“Drawing” and “Being Drawn”
The German word “Entwerfen” — drafting or drawing — is closely related, a kind of reversal of the verb “werfen,” which is to throw, or hurl, or toss. Flusser uses the association to describe...
Category: functionary
I am a functionary
I am a functionary. The phrase sounds like an admission or confession. But Flusser’s writing keeps drawing us – or at least me – back in, rewarding repeated readings, never feeling “finished” because both writer...
Apparently this logo isn’t original enough to qualify for any kind of legal protection at all. Anyway, there’s a sobering piece about Facebook in the current New York Review of Books, just a few weeks...
Out of Language: Photographing as Translating
My essay for The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory traces Flusser’s engagement with photography–or more exactly, of his concern with the human-device mesh he called the apparatus. The idea of photography as an alternative...
Damaging Marks: Functionaries in Writing Education
Hour after hour, reading the writing of students who struggle (that’s the word everyone uses, and it is heavy with implications), I pass between two distinct forms of perception, two different identities, in a...
apparatus
Flusser’s term Apparat, which can only be apparatus in English, has a pivotal position in his thinking about media. The word is not perfect, because it sounds like a machine. But it refers to a...