Introduction
Into the Slipstream of Flusser’s “Field of Possibilities”
Anke Finger
In 1988, Vilém Flusser (1920–91) is invited to address the TV Club of Vienna with a lecture on “Science Fiction.” He defines science fiction as a “grey zone within which science and fiction (fact and fiction) overlap,” but he generally considers this area of literary production “a disappointment”: “We expect texts that establish fictitious scientific hypotheses and then, forthcoming as a result, fictitious theories, for example, imagined alternatives to Darwin or Einstein. Regrettably, we have to discover that the imagination is more alive in the works of hard science than in most science fiction texts, by far.” At issue, according to Flusser, is the contemporary concept of truth. To move beyond what he observes as a paralyzing binary, we must unlearn the habit to seek clear differences between “right” and “wrong”, between “true” and “untrue.” He proposes to revivify scholastic and Talmudic traditions by aiming for “a level of the absurd” such that “truth will somehow shine through.” In short, we should start to consider science fiction as an epistemology of the weird, a “counter science” to the hard sciences that demands of the author a “simultaneous zest for the improbable and scientific rigor.”1 A year later, he publishes Angenommen: Eine Szenenfolge, and the Berlin Wall comes down.
That same year, far, far away, Bruce Sterling, too, laments that “Science Fiction—much like the former Vanguard of Progressive Mankind, the Communist Party—has lost touch with its cultural reasons for being.” Accusing especially “hard” science fiction of having lost its “inner identity,” devoid of innovation and creativity, Sterling sets out to coin a new genre by describing what he perceives as a “contemporary kind of writing which has set its face against consensus reality. It is fantastic, surreal at times, speculative on occasion, but not rigorously so. . . . This is a kind of writing which makes you feel very strange. . . . We would call this kind of fiction Novels of Postmodern Sensibility, but that looks pretty bad on a category rack [ . . . ]; so for the sake of convenience and argument, we will call these books ‘slipstream.’”2
What If?, now the English translation of Angenommen and one of Vilém Flusser’s last books, has endured something of an outsider status among the vast oeuvre he has produced over forty years and in more than four languages. While the last two decades have brought forth a plethora of new editions, as well as scholarship, exhibitions, and conferences on the substantial volume and network of Flusser’s writings and ideas, What If? has remained sidelined—not entirely “at home” either in his media philosophy, or in what has been called his “scientific writing” or “philosophical fiction,” as his friend Abraham Moles called it, or in his writings on design, on language and communication, on history, and so forth. It simply does not seem to fit, really, into any of the categories now more or less established in Flusser scholarship. To this day, little has been said about this text at all. If anything, it is handled as a film or television script—including by myself in the introduction to Vilém Flusser: An Introduction (2011), where I referred to the structure of twenty-two scenarios as “vignettes”—unsure how to assign a thematic arch, a narrative coherence, a contemporary or current locus.3 This set of micro-essays Flusser refers to, in the first scenario, as “a series motivated by curiosity,” an “unreasonable endeavor” and “an invitation to an impossible journey,” appears to be a kind of hopscotch of ramblings and musings. Defying “reason” and embarking on an “impossible” trip may entice at the outset, but what, in fact, is the reader to make of meeting an intellectually (and sexually) poised tapeworm ready to become a model for humanity, the biblical Abraham cloaked as a modern-day cranky and avuncular misanthrope, a brand-new paragraph-eating insect categorized as Bibliophagus convictus, a political party from the twenty-third century, a scientist who promotes creativity by means of population control, a genetically modified Zebu cow called “SuperKali,” catastrophes hailed as productive, and Shamans, Jesus, and Martin Heidegger all in one place?
