Chapter 1: What is Communication?
Flusser states that “communications theory is not a natural science, but rather is concerned with the human being’s unnatural aspects” (p. 3). The humanities.
“If he has not learned to make use of the instrument of communication (i.i., language), he is an idiot (originally: a “private person”)” (p. 3).
“The purpose of human communication is to make us forget the meaningless context in which we are completely alone and incommunicado, that is, the world in which we are condemned to solitary confinement and death: the world of ‘nature’” (p. 4).
“He is a ‘political animal,’ not because he is a social animal, but because he is a solitary animal who cannot live in solitude” (p. 4).
“At the end of the 19th century, it was generally agreed that the natural sciences explain phenomena, whereas the ‘human sciences’ interprets them” (p. 4). This seems to be a topic that Flusser wants to donate time to. What is communication and how is it different than “natural” studies?
” As a result, ‘communication theory’ is understood as an interpretive discipline (for instance, in contrast to ‘information theory’ or ‘information sciences’), and human communication is seen to be a meaningful phenomenon that must be interpreted” (p. 5).
Negentropy – Flusser notes that, “the accumulation of information is not seen as a process that is statistically improbable [due to the second law of thermodynamics] but possible. Rather, it is seen as a human intention-not as the result of accident and necessity, but of freedom” (p. 6).
Two ThesMediaes
1. “The thesis that human communication is an artistic technique directed against the solitude unto death” (p. 6)
2. “That human communication is a process directed against the general entropic tendency of nature” (p. 6).
In essence, rather than something being lost between a sender and a receiver in communication (expenditure of energy) the amount of information is built upon.
Chapter 2: On the Theory of Communication
Communication
1. Wide – “A process by which a system is changed by another system” (p. 8).
2. Strict – “A process by which a system is changed by another system in such a way that the sum of information is greater at the end of the process than at its beginning” (p. 8).
“Seen thus, the lecture is not a thermodynamic process, but is of a different order. The sum total of information in the room increases as the lecture goes on, if seen thus. And this is in fact the reason why it increases information, why it is negentropic” (p. 9).
“Negentropy cannot be observed objectively” (p. 9).
“Although no objective observation of cultural negentropy is possible, it is still possible to observe it with a rigor that approaches the rigor of the natural sciences” (p. 9).
Codes
“Codes are results of conventions that establish symbols and rules” (p. 11).
“Three types of structures: those that order the symbols in linear sequences (the diachronical ones); those that order them in surfaces (the plain synchronical ones); and that order them in space (the tridimentional synchronical ones)” (p. 15). Structure of the messages influences the translation.
Three types of symbols
“Those that mean phenomena (substantives) those that mean relations (verbs) and those that mean rules (copulas)” (p. 16).
“The ultimate aim of the theory of communication is to ‘explain’ the negentropic character of human communication, an aspect of man in his opposition to the world” (p. 20).
“Aside from the theory of communication, and in part within it, a purely quantifying discipline, the theory of information is developing, and it is dedicated to the study of negentropy” (p. 20).
Chapter 3: Line and Surface
“Lines are discourses of points, and that each point is a symbol of something out there in the world (a ‘concept’). Therefore, lines represent the world by projecting it as a series of successions, in the form of a process” (p. 21).
Adequation of “Surface Thought” to “Line Thought”
Difference between reading a book or pictures, we read language left to right, up to down.
Reading a picture “This double method – synthesis followed by analysis (a process that may be repeated several times in the course of a single reading) is what characterizes the reading of pictures” (p. 23). We read to get the message, when reading pictures we get the message first and then decompose it.
“The theater represents the world of things through things, and the film represents the world of things through projections of things” (p. 24).
Historical freedom – “For those who think in written lines, the term means the possibility of acting upon history from within history. For those who think in films, however, it will mean the possibility of acting upon history from without.
“Visually, films are surfaces, but to the ear they are spatial” (p. 25).
