Trying to imagine Flusser's utopia

I have to say that I found myself initially amused and dismissive, then irritated, then fascinated, with Flusser’s “Line and Surface.” As Sophia pointed out to me earlier this week, it’s strange to read such an abstract and prophetic text that is not of one’s own time. The referents to which Flusser alludes are all out of order now: which of his predictions are outdated futures-never-to-be, and which are so much already-taken-for-granted that they can no longer be recognized as alternatives to something else? Even amongst the things I thought I recognized, I could never be sure if what I understood was what he actually intended. Flusser and I are from different worlds, it seems, and translation is only impaired by our apparently similar vocabularies.

That said, after I redefined some of his terms for myself I was able to grasp a bit more of what he was arguing (though I still struggle to evaluate its relationship to the “actual” future of the 1970s, i.e. now). As I understood it, Flusser was talking about new visual media (especially the moving image) and how they signify differently (as surfaces) than linear, textual media. In service of this, he sets up a distinction between facts, imaginations, and concepts. Facts are physically-accessible phenomena — rocks are his favorite example. Imaginal thoughts present themselves to the unconscious and require a subjective perspective. Imaginal fictions are associated with images but also with myth and symbolizing facts. In general, it seems like they are meant to be understood as “intuitive” somehow, in that they come with all of this perceptual richness that can’t be broken down into a logical structure but must be grasped whole. Finally, there are conceptual fictions, which he associates (for now) with linear writing, and history. This is because (somehow) anything in linear form has to be organized, symbolized “objectively” (because an alphabet is objective) and is subject to some sort of logos or abstraction that surfaces don’t offer.

I find this such an odd taxonomy! Why would you split “rational, conceptual, abstract” and “immediate, perceptual, subjective” along lines of text versus image/surface? Why would you call individual subjective experiences of things “facts” rather than referring to something like physical objects?

Anyhow, I was intrigued by Flusser’s resultant vision of the future, in which a linear process is replaced by a cyclical one. In the past, images(symbols?) objectified and translated facts(stuff), and concepts objectified/translated images and facts. These were the two forms of mediation between ourselves and the world of facts. But, for various reasons not to be treated here, this is now leading to an increasing disconnect from "reality." How to restore it? Flusser hopes that, soon, "imaginal thought will be a translation from concept to image, and conceptual thought a translation from image to concept. In such a feedback situation, an adequate model can finally be elaborated.” This model can eventually be compared to “facts” in order to determine that model's fitness. This Flusser seems to see as a means to bring about a utopian possibility— a medium in which “structural thought” can objectify concepts. This would render concepts as easy to access as images are for us-- mediating between ourselves and our concepts. Leveling up!

As to how this new development would look, the structural thinker is “no longer interested in history as such, but in the combining of various histories … The structural position stands in that sort of time wherein processes are seen as forms.” What Flusser seems to be imagining is a sort of God’s-eye view, one which sums time and space into unities that become moveable or manipulable parts: “those things that are in opposition for the historical position (matter-energy, entropy-negentropy, positive-negative and so on) are complementary for the structural position.” Whatever could he mean by this? Evidently, it would require “a new kind of media… a new type of thinking, with its own logic and its own kind of codified symbols.” Whether any of the technological changes since Flusser wrote this piece have reproduced any part of this vision is difficult to determine; but I’d like to end by using my primary text, chock full of “thought experiments,” to try to literalize some parts of Flusser’s more abstract reasoning.

Interestingly, “The Heat Death of The Universe” by Pamela Zoline predates Flusser’s chapter by six years. It has a characteristically postmodern form, with a hyper-referential structure that spans time and space and discipline, sweeping from evolutionary history to Shakespeare to Hong Kong to cosmology and systems theory. Mary Papke describes the structure of “Heat Death” as a numbered "series of axioms, hypotheses, definitions, narrative fragments and summaries that instantiate [the story’s] scientific principles” by referring to a kind of inferential or logical form more common to scientific reasoning and reminiscent of a lab notebook. However, an in relation to Flusser’s future vision, the form that many of these numbered entries take is precisely a sort of abstracted visually-rich imagined process, as when protagonist Sarah Boyle imagines allowing entropy to take over. She envisions that

The rooms would fill up with objects, newspapers and magazines would compost, the potatoes in the rack, the canned green beans in the garbage pail would take new heart and come to life again, reaching out green shoots towards the sun. The plants would grow wild and wind into a jungle around the house, splitting plaster, tearing shingles, the garden would enter in at the door… (4-5).

This kind of symbolization of a concept-as-process-as-image is frequent throughout the story, which made me wonder what Flusser would make of Sarah Boyle’s imaginative personalizations of scientific concepts. Presumably this is not the utopian ideal of structural thought he refers to; however, it does raise the possibility that using imagined processes as metaphors for concepts is not as unfamiliar as it seems when Flusser describes it. Like Sarah Boyle, when I think of evolution, I don’t think “descent with modification by way of natural selection.” I picture a fish slowly becoming a fish-monkey and then a monkey and then an ape-person and then a person.

Am I missing something? Perhaps. But as far as utopian visions of interactive, multiform, sweeping and even-handed historical thought goes, I have one name for you (my dear readers): James Burke. A BBC edutainment host for decades in the latter half of the 20th century, he truly brought Flusser's vision of the structuralist historian to life. This is most clear with his television show "Connections: An Alternative View of Change," which (per wikipedia) "rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress. Burke contends that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation. Rather, the entire gestalt of the modern world is the result of a web of interconnected events, each one consisting of a person or group acting for reasons of their own," with no sense of the whole to which they contribute. The form of the television show is a sort of time-traveling zig-zag through unexpected connections in history-- how nylon was invented because of new petroleum by-products that were the result of the invention of Jeeps, connecting to stocking-machine-slaying luddites in England, who are defended by Lord Byron, who we then follow to Turkey-- and so on. These journeys seem to spatialize history, just as Flusser would have hoped-- history becomes a sort of ecology, a vast block of interconnections and interactions across which you can make many paths. Burke's own utopian vision takes this idea a step further-- though his efforts seem to have stalled out in the early 2000s. He planned to create a vast, history-producing software that would allow schoolchildren worldwide to perform their own research into interconnections, and posit their own historical narratives to stand alongside his.

Check out between minutes 3 and 4!