Communicology: Mutations in Human Relations?

by Vilém Flusser

Communicology is Vilém Flusser's first thesis on his concepts of technical images and technical imagination. In this foundational text he lays the groundwork for later work, offering a philosophical approach to communication as a phenomenon that permeates every aspect of human existence. Clearly organized around questions such as "What is Communication?," "What are Codes?," and "What is Technical Imagination?," the work touches on theater, photography, film, television, and more. Originally written in 1978, but only posthumously published in German, the book is one of the clearest statements of Flusser's theory of communication as involving a variably mediated relation between humans and the world. Although Flusser was writing in the 1970s, his work demonstrates a prescience that makes it of significant contemporary interest to scholars in visual culture, art history, media studies, and philosophy.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy

236 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Vilém Flusser was a philosopher born in Czechoslovakia. He lived for a long period in Brazil and later in France, and his works are written in several different languages.
His early work was marked by discussion of the thought of Martin Heidegger, and by the influence of existentialism and phenomenology. Phenomenology would play a major role in the transition to the later phase of his work, in which he turned his attention to the philosophy of communication and of artistic production. He contributed to the dichotomy in history: the period of image worship, and period of text worship, with deviations consequently into idolatry and "textolatry".

Flusser was born in 1920 in Prague into a family of Jewish intellectuals. His father, Gustav Flusser, studied mathematics and physics (under Albert Einstein among others). Flusser attended German and Czech primary schools and later a German grammar school.

In 1938, Flusser started to study philosophy at the Juridical Faculty of the Charles University in Prague. In 1939, shortly after the Nazi occupation, Flusser emigrated to London to continue his studies for one term at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Vilém Flusser lost all of his family in the German concentration camps: his father died in Buchenwald in 1940; his grandparents, his mother and his sister were brought to Auschwitz and later to Theresienstadt where they were killed. The next year, he emigrated to Brazil, living both in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

In 1960 he started to collaborate with the Brazilian Institute for Philosophy (IBF) in São Paulo and published in the Revista Brasileira de Filosofia; by these means he seriously approached the Brazilian intellectual community. During that decade he published and taught at several schools in São Paulo, being Lecturer for Philosophy of Science at the Escola Politécnica of the University of São Paulo and Professor of Philosophy of Communication at the Escola Dramática and the Escola Superior de Cinema in São Paulo. He also participated actively in the arts, collaborating with the Bienal de São Paulo, among other cultural events.

Beginning in the 1950s he taught philosophy and functioned as a journalist, before publishing his first book Língua e realidade (Language and Reality) in 1963. In 1972 he decided to leave Brazil.

He lived in both Germany and the South of France. To the end of his life, he was quite active writing and giving lectures around media theory. He died in 1991 in a car accident, while visiting his native Prague to give a lecture.

Reviews

[Vladimir · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am reading books for more than 40 years and I thought that nothing could surprise me anymore. The book is based on the Fluser's lectures in 1973, but the ideas he introduced are still fresh and exciting. Studying communicology indeed enables one to understand many things about society which are hidden by an information noise. I strongly recommend this book.

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Consisting of arguments and ideas that can be found elsewhere, this collection is nonetheless a welcome addition to Flusser’s sprawling body of work. Flusser benefits from rearticulation: not entirely plugged into the usual academic circuits, his writing is looser, more imagistic and aphoristic than that of other theorists of his generation.
Two virtues of this specific volume: it’s a focused, *concise* presentation of ideas that animate works like _Into the Universe of Technical Images_ and _Towards a Philosophy of Photography_; it’s also, unlike those works, more *systematic* in its treatment of “technical images” etc. A really useful introductory/background work…

[Lucas]

To understand, experiment with and utilise the new language of image, of platform of game etc, is something I find alluring; detailing and breaking down media and discourse infrastructure Flusser reveals ideas in an almost poetic way at times.

"I do not become; I stand always still; it is the world that comes toward me; it becomes me. Or I do not happen; the world happens to me."

Technical image is very much connected to - James Bridle's "The New Aesthetic" and Hito Steyerls - "In Defense of the Poor Image"

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes! I found the Flusser ur-text. All those key terms that flash by in his other well-known books such as Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Into the Universe of Technical Images, and Does Writing Have a Future? find loving, if sometimes annoying, elaboration in Communicology. Strangely, despite predating these other books, this one only saw the light of day in English in 2022. Given the general patch-work translation of his books into English, none of this is truly surprising. But who's complaining? Glad to have the ur-text.