Mira Schendel’s Gesture: On Art in Vilém Flusser’s Thought, with ‘Mira Schendel’ by Flusser

Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) is currently best-known as a theorist of new media, a term he would have defined as ‘communication technology since photography’. However, he most often described himself as a writer and his project as a comprehensive theory of human communication, terms that are considerably more helpful in grasping his sense of art as movement, as a particular expression of human consciousness and not as a set of objects. 

A native of Prague, Flusser emigrated to Brazil in 1940, then returned to live in Europe in 1972. When his first book, Língua e Realidade (Language and Reality) was published in Brazil in 1963, his main focus was on the criticism of literature. But he wrote criticism of specific art exhibitions, both in Brazil and later, after he returned to Europe. He participated in the planning and promotion of the São Paulo Bienale, and later contributed to the American art journals Artforum International and Leonardo.3 A reader of his many books and articles on an eclectic range of subjects will nonetheless be puzzled by references to art that sometimes dismiss, sometimes prescribe, and sometimes embrace art as tantamount to creativity itself, equivalent to what we think of as human.4 There is no comprehensive theory. The closest equivalent is a description of artistic gesture, a pattern of movement associated with a particular kind of consciousness. But in this way, art does figure in a very comprehensive theory, for Flusser’s theory of gesture proposes nothing less than a new way of defining and valuing the way human beings make and share meaning.

The foregoing remarks are vulnerable to the charge of anachronism, for they draw on an idea of gesture that seems unlikely to have figured in the direct exchange between Flusser and Schendel, that is, in the actual, face-to-face conversations that took place on the terrace of the Flussers’ apartment in São Paulo between the 1950s and early 1970s. Among the few sources of information about the exchange is the short essay ‘Mira Schendel’ that is part of Flusser’s autobiography, Bodenlos [rootless or foundationless] and is reproduced here as an appendix.5 Although Bodenlos was not actually published until 1992, it was written in the early 1970s, when Flusser was literally and figuratively between Brazil and Europe, reflecting on the immediate past in anticipation of imminent change. The text of ‘Mira Schendel’, which appears in the section titled ‘Dialogues’, describes an emotionally turbulent yet sturdy friendship.6 He assures us that Schendel always controlled the content of the conversations, and that the topic was always her work. To take him at his word, then, it was a situation in which he was obliged to think from her point of view, to enter into the intensity, the emotional volatility, the uncompromising materiality of her way of being in the world. He says that relationship taxed his patience; it would seem it taxed her patience as well. For although she had a very high regard for at least one earlier statement he had written about her work,7 what she read in the manuscript of the text in Bodenlos made her angry: the time of frequent and intense discussion between them had largely ended, even before Flusser and his wife left Brazil.8  

Schendel continued, nevertheless, to be a force in Flusser’s thinking. The two quotations reproduced above, both very difficult to date with any certainty, provide evidence of a shared interest in a very subtle, very ephemeral event, in ‘catching’ something intangible – a thought, an idea – long enough to make its meaning available to others. ‘Catch’ – the same verb in both quotations – seems to involve a physical, embodied movement, returning again to the idea of a gesture, a physical movement, as distinct from an object. There is no point in asking which of the two thoughts came first, or which ‘caused’ the other: Flusser categorised his exchange with Schendel as a dialogue, a term he consistently defined, first, as a free, interested exchange of information between two different memories, and, second, as the one and only way human beings can create something genuinely new. Just by putting the statement about Schendel in the ‘Dialogues’ section of the book, he was ascribing a very high value to what had transpired between them. And he went on to be more specific: ‘For Mira, I am a genuine critic’, he wrote. ‘I influence her work. And she presents me with genuine issues that need to be thought and worked through.’9  

Schendel’s impact on Flusser cannot be definitively ‘proven’. Among other reasons, he notoriously failed to acknowledge sources in his published texts. But Schendel raised ‘genuine issues’, and the loss of direct contact in itself would not have resolved them. In any case, by heuristically supposing Schendel to have been ‘there’, present in his thinking, Flusser’s widely dispersed, even apparently contradictory references to art seem to coalesce and to suggest the scope of the demands Schendel’s project made on his theory.

