Does Writing Have a Past? A Conversation with Martha Schwendener

Cover detail of Martha Schwendener, The Society of the Screen: Vilém Flusser's Radical Prescience, 2026.

Martha Schwendener is an art historian and critic attuned to the social life of ideas. Her recent book, The Society of the Screen: Vilém Flusser’s Radical Prescience (2026), traces Flusser’s intellectual trajectory through the ebb and flow of his relationships with artists, poets, designers, publishers, and fellow thinkers, across lectures, exhibitions, publications, and private correspondence. These exchanges unfolded via the conflicting codes Flusser sought to theorize, as traditional images, writing, and technical images collided within a single cultural field. Discussing her richly illustrated book at Emmelines, a gallery located in a subway kiosk in New York City, Martha and I could not help but stage a version of this conflict ourselves: How, as Flusser asked, “can an art gallery compete with the shop windows that surround it, and what relation is there between a cover and the contents of a best-seller?”1

Between us was Flusser’s wager that writing does not merely transmit history but produces the type of consciousness that organizes events into something called “history” in the first place. The conversation that follows approaches Flusser as a thinker for whom writing’s past was not simply a store of inherited meanings, but the code that drew thought and action onto the linear track of history. Dialogue, for him, was one way that inherited code could be remade.

***

William Wiebe: Your book emphasizes how Flusser’s philosophy was shaped by his encounters with artists and thinkers and by his public life in the art world. How did the use of language by artists shape his understanding of text and his own writing practice?

Martha Schwendener: One consequential figure for Flusser was the designer and artist Karl Gerstner, whose agency made the Swiss Air logo, among other things. Gerstner’s 1964 book Designing Programmes offers a framework for thinking through language, systems, and information theory. In it, he talks about everything from Gothic cathedrals to knitting as a type of program: making something linear into something two-dimensional or even spatial by simple means. The program is contained in the knitting instructions. In machine knitting, it’s a punched card, which brings us back to Jacquard looms and early computing. Then in the 1970s Gerstner published Compendium for Literates, which is laid out horizontally. He’s writing about Saussure and language, but he’s also making language tactile and visual, asking how one reads text as a surface.

Concrete poetry matters here too. Flusser knew Haroldo de Campos and Max Bense, whose philosophy of information aesthetics was very important to him. Bense’s concrete poem “Statistical Text” brings together art, language, and science. Flusser was very concerned with C. P. Snow’s 1959 lecture on “The Two Cultures,” about the growing divide between art and science, and he was trying to bring those together. Concrete poetry was one of the places where that happened for him.

And then there’s Mira Schendel, who was Swiss-Italian but ended up in Brazil, like Flusser. She worked extensively with text, including typewriter drawings in the 1970s. When you look at her work from the 1960s and ’70s—the scrambled letters, her Graphic Objects series of suspended text pieces—you get a sense that Flusser was seeing something in artists that was more radical than what he was finding in the philosophy community, even though he was reading Wittgenstein, Carnap, the Vienna school, Heidegger. These artists gave him a way to think about language not as a linear instrument but as something spatial and surface based.

Looking at this work now, after large language models (LLMs), her letters can almost seem token like: fragments that activate a system before they settle into language. Flusser, who wrote about Schendel’s Graphic Objects and drawings on rice paper, called these works “pre-texts”—playing with the idea of “pretext” (a fabricated reason or excuse) but also with the idea of letters before they cohere into linear writing.

Flusser’s text Does Writing Have a Future? was originally released in 1987 on a floppy disk, in keeping with his contention that writing did not have a future. He felt like a later edition, printed as a traditional book, was a failure.

WW: One of the crucial dimensions of your book is that Flusser’s ideas are worked out alongside the artists he was in contact with, not simply applied to them after the fact. Those materials make the tension between writing and images tangible. How might we think about that tension now that dialogue itself is becoming a dominant interface of computation?

MS: I think the real turning point for Flusser is the question of automation, the point when there’s no longer a human being at the controls. That’s what links him to the present so strongly. The image or text might be generated by a machine, but the prompt might be generated by a machine too. That’s where something like vibe-coding becomes interesting—you don’t have to know how to write code in order to program. Language prompts are enough. Moreover, in current AI—which is to say, chatbots and LLMs—it’s not simply a human operating an apparatus, but an apparatus beginning to enter into dialogue with itself.

