The Philosopher Who Predicted Our Post-Literate Art Moment

The average metropolitan person now is exposed to more media in a single day than someone a few generations ago would absorb in a lifetime. Amid the deluge of hot takes and commentary on today’s image culture, and its effects on our brains, many people have also been looking back to an older figure for guidance, one who seems to have been something of a prophet: the philosopher Vilém Flusser.

Born in 1920 in Prague, Flusser lived a fascinating life, working in São Paulo, Brazil for decades, before returning to Europe, where he died in 1991. In his writings of the 1980s, Flusser created a unique body of theory about how new genres of media were giving birth to a new form of consciousness, one defined by images over the written word.

Flusser thought this transformation would reshape the world, and he developed a whole vocabulary to think about it, concepts like the “technical image,” “the apparatus,” and “techno-imagination.” These have had a huge impact on media studies, and yet remain under-known.

Long in the works but now just in time to serve as a guide, Martha Schwendener’s The Society of the Screen: Vilem Flusser’s Radical Prescience, is just out from MIT Press. Schwendener is a teacher, an art historian, and a long-time art critic for the New York Times. The Society of the Screen tackles what Flusser’s wide-ranging and experimental body of thought means for art today and how his theories might help us find a way through our media-saturated moment.