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Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) has long been known and celebrated in Europe and Brazil primarily as a media theorist. Only recently have other facets of his accomplishments come to light, clearly establishing Flusser as a key thinker. This book reveals his engagement with a wide array of disciplines, from communication studies, posthuman philosophy, media studies, and history to art and art history, migrant studies, anthropology, and film studies. Connecting together Flusser’s entire oeuvre, this volume shows how his works on media theory are just one part of a greater mosaic of writings that bring to the fore cultural and cognitive changes concerning all of us in the twenty-first century. A theorist deeply influenced by his experiences as a privileged citizen of Prague, a Jew pursued by the Nazis, a European emigrant, a Brazilian immigrant, and a survivor keenly interested and invested in history and memory, Vilém Flusser was an outsider in a staunchly hierarchical and disciplined academic world.

This book asks what will happen to thought and communication as written communication gives way, inevitably, to digital expression. In the introduction, it proposes that writing does not, in fact, have a future because everything that is now conveyed in writing—and much that cannot be—can be recorded and transmitted by other means. The balance of this book teases out the nuances of these developments. To find a common denominator among texts and practices that span millennia, the book looks back to the earliest forms of writing and forward to the digitization of texts now under way. For this book, writing—despite its limitations when compared to digital media—underpins historical consciousness, the concept of progress, and the nature of critical inquiry. While the text as a cultural form may ultimately become superfluous, it argues, the art of writing will not so much disappear but rather evolve into new kinds of thought and expression.

Poised between hope and despair for a humanity facing an urgent communications crisis, this book forecasts either the first truly human, infinitely creative society in history or a society of unbearable, oppressive sameness, locked in a pattern it cannot change. First published in German in 1985, this book outlines the history of communications technology as a process of increasing abstraction. The book charts how communication evolved from direct interaction with the world to mediation through various technologies. The invention of writing marked one significant shift; the invention of photography marked another, heralding the current age of the technical image. The automation of the processing of technical images carries both promise and threat: the promise of freeing humans to play and invent and the threat for networks of automation to proceed independently of humans.

Gestures is a collection of essays that proposes a daring and ambitious new conception of human behavior. Defining gesture as “a movement of the body or of a tool attached to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation,” Flusser moves around the topic from different points of view, angles and distances: sometimes he zooms in on a modest, ordinary movement like taking a photograph, shaving, or smoking a pipe. Sometimes he pulls back to look at something as vast and varied as human “making,” embracing everything from the fashioning of simple tools to mass manufacturing. Holding firmly to basic phenomenological principles – that consciousness is always consciousness of something, that we know others by reference to ourselves, he claims that we constantly “read” states of mind, i.e. thoughts, intentions, emotions, from gestures; still we lack a theory about how this happens. Gestures takes a first step. It offers alternatives to theories by now so veiled by habit and myth that we are hardly conscious of them, and so hardly realize that they are failing. These include the assumption that we can “know” something without being affected by it, the belief that science is value-free, and the common conviction that science and art are fundamentally different activities.