What If?

Twenty-Two Scenarios in Search of Images

2022

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Author:

Vilém Flusser
Translated by Anke Finger and Kenneth Kronenberg
Afterword by Kenneth Goldsmith
Introduction by Anke Finger

An imagination of possibilities, of miscalculations, of futures off-kilter

Two years after his Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, Vilém Flusser engaged in another thought experiment: a collection of twenty-two “scenarios for the future.” What If? offers insight into the radical futures of a slipstream Anthropocene that have much to do with speculative fiction, and serves as both a warning and a nudge to imagine what we may yet become and be.

While the universe Flusser created with his previous book, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, explores a single alternate lifeworld coherent in its mirroring of the human species by a cephalopod, each scenario in What If? suggests a variety of new ideas, given the speculative, projecting nature of their setting—in the best and most creative sense of ‘what if’—in the past, the present, or the future.

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from the Introduction

Tags

Theory and Philosophy, Film and Media, Literature, Literary Criticism

“Probability is a chimera, its head is true, its tail a suggestion. Futurologists attempt to compel the head to eat the tail (ouroboros). Here, though, we will try to wag the tail.” —Vilém Flusser

Two years after his Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, the philosopher Vilém Flusser engaged in another thought experiment: a collection of twenty-two “scenarios for the future” to be produced as computer-generated media, or technical images, that would break the imaginative logjam in conceiving the social, political, and economic future of the universe. What If? is not just an “impossible journey” to which Flusser invites us in the first scenario; it functions also as a distorting mirror held up to humanity.

Flusser’s disarming scenarios of an Anthropocene fraught with nightmares offer new visions that range from the scientific to the fantastic to the playful and whimsical. Each essay reflects our present sense of understanding the world, considering the exploitation of nature and the dangers of global warming, overpopulation, and blind reliance on the promises of scientific knowledge and invention. What If? offers insight into the radical futures of a slipstream Anthropocene that have much to do with speculative fiction, with Flusser’s concept of design as “crafty” or slippery, and with art and the immense creative potential of failure versus reasonable, “good” computing or calculability. As such, the book is both a warning and a nudge to imagine what we may yet become and be.

Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) was born in Prague; emigrated to Brazil, where he taught philosophy and wrote a daily newspaper column; and later moved to France. Minnesota has published a dozen of Flusser’s works in translation, among them Into the Universe of Technical Images, Does Writing Have a Future?, Gestures, and Vampyroteuthis Infernalis.

Anke Finger is professor of German studies and media studies at the University of Connecticut, where she also inaugurated the Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative at the Humanities Institute. She is cofounder of the open access journal Flusser Studies and coauthor of Vilem Flusser: An Introduction (Minnesota, 2011).

Kenneth Kronenberg has been a translator for nearly thirty years, specializing in German intellectual and cultural history and diaries and letters. His recent translations include Jorun Poettering’s Trade, Nation, and Religion and Fritz Trümpi’s Political Orchestras.

Kenneth Goldsmith is an American avant-garde poet and critic, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and founder of the UbuWeb online archive of experimental literary and visual art.

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from the Introduction

Contents

Introduction: What If? Into the Slipstream of Flusser’s “Field of Possibilities”

Anke Finger

First Scenario: What If . . .

Part I. Scenes from Family Life

Second Scenario: Grandmother

Third Scenario: Grandfather

Fourth Scenario: Great Uncle

Fifth Scenario: Brothers

Sixth Scenario: Son