Traditional and technical images

Schendel and Flusser were only a year apart in age. For both, German had been the language – or one of the languages – of childhood, and Judaism had been a factor in their earliest religious experience, although Schendel was educated in Catholic schools. Both had been the object of religious persecution, and after emigrating to Brazil, in 1940 and 1949, respectively, they shared the status of ‘expellees’. Flusser used the term in his well-known essay, ‘Exile and Creativity’ to describe people in a completely unfamiliar situation, constantly confronted with such vast quantities of new information as to have to filter and shape it creatively in order to survive.10 Both expellees had had to abruptly abandon their formal education, and although both investigated the possibility of going back to earn formal qualifications, both decided against it, preferring to pursue a broad range of studies independently, guided by immediate interests, needs and opportunities.  Among these was a keen awareness of language itself.

They were hardly alone. Abruptly plunged as they were into a completely new culture, they surely felt the force of language with exceptional intensity. But a heightened consciousness of language was noticeable across diverse disciplines and institutional contexts at that moment, noticeable enough to acquire the name the linguistic turn, the title of an influential collection of philosophical essays published in 1967.11 The date falls comfortably within the timespan of conversations with Schendel on the Flussers’ terrace in São Paolo, and there are grounds for supposing some resonance with the heightened awareness of language that was felt at that particular moment in art as well as philosophy, in Europe and the United States. And yet Flusser’s dialogue with Schendel, grounded in a quite extensive shared cultural – and arguably especially religious – memory, seems to have facilitated a radical rethinking of the way concepts relate to art.

Flusser was relatively new to art criticism when he met Schendel. As he had long since adopted phenomenology as his main philosophical method, however, he may well have tried, in keeping with the philosopher Edmund Husserl’s epoché, or reduction, to ‘bracket out’ whatever assumptions he brought to the table regarding the relationship of image to text.  Above all, he may have felt philosophically obligated not to try to attempt any causal ‘explanation’ of Schendel’s work. The project would rather be to enter into Schendel’s position, to gain some insight into the challenges she faced by seeking parallels between his practice as a writer and hers as a maker. It would have raised the relationship between text and image as a central issue. And here, writer and artist did have some common ground. As Geraldo de Souza Diaz points out in his excellent monograph on Schendel, published in 2000:

Flusser clearly shared Schendel’s familiarity with these aspects of Jewish thought, for the ban on images figures prominently in his subsequent writing. In fact, he seems never to have seriously doubted that writing is fiercely and intractably antagonistic toward images. Given a phenomenological understanding of the relationship of consciousness to its objects, this intractable antagonism became the basis for his history of communications media. In this view, writing always sought to dominate images – or more exactly, writing consciousness tried to dominate image consciousness. It took a long time: ‘Only in the eighteenth century, after a three-thousand-year struggle, did texts succeed in pushing images, with their magic and myth, into such corners as museums and the unconscious.’13 But by the time of Flusser’s own writing, in the 1980s, the tables were again turning not exactly back to previous conditions but definitely against writing.  

For whereas writing is capable of channelling, controlling the meaning of traditional images such as drawing and painting, it cannot control the meanings of images produced by cameras, video recorders and synthesizers. This is the difference Flusser makes between traditional and technical images. Cameras, sound recorders and synthesizers – in his word, ‘apparatuses’ – can penetrate past what human beings can actually see or hear or touch. They reach in to a level at which the world is a mass of whirling particles, meaningless in itself. The apparatus can confer a meaning. Most technical images are still made and used as if they were traditional (in particular, photographs are still ordinarily understood and used as if they were paintings or drawings). But technical images potentially store more information, manipulate and distribute it far faster and more efficiently than linear, alphanumeric text ever could. Flusser’s writing is not rich in specific examples, but it seems useful to think of images that consolidate scientific data visually, assigning visual qualities – shape, scale, colour – to, say, measurements of speed or temperature, creating an image from information that no one could possibly ‘see’.

The theory of technical images was elaborated after direct dialogue with Schendel had ended. And yet the idea seems to be there in outline form already in the early 1970s, in the short essay ‘Mira Schendel’, where it is implied that her images are no longer ‘traditional’:

It also seems clear that Mira did not make what Flusser termed, in retrospect, ‘technical images’, for Flusser defined them as images made by an apparatus. Still, he writes that her images reverse the ‘traditional’ relationship of images to texts. As he describes it, her ‘things’ (more on the difficulty with the designation ‘work’ below) are not available to theorisation or explanation: in some sense, they already are theory. In fact, Flusser takes considerable care to avoid the presumption of explaining her work. He doubles up his discussion, so that two perspectives, roughly ‘his’ and ‘hers’, appear: the description of the content of their verbal dialogue might be considered ‘his’, and the close visual descriptions of the two pieces, one Graphic Object and one Notebook, are ‘hers’. The text closes with a passage that positions Schendel’s project roughly in parallel to his own, both being responses to a shared contemporary situation. Her ‘voice’ is her work.       

