Flusseriana: An Intellectual Toolbox

Freestyle thinking—that is Vilém Flusser’s intellectual modus operandi: challenging and offensive, paradoxical and audacious. His thought knows no disciplines or subjects nor does it pay tribute to other academic frameworks or rituals. Above all else his thought wants to intervene in ongoing cultural and artistic processes and influence them. In order to achieve this, no closed theoretical systems are necessary—only open, operative structures. The Flusseriana is a toolbox capable of being developed and expanded. It contains more than two hundred “thinkthings” (Denkdinge) of all kinds: particularities like “Indian Summer,” “Atlas,” “Submissiveness,” “Animal,” and “Mediterranean Sea”; condensed Flusserian thought concerning the big eternal questions such as “History,” “Language,” “Myth,” and “Religion”; the central concepts of his media analysis including “Apparatus,” “Abstraction,” “Cybernetics,” and “Telematics”; as well as Flusser’s own neologisms, “Communicology,” “Universe of Dots,” and the old and the new “Imaginations.” More than one hundred authors produced the entries under these entries in a dialogic practice entirely in the spirit of the philosophical writer from Prague