Does Writing Have a Future?

Vilém Flusser

Translated by Nancy Ann Roth

Introduction by Mark Poster

A prescient exploration of the fate of the book in the digital age

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208 Pages, 5 x 8 in

Paperback
9780816670239
Published: February 24, 2011
Series: Electronic Mediations

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eBook
9781452924076
Published: February 24, 2011
Series: Electronic Mediations

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Does Writing Have a Future?

Series: Electronic Mediations

Vilém Flusser

Translated by Nancy Ann Roth

Introduction by Mark Poster

ISBN: 9780816670239

Publication date: February 24th, 2011

208 Pages

8 x 5

"Vilém Flusser’s flashes of brilliant insight, his intuitions about the psychology of gadgets and convergences, his deeply well-read and philosophically grounded investigations of wide-ranging consequences of a new literacy, are widely admired and deserve an Anglophone audience. Into the Universe of Technical Images and Does Writing Have a Future? are of the first rank in the canon of new media studies and digital culture." —Peter Krapp, author of Déjà Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory

"Perhaps a turn to Flusser will change the disregard for media that so characterizes the cultural theory of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. For Flusser, however flamboyant and polemical his writing at times is, thought deeply about the emergence of electronic media and its implications for not only Western but truly global culture." —Mark Poster, from the Introduction

In Does Writing Have a Future?, a remarkably perceptive work first published in German in 1987, Vilém Flusser asks what will happen to thought and communication as written communication gives way, inevitably, to digital expression. In his introduction, Flusser proposes that writing does not, in fact, have a future because everything that is now conveyed in writing—and much that cannot be—can be recorded and transmitted by other means.

Confirming Flusser’s status as a theorist of new media in the same rank as Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and Friedrich Kittler, the balance of this book teases out the nuances of these developments. To find a common denominator among texts and practices that span millennia, Flusser looks back to the earliest forms of writing and forward to the digitization of texts now under way. For Flusser, writing—despite its limitations when compared to digital media—underpins historical consciousness, the concept of progress, and the nature of critical inquiry. While the text as a cultural form may ultimately become superfluous, he argues, the art of writing will not so much disappear but rather evolve into new kinds of thought and expression.

Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) was born in Prague; emigrated to Brazil, where he taught philosophy and wrote a daily newspaper colum; and later moved to France. Among his many books that have been translated into English are The Shape of Things, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, The Freedom of the Migrant, and Writings (Minnesota, 2004). Nancy Ann Roth is an arts writer and critic based in the United Kingdom. Mark Poster is professor of history at University of California, Irvine.

An Introduction to Vilém Flusser’s Into the Universe of Technical Images and Does Writing Have a Future?
Mark Poster
Does Writing Have a Future?
Introduction
Superscript
Inscriptions
Notation
Letters of the Alphabet
Texts
Print
Instructions
Spoken Languages
Poetry
Ways of Reading
Deciphering
Books
Letters
Newspapers
Stationeries
Desks
Scripts
The Digital
Recoding
Subscript
Afterword to the Second Edition
Translator’s Afterword and Acknowledgments
Nancy Roth
Translator’s Notes
Index