Flusser is not alone among media theorists in associating writing with a particular form of consciousness, or in projecting a culture after writing, a time when writing becomes a rather esoteric skill, if not altogether extinct. He does appear to be unique in his sense of antagonism between writing consciousness (he calls it ‘historical’ consciousness) and image-based consciousness. Nor is it a conflict that has been resolved in the past. On the contrary, he experiences it as a regular feature of his own – and presumably others’ – writing. An idea comes in the form of an image.15 In order to write the idea down, he must attack it, shattering it into word-scaled pieces, forcing it to follow the grammatical and orthographic rules of a specific language. His description of Schendel’s procedure suggests something like the reverse, only in some ways also a move forward. He reaches a concept by writing it; she goes on to turn a concept to a new kind of image. 

Rather than the conventional relationship between artist and writer, then, in which the writer writes about and explains the artist’s work, Flusser suggests a sense in which the image might supersede writing, in which the artist might imagine the writer’s idea, and in which writing could disappear.16

Art and information

In the Bodenlos article, Flusser acknowledges Schendel as a great artist. Yet the analysis that follows makes no particular reference to art. With certain notable exceptions to be discussed below, when Flusser discusses art in his writing, he invariably does so from the ‘outside’, from the position of a critic, observing, listening, and receiving. Perhaps particularly in the books published in the 1980s, he writes as someone who sees art as one kind of message, that is, as information. In broad outline, the theory he advances defines information in terms of probability and improbability: the more improbable a given event or object is, the more informative. In this context, human being are engaged in a kind of permanent struggle against the forces of entropy, the overall tendency of the world to gradually lose information, so that everything becomes more and more probable, predictable. The tendency to resist entropy, negentropy, is another word for creativity. Nature created the world – very slowly – and continues to create at the rate improbable events occur, rarely and randomly. But human beings are capable of creating – which is to say of generating new information – much more quickly and deliberately.17 They can do it under one simple, but absolute condition: there must be dialogue. New information comes exclusively from dialogue, that is, from a free exchange of information between two memories. The two memories may be aspects of a single mind – a possibility that largely accounts for the ‘lonely genius’ model of creativity. There may also be a dialogue between an organic, human memory and an artificial one, such as a library or archive or memory stored on a server. But the really exciting form of creativity involves an exchange between two human memories – provided these are free and equal rather than forced or predetermined. His concern for the immediate future is that in our society, reliant as it is on forms of communication that are increasingly automated, genuine dialogue is becoming close to impossible: a society that does not generate new information will become completely predictable – and humanly unbearable. It is in the interests of preserving the possibility of dialogue (creativity), then, that Flusser discusses the task of art criticism, again, with the tools of information theory: the more improbable and informative a given gesture may be, the higher its value as art – and this will be the case whether the object in question in an image, musical performance, new algorithm, scientific insight or business plan. Treating art as information leads him to some startling and irreverent conclusions, for example, the possibility that our inherited concept of art effectively blocks our perception of new, especially new digital images,18 or that the idea of an avant-garde, just by virtue of its isolation, is ‘ridiculous’.19 But perhaps more startling than either of these is the insistence that any future art criticism will have to accommodate the tendency for new information to become old, familiar – it will have to take the formation of habit into account.20

The engagement with information theory does not, on the surface, seem to involve Schendel. It is highly abstract, impersonal, and the relationship with her was neither.  What links the two is clearly dialogue. In the sustained concern with Schendel’s on-going project, with her thinking and experimenting, elations, frustrations, demands and above all persistence, Flusser had seen the force of dialogue for himself, experienced it producing new information, in this case new both highly improbable objects and equally improbable ideas. He could write about creativity and dialogue with phenomenological confidence. 

