The Gesture of Writing
Flusser’s “The Gesture of Writing,” along with my notes about it, has just been published in New Writing: the International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing (Taylor and Francis) vol 9...
Category: Flusser
technical images
It’s among the most central–and difficult–of the terms Flusser introduced. It suggests, loosely, “digital” images, “mass” media, “new” media. But it is both more and less than any of these. The phrase is awkward, perhaps...
Does Writing Have a Future? (Flusser’s book)
Flusser’s voice sounds plaintive in this book. His own attachment to writing seems to intensify as he describes a contemporary weakening, thinning of “historical consciousness,” that consciousness that writing created and always sustained. For in...
Plausible Fictions
Suppose photographing is, as Flusser contended, an act of projecting, rather than “capturing” extant meaning. Rather than constituting records, then, photographs propose possibilities, sometimes in tremendously persuasive detail. Photographs are what comes of reaching...
Is fiction “theory”? is “theory” fiction?
Suppose Flusser is “wrong” about most things. He could only be wrong in the sense of someone working within a scientific model–probably a rather narrow one at that, someone who expects to predict something,...
Flusser the Writer
Flusser is usually described as a philosopher. By “trade,” he was a critic — of language, photography, film, art, design, and social practice. He was also a teacher and someone who wrote critically...