Public (E-Journal, York University)

Flusser, Vilém

On the Death of Politics
by Vilem Flusser
The term "revolution," originally a metaphor transferred
from astronomical to political discourse, signifies the
point on a line at which the line turns in a new direction.
In this original sense, a circle consists of many such
points, and the circling celestial bodies describe permanent
revolutions. However, courses here in this world are
sooner perceived to be rougWy linear, rather like the
course of a river. The current of political history, for
example, seems to flow forwards, namely from the past
towards the future. In such a current, revolutions are
seldom aspects of the course, points around which the
line winds. For this reason, the transition of the term
"revolution" from astronomy to politics results in a shaky
metaphor. There is, however, one point on the line of
political history for which celestial mechanics is applicable,
namely the end point. At this point, the line stops flowing
forwards, events begin to shift and circulate, and to
resemble heavenly conditions. In light of the Romanian
revolution, this lecture submits the hypothesis that we are
on our way to reaching this point.
In order for politics-that is, a life in public-to exist
at all, one has to be able to distinguish between public
and private. A distinction of this kind has been possible
ever since there have been villages. Only in the village
(polis), and not previously with hunting and gathering
nomads, did people step out from their private spaces
into the village square in order to exchange information
they had developed within that private space. For this
reason, history and politics are fundamentally synonymous:
there can be no private histories precisely because a
private language is a square circle. Everything prior to
villages is prehistorical, because it is pre-political. Should a
distinction between private and public become impossible,
should the private house and village square become
blurred, then politics and thus history will have come to
an end. The pre-village condition of the circulation of
myth, of the eternal repetition of the same, would thus be
reproduced. Romania suggests such a return to permanent
revolution. To a post-historical prehistory.
One can discuss the historic oscillation between
private and public, between economics and politics,
from the perspective of various discourses. For example,
communicologically. Then history looks something like
this: information is acquired in public space, stored and
processed in private space, reworked into new information
so as to be published, that is, exhibited in public space
and, for its part, collected anew. Such a communicological
interpretation ofhistory as feedback between privatization
and publication appears to have a negatively entropic
tone: against the second law of thermodynamics, but also
against Mendel's Laws, history is a process, thanks to which
the sum of information continually increases by means of
the progressive reprocessing of acquired information. This
makes political engagement plausible; it is directed against
the stubbornness of nature. Recently, however, it has
become clear that the negatively entropic aspect of history
is only on the surface. All information developed histor-
ically is condemned to lapse into entropy. Ecological
movements (such as the German Greens) demonstrate
that one becomes aware of the absurd in every political
engagement. Consider the following example.
A pot displayed at the market is fetched home, stored
there, compared with others already in storage, from
which a new, better, more beautiful pot is fashioned,
displayed on the market, then fetched home, and this is
what we call historical progress. People become committed
to this, that is, to something always better and more
beautiful, occasionally at the risk of their own lives.
Nevertheless all pots, all potters, and all pot consumers
will necessarily crumble into ashes, and in case they do
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not disinform themselves quickly enough, they will
contaminate the area as waste and refuse. According to
this, history is nothing but a negatively entropic epicycle
on the entropic track, and political engagement ultimately
results in producing disinformation (waste) and not
information (culture). This is just as true for so-called
immaterial information as for material information,
which is not difficult to prove.
However, the approaching death of politics is not
only a function of ecological awareness. For example, it is
not only a function of the fact that historical materialism,
the clearest commitment to political progress, threatened
to transform areas under its control into muck hills and
radioactive waste. The death of politics has yet another
explanation, quite simply the fact that there is neither a
public space in which to publish, nor even a private space
in which to be private. One can neither politicize the
economy (the goal of the Left) nor privatize politics (the
goal of the Right)-thus neither nationalization nor
perestroika-because, owing to the communications
"revolution," above all of electromagnetic media, no one
can speak of publication and privatization. There is no
longer a public sphere, ever since politicians, uninvited,
pushed their way into kitchens in order to make their
speeches, and since then the kitchen itself is no longer a
private sphere, but rather is carried away into the media
storm. Politics is on its deathbed, history is perishing, and
Romania is the first symptom of post-history.
Since town drummers no longer summon people to
gather in the marketplace, but rather newspapers and letters
are delivered straight to the house, insightful people
should have, in fact, foreseen the death of politics. Since
then, the outflow from the private into the public sphere
(political engagement) began to become absurd. One can
become better informed by staying home, and one can
better inform others by beaming news directly into their
houses rather than by publishing. But even today, with
"broadcasted" [rundgefunkten] images and sounds and
with "reversible cables," there are still people who obsti-