This also gets us to his distinction between “technical” and “synthetic” images. Flusser starts using the term “techno-images,” then later “technical images” in the 1970s, at which point he’s referring to images produced by technical apparatuses—film, television, video, satellites. Still later, in correspondence with the Swiss poet and scholar Felix Philipp Ingold, who really pressed him on these terms, Flusser starts referring to “synthetic images.” “Technical” remains tied to the camera and the operator—images generated by a technological apparatus—while “synthetic” belongs more to the rise of computers and automation. That distinction also changes the artists Flusser is looking at: Someone like Joan Fontcuberta remains close to the technical image, while Harun Farocki, with his interest in automation, points more directly toward the synthetic.

There’s also the “image flood,” or Bilderflut, which was a major term in German discussions of the day. For instance, in the early years of social media, people used to count how many images were uploaded to Facebook or Instagram each day. Now they don’t even bother.

WW: It’s just “billions and billions served.”

MS: Exactly. And this fluctuation is also important. For Flusser, the universe of technical images is not static but constantly shifting: The images are being replaced by other images. If you walk through Times Square or a subway station, you expect advertisements to change over time. It would be strange if they stayed the same. Flusser’s universe of technical images—which draws from both McLuhan’s “global village” and the biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s “Umwelt,” or “surrounding environment”—is scrolling, moving, circulating. It is less The Society of the Spectacle than a tsunami of visuality. I also see “Umwelt” mentioned frequently in current AI literature.

WW: Speaking in an art gallery inside a subway kiosk, surrounded by shop windows, signage, and advertisements, seems to literalize this collision of codes. What is Flusser getting at when he discusses how the conflict between codes is lived existentially before being understood theoretically?

MS: He was always interested in the program of the apparatus. If you don’t understand the program, you become a functionary of it. That applied to photography, television—and now algorithms. If you’re not aware of how social media works, you just become a functionary. You buy stuff, like stuff, hate stuff—whatever the program induces.

WW: Flusser often insists that our confusion of codes leads us to ask the wrong questions. Instead of asking what kind of consciousness mass media produces, we ask whether artists can redirect it away from sinister purposes, or whether media can be made more human.2 How did he think artists were better able to ask the right questions?

MS: He thought artists were among the people best able to work against the program. Not only against the program of painting or of photography but also against the larger apparatus. In his 1984 essay “Photo Criticism” for European Photography —which was edited by Andreas Müller-Pohle and was an incredibly important platform for Flusser—he lays out what he thinks the proper approach for a photo critic would be, to show how the photographer is a functionary of various apparatuses, even while struggling to emancipate themself from that function. The critic would show

society to behave increasingly uncritically towards the nearly omnipresent photographic images that function as models for behavior, attitudes, and values. They would show the camera and the media complex to be only minor cogs in a gigantic programming apparatus on its way towards establishing an automatic totalitarianism.

And they would make “explicit the complex co-implications between man and apparatus that result in photographs.”3 This criticism would also ask: What sort of camera produced the photograph? Where in the world, by which techniques, against which cultural, political, and historical backgrounds? That jumps out now, when we talk about LLMs, which are largely developed by Western tech companies from training data that is overwhelmingly in English.

WW: Something similar seems to happen with generated texts. The questions we ask of them—whether they’re accurate or inaccurate, creative or derivative, critical or sycophantic—can conceal the fact that generated text is not simply another kind of writing, but a different code relation altogether. It presents itself as a line of thought while functioning as the surface of a program. The danger is that we continue asking literary or hermeneutic questions of something structured by another order of operations.

MS: This also brings us to Flusser’s engagement with post-hermeneutics. Flusser is part of a broader world of thinkers—Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino—who are moving away from the idea that texts or images are only there to be interpreted. After the 1960s and ’70s, he wasn’t writing as much about painting or language philosophy, which was his original project, as he was about “new media.” When he thinks about programming, the artist can be a programmer—is a programmer, but now with technological apparatuses

WW: I wonder if he would say that AI generalizes the position of programmer or artist? Flusser distinguishes between two kinds of revolutionaries: the scientists and programmers who invent instruments of probability—cameras, computers—and the artists who make improbable situations out of technical images. So are we all becoming programmers or artists—or functionaries?