He would, further, resist any thought that dialogue might diminish difference, might blur the distinct features, the identities of the separate participants. It comes to something of a test in his vision of artists of the future (no longer called ‘artists’, for in the universe of technical images they are so different from traditional artists as to have acquired the name “Einbildner’ or ‘envisioners’). After warning us about the tendency of technical images to steer us toward intolerable sameness and boredom, Flusser goes on to envision them used creatively, that is, in dialogue. Toward the end of Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985), he treats himself to a rather extravagant vision of how this might look (the weakness of the term ‘images’ is exposed here, because the material being exchanged might be acoustic or tactile, as well as visible). In his description, the exchange is truly exhilarating – like musical improvisation in multiple dimensions, sensitive to harmonies and dissonance, to the particular strengths and weaknesses of the particular players, totally absorbing, culminating in a joyous suspension of self-awareness.21 Yet Flusser insists that such creative exchange does not result in any diminished sense of self but that, on the contrary, it provides the ideal conditions for recognising, acknowledging and appreciating what is singular, unique about any one person’s characteristic contribution. Even in this rather fantastic bit of science fiction, then, Flusser does not contradict his own direct experience of dialogue. 

Gesture and the artistic life 

If information theory seems to gain and lose prominence in Flusser’s thought over time, his grounding in phenomenology is constant. One of the best examples is his persistent engagement with the thoroughly phenomenological idea of gesture. The three books in which he outlined his theory of communication appeared in quite rapid succession, in 1983, 1985 and 1987, respectively.22 The volume titled Gesten (Gestures), first published in 1991, ‘traces back to years of talks and courses Vilém Flusser gave in São Paulo and Aix-en-Provence’.23 The book bears witness to a striking continuity in his thinking. It suggests someone moving around his objects of study – a bit like the photographer he describes in ‘The Gesture of Photographing’ moving around his subject, changing the distance, changing the angle, finding what he may not have quite known he was seeking. The book consists of eighteen essays. Two are introductory, and sixteen bear the title, ‘The Gesture of …’. Many of the gestures correspond to established ‘media’, for example, writing, painting, videoing or filming. Some, such as ‘The Gesture of Planting’, take up a broad historical shift in social consciousness, in this case the rise and spread of ecological awareness. Still others examine such repetitive, familiar movements as shaving. 

‘The Gesture of Writing’ comes first after the introductions, and, in this context, it quickly becomes identifiable as an analysis of Flusser’s own most characteristic gesture – the one through which he articulates his own way of being in the world most effectively. From here, we move out, with him, either as participants or as spectators of the various gestures, and Flusser takes care to state his own experience – or lack of it – in each case. ‘The Gesture of Painting’, for example, is written from the standpoint of someone observing a painting-in-progress, for Flusser did not paint. In fact, within the collection, ‘The Gesture of Painting’ presents a kind of primer in the phenomenological method, the careful bracketing out of prior knowledge about the matter at hand. It starts with a deliberate refusal to accept that the painter is the ‘cause’ of the painting, or even that the ‘painter’ can be regarded as separate from his or her brush or pigment or canvas. The memorable conclusions he reaches here include the idea that a painter is really only a painter in the gesture of painting itself, in the actual movement. 

Nothing in ‘The Gesture of Painting’ contradicts the memory of Schendel. And yet her presence seems far stronger in another essay, “The Gesture of Smoking a Pipe’. The title hardly announces any discussion of art, and so it comes as something of a surprise to find Flusser using pipe-smoking to establish both a weak connection and a very sharp distinction between himself and a ‘real’ artist. For, of course it is Flusser himself who is the pipe-smoker.

The essay is concerned with a classification of gesture, and more particularly with the classification of ritual gesture. The broad contention – argued in more detail elsewhere – is that, with allowances for overlap, a given gesture will belong to one of three broad categories: work, communication or ritual. He argues that pipe-smoking belongs to the third category, ritual – defined as a gesture that is meaningful without either changing anything, as work is intended to do, or communicating anything. This furnishes the occasion to look more closely at ritual, and in particular at religious ritual. He emphasises how Jewish tradition in particular guards zealously against any association between its rituals and, for example, magic – for magic seeks to have an effect in the world, and so constitutes a form of work. He himself seems somewhat startled to conclude that ritual gesture is essentially aesthetic – not concerned to change the world or to communicate anything but to ‘act out’ a unique way of being in the world. And it is on this last point that his pipe-smoking is drawn into the comparison – because it, too, is only an expression of a singular, personal set of judgements with no further ambitions. Pipe-smoking is exposed as a pale, small example of ritual, only just enough to appreciate the kind of gesture that dominates ritual lives, the lives of priests, prophets – and artists:

