The Photograph as Post-Industrial Object: 

Essay on the Ontological Standing of Photographs 

VilCm Flusser

Abstract-Photos, as they are now-namely sheets of paper or a similar material carrying information ontheir surfaces-are objects of post-industrial culture, one in which work is done by automatic apparatus. Inthe not far distant future, photos will become images appearing on electromagnetic screens; thus they willillustrate a future culture of pure, immaterial information, one in which society will be busy elaborating whatis now called 'software'. The difference between the two cultures is that objects will no longer occupy thecenter of attention in the future one. This will involve not only a transvaluationof all values but a mutation inhuman existence.

I. OBJECTS

The Latin term 'ob-iectum' and its Greekequivalent 'pro-blema' mean 'thrownagainst', which implies that there issomething against which the object isthrown: a 'sub-ject'. As subjects, we face auniverse of objects, of problems, whichare somehow hurled against us. Thisopposition is dynamic. The objectsapproach the subject, they come from thefuture into the subject's presence. Andthe subjects project themselves into thefuture, into the universe of objects. Theshock between subject and object occursover the abyss of alienation which separatesthe two. The present tendency is torelegate this shock from human subjectsto automatic apparatus. Automaticcameras may serve as an example.Objects are shocking because theystand in our way. They are where theyought not to be. The shock betweensubject and object is one between 'to be'and 'ought to be', between reality andvalue. The subject tries to inject value intothe object through 'work'. Objects changedby work are cultural objects. The presenttendency is to relegate work from humansubjects to automatic apparatus. Theshocking objects are somehow given, theyare data'. Cultural objects are made, theyare facta'. To work is to process data andchange them into facta. Automaticapparatus are capable of this data pro-cessing. We are witnessing a culturalrevolution.

11. CULTURAL OBJECTS

Data present themselves to the subjectin various shapes, 'Gestalten'. The subject

Viltm Flusser (educator), Rue de la Caoune, LeVieux Village,

F-84440

Robion, France.Manuscript solicited by Jan ZachReceived

September 1985.

tries to change those shapes so that theybecome as they ought to be by 'informing'the data. To do this, the subject must havethem stand still (understand them) andmust grasp them (conceive them). Under-standing has to do with the eyes; theGreeks called this gaze which makes thedata stand still 'theoria'. Conception hasto do with hands and fingers; the Greekscalled this kind of gesture 'praxis'. Theyfelt a contradiction between theoreticalunderstanding and practical action. (Kantformalized this contradiction betweentheoretical and practical 'reason' bydistinguishing between the categories ofpure reason and the 'categorical imper-ative'.) One seems to lead toward wisdom,'Sophia'; the other toward mere opinion,'doxa'. Thus, in Occidental tradition,philosophy (love of wisdom) came todespise action.As a result, the cultural objects (datachanged into facta) were little illuminatedby theoretical understanding. Work was,to a large extent, an empirical gesture.The cultural objects were, to a largeextent, products of hands and fingers,works made by artisans and artists.

111. INDUSTRIAL OBJECTS

The fifteenth century established adialectic between theory and praxis. Onebegan to look in order to grasp better,and to grasp in order to see better. Theorybecame hypothetical: praxis could dis-prove it. And praxis became experimental:it applied heoretical understanding. Modemscience was born.The eighteenth century used modernscience to analyse work into two elements:one concerned the shape to be imposedon data, the other the gesture of thatimposition. This resulted in machines andmachine tools: the industrial revolution.A given object, a datum, is introducedinto a machine (a practical application ofa theoretical understanding of the gestureof working). It is there impressed by amachine tool (a practical application of atheoretical understanding of shaping).Out comes a new type of cultural object,the industrial object. This has had pro-found consequences: artisans and artistsbecame marginalized, and society becamedivided into owners of machines andmachine tools, makers of machines andmachine tools and servants of machinesand machine tools.Industrial objects differ from pre-industrial ones in two aspects. First, theyare more numerous-machines, beingmore rapid than humans, produce moreobjects than humans do; the result wasobject inflation, a devaluation of culturalobjects. Second, they arestereotypical-the same tool impresses the same shapeon a series of objects; the result was thatcultural objects became equivalent toeach other. This progressive devaluationof and indifference toward cultural objectsis called 'mass culture'.