“Official Western thought had expressed itself much more in written lines than in surfaces. Written lines impose a specific structure on thought, in that they represent the world by means of a point sequence. This implies a ‘historical’ being-in-the-world of those who write and read written lines” (p. 25).
“It means that ‘surface thought’ is absorbing ‘linear thought,’ or is at least beginning to do so” (p. 26).
“This means that imaginal thought is becoming capable of thinking about concepts. It can transform a concept into its ‘object,’ and can therefore become a metathought of conceptual thinking” (p. 30).
“At present we dispose of two media between ourselves and the facts – the linear and the surface. The linear are becoming more and more abstract, and are losing all meaning” (p. 31).
“A new kind of medium may thus emerge, permitting us to rediscover a sense of ‘reality’; in this way, we may be able to open up fields for a new type of thinking, with its own logic and its own kind of codified symbols. In short, the synthesis of linear and surface media may result in a new civilization” (p. 31).
“A difference in the temporality of the two positions. The historical position stands in historical time, in the process. The structural position stands in that sort of time wherein processes are seen as forms” (p. 33).
New Civilization
1. “There is the possibility that imaginal thinking will not succeed in incorporating conceptual thinking.” Would lead to victory of consumer society and to the totalitarianism of the mass media.
2. “That imaginal thinking will succeed in incorporating conceptual thinking.” Structural position, a new sense of reality would articulate itself, within the existential climate of a new religiosity (p. 34).
Chapter 4: The Codified World
“We are exposed to a constant stream of colors. We are programmed by colors. They are an aspect of the codified world in which we have to live. Colors are the manner in which surfaces appear to us. Thus, if a significant number of the messages programmed for us appear in color, it means that surfaces have become important as carriers of messages” (p. 35).
“The face that humankind is being programmed by surfaces (images) should not be considered a revolutionary piece of news. On the contrary, it apparently signifies a return to a primitive origin” (p. 36). A return to the Middle Ages yet not illiteracy. “The difference is this: premodern images are the products of skilled handworkers (‘works of art’), and postmodern images are the products of technology” (p. 36).
“A code is a system of symbols. Its purpose is to make communication between people possible” (p. 36).
‘”imagination’ means: the ability to reduce the world of situations to scenes. And vice versa: to decipher the scenes as substitutes for situations, to make ‘maps’ and to read them – including the ‘maps’ that designate desired situations” (p. 37).
“The invention of writing consisted not so very much in the invention of new symbols, but rather in the unrolling of the image into rows (lines)” (p. 38).
“If one considers scientific thinking as the highest expression of historical consciousness – because it raises the logical and procedural thinking of the linear text up to the level of method – then one can say: the victory of texts over images – of science over magic – is an event of our most recent history and far from being counted as conclusive” (p. 39).
“The new generation, which is programmed by techno-images, does not share our ‘values.’ And we still do not know for what meaning the techno-images that surround us are being programmed” (p. 40).
“That is what we mean by ‘crisis of values’: that we step out of the linear world of explanations and into the techno-imaginary world of ‘models’” (p. 40). They are the image of a concept of a scene. Crisis because it gets rid of old programs (politics) yet does not replace them with new ones.
Chapter 5: Criteria – Crisis – Criticism
“Critical thinking results from the praxis of writing…Counting is the act of tearing things out of their context, to arrange them in rows. Counting is the core of critical thinking” (p. 42).
“Linear writing is both the origin of critical thinking and its tool. Its original purpose was not to critique objects in the world out there or the phenomena of the interior world, but rather to critique images” (p. 43).
“The result of critical thinking is Western history, with all its triumphs and its barbarities” (p. 43). Resulting in Western science and technology.
“If we consider how the criticism of images has been elaborated during the course of our history, then critical thinking cannot be applied to photography or other technical images, because these images are based on science and technology – produced by apparatuses – and are therefore themselves based on critical thinking” (p. 43).
“Critical thinking is presently experiencing its own crisis, because it does not possess the appropriate criteria allowing it to critique its own products” (p. 44).
“The critics have expelled beauty from daily life” (p. 45).