The real artist, then, is someone who lives in ‘renunciation of reason and the unconditional surrender in and to the gesture’. It is someone quite different from a person for whom the aesthetic gesture is superficial, as pipe-smoking was for Flusser himself. I contend that Mira Schendel had shown him such a life. She presented him with a challenge of such intensity and consistency that it burst the boundaries of any understanding of art available to him at the time. He was forced to develop another.  In a sense, he never recovered the lost boundaries, for they dissolved in the much broader context of gesture. As gesture, art emerged as a particular kind movement, an expression of a one kind of intention rather than a vast inventory of objects, or ‘works’.  Set free of physical objects, art flows out of dedicated institutions and becomes a particular dimension, an intensity, a level of commitment potentially available in any human activity at all.

Appendix: ‘Mira Schendel’ by Vilém Flusser (published in 1992)

Dialogue with her blew hot and cold, both in terms of its intensity and its emotional charge. This wild oscillation is in Mira’s character. She, and in fact she alone always determined the way the dialogue went. It is not that she was deliberately using me (or any of her other partners) as tools. Just the opposite: open and unattached, she seeks genuine companionship. But there is an impatience in her, a kind of simmering fanaticism that puts everyone who comes close to her in danger of being objectified, even though this does not correspond to her own feelings and desires. When she encounters weak people, she can destroy them, even against her will and to her own regret. When she encounters people able and willing to resist (and I certainly count myself among them), sparks fly. In this, shall we say ‘electrifying’ sense, contact with Mira was at points exceptionally fruitful for me, if also very tiring, demanding patience I do not actually possess. I managed to do it for Mira for two completely independent reasons. I admire the great artist in her (in her way, the greatest in my immediate acquaintance). And I trust her without reservation, as one can trust only those whose ethical and intellectual integrity is not in doubt. In short, I am bound to her in constant friendship, despite her highs and lows. This friendship forms the pivot around which her wildly fluctuating attitudes toward me can be expressed at all.

I will try to distil two key points from the dialogue with her, at the same time proposing that not only Mira’s work, but some of the most important developments in contemporary visual art as a whole move elliptically around the same two points. They are ‘transparency’ and ‘meaning’. And I will try to bring these two key points into view twice, once as they appeared in the course of the dialogue, and again as they appear in Mira’s work. Of course there is feedback between the two means of observation. Our dialogues affected Mira’s work (as they did mine, I hasten to add). And Mira’s work was the topic of the dialogue. That was the productive thing about our relationship: for Mira, I am a genuine critic: I influence her work. And she presents me with genuine issues that need to be thought and worked through.

‘Transparency’ is the result of a capacity of human vision to penetrate through the surface of things. This distinguishes human vision from all other kinds. Human vision is not necessarily turned back from surrounding surfaces, and this is the reason human beings do not necessarily live, as an animal does, in an ‘environment’. There can be either disciplined or brute25 penetration of the surface into the depth of things, and it is this depth that gives human beings the experience of a ‘life world’. I mentioned disciplined and brute ways of making things transparent. In the first one (for example, the methods of scientific discourse), penetrating, searching vision uncovers increasingly abstract, formal, empty backgrounds, against which those things visible to ‘naïve’ vision move back and forth as if they were just surfaces. To the penetrating vision in the second method of making things transparent (for example, in mystical, phenomenological or artistic observation), voids appear abruptly behind the surfaces, and the look encounters no objects, only nothingness. Now the disciplined method is ‘progressive’ in the sense that it moves from a formal to an even more formal background, from empty to even emptier. Today it is about to ‘discover’, by disciplined methods, the same voids that brute vision supposed were there all along. Soon, then, there will be no objects in our life world. We are surrounded by transparent structures, through which we in fact see ‘nothing’, only endless rows of more transparent structures, and this in all directions, even inwards. We have become transparent even to ourselves. The result of this, the world’s being without objects, is that we ourselves are somehow not there. For to be there, to exist, means to be in a world of objects. There can be no subject without an object. That is the problem of transparency in my dialogues with Mira.  

