Reading:

Flusser, V (1983), Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Gottingen: European Photography.

I. IMAGE

Keywords: Image, surface, meaning, scanning, eyes, magic, historical linearity, linear writing, codify, co-note, conceptualization.

Key concepts:

• Image are significant surfaces.
• Image substitutes scenes for events.
• Images are not “frozen events” but translations of events into situations.
• Meaning rests in the surface.
• Meaning is enclosed in scanning the image. Meaning enclosed in the image itself; Meaning enclosed in the observer.
• Magic vs historical linearity.
• Linear writing transcodes circular time of magic to linear time of  the history.
• “Textolatry” reach a critical phase in the 19th century.  That period is also when technical images are invented: “in order to render texts imaginable again, to charge the with magic”.

In this chapter Flusser speaks about the the “traditional image” which will be differentiated by the “technical image”.

According to Flusser, images “are mediations between the world and human beings”. He argues that people  live in a world that they don’t understand. They try to understand by using media that help them to decipher elements of this world. So these media function as  mediators between man and the world, making the world more intelligible. “Traditional images ”  like painting or a drawing  can generate information about the world and at the same time they give their own interpretation of the world. Images are no just “frozen events” but “translations of events into situations.

“Idolatry” for Flusser happens when the images dominate in man’s conception of the world. When “man lives as function of the images he has produced”. The image becomes the concrete reality: World of experience- to world of imagination. When the man forgets that the images are created by him in order to find his way in the world. Instead of using the image as a means of orientation he considers the image as a faithful representation of the world as such.  It’s then that imagination  becomes hallucination. This lead to the invention of written text: “linear writing”.

From “idolatry” to “textolatry”

Linear writing:

• will bring with it a new form of consciousness: conceptualization.
• will produce a new universe different from the one the traditional image created.
• Time is perceived linearly: goes from a beginning towards an end.
• Not longer magic but historical consciousness.

  “Texts admittedly explain images in order to explain them away, but images also illustrate texts in order to make them comprehensible.” As a result the magical thought becomes conceptual thought. But when “texts are not longer imaginable” then it appears the need to invent a new medium  in order to explain the texts again. It’s then , in the 19th century of extreme textology, that photography will be invented.

II. TECHNICAL IMAGE

Keywords: technical image, apparatus, objectivity, post-history.

• According Flusser photography was invented in a turning historical point and a hidden purpose was that of recharging images with magic.
• technical images attempt to explain texts.
• Although the technical image (e.g. a photograph) appears to be an objective reproduction of reality, it is not.
• they are meta-codes of texts.
• Imagination transcodes concepts from texts into images.
• The technical images are images: therefore emit magic and seduce their observers.
• photos are surfaces that arrest flux.
• Traditional images: first-degree abstractions, abstracted from the concrete world. Refer to phenomena
• Technical images :third-degree abstractions, abstracted from texts that are abstracted from the concrete world. Refer to concepts.

Flusser claims that nothing can resist at the attraction of the technical image; every daily action (artistic, political, scientific) aims to be photographed and become part of the eternal memory. The result is that every event or action tends to become a magical ritual and lose its historical character. Everything becomes eternally reproducible.

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Flusser:

“Photography was invented in order to render imaginable the events around us. Not only the political events but also the scientific and technological. Photographs transcended history and they froze events into happenings. They took events out for their context, they trans-coded them into happenings and then they went back to the history. And they could be used as memory of history: documentation. Images were used to document historical events. It was not so easy cause the problem of subjectivity came into it.  Photography was invented to give an objective image but since camera is coded is less objective than painting. Still the idea was that there is history and then there is a photographer, and he steps back from history  into something we might called mystical transcendence, and out of this he photographs. There is a problem:   The moment you step back from politics into images you can no point of view. The politic point of view is lost. Because out of politics an event has many point of view. you dance around the event, and the more you have, you collect point of views, the better is your image. So that the photographer, who dances around an event, look at the people with  camera, there are dancers, they tried to be phenomenological but they don’t succeed. Image makers do not think that they cannot think. Thinking is anti-image. So they dance around it, and by collecting points of view they destroy ideology which is the insistence in one point of view. If you listen a photographer: “every point of view is the same, the problem is how many point of view I can collect.

The idea was that image  should to document politics. in the middle of the 20th century and especially after war, politics were made in order to be in a picture….we advanced toward an image. Everything wanted to be photographed and filmed, and taken in a video. The purpose is to be in an image…Politics is aimed at being taken, aufgennomen, in an image…Events began to accelerate. They rolled toward the image. ..and there were the people with the television cameras, and there were the photographers, and there were the people with this film, the filmmakers,  they were standing there and all the history rolled toward them and they said: “Please take me, please put me to the image”. Why people to do that?”

 Every image is strongly magically coded. Initially was made in order to orient people, i.e to hunt. And when people were exposed in the imgae, made rituals happening and then went to hunt the animal. Those images couldn’t be out of rituals.

Notes from interview:

• Happening: result of an accident. An accident that becomes necessary. (i.e coronation of a king after the death of the previous one. It contains elements of magic)
• Event:has causes and effects.
• Image is anti-political but it’s still structure.
• Invention of writing: social revolution. Before the power was in the hands of magician, who manipulated the behavior, made decision in function of rituals and magical values. With the invention of writing a new class – literati- decision makers with different way to experience world. For magician: world= circular. For literati: world=linear. Causality takes the place of destiny.
• 16th century: the invention of printing press that rendered writing first to the bourgeois and later to whole the society. Alphabetic code was not secret anymore: democratically diffused. The code became profane. At the same time, mathematics, mostly arithmetic became the code of science; a new secret code became about: the mathematic code; anew elite of science and technician who used mathematics> formal, analytical, systematic, structural way of elite thinking. Science proposed overall knowledge of the world that can’t be visualized.
• Photography was the first product of applied science that transcode equations into images. The first Photographers were not conscious what they were doing, that is the apparatus that make the images, that the photographer isn’t necessary cause you can make automatic cameras, that sciences and technology itself make images. When they understood that they tried to make images which are not programmed in the apparatus. Instead of working for the apparatus they started working against it. Sicen the end of 19th century is an effort against apparatus. On concrete level people use apparatus in different ways.
• Photography sucks in history like a vacuum cleaner.
• It s possible with photo to create history.
• You can take elements from out an image and align them in a thread. Pictographic writing. Writing’s purposes is to destroy images in order to explain them away.