IV. POST-INDUSTRIAL OBJECTS

As cultural objects became increasinglycheaper, and machines and tools in-creasingly more expensive, one tended tobelieve that those who owned the machinesand the tools held the power of decision.This belief is one of the roots of Marxism.But as it became evident that 'shape' and'value' are synonymous, that it is thetoolmakers who shape the future ofsociety, this belief shifted. It is now thetoolmakers ('information programmers')who are believed to hold the power ofdecision.Information production (the elabo-ration of information to be imposed ondata) thus became neatly distinguishedfrom work (the imposition of information

Pergamon Journals

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upon data). Work was now understood tobe a mechanical motion, one unworthy ofhuman subjects. The result was automaticmachines, robots. Somewhat later it wasfound that even the elaboration ofinformation has mechanical aspects. Theresult was automatic artificial intelligences.Thus the shock between subject andobject was transferred from human beingto apparatus, and the human beingbecame a sort of judge of that struggle byprogramming the information to beelaborated by computers.Post-industrial society will be one inwhich most people will be engaged in thisprogramming. Post-industrial objects willdiffer from industrial ones in that theywill become almost 'value-less' supportsfor programmed information. (Even now,the value of a plastic fountain pen liesalmost entirely in its shape and hardly atall in its plastic material.) Strictly speaking,post-industrial objects will no longer betrue 'objects'. If culture is defined as astore of values, this store will no longerconsist of objects but of other forms ofmemories (see below).To summarize this discussion of theterm 'object': human beings are subjectsto objects which stand in their way. Theymust change the objects. This changing ofthe objects becomes increasingly betterunderstood theoretically and can beimproved in practice, that is until humanbeings no longer need to confront objectswhile advancing toward the future: thenhumans can be replaced by apparatus.From this point on, humans are no longertrue subjects.

PHOTOSPhotos are practically worthless sup-ports of information. This informationhas been elaborated by an increasinglybetter automated apparatus. A criticalanalysis of photos (a 'photo philosophy')may therefore help us understand what isgoing on around us.The information the photo carries sitson its surface and not within its body, asin the case of shoes or fountain pens.Though this would seem to be true for allpictures, it is not. Pre-industrial picturesare valuable as objects because one losesthe information they carry if one destroystheir body, just as with shoes or fountainpens. Photos are worthless as objectsbecause the information they carry isstored elsewhere and may be transferredeasily from one worthless surface toanother.Photos and printed matter have thefollowing in common: both can become anuisance by creating waste material.However, in printed matter a humansubject, an 'author', elaborates the infor-mation (unless a word processor is used),while in the photo an apparatus does.Apost-industrial object is objectively worth-less and carries information that can bereplicated and information that has beenelaborated by an automated apparatus.Thus, if we are to grasp the photo (andpost-industrial culture in general), wemust concentrate upon the camera (andthe apparatus in general).

VI.

APPARATUSAn apparatus is a machine that elabo-rates information. A situation is moreinformative the less it is probable; forinstance, the letter 'z' is more informativewithin an English text than the letter 'a',and a penguin encountered in a street ismore informative than a mail carrier. Anapparatus is a machine that calculatesprobabilities. Humans used to do thesame thing, and they called it 'creation'.They used to elaborate improbable situ-ations empirically, and they used to calltheir empiricism by noble terms such as'intuition'. Apparatus do this betterbecause they use information theories.This gives rise to a philosophicalproblem. The universe of given objects('nature') tends toward a progressive lossof information. It tends toward an evermore probable distribution of the elementswhich compose it. Culture is a store ofimprobable situations which humankindopposes against this mindless naturaltendency toward loss of information,toward 'thermicdeath', toward oblivion.This is why information is synonymouswith value. However, if apparatui cancreate information in the place of human-kind, what about human commitment?What about values?

VII.

THREE TYPES OF PHOTOSIn order to restate the above philo-sophical problem, one may distinguishbetween three types of photos: photosmade by fully automated cameras (e.g. aphoto made from a NASA satellite),amateur photos (e.g. a photo of thephotographer's dog in front of theDuomo Cathedral in Florence) andprofessional photos (e.g. an experimentalphoto). The first type carries informationprogrammed by humans and elaboratedby apparatus. The third type carriesinformation intended by the photo-grapher, and this intention may beopposed to the one that programmed theapparatus. It is the second and by farmost frequent type of photo which is ofinterest here.The amateur presses upon the shutterrelease as often as possible, becoming

fact an automatic shutter release. Theamateur photographs everything he cameracan photograph and tries to exhaust thecamera program. As a result, the infor-mation these photos carry has not in factbeen intended either by the amateur or bythe camera programmer; they were merevirtualities within the camera program,which became real through an automaticreleasing gesture. This creates pure terror:an apparatus has escaped from humanintention and now realizes all of itsvirtualities automatically (including theone to destroy itself, see Goedel's theorem,which states that every system contains itsown destruction)-an apocalyptic visionif applied, for example, to the thermo-nuclear or the political apparatus.Snapshots carry little information.They are probable. But some of them arehighly informative, difficult to futurize;and for a curious reason: they are badphotos. They owe their information to anerror, to a deviation from the cameraprogram. We are familiar with this sort ofinformation that results from error. Newbiological species arise through errors inthe transmission of the genetic program.In fact, this deviation from programthrough error is responsible for everyinformation produced by nature. Anapparatus that has escaped from humanintention, realizes all its virtualities auto-matically and deviates from its programby error, works like nature. This impliesthat a society dominated by uncontrolledapparatus will be thrown back into theterror of blind, absurd automaticity, intoa pre-cultural situation.The challenge is to control the apparatus.This is shown in the third type of photo.When the experimental photographerdeviates from the camera program, it isdone intentionally, not by error. But theproblem remains that despite the intentionto deviate from the program, the photo-grapher can only photograph what iscontained as a virtuality in the cameraprogram. This is the aspect of the famous'inner dialectic of freedom' we shall haveto face in the post-industrial future.To summarize this discussion of thephoto as an example for the post-industrial future: objects tend to becomeworthless supports for information. Mostof that information is elaborated byautomatic apparatus according to an(originally) human program. Apparatustend to escape from this (originally)human intention. Human commitment istherefore no longer dedicated to theelaboration of programs but to thedeviation from programs; it is no longerdedicated to the creation of values but tothe deviation from values.

