“Photography is the Destruction of History”: Flusser and the Victory of Memory over History in the Age of Technical Images

Abstract

Abstract: For Vilém Flusser the technical images should be seen as “vacuum cleaners” that suck all history: they accelerate time and metamorphose everything into frozen images. For him we should see those images as the concretization of the Judaic-Christian redemption concept. Technical images allow the overcoming of what he saw as the imprisoning inside the historical world, characterized by textolatry. They allow to logically rebuild the universe departing from its imagistic decomposition, as if images (built by “calculi”, pixels) were lego bricks. The work presents Flusser‟s Jewish mystical eschatology about magical redemptive images taking also in account his credo (which he judged also to be Jewish), that said that instead of consider the immortality of the soul, we should bet that “we shall survive within the memory of others”. What kind of memory would it be and what would it mean to survive in a post-historical world are some of the questions this text poses. Comparing with some of Walter Benjamin‟s ideas and concepts, it shows how Flusser proposed to answer to the demand of Benjamin, who wrote that the new techniques imposed the necessity to rethink today the meaning of death and love.