The prevalent representation of Vilém Flusser in Euro-American academic circles has focused overwhelmingly on his idea of a post-historical stage in communication technology, especially as discussed in three of his later books, and particularly in Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1984). Among “theory”-oriented scholars—whatever “theory” might mean in this case—Flusser is a thinker of media, obsessed with the end of history, the overcoming of textual meaning, and a return to an imagetic mode of consciousness of the world. Yet I would suggest that this gives us at best a limited sense of his work, and at worst a caricature. One of the results of this focus is that Flusser’s early writings from his decades living in Brazil—many of them still untranslated—have been skipped entirely, or briefly brushed through: these include his theory-fictional methodology, his radical philosophy of language, and his ironic philosophy of nature. The resulting intellectual reception of him does little justice to the vast network of concepts Flusser articulated throughout his life. It does not encompass his deep immersion into religious existentialism, phenomenology, and the Madrid School of Ortega y Gasset, or his commitment to philosophy as a vital engagement with concrete lived relations. It equally ignores the biographical roots of his apologetics of the migrant, the role played by his exile, his mystical Judaism, and his exchanges with Brazilian artists in the development of that very model of post-historicity.
The publication, in this issue of e-flux journal, of my translation of an excerpt (“Delays”) from an early, untranslated book by Flusser aims to reverse this impression, highlighting the fundamental centrality of Brazil and of his personal situation to the whole edifice of his thought. While Flusser’s thinking can hardly be reduced to a decoding through biography, the particularity of his life and movements across locations and languages is invaluable for understanding the stakes of this work. Like many of Flusser’s works, this book was written simultaneously in multiple languages, with slight changes between each version, and bits of it published here and there, in a scattered fashion. The book was written in German and Portuguese in the 1960s, but it was published posthumously, first in Germany in 1994, as Brasilien oder die Suche nach dem neuen Menschen: Fur eine Phänomenologie der Unterentwicklung (which we might translate as “Brazil or the search for a new man: For a phenomenology of underdevelopment”), and then in Brazil in 1998, as Fenomenologia do Brasileiro: Em Busca de Um Novo Homem (Phenomenology of the Brazilian: In search of a new man). The reason for the lack of previous English-language attention to this book is not obvious; perhaps English-speaking editors have so far overlooked this work because they believe the audience for a Brazilianist treatise by Flusser is niche at best. What they miss, though, is that tricky word that appears in the German subtitle: “underdevelopment.” It is this word that opens up the full matrix of Flusser’s dynamic and expansive thinking. It lets us start to approach the way that Brazil can serve, in Flusser’s writing, as a substitute for all longstanding but newly nationalized cultures based on mixture, synthesis, and what postcolonial philosopher Édouard Glissant would later call the “écho-monde.” Brazilian culture is above all a great metaphor, for Flusser, for the culture of the “third world” or the “Global South.” This is why I’ve chosen to translate chapter four of Flusser’s book, one that focuses on “delays” or historical gaps between cultures, as it is this one that best encapsulates this broader application of his phenomenology of Brazil as a phenomenology of underdevelopment.
Vilém Flusser was born in Prague in 1920 to a family of Jewish entrepreneurs and intellectuals. He and his brother would be the only ones to escape the Nazi regime, alongside his later wife, Edith Barth. After leaving Prague, Flusser studied for a few months at the London School of Economics, briefly became a Marxist, and subsequently rejected Marx on the basis of what he saw as a reductionist account of human existential struggle in those economically deterministic texts. Marxism, he would write, seemed to have serious problems decoding the most recent discoveries in psychology, biology, linguistics, and anthropology. After entangling himself instead with Wittgenstein and the mythologists of Eranos, Flusser would claim that Marxism was as “kitsch” as Nazism (a somewhat morbid accusation against his own tragedy: it was essentially ridiculous); both, he claimed, suffered from a premade characteriology, a theatrical avoidance of the core of life, and a vulgar, barbaric reduction of the world to a simple mechanism. The failures of the Soviet regime, and later its subjugation of Prague, proved that it was too shallow and hazardous to encompass his moral and aesthetic worries. Still, he would maintain much of the post-Marxist terminology in his own work, such as the broad use of the concepts of “alienation” and the “petite bourgeoisie” in this very text.
