Goday, after many years, I finally drove to the center of Roubion. Vilém Flusser lived here for many years. I quoted his books a lot in my seminars and used them as a basis for discussion. Especially his philosophy of photography. Flusser is a wild theorist. He wrote a lot about images, media, language, technology, signs, history... It seems to me that he was always thinking about how thinking works. How words and images are created in our heads and how much this has to do with technology, e.g. photography or digital media. He talks about the universe of technical images.
Imagination
Our thoughts often move in images of the imagination... They correspond to a medium: when we communicate, we use language, text, images, photography, film, sculpture, in short media, technical and artistic, scientific and fictional. These media are always based on a technique. Writing and drawing, printing, an algorithm, digital representation, etc. How is this connected? Our thinking, the media and their technical conditions? How does our thinking change technology (progress), and how does technology change the production of new media? And how do these new media in turn change our thinking?
This whole process is not at all clear, and anyone who says he or she has understood it has basically not even seen the problem. Flusser is always alive in his thinking, he has a deep historical dimension, a great understanding of technology, he understands the dynamics of media use and the social effects. His philosophy attempts to grasp the core of human thought technically, semiotically and historically. This is an incredible project. It is not modest, nor is it without contradictions.
Flusser has always been an inspiration to me, but at the same time I have always missed something. His thinking is basically materialistic. His philosophy is one of the most exciting in the field of semiotics and media theory. He sometimes talks about a historical consciousness and a magical one. He always talks about it very abstractly. He is not a consciousness theorist. His world is technical. It is important to read him in order to understand our time. Personally, however, I am now concerned with other thoughts.
If you are now in the mood for Flusser, you can find more here... https://www.flusserstudies.net/