‘Meaning’ is what symbols refer to. Symbols are consciously or unconsciously conventionalised things that represent other things, in fact that represent those things available to the conventions (‘codes’). For those who can ‘decode’ the symbols, the things the symbols represent is their meaning. This, the meaning of a symbol, can in turn be another symbol, and so hierarchies of symbols arise. The ordering of symbols into hierarchies, the provision of a suitable index, is one of the problems of language philosophy and of ‘perception theory’ as a whole at present. But none of this alters the premise that there are, in the final analysis, things that are not themselves symbols, but so-called ‘concrete things’. These concrete things would be meaningless in themselves (that is, not symbols), but would be the final meaning of all symbols. To make symbols, then, would be to give the concrete things of the world new meaning, in the sense that every new symbol refers to the concrete world from another angle, so to speak. This would then be the function of the ‘mind’: to symbolise and to constantly propose new codes. 

But when the entire world has become transparent, that is to say that it is ‘not concrete’, then, everything is symbolic, and no symbol has any final meaning any more. Everything means everything, which is essentially to say it means nothing at all. When the world no longer has any objects, it becomes meaningless to ‘think’. ‘Transparency’ basically means, then: it is possible to see through any meaning. And ‘meaning’ basically means, then: it is possible to make any object that seems to be opaque transparent. These are the co-ordinates of the contemporary situation as it appears to a thinking person, but in particular to a visual artist. I will now try to describe how it expresses itself in Mira’s work.   

Let us describe two of her works. One is a sheet that hangs freely in space, suspended from the ceiling. It consists of two transparent sheets of acrylic about one and a half meters square, fastened together. Between the two sheets, very thin pieces of rice paper have been mounted in such a way that they overlap one another in places. The papers have been marked with black signs. Other signs have been inscribed on the four sides (the two inside, and two outside) of the acrylic sheets. Since it is all perfectly transparent, the observer is looking at a text through which he can see the room. And because the sheet swings easily with any air movement, the observer sees a text that changes constantly in space (in its context). The text offers itself to the observer from two sides, the two surfaces of the hanging sheet. Of course, it is the same text seen from two sides, but the one is not only the mirror image of the other, but the various layers appear in reverse order. The text consists of at least four different kinds of signs: letters of type, letters of Latin script, numbers and elements of calligraphic writing. These signs take on a particular form depending on the angle at which the observer is looking, that is as traditional lines, as vertical lines, as diagonal lines and as lines in a third dimension. Many of these forms yield words and sentences in various languages, giving the impression that one has somehow formed these words and sentences oneself.  Others yield images of scenes, such as that of a swarm of bees consisting of ‘a’, or an army of ‘b’s’ on the march. Still others yield geometric formations (spirals, for example). But all of these shapes call one another into question, because many can see through them and so reject them. The overall impression is one of a completely meaningless text, yet one that can be deciphered at any point if one focuses attention on just that point. In this sense the sheet is a map of the world as it currently presents itself to human beings in its transparency and ultimate meaninglessness. All the while, the work makes a clear aesthetic impression: it fascinates, and demands continual decoding, to say nothing of its decorative function in the room. Despite its transparency, the sheet dominates its entire environment.

Another of Mira’s works is a notebook, about 30 by 20 cm in size. It is one of a series of notebooks that differ from one another in format and theme. Nevertheless, the series forms a unity, one might say a library of the future. If I describe one single notebook, I am taking it out of its context, thereby losing one of its dimensions, namely the one between notebooks. The one I have chosen consists of about 40 pages (I am describing it from memory), and the pages are of transparent oiled paper, reminiscent of cellophane. It is possible to page through in the familiar way, or to turn the pages 360° along a horizontal axis. In doing this, two texts appear to the reader, one on either side of the axis. The topic of notebook I have chosen is ‘b’. This letter appears on most of the pages of the notebook, either alone somewhere on the page, or touching the inner or outer edge of a circle. But there are also pages that contain only circles, as well as empty pages. In paging through quickly, the reader finds that letter appears to move, and to dance around a circle or to escape from the notebook, in a way familiar from slides. In rotating the pages, the observer is presented with choices about how many transparent pages to bring forward, and so which combination of texts to view. The crucial thing about the text is, however, that it appears to turn not only in a third, but also in a fourth dimension, for the ‘b’ not only changes abruptly into ‘d’, but also into ‘p’ and ‘q’ in a way that can be seen, but not actually ‘understood’, since it continues to be a shock each time it happens. It is roughly the same feeling one would have if the right and left hands could be made congruent. One gets the feeling of being in the presence of something that is mysterious in its simplicity, and of sensing an obligation to take it in (and that is probably one indication of genuine art).