The twenty-two fictitious micro-essays Vilém Flusser termed “scenarios of the future” are organized into three sets of different lifeworlds, entitled “Scenes from Family Life,” “Scenes from Economic Life,” and “Scenes from Politics.” The author explicitly implores readers at the outset (“Wanted!”), in a dedication of the book to his cousin, David Flusser, to dare to transcode the written scenarios into images, that is, to turn the text into a film or a set of videos—in 1989, the new media of the time. According to Gustavo Bernardo, the “philosophical poet and poetical philosopher . . . is searching for a style of writing and thinking that can express his speculative position with the goal to develop and stimulate new ideas.”4 New ideas, to Flusser, are generated by (technical) images, by code. 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. They range from the scientific to the fantastic, to the outrageous and provocative, and certainly include the playful and whimsical. As such, What If?, the TV series—these days, an obligatory three seasons, following the text’s structure, with 6–7 episodes each—could be entertaining and reflective, thought-provoking, exasperating, stimulating, constructive, and decidedly off-kilter. A campy Black Mirror, perhaps.
What If?: The Past
In 1989, nothing came of the plans to create images from the text. Few comment on the genealogy of the manuscript, fewer write about What If? at all. Most prominent among them is the Swiss author Felix Phillip Ingold, a good friend of Flusser’s and a frequent correspondent. As Daniel Irrgang has documented in his important discussion of the almost decade-long exchange of letters, Flusser, upon finishing his manuscript of Vampyroteuthis Infernalis in 1981, contemplated intensely the “difference between Science fiction and Fictitious science . . . , in short: what’s the difference between hypotheses and fables?”5 According to Irrgang, the first scenario, a so-called “pre-text,” for What If?, reached Ingold in the fall of 1987, and while Ingold attempted to interest the Genevan station Télévision Remande in the project, he himself was skeptical whether Flusser’s goal of encoding the text into images was feasible. Flusser, in turn, tried to further explicate his idea of the technical image, but Ingold, unflappable, and with a precise sense of the slippage in Flusser’s vision, detected an “unsolvable issue: namely the fact that you are writing far beyond concepts only [since] you render effective the knowledge packed into a concept within the context of scenes, which you flesh out with great powers of the imagination only to declare thereafter, in case of a possible TV-production, that merely the concepts are to be put into images.”6 While their correspondence ended in 1990, Ingold remained fascinated by this small piece of science fiction his friend shared with him shortly before his untimely death. Twenty-eight years later, in a lengthy article honoring Vilém Flusser published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Ingold offers his own reading of Flusser’s oeuvre, emphasizing Flusser’s revolt against academic conventions, his insistence, obsession even, on writing as a “permanent learning curve,” and describing his output, articles, op-eds, stories, anecdotes, scenes, letters, essayistic texts, as invitations for nomadic reading, a nonlinear pursuit akin to scanning or screen-hopping. Ingold explicitly singles out What If?, applauding Flusser’s uncanny foresight, especially with scenario seventeen, “Perpetual Peace”—a nod to Immanuel Kant’s famous treatise of the same name from 1795: “Flusser foresaw, already back then, in the late 1980s, a period of rapid stagnancy, a global standstill, unpleasantly completing the promise of ‘perpetual peace.’”7 History is composed and computed, it is being made, including by “potentates such as Trump, Putin, Xi Jinping”; engaged as “makers (fakers) of history, they show themselves to act as handlers and artists, as deceptive geniuses and theurgists.” Ingold concludes his commemoration by describing Flusser as a “sharp-sighted and distinctly headstrong apocalyptic thinker.”8
Beyond Ingold’s involvement in the composition of What If?, and his recall of a text he deems possibly more compelling today, thirty years later, than in 1989, the literature is thin. Petra Gropp, in her erudite and detailed discussion of Flusser in Szenen der Schrift (2006) grants the book a short paragraph, reading it as a “hybrid text, oriented towards the techno-imaginary,” with scenes playing to “traditional, literary forms of travel and adventure literature.”9 Heiko Christians, delineating the conceptual history of “scenario” by pointing to Hermann Kahn, Stanley Kubrick’s template for Dr. Strangelove, and Anthony J. Wiener, makes us aware that Flusser employed the scenario technique not to play with the “futurist” implications of a scenario versus a scene.10 Rather, as specified in the first scenario, he sought to “integrate the factor of a finite existence, removed from media, and the dialog format as a scenic base structure of communication, he crossed futurology, cybernetics and dialogic existentialism all in one.”11 According to Christians, as Flusser points to death as part of the field of possibilities, he embraces the anthropology of this endeavor: the human is an animal that feeds on improbabilities—naturally, the scenarios will provide precisely that. Flusser himself underscores the scenarios’ virtualities in one of his last lectures from 1991:
