The Brooklyn Rail

In 1966, the Czech-born philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920–91) wrote an essay titled “Da ficção” (“On Fiction”), which was published in Jornal O Diário de Ribeirão Preto. The essay is a meditation on reality versus fiction in the post-World War II era and bears revisiting.

Flusser’s own reality had been upended. Born in Prague to a Jewish intellectual family, he was forced to migrate to Brazil after the 1939 Nazi invasion. His entire nuclear family perished in the holocaust. Flusser became a philosopher and media theorist—despite the fact that he never earned a college degree—and is best known for his technical image trilogy, written in the 1980s (e.g., Towards a Philosophy of Photography from 1983), which expanded thinking about images and apparatuses in the digital era. However, he also wrote about design, migration, and Zionism.

In “On Fiction,” Flusser juxtaposes two propositions, one he takes from Newton and one from Wittgenstein: Hypotheses non fingo (I feign no hypotheses) versus “Science discovers nothing: it invents it.” The distance between these two statements demonstrated, for Flusser, “loss of faith in the established and discovered reality.” For him, we now exist in an “atmosphere” of fiction.

Even science supports this, he argued. A table can be considered from multiple angles: as an industrial product, a work of art or an electromagnetic and gravitational field; solid and hollow at the same time (from the viewpoint of physics). But which of these perspectives is true? Phenomenology could help these coordinates to coalesce, such that the table becomes the sum of all fictions that shape it. Or perhaps reality is what exists between the coordinates.

Later, Flusser would write about television as a technology that blurs fiction and reality, and photographers like Joan Fontcuberta, who explored truth in photography—particularly photography’s application in scientific fields. Biotechnology was teasing the boundaries of “artificial” and “real,” and Flusser explored this in his “Curie’s Children” column for Artforum (1986–92).

Flusser’s thought coincided with many post-structuralist thinkers who argued against grand narratives and singular observable truths. Derrida questioned The Truth in Painting (1978) and Baudrillard posited the simulacra—wildly popular in the US art world, where, under Reagan, a former Hollywood actor, life itself seemed like a simulation. More recently, however, the question has been posed: did “postmodern” relativism contribute to the Post-Truth moment, and particularly the corrosively alternative-facts-conspiracy-theory aspects of our era?

Sure—in the same way the internet and social media have been harnessed to nefarious ends. (Regarding the “hollow” table, Eyal Weizman has written about how the Israeli military studied Deleuze, Guattari, and Debord to theorize immaterial walls they could glide through—although there were generally real people on the other side of those walls.) Truth has become increasingly relative in the age of algorithms. Perform a Google search for the shape of the Earth—or any other “fact”—in different regions and you will get opposing answers.

There is another way to view the relativism of “postmodern” theory (a fraught term which I use anyway to signify a particular grouping and period of quasi-radical thought). Flusser called his thinking “science fiction philosophy” to highlight its adjacency to a certain time, place, and way of thinking. His “parabiology” opus Vampyroteuthis infernalis (1987) functioned as a science-fiction fable in which Western traditions might be questioned or overturned. Biotechnology was an epistemological issue for Flusser because biology itself is a human-created science. The text was accompanied by Louis Bec’s drawings of fantastical creatures that looked like actual scientific illustrations, including one of Vampyroteuthis. The fable asked: how is the Vampyroteuthis, which has thrived for millions of years in its habitat, an analogue to humans? More importantly, what might we learn from such animals? (This, decades before My Octopus Teacher.)

Science fiction has been used as a model for rethinking history, science, and gender by many writers, not just Flusser. Donna Haraway argued in her “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) that the boundary between science fiction and social reality is “an optical illusion” and Octavia Butler’s stories and novels imagined different outcomes—“Afrofutures”—for the African diaspora. Like many of these thinkers, Flusser was leaving behind critique for envisioning. So I will end with a quotation from the second book in the technical image trilogy, Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985), which inspired his friend and collaborator Harun Farocki—who also explored the world of truth and fiction. Flusser wrote that “we are about to reach a level of consciousness in which the search for deep coherence, explanation, enumeration, narration, and calculation, in short, and historical, scientific, and textually linear thinking is being surpassed.” Hence, “we no longer see any sense in trying to distinguish between something illusionary and something non-illusionary, between fiction and reality.” As Flusser says, “we must abandon such categories as true-false, real-artificial, or real-apparent in favor of categories such as concrete-abstract. The power to envision is the power of drawing the concrete out of the abstract.”