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Vilem Flusser 1990, 24 minutes (youtube)
"television image and political space in the light of the romanian revolution"

what happened in romania is no revolution. is not political
what if tv would take over in the usa? in romania nobody cares about it
are we getting into a new situation in the image culture?

(sketch)

stepping out of reality and looking back at it: the "image" of the world. scenic context. (Heidegger / wittgenstein) context in which things relate with each other.

images are loaded. they are magical. voodoo character
images allow us to escape our immersion in reality. they represent the world and they "hide" the world. dicotomy. can lead to profound alienation.
the image becomes the concrete reality. sort of paganism.

Plato wanted to forbid images and art in the republic. he considered them incompatible with the political thinking.

Linear Writing: opens up images, unfolds reality behind them. the images represent a happening, the linear writing documents the event itself. happening vs event. event is a frozen moment of reality, there is no action about it. happening is the action that onw might imagine associated with the event. Events can be linearly explained and historically contextualized, whereas happening are short processes constantly repeated along a sequence of events.

Linear writing is part of political consciousness. TV is anti-political by its very nature. political consciousness is anti-image.

there was no history before the linear writing. there were no 'events'

resistance of image even in the course of linear writing: the image invades the text and tends to 'illustrate' it.

the conflict behind the 'explosive' cognitive context of the western world: image vs text; imagination vs conceptual thinking; magic vs politics

linear writing got into its peak in the XVIII century, with the invention of printing, and became the fertile ground for an age of 'enlightenment'. Images were relegated to the marginalized field of hidden treasures, in museums and galleries. The XVIII century was the most developed period of political thinking.

but the state of advance of politics and science rendered its message more and more unimagnable... science achievements are conceivable but not imaginable... this is the reason why photography was invented in the XIX century. to filter in images what was not possible to process abstractly.

dialectis of politics: the confrontation, dialog and growth between the private and the public sphere.

before, the newspapers where written in private and distributed / red in public and there was a reaction, a public field (physical and rationa) where the text was confronted with reality; political consciousness is always unhappy. Happy, only worms maybe are happy.

"when I go out to the worls I loose myself, when I get back home I loose the world" Hegel. the threshold between the public and the private sphere as a necessary conflict that generates the exercise of individualism and political consciousness.

nowadays, news go out from the private sphere into another private sphere without crossing the public realm. if you want to stay 'informed' you should stay home. If you go out you might loose information.

photography:

renders events imaginable. it freezes events into happenings. It aims to be a memory of History: documentation.
the impossibility of the impartial view. not even if the photographer would dance around reality to grasp it in multiple 'points of view'. maybe not even if we would get together many points of view of various photographers. it would always be personal and therefore unable to invest itself of any pure political dimension. In the moment one steps out of reality to make an image one gets into the realm of non-thinking. An image maker does not think; cannot have any political consciousness.

how can one break ideology? the insistency in one single point of view. In one sort of reality framing?

Why do we believe we are 'advancing' if we don't know where to?
We can maybe conclude that our advance is all towards Image itself. we create events just in order to mak images out of it. we generate an aceleration of events. there is a general eagerness of being included into a picture. ultimately is the image itself that generates events... (romania). political thinking is no longer valid.