Feed your bedridden mother rice pudding
I have to say that I really like Vilem Flusser. I also have to wonder if I like Flusser or if it's really Nancy Ann Roth's work in translation that I like. I have had the same questions about translated poetry before too--is it the poet (Szymborska, Leopardi, etc) or the translator who is brilliant? Probably both.
But Flusser thinks about and plays with word origins in a way that works for me, and though he is clearly falling in line with McLuhan (mosaics and print thinking, for two examples) I like how he says it much better.
I also just got to the section where Flusser suggests that our fears about the loss of reading are really fears that people will become robots ("The information revolution could turn people into receivers who remix messages uncritically, that is, into Robots--Flusser 77). As soon as I started this blog, tumblr suggested that I start following twicr--This Week in Creepy Robots. I have resisted cross posting so far, but you should follow them. In some ways, their posts go along nicely with our readings.
Oh dear, this is becoming a robot post. Because Flusser also says "Subsequent instructions tend to become value-free, until finally, user's manuals apply to functional behavior only. So it concerns a depoliticization and functionalization of behavior, which can be read from the syntactical construction of instructions" (57). Thou-shalts, and shoulds are removed. This means that should-nots and thou-shalt nots are removed too. This reminds me of the way we currently operate American military drones. There is an operating center in the desert of Nevada, from which people operate drones striking in various and sundry parts of the world. I've read that operators have begun to identify their targets as "squirters" (formerly known as humans, I think), and there are calculations made about whether or not the drones should strike depending on the number of "squirters" in range and the priority, or likely priority, of the targets (how high on the list are they?) So, while Flusser may be mocking this roboticization/ depoliticization of writing and instructions, I think he's onto something, something that bothers at least me.
But, the title of this post comes from a section where Flusser says that ideas like "treat your parents well" can actually be broken down into a series of instructions for robots that can be followed. "All modes of behavior," he says, "can be programmed and automated. It is a matter of breaking the behavior down into its constituent elements, into actemes, and then computing them back together again" (58).
Perhaps that's enough for one post. I'll come back later to talk about the cool stuff he says about poetry, music, etc, and I'll also update you on my count of his use of the word "mosaic."
