It’s about understanding this system properly sufficient to work towards it, so as to not change into its functionary. More alarming may be the phenomenon of technologists figuring out as “artists,” like (Palantir cofounder and CEO) Alex Karp: “I am an artist with a gun.”

WW: Do you suppose Flusser ever thought of his personal writing to be post-hermeneutic? You argue that his writing may typically be “an inscrutable black box.” And he additionally means that, with a view to train our energy over apparatuses “we must let the black box remain … black.”

MS: He was undoubtedly a nontraditional thinker. He by no means earned a school diploma as a result of he needed to work. He started learning at Charles University however left Prague after the Nazi occupation, went by way of London, after which to Brazil. One of his paths into publishing was by way of newspapers. He turned a widely known columnist in Brazil. For these of us who write for fashionable sources, the thought of fully inscrutable writing is not possible. It needs to be accessible.

On the opposite hand, among the essays he printed in newspapers throughout Brazil’s army dictatorship are extremely coded. He may be writing in regards to the army or politics, however describing it as an intersection in São Paulo with stoplights indicating the place you may flip “right” or “left” and proposing to erect a “Coca-Cola Viaduct”—a reference to US interference in Brazilian politics. It was clear on one degree and fully coded on one other.

That pertains to Mira Schendel too. The 1973 São Paulo Biennial was boycotted by many artists, with Gordon Matta-Clark and Hans Haacke concerned within the US boycott. But Schendel participated. Flusser argued at an AICA [International Association of Art Critics] convention in Paris that you may boycott the Biennial from an armchair in Paris or be on the bottom in São Paulo. Schendel’s set up suspending clear nylon threads from the ceiling, Still Waves of Probability (1969), was seen by many individuals there as a protest work. It may appear like a stupendous set up to us now, however in São Paulo it was a query of language, of what may and couldn’t be stated, of transparency.

WW: That looks like a concrete instance of how post-hermeneutic writing or artwork may operate: not that means much less, however making that means by way of a state of affairs, by way of the codes it has to go between.

MS: Yes. It’s accessible and coded on the identical time.

Audience Member: With AI now, so most of the questions concern fact, actuality, pretend information, the splintering of the actual. Did Flusser have a framework for fascinated about fact?

MS: He makes use of the phrase “freedom” extra typically than “truth.” “Truth” was such a buzzword in pictures within the Eighties and ’90s: staged pictures, the digitally manipulated O. J. Simpson Time journal cowl, made when Photoshop was new—all of that. Flusser was fascinated by fact, however for him it’s extra a query of the transparency of the equipment.

Someone not too long ago emailed me, “What if we’re at the point where the algorithm can convince us that the black box we’re dealing with is transparent?” That’s the subsequent degree, a really post-truth second. With AI, I’m seeing phrases like “gray box,” “glass box”—I even stumbled throughout “lightly frosted glass box” to point which you could see the shadows of the inputs and the outputs, however the coding continues to be opaque.

One of my favourite issues in Flusser is his use of the phrase “magic.” The actual problem with technical pictures is what he calls their “bewitching” high quality. They throw you again into the cave with candlelight and dancing pictures. It’s a type of ritual hallucination. He makes use of the phrase “hallucination” fairly a bit, which is uncanny now when folks discuss AI hallucinating.

WW: For Flusser, each stage of consciousness is a hallucination of a distinct order. Each has its personal expectation, or protocol, of information and fact.

The magical considering of pictures hallucinates recurrence. Historical consciousness hallucinates sequence. The consciousness of technical pictures hallucinates that means in surfaces projected by apparatuses. LLMs appear to do one thing comparable with writing: They invite us to hallucinate that means onto surfaces produced by code.

MS: This is the place Flusser is beneficial. He’s not merely asking whether or not a picture or textual content is true or not. He is asking what equipment produced it, what program it belongs to, and how much freedom stays doable inside or towards that program.

WW: Which brings us again to dialogue. As your e-book exhibits, Flusser’s idea of communication was by no means abstracted from life. So maybe the query now could be much less about how AI bears on fact than whether or not dialogue can nonetheless produce one thing new inside programs more and more designed to simulate it.

MS: Exactly. Dialogue will not be secondary to the system. It could also be one of many few methods to keep away from turning into a functionary of it.

A set of Martha Schwendener’s 2026 displays on Vilém Flusser is forthcoming this fall from End of Medium and Library Stack.