We are in the same situation as a magnet. . . . Everything around us approaches from all directions and all times. . . . Linguistic thought is bankrupt. Everything comes close. Lines are no more. Progress, regress, all of that is pointless. It comes closer. It approaches, not unendingly, but not exactly in chaos, either. There is this tendency towards becoming-more-probable that is contradicted by tendencies towards becoming-more-improbable. Virtualities intersect, and because they intersect accidentally, they become even more virtual. Some prevail. One is almost here. At the last moment, it disappears. I don’t know if I was able to describe this dramatically enough.”12
What If?: The Present
Perhaps readers and scholars have all been looking in the wrong place, working with unworkable categories to place What If? into literary or philosophical contexts and bookshelves that turned out to be not only unaccommodating but possibly hostile to its contents. Let me suggest that the category established within scholarship on Flusser, “philosophical fiction” or “scientific fiction,” has remained unsatisfactory. It requires updating based on an as-of-yet absent dialog with science fiction studies. Such updating should benefit from the passage of time because Science Fiction (SF) or speculative fiction, as a research field in literary and cultural studies, endured a comparable outlier status, just like What If? in Flusser scholarship. More specifically, I suggest that What If? belongs to the subcategory of SF Bruce Sterling inaugurated in 1989, that same year Angenommen was published. What If? is slipstream fiction. Here’s why.
The stories in What If? are subsumed under three rather expansive themes: family, economics, and politics. Fittingly, the first part, family, encompasses an entire household, including grandparents, a son, brothers, a great-uncle even, and great-grandchildren. The second part, economics, addresses particular pockets of production in modern economic structures such as the chemical industry, engineering, foreign aid, population growth, and cultivation. The third part embraces the many forms of political activity, from war to peace, from revolution to democracy, from obedience to human rights. To the hurried reader this is mildly intriguing to blatantly tedious. Upon some text mining, together with the Greenhouse Studios team and based on characters, themes, and symbols or visuals,13 however, the content of What If? reveals itself as squarely in the speculative fiction genre, described by Marek Oziewicz as “non-mimetic fiction operating across different media for the purpose of reflecting on their cultural role, especially as opposed to the work performed by mimetic, or realist narratives”14:
- Characters: meet a futurologist, a terrorist, astronauts, the goddess Venus, hunters, Neanderthals, ghosts or spirits, a very cogent fetus, Taenia Solium (that tapeworm), the Great Khan Timur the Lame, the Romans, the Goths, an Anhalt-Lippe descendent, “feral” children, Homo Immaterialis, survivalist monks, the Actor-Player-Dealer (possibly all one and the same), the Prophet, Darius (king of all Aryans and Non-Aryans), a Black activist—and all the other protagonists mentioned earlier.
- Themes: explore the singularity as the end of humanity; birth/rebirth, excess, rationes seminales, technological failure; the meaning of life in the Jewish tradition; compassion versus aggression; spiritualism and determinism; devolution of “culture”; information, datafication, classification; love and self-love, parasitism; Ethno/Eurocentrism, the pitfalls of capitalism; environmentalism, humanity versus its own creations; art versus nature, animism; particle/wave fields, the fog of the past; Darwinism; sensory perception, hearing/seeing; Buddhism; the Quran; democracy viewed as flawed in the future; a new color theory to critique white supremacy.
- Symbols/Visuals: imagine charts, graphs, knots, lines, curves, guns, magnets, iron shavings; white clouds, a yellow ocean, an erection, mountains, many instances of the goddess Venus; cramped alleyways, a prayer coat, a library, a dictionary; human-like creatures, burials, hunters; a congress of spirits; paradise inside the womb; destroyed cities, mutilation of human bodies, razor blades; roads as ribbons, cars as stinking boxes, a river of consumer goods; giant cows; hymenoptera; fields, waves, particles, networks; a mushroom cloud, nuclear winter, an unpredictable “curve” with multiple outcomes; telematic screens, buttons (history at our fingertips); hands, feet, nuclear/civil war, overpopulated continents, planetary colonization, centralized computing systems; “Mene mene tekel upharsin”; Ouroboros snake eating its tail; the Peacock throne.