The first of the two works described here was shown in the Venice Biennale, the second in the Bienal de São Paulo. Mira gave me both, and they are now in my [‘paulistaner’] apartment. I wrote about the first work in the Brazilian press, and believe I was able in this way to contribute to Mira’s influence and to her self understanding. Mira sent a translation of my criticism to Max Bense in Stuttgart, who characteristically did not ‘understand’ it. Bense’s reticence is worth mentioning because it is, as I see it, a symptom of the aesthetic crisis in which we find ourselves today.

The two works can be seen from at least three sides. They can first be regarded as experiments, secondly as toys and thirdly as things that suddenly appear in our environment. I will pass lightly over the second and third ways of seeing them, and spend a little more time with the first.

Seen as a toy, the notebook develops the sheet further. Both works permit me to make my own texts, and to enjoy doing this as I would enjoy making a new discovery, but the notebook gives me greater freedom of action, not only in the concrete sense of ‘handling’ the pages, but also in the sense of a dialogue with Mira. Not only can I see, but I can also feel, in my fingertips, the level of intelligence, patience and technical perfection with which Mira literally suggested this notebook to me, and I can take up this suggestion. For these are toys for people on Mira’s level, for her partners. Of course there is much to be said about this, but lack of space keeps me from further comment.

As a thing in my environment, the sheet develops the notebook further.  Characteristic of this thing is that it is ‘reversibly’ transparent, in comparison to most of the others.  Most of the other things appear opaque and become transparent if I penetrate them with my searching or observing vision. But Mira’s things demand that I constrain my vision in order to see them at all. They force my vision into a reverse dynamic, and in doing so force my whole attitude toward the world into a ‘turn’ (as Heidegger would say). I am not supposed to ‘explain’ it, that is (for it is already entirely clear), I am meant to ‘assemble’ it. It makes these things ‘revolutionary’, that is, suddenly completely different from everything that is familiar to me. It suggests that the meaninglessness and transparency of the world might be overcome, and in this sense it points toward the future. This, too, could be discussed at length, greater for the sheet than for the notebook, and one could contend that it would still be only a beginning.

I have been intensively engaged with the works as experiments for a long time. We have before us an attempt to present thought constructions (‘concepts’) to us as images, to make them imaginable. To say it concretely, Mira tries to translate the concept of transparency and the concept of meaning into a realisation (performance) of transparency and a realisation of meaning. That is, an inversion of the traditional function of ‘imagine’ and ‘understand’. Traditionally, thinking goes something like this:  I encounter something concrete. I form an image of this concrete thing (I ‘imagine’ it), so as to acquaint myself with it. And then I translate my image into a concept, so as to understand the concrete thing and be able to handle it. Historically, the phase of imagining is the mythical-magical one, and the phase of understanding is the epistemological-technical one (in fact, this briefly describes the structure of Western civilisation). With Mira, it comes to a qualitative reversal. She starts from the concept and tries to imagine it. She uses her imaginative powers to make the world of ideas concrete, rather that to grasp the world of concrete things (for this world slips through our fingers). One aspect of the contemporary world of ideas is that it has become unimaginable. This has a great deal to do with our alienation: we cannot imagine what our ideas (for example, our scientific ideas) mean. A new kind of imaginary power is required to do it, and Mira mobilises this new power for us.

That is of extraordinary importance; for these experiments show a new way for human beings to be in the world. Until now, it was something like this: a human being faced the concrete world. He objectified this concrete world by inserting an intermediary imaginary world between himself and it. Then he objectified the imaginary world by inserting a world of concepts between himself and the world of suppositions. In this way human beings freed themselves from the world twice over, and alienated themselves from it, becoming ‘subjects of the world’ in this doubled sense. Now, however, human beings are beginning to insert an intermediary imaginary layer between themselves and the world of concepts (Mira’s experiments show it). Human beings are beginning to free themselves from their concepts by objectifying them, and this in the form of realisations. People are beginning to live among realised concepts. That, I believe, is what is called ‘structural’, ‘synchronic’, ‘post-historic’ being. Concepts are processes. They are discursive and linear, holding what has been imagined in rows. But imagined things are situations: they are synthetic, two-dimensional, and hold things on surfaces. To make a concept into an image is to turn what is diachronic into something synchronic, to collapse a process. Mira’s works, which make concepts imaginable, are the first steps toward a revolution in human existence. 

(From Vilém Flusser, Bodenlos: Eine philosophische Biographie, Bensheim and Düsseldorf 1992, pp.197–206, trans. by Nancy Ann Roth.)