“This means that we, as the addressees of photographs, have to critique the criteria according to which photographs have been produced: that is, those criteria according to the apparatus that produced them has itself been produced and programmed, and through which they have been distributed, until they finally reach us” (p. 45).
“As long as we do not recognize that we need to critique photography’s struggle against criteria – against programs – we remain incapable of working out newer and more appropriate criteria” (p. 46).
Crisis – “I use this concept to describe the critical point where critical thinking beings to turn on itself” (p. 46).
“The term truth is experiencing a moment of crisis in the scientific realm. But, in a photograph, the relationship between a statement and its meaning is even more opaque than in scientific propositions” (p. 47).
“‘Photo criticism’ signifies a critical, judgmental, decision-making activity that programs photographic apparatuses and directs the photographs pouring from them into channels through which we receive them. On the other hand, ‘photo criticism’ signifies the attempt to critique photo criticism in the first sense” (p. 48).
“Therefore, it is first necessary to invent an anti-apparatus, to program this sort of antifunction” (p. 49).
“Thus, the task of this sort of photo criticism is to emancipate the photographer and, through him, to contribute to the emancipation of society as a whole” (p. 50).
Chapter 6: Habit: The True Aesthetic Criterion
Second law of thermodynamics translated into English
“The statement is radical because it proposes quantifiable aesthetic criteria: it states that mathematical categories may be applied to art criticism. It translates the second law from an algorithm into an English sentence in order to use that algorithm as a criterion to judge art by” (p. 51).
New
“The word new here means objectively any situation that emerges from the tendency toward ever-increasing probability, and such an improbability may be exactly quantified by probability calculus…And the word new means subjectively any situation that makes us tremble because it is unexpected” (p. 52).
Art
“Art is any human activity that aims at producing improbable situation…Thus art is that human activity which aims at producing hateful, ugly situations, situations that cause terror” (p. 52).
Habit
“Habit here means the aesthetic equivalent of ‘entropy’ in physics” (p. 53).
“This is the central point of any future art criticism – that point at which habit turns into terror, kitsch into what is ugly” (p. 56).
Chapter 7: Betrayal
“To divulge means to betray a secret” (p. 58). The purpose of this essay is to consider the connotation of treachery hidden within the concept of publication.
“Whether to divulge secrets, to betray, is a good or a bad thing” (p. 59).
Chicken vs. Egg
1. Chicken – We’re becoming more vulgar because the middle class is becoming the proletariat.
2. Egg – Vulgar because science and technology make comm gadgets that make the media a silent majority
“Those who try to establish secret codes to which the masses do not have easy access (computer codes) are doing the right thing” (p. 60). Elites
“The elite that is emerging at present could lead society nowhere, and it is precisely this lack of purpose that would constitute its secret” (p. 61). New Dark Ages could be darker than the first.
Chapter 8: The Future of Writing
“The tendency away from linear codes such as writing and toward two-dimensional codes such as photographs, films, and TV, a tendency that may be observed if one glances even superficially at the codified world that surrounds us” (p. 63).
“Writing is an important gesture, because it both articulates and produces that state of mind which is called ‘historical consciousness’” (p. 63).
“The imagined world is the world of myth, of magic, the prehistorical world” (p. 64).
“The conceived world is the world of religions, of salvation, of political commitment, of science, and of technology – the historical world” (p. 65).
“The purpose of writing is to mean, to explain images, but texts may become opaque, unimaginable, and they then constitute barriers between man and the world” (p. 66).
“Therefore, prehistoric myths mean ‘real’ situations and posthistoric myths will mean textual prescriptions, and prehistoric magic is meant to propitiate the world, whereas posthistoric magic will be meant to manipulate people” (p. 67).
“The future of writing is to write pretexts for programs while believing that one is writing for utopia” (p. 67). \
Crisis – It is an inversion of the historical roles of reason and imagination…It is one of reason’s prostitution, of a ‘betrayal of the intellectuals” (p. 68).