I have my favorites, and so might you. That Bibliophagus convictus? A wicked insect of mind-blowing proportions, literally, with a devilish grin to boot. The several “reports” by groups of ethnologists, scientists or explorers of some ilk? They veer on the Kafkaesque, reminiscent indeed of Kafka’s 1917 stirring “A Report to an Academy.” Some take several reads, as if resistant to interpretation, oblique, your eyebrows cocked; some are horrific, murderous children, induced catastrophes for world-cleansing, and organizing humanity in neat bidecadials. Yet others conjure up vortices that weave a complex mixture of space-time dimensions, catapulting the reader into an alternate past or distant and alien future. None are related to another. And yet, they all are spinning within a network of humans, nonhumans, ideas, issues, events, and time that speaks to versions of realities as much on our minds now as they were when What If? was first published. It still sends a message from back then, more than thirty years ago, into our pandemic-stricken, divisive, weird and electrifying time.
Why read What If?, a text very much of the postmodern, 1989, moment, in the twenty-first century? Flusser’s popular book on design, The Shape of Things (1999), includes a story on “The Submarine.”15 The submersible, an underwater-travel design emerging from the nineteenth century, becomes the ultimate expression of modernist warfare in World War I. It, too, in Flusser’s slipstream, presents imagination gone awry, because it represents a nineteenth-century dream that turns into a twentieth-century nightmare. The submarine in this story functions as a lab for seventeen scientists, artists, and theologians who leave society for an experiment to rule the world and anchor on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean (“near the Philippines”) to “enforce the military and intellectual disarmament of humanity.”16 To be brief, this form of totalitarianism does not succeed. The scientists fail because they set out to realize utopian ideals based on logic and control—from the narrator’s perspective several hundred years prior to writing this story—not because the materials did not obey or hold up, but because the people didn’t. Everyone turns against them. The narrator argues that the experimenters failed because they refused, deluded, to see an object for what it was: twentieth-century humans living in a dream world where the common “walking cane presented an electromagnetic field or a cultural product or a fabrication or a sexual symbol or a thing proving being (Dasein), in short, within which it presented everything: except a cane.” At the end of such a dream, or nightmare, and upon awakening, lies reality. But, as the narrator acknowledges, the experimenters valiantly sought to “merge faith, knowledge, and art” for the first time since the Middle Ages, while, in their “ephemeral world domination from within the submarine,” they inadvertently failed to take into account the human factor. This is a factor that eludes design.
With What If?, and, by extension, other texts such as “The Submarine” as well as Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, Vilém Flusser aligns himself with some of the best features of slipstream SF, this subcategory of speculative fiction. While the genre itself stays in dispute, Sterling’s term has stuck; in fact, according to Victoria de Zwaan, science fiction studies “demonstrates a strangely persistent attachment to the term ‘slipstream’ that remains hard to explain.”17 Even if Sterling identified it as no more than a certain “sensibility,” de Zwaan’s list of characteristics and adjacent terminology speaks to slipstream’s relevance for placing What If? within this genre’s contexts: estrangement; late capitalism; postmodernist (experimental) fiction; disruptive; contemporary realities; quasi-SF; uncanny; weird; counterrealism. Flusser should be in good and quite familiar company. While contemporary authors considered slipstream include Kathy Acker, Thomas Pynchon, or Ishmael Reed—authors Flusser never read—among the literary giants influencing slipstream, based on a rare slipstream-scholarship consensus, are Franz Kafka and Luis Borges. Flusser very much read the first, and his imaginary worlds have been repeatedly compared to the second.
What If?: The Future
May the futurologist and the terrorist meet only in Flusser’s field of possibilities.