MS: I think that’s the question. It’s not just about knowing how to use a tool. It’s about understanding the program well enough to work against it, in order not to become its functionary. More alarming might be the phenomenon of technologists identifying as “artists,” like (Palantir cofounder and CEO) Alex Karp: “I am an artist with a gun.”

WW: Do you think Flusser ever considered his own writing to be post-hermeneutic? You argue that his writing could sometimes be “an inscrutable black box.” And he also suggests that, in order to exercise our power over apparatuses “we must let the black box remain … black.”4

MS: He was definitely a nontraditional philosopher. He never earned a college degree because he had to work. He began studying at Charles University but left Prague after the Nazi occupation, went through London, and then to Brazil. One of his paths into publishing was through newspapers. He became a well-known columnist in Brazil. For those of us who write for popular sources, the idea of completely inscrutable writing is impossible. It has to be accessible.

On the other hand, some of the essays he published in newspapers during Brazil’s military dictatorship are incredibly coded. He might be writing about the military or politics, but describing it as an intersection in São Paulo with stoplights indicating where you can turn “right” or “left” and proposing to erect a “Coca-Cola Viaduct”—a reference to US interference in Brazilian politics.5 It was transparent on one level and entirely coded on another.

That relates to Mira Schendel too. The 1973 São Paulo Biennial was boycotted by many artists, with Gordon Matta-Clark and Hans Haacke involved in the US boycott. But Schendel participated. Flusser argued at an AICA [International Association of Art Critics] conference in Paris that you could boycott the Biennial from an armchair in Paris or be on the ground in São Paulo. Schendel’s installation suspending transparent nylon threads from the ceiling, Still Waves of Probability (1969), was seen by many people there as a protest work. It might look like a beautiful installation to us now, but in São Paulo it was a question of language, of what could and could not be said, of transparency.

WW: That seems like a concrete example of how post-hermeneutic writing or art might function: not meaning less, but making meaning through a situation, through the codes it has to pass between.

MS: Yes. It’s accessible and coded at the same time.

Audience Member: With AI now, so many of the questions concern truth, reality, fake news, the splintering of the real. Did Flusser have a framework for thinking about truth?

MS: He uses the word “freedom” more often than “truth.” “Truth” was such a buzzword in photography in the 1980s and ’90s: staged photography, the digitally manipulated O. J. Simpson Time magazine cover, made when Photoshop was new—all of that. Flusser was interested in truth, but for him it’s more a question of the transparency of the apparatus.

Someone recently emailed me, “What if we’re at the point where the algorithm can convince us that the black box we’re dealing with is transparent?” That’s the next level, a truly post-truth moment. With AI, I’m seeing terms like “gray box,” “glass box”—I even stumbled across “lightly frosted glass box” to indicate that you can see the shadows of the inputs and the outputs, but the coding is still opaque.

One of my favorite things in Flusser is his use of the word “magic.” The real issue with technical images is what he calls their “bewitching” quality. They throw you back into the cave with candlelight and dancing images. It’s a kind of ritual hallucination. He uses the word “hallucination” quite a bit, which is uncanny now when people talk about AI hallucinating.

WW: For Flusser, every stage of consciousness is a hallucination of a different order. Each has its own expectation, or protocol, of knowledge and truth.

The magical thinking of images hallucinates recurrence. Historical consciousness hallucinates sequence. The consciousness of technical images hallucinates meaning in surfaces projected by apparatuses. LLMs seem to do something similar with writing: They invite us to hallucinate meaning onto surfaces produced by code.

MS: This is where Flusser is useful. He’s not simply asking whether an image or text is true or not. He is asking what apparatus produced it, what program it belongs to, and what kind of freedom remains possible within or against that program.

WW: Which brings us back to dialogue. As your book shows, Flusser’s theory of communication was never abstracted from life. So perhaps the question now is less about how AI bears on truth than whether dialogue can still produce something new within systems increasingly designed to simulate it.

MS: Exactly. Dialogue is not secondary to the system. It may be one of the few ways to avoid becoming a functionary of it.

A collection of Martha Schwendener’s 2026 presentations on Vilém Flusser is forthcoming this fall from End of Medium and Library Stack.