In 1940, Flusser migrated to Brazil, where he received the news of his family’s passing, and decided to settle in São Paulo. In his writings, Flusser comes back again and again to the solitude of being the only one left, and how processing familial death in Brazil propelled him to a certain relation with the new culture he found himself in—to the necessity of creating a new life in this new place. “Those who have fallen in the lack of ground,” he writes in his autobiography, “might exist more intensively, if ‘to exist’ means ‘to live from the outside.’” Free to experiment from the outside for the following thirty years, Flusser would enter a profound dialogue with the intellectual elite of the city, including Jewish thinkers who had also escaped the war, like Alex Bloch and Romy Fink, and famous names of the Brazilian literary scene, like the Campos brothers and João Guimarães Rosa. Flusser wrote some of his first and most fundamental books during this time, like Language and Reality (1963, English translation 2018), where he proposes the provocative and prescient idea that each language implies a different ontology, and History of the Devil (1965, English translation 2014), where he reframes the evolution of the universe, from the first minerals to the most recent technological developments, as the Devil playing around with time. Flusser wrote the two books while working at a factory for radio transistors. In the 1960s, he would also start writing for newspapers and get a teaching gig at the distinctly alternative Instituto Brasileiro de Filosofia, founded by his friends Milton Vargas, Miguel Reale, and Vicente Ferreira da Silva, who formed a circle of right-wing self-taught scholars (which I discuss more below), at the margin of the much more prominent, much more rigorous University of São Paulo, where Flusser would also later teach a few courses.
In his essay “The Freedom of the Migrant,” published in English in 2003 but originally released as a postface to his “philosophical autobiography” Bodenlos (Groundless) in 1992, Flusser praised uprooted people as the avant-garde that would lead humanity to a utopian future beyond national boundaries. This idea was based, of course, on his own experience as a migrant in Brazil. The loss of the motherland had highlighted to him the affective knots that connected him to a certain system of behaviors from there, which for most people remain hidden and unconscious in the form of their “culture.” Humans with fixed national homes, he argued, are mysteriously tied to an opaque identity they ignore, and once these links are revealed, the attachment to the land can become an intentional, transparent choice. The migrant (meaning Flusser himself, as these two figures are often one and the same in his writing) can break their own national identity and continuously remodel it, painfully conscious as they are of the predefined paths provided by the homeland. They can also intuit in the identity of natives from other homelands what is compatible with the elements they have decided to embody and retrace in the newfound place, sensing the real connection to the elements of that culture, and picking other affinities outside of it. The “ugly stranger” would then work freely from within an established sense of mystery (that is, a culture) and make that mystery explicit by selecting what’s most interesting in it, blending it all like a divine curator, and even showcasing this mystery again—now as mystery proper—to the “beautiful native.” Flusser goes so far as to say that the situation of the migrant is an exemplary type of what Heidegger called the condition of “thrownness,” which is the ulterior human existential state: finding yourself in a time and space that is already configured before you, realizing your own position in it as you go, from the outside, by defining yourself against this circumstance and letting the circumstance define itself with you.
More importantly, Flusser theorizes early on that the uprooting of the migrant is an inflection point in history: the migrant intelligence is a microcosm of future—global—culture. The migrant is simultaneously the culmination and the overcoming of human historical conditioning, associated with the entrenchment of practices in specific epochs and places. This conception anticipates the decoupling of culture and place that would emerge later in the decolonial works of Homi K. Bhabha, James Clifford, and Arjun Appadurai, who thoroughly complicate the relationship between culture and place, the notions of authenticity and filiation that emplacement betrays, and even more so the emergence of a-local trends in the hyperspace of the internet. In Flusser’s work already, homelands are enforced through a juncture of opacities that a community lives in, flowing like mental rivers, generalized from a set of unlearned values in the collective imagination, rather than being necessarily and exclusively a static product of a long-term relationship with the earth. Flusser argues that the proliferation of cultures entirely co-composed by migrants (i.e., diasporic cultures, such as those in Brazil) is a significant achievement for the development of human consciousness, because they spring from this post-historical cosmopolitanism. For Flusser, to be a migrant is to contain within yourself the very uprooting dynamics of globalization. It’s as if the migrant could think the thoughts of Capital itself, as if they were the deterritorializing force that runs through history—part and parcel, tip and agent of this civilization process, a living metonymy for the end of history.
For Flusser, the result of all this is that a culture of migrants is one primed for tremendous creative novelty. It’s no coincidence that the Brazil that he encountered in the 1950s and that transfixed him was at a boil, densely charged with all kinds of towering intellectual figures, artistic movements, historically sui generis events, and a demographic explosion of migrants. From the end of the Vargas dictatorship in 1945 to the right-wing military coup in 1964, Brazil was essentially born again as a modern nation and lived through an extremely fertile period of cultural invigoration, developing its own founding myths, art, music, and cuisine, as part of an explicit and conscious project to design a national identity from scratch. In the forties, pivotal sociological celebrations of miscegenation by Gilberto Freire and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda established themselves in the public eye, and Carnival samba was hailed as the musical paragon of this syncretic ethos. In the fifties, bossa nova was born out of the mix of samba and jazz, coming to influence American culture itself; Flusser understood it as a development of major importance, writing that bossa nova established for the first time a direct channel between elite and masses, with “a bomb effect to the whole of Western culture.” By then, Brazil was also developing new artistic movements based on participatory paradigms and the aestheticization of its own social condition—in film, with cinema novo, and in theater, with teatro do oprimido. In literature, conversely, the poesia concreta idealized by the Campos brothers produced for the first time experiments with the visual structuring of poems on the page, with an acute impact on Flusser’s attention to media formats.