nately persist in the political. In this regard, the events in
Romania allow the last scales to fall from our eyes: they
clearly show that political categories are wide of the
mark. Romania is not a republic, but rather a mass reacting
to broadcasts, and the same will be true increasingly for
all media-controlled situations.
The communications structure ofhistorical societies,
the oscillation between private and public, gave rise to
dividing society into peoples, stations, classes or unions,
and "history" is really the public collision ofsuch groups.
The new communications structure, the broadcasting of
PUBLIC 37
information by way of channels, leads to an amorphous
mass ofpulverized granules, whereby these grains of sand
accumulate into dunes in the wind of sensations, only
to be scattered again into solitariness, boredom, and
probability. This decline of historical structures such as
the family or the party and this uniformizing of solitudes,
that is, this post-political and thus post-historical
behaviour, are already clearly apparent in the various
fascisms of the first half of the century. Yet, at that time,
the uniformizing broadcasters, which were also made
uniform themselves, had no television, but only radio,
film, and newsprint at their disposal. That is to say, the
murderous and bestial uniformization of the period was
not yet able to erase the given reality through alternative
realities. The demagogues of the time still had to lie,
while contemporary programmers are already able to
formulate desired facts through the given reality, in order
to cover it up. This ontological violence of television calls
for careful consideration.
Goebbels, the first information theoretician of post-
politics, had to reach for redundancies in order to bestow
plausibility to the lie within the given reality. That, for
example, the Jews are our misfortune, had to be repeated
daily for years in order to become almost believable. The
television images of corpses in Timisoara, on the other
hand, are instantly convincing, for they are neither truth
nor lie. They are intentionally formulated, programmed
facts that take the place of the given reality, and in such
a way that doubts can be raised about that reality, but not
about themselves. Images of this sort are not as good as
real, but rather better than real. Only this ontological
magic of television images, which are becoming ever
more technically refined, can eradicate the last remains of
political awareness together with its roots, in order to
make room for a new, still nameless awareness, or a new
unconsciousness: a post-ontological awareness, relativizing
every reality, a loss of faith, an existence in the abyss.
The television, this executioner and gravedigger of
politics, this underminer of faith in the reality of
things, can nonetheless be "played down." Television is
a broad form of dissemination [eine breite Ausstreuung]
(broadcasting*) and only as such is it uniformizing.
Closely disseminated television images [eng ausgestreute
Fernsehbilder] (narrowcasting,* for example, closed
circuits*) can on the contrary lead to creative dialogues,
especially when such images are coupled with computers.
The concept of a future telematic society is based upon
such a narrow diffusion [enge Streuung] of networked
images. Thus, the decline of reality in Romania is not the
only possibility after the death of politics, rather, the
Vilem Flusser
telematic alternative is also possible. This argument runs
roughly as follows: wherever uniformized, fascistic con-
ditions already prevailed before the death of politics,
television will be centrally connected, and it will broadcast
[broadcasten], thus transforming people into granules that
will pile up and disperse in the storm of programmed
emotions. But wherever so-called "democratic," and thus
roughly dialogic, conditions prevail before the death of
politics, telematic networks are at least conceivable.What
is proceeding in contemporary Eastern Europe, and
under somewhat different circumstances in the Third
World, should not necessarily make us worried. We can
certainly mourn the granulation taking place over there,
but we do not need to fear it. This is an argument on
shaky ground.
Television images are magical, not only because they
pile up key elements for alternative facts, but also because
they can be received simultaneously everywhere: not
only space, but also time is conquered. Under their
control, there can be no spatially and temporally remote
areas, and such distinctions (for example the term
"underdeveloped") are pre-televisionary, which means
still historical. What happened in Romania one year ago
happened everywhere simultaneously. And when in
Eastern Europe the last remains of political awareness
give way to a brutal, post-historical, uniformized magic,
then de te Jabula narratur. 1 This is the reason why we are
gathering here today.
The death of politics is no reason to despair. I wish
to bury it and not to praise it. In its stead could appear
almost immediately a new, networked intersubjectivity,
which we could call "telematics." The mise en scene that
we have seen played out in Romania is only one among
various post-historical possibilities. And to this let me
add the following thought: in my talk, our contemporary
situation was only articulated from a communicological
standpoint, and even then only in cursory sketches.There
could be other, less eschatological standpoints.
Nevertheless, we are used to interpreting the concept of
"freedom" above all in a political way. Indeed, we cannot
mourn the death of politics, as it became visible in
Romania, but it is nonetheless sad. May the following
discussion help air this atmosphere.
* Terms in English in the original-trans.
75
TranslatedJrom the original typescript oJa talk delivered on the
theme ''lvledia and Revolution," 1I1annheim, Germany, 17
November 1990. Held in the ViICm-Flusser-Archiv,
Universitat der Kunste, Berlin.
Translated by Michael Darroch, University oJWindsOl; 2008.
NOTES
"Of you the tale is told." ef. Karl Marx, Preface to Das
Capital-tram.


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