Flusser,

The Photograph as Post-Industrial Object

VIII. ELECTROMAGNETIZED PHOTOS 

Photos are about to emigrate fromtheir material support into the electro-magnetic field, to abandon their chemistry:they will no longer be seen on paper buton screens. This is a technical revolution,and basically all cultural revolutions havea technical basis. For instance, theNeolithic revolution was based on agri-culture, and the industrial one on machines.We are in the midst of a culturalrevolution.The new photo can be distinguishedfrom a chemical one in three ways:

(1)

It ispractically eternal; it is not subject toentropy, to the second principle ofthermodynamics.

(2)

It can move andsound.

(3)

It can be changed by itsreceiver. This is true of every electro-magnetized information (e.g. video orcomputer synthetizing), but in the photoone can see how information abandonsits material basis.

(1)

Memory

Objects are bad memories: paper fallsinto ashes, buildings into ruin, entirecivilisations into oblivion. Humans arecommitted to preserving the informationthey create; they are committed tostruggle against entropy, against oblivion.In their search for immortality, humanshave always tried to find something 'aereperennius', something that might resistentropy better than bronze. It has beenfound: silicon (and even better, wetmemories of the immediate future-onesmade of nerve fibres) will assure that allcreated information should outlast thehuman species. The new photos may bestored in this kind of memory.

(2)

Total art

Ever since the fifteenth century, Occi-dental civilisation has suffered from thedivorce into two cultures: science and itstechniques-the 'true' and the 'good forsomething'-on the one hand; the arts-beauty-on the other. This is a perniciousdistinction. Every scientific propositionand every technical gadget has an aestheticquality, just as every work of art has anepistemological and political quality.More significantly, there is no basicdistinction between scientific and artisticresearch: both are fictions in the quest oftruth (scientific hypotheses being fictions).Electromagnetized images do away withthis divorce because they are the result ofscience and are at the service of theimagination. They are what Leonardo daVinci used to call 'fantasia essata'.

synthetic image of a fractal equation isboth a work of art and a model forknowledge. Thus the new photo not onlydoes away with the traditional classi-fication of the various arts (it is painting,music, literature, dance and theatre allrolled into one), but it also does awaywith the distinction between the 'twocultures' (it is both art and science). Itrenders possible a total art Wagner neverdreamt of.

(3)

Dialogue

Totalitarian society is discoursive: itemits information, like the daily press orthe television system. Democratic societyis dialogical: it permits the exchange ofinformation, like the telephone. Bothforms overlap at present, but discoursedominates. The new photo will changethat. Cables and other reversible channelswill carry information both ways. Thenew photo may be changed by its receiverto be sent back, thus changed, to thesender. Everybody will become capableof collaborating in the elaboration ofinformation (within the limits imposed byautomation). Democracy has becometechnically possible for the first time sincethe industrial revolution.To summarize: the new photo willdiffer from the chemical one in that it willbe practically eternal, it will render totalart possible and it will permit democracyto function.

IX.

LES IMMA TERIA

UX"

The purpose of the recent exhibitionorganized by Jean-Francois Liautardunder the title

Les

Immateriaux

at theCentre Pompidou in Paris was to showwhat the future society of pure informationwill look like. It consisted of various typesof electromagnetic images: moving photosof Jupiter's satellites, of particles, ofintestines during digestion as well asimages of mathematical equations and'impossible' objects, such as four-dimen-sional cubes, exchangeable holograms.All this was bathed in synthetic soundwith comments by synthetic voices. Therewas no object present, just immaterialinformation. From the point of view ofindustrial culture, all this was entirelyuseless. It cannot be consumed, onlycontemplated. If in the future peopleconcentrate upon producing such uselessinformation and relegate the productionof useful objects to automatic machinesand artificial intelligences, then we shallhave a useless culture.But if one changes one's point of view,the exhibition suggests that it is preciselythis uselessness of pure information thatwill permit humankind to lead a meaning-ful life for the first time. The ancientsthought idleness ('schole') was the purposeof all action ('a-scholia'). Thanks to theautomatic machines, humankind is be-coming unemployed and thus free topursue the useless dialogical elaborationof pure information. This, of course, iscalled 'play', and the present culturalrevolution may be seen as a mutationfrom 'homo faber' into 'homo ludens'.All serious business will be relegated toapparatus, and the new generation