Brazil in the late fifties and early sixties also saw the construction of Brasília, the new capital of the country. A megalomaniacal project by Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, the city was a sort of zenith of high-modernist architecture, erected out of thin air in the middle of a desert. Brasília fascinated Flusser, both as an example of a new level of human control over nature and as another exploratory use of media: for him, Brasília was writing in the form of architecture. Around the same time as the construction of the capital, Brazilian football consolidated itself as an unprecedented international force, and it remains, to this day, perhaps the only example of a third-world country achieving such hegemony against the usual “metropolitan” standards of the cultural industry. Brazil won the World Cup in 1958, 1962, and 1970, becoming the first nation to win it three times. Pelé, crowned as the main player in those championships, was elevated to a Beatles-like level of fame in the pop-cultural imagination. A fan of sports as a communicative and human phenomena, Flusser was deeply impressed with Brazilian football and what it said about the country’s worldview, even publishing a text on “Peleology”: the study of Pelé as a modern mythological figure who “unveiled Being” in his own way, through revealing the presence of the “Peleic” element in Brazilian culture.
Such a staunch defense of the national image in a precarious time between two nationalist dictatorships has raised suspicions in Brazil about Flusser’s political inclinations, which have also have been underexplored by Euro-American scholars. By all accounts and through his writings, one notices that Flusser tends to a kind of classical liberal position, with hints of conservatism at times, especially given his early reservations about Marxism and his quasi-religious views of conscience and personhood. As I’ve mentioned, many of Flusser’s acquaintances in São Paulo were right wing, and some of them—like Miguel Reale—would even become part of the post-1964 regime, writing some of its legal justifications. Flusser also expresses an ambivalence towards Israel, coming to be more conscious of the violence of the Jewish predicament and of the contradictions of the Zionist state only after moving to Germany in the seventies. However, while Flusser himself was always lukewarm towards the Brazilian military government, never coming to denounce it and even accepting jobs that required some complicity with the coup, he also had friends who fought against the military and were imprisoned and tortured as a result. People of different opinions and backgrounds gathered at Flusser’s house weekly, arguing or listening to his lectures. In some of his letters to Reale from 1991, Flusser highlights “fundamental divergences” between the two of them as part of his original disillusionment with Brazil and as a reason for moving back to Europe in 1972.
A compelling question in this respect is how much Flusser’s political perspectives alter the underlying notions of his philosophy. For example, it is unclear whether Flusser’s optimism about the future and the sociocultural consequences of accelerated technological development is rooted in a fundamentally center-right personality. In certain regards, this optimism is a result of Flusser seeking inventive ways out of an essentialism that is characteristic of Heideggerianism, itself a right-wing incubator. Throughout his work on technics, he inverts the claustrophobia of Ge-Stell, or “enframing,” focusing instead on the transformative potentialities of novelty and the infinite plasticity of human paradigms. Another question worth asking is how much Flusser’s own politics were defined in response to departmental rivalries with Marxist professors at the University of São Paulo, professors who personally rejected him and undermined his career. This is unsurprising to a degree: Flusser was by most accounts a very difficult person, stubborn and full of idiosyncrasies, which resulted in frequent clashes with colleagues. It’s easy to imagine the resentments that Flusser might have harbored in his semester lecturing at the University of São Paulo while watching interviews with Brazilian philosophers from the department, like José Gianotti, the first Portuguese translator of Wittgenstein, who Flusser publicly decried for his translation, and who calls Flusser—during an interview in his homage—semiliterate, refusing to say a single positive thing about him for thirty minutes.
