writing and translation
The title refers to the theory “Ontogeny Repeats Phylogeny”, credited to the German biologist Ernst Haeckel. Since Stephen Jay Gould’s detailed investigation of it in 1977, it has some standing as a framework for...
If language is like music, surely translators are in the best position to notice it, and to respond, whether with joy or foreboding. Probably all of us hear it. There’s a particular beat, a...
Long ago — 1968, to be exact — Vilém Flusser proposed a model of human communication based on games (yes, Wittgenstein IS in the background). It may sound like trivialization, but it isn’t. The...
From his first encounters with game theory, or decision theory in the 1960s, Flusser was concerned with the way human beings were different from “apparatuses”. As far as I know, he never used the...
The German verb “einbilden” is ordinarily translated into English as “imagine.” But at one point in Into the Universe of Technical Images, Flusser calls attention to the difference between “einbilden” and the cognate “imaginieren”. Expressing his gratitude to Kant for...
Flusser translated the title of his essay “Geste und Gestimmtheit” as “Gesture and Sentimentality”. I didn’t. I found, and to some extent still find that particular word misleading at best. Its equivalence to “Gestimmtheit” is almost...