In sum, Flusser writes the “philosophy of the Brazilian as new man” under the spell of the cultural innovations of the Brazilian Fourth Republic (1945–64), mixed with his own grievances against Brazilian academia and his latent, unavoidable techno-optimism. The result is a strange work, simultaneously sarcastic, critical of various Brazilian habits, and subtly glorifying of the country’s overall spirit. In this, Flusser is not entirely original: by the fifties, it was already commonplace to say Brazil was “the country of the future,” both as critique and as commendation. Coined in 1941 by Stefan Zweig—an equally European-Jewish migrant who lived the end of his life exiled in the city of Petrópolis, in the state of Rio de Janeiro—the expression “country of the future” was quickly absorbed by Brazilian society as a patriotic epithet, taken to mean that the country would soon grow to become a world superpower. Yet after various disenchantments with political instability, and especially after the coup of 1964, the phrase shifted into a kind of a self-derogatory joke, in which Brazil was forever the country of the future, because this supposed promise was never actualized. Flusser, on the other hand, was interested in the epithet as an ontological classification of Brazil: it was “the country of the future” not in terms of occupying a certain position on the ladder of development, but in terms of its mindset and behavior—a country of endless expectation, openness, projection, and hope. In this, again, we might see Brazil as a metaphor for the colonial itself, for underdevelopment and its phenomenological experience. For Flusser, the future is destined for creolization, since globalization is for him the creolization of everything, a series of encounters, clashes, and adaptations between people. In this regard, creolized cultures like Brazil are ontologically futural. They anticipate future social and cultural practices because their very core, their foundation, lies in those practices. This idea has also come up in more recent Brazilianist works, such as Paulo Arantes’s A fratura brasileira no mundo (The Brazilian rupture in the world), from 2001, which sees the contemporary social malaise—growing economic inequality and racial tensions around the world—as a universalization of characteristically Brazilian problems.
The excerpt from Flusser’s unpublished writings that I have translated for this issue of e-flux journal centers on these questions. It specifically concerns the idea of “delays.” In the excerpt, Flusser notes how such new cultures—futural, global, diasporic—offer a new stratification of longer historical temporalities. In this schema, it is not merely that the medieval comfortably nests with the industrial, and the Neolithic with the Romantic. Rather, historical categories themselves are transcended, opening out into a new, given level of existential freedom and environmental awareness. As abstract as this sounds, this uneven temporality is rooted in concrete lived and daily situations. A Brazilian engineer who develops complex technological systems in his day job might go home to a besieged favela, where armed gangs follow a feudal pattern of vassalage and an ancient rule of law. The sexual revolution might function alongside—above and below, within and around—premodern religious moralities that are by no means cleared away by new understandings and possibilities of gender equality. For Flusser, this is not because of a “delay” between the development of Brazilian society and its European counterpart, but rather because Brazilian society does not belong to the same framework that produces the social division of time and space responsible for the uniformization of historical development in Europe. He explains that Brazil employs a whole other structure of interspersion between historical elements and scenographies. These are influenced by European stages of development (and even aim at them, at times) due to the colonial enterprise and the bourgeois insecurity it generated. However, they are less the chapters of any necessary evolution than coexisting coincidences and coded communications that are not lived—experienced in the flesh—by Brazilians themselves. Here lies a crucial and difficult aspect of Flusser’s thinking on these questions: while the uneven temporality suggested above, in which the new and the old are stratified and overlapping, is lived as quotidian experience, the colonial logic of stages and “delay” is always mediated. In this sense, Brazil sits outside of the homogeneous history commanded by Capital and its structuring social categories and tropes: it has a fundamentally different apprehension of historical concepts like misery and abundance, alienation and engagement, nature and language.
Read today, Flusser’s views may seem innocent, hallucinatory, and even somewhat orientalizing, since they problematically set Brazilian culture apart from an imagined Western Weltanschauung. Yet his early work is still a relevant interpretation of the phenomenological reality Flusser experienced in his exile. It also provided a different sense of how Flusser, later celebrated as a theorist of media and technological development, understood processes of mediation—as relations rooted in colonization, nationalization, and mixture. In this regard, his early work remains a captivating and contradictory elaboration of the culture of nations with no antiquity (insofar as their national identity requires a destruction and forgetting of Indigenous histories and communities)—nations whose history is constitutively fabulatory and continually in relation with grand narratives embedded in European culture. These dynamics are still wholly pertinent to any adequate approach to Flusser’s more celebrated ideas of post-history. Consider, for instance, Flusser’s understanding of the barroco mineiro, the peculiar version of baroque art developed in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Flusser compares the Brazilian baroque to the baroque he knew from his youth in Prague and finds it laughable at best—not because this Brazilian baroque is a lesser version of the European type, but because it is a completely different thing, one that is largely antithetical to the concepts structuring it, and that is in many respects more beautiful, more nuanced, and more singular. His conclusion is that this is not baroque, this is not Prague, this is not his youth, this is not history anymore. Rather, what he sees in the barroco mineiro is beyond baroque, beyond Prague, beyond himself, beyond history, and thus beyond any European labelling of art phases. In fact, Brazil is so oblivious to history that it borrows history only in order to free itself from it and create something else entirely on top of it. In other words, Brazil creates a new form of art without the anxiety of needing to respond to actual, previous European artforms. Proof of the relevance of this notion to Brazilianist studies is that the exact same process Flusser identified in barroco mineiro is repeated across Brazilian artistic movements and theorized by Brazilians themselves—be it in the “cultural cannibalism” of early modernism, in the pop potpourri of 1960s Tropicália, or in the late-twentieth century visual art that would come to anticipate many postmodern—or, we might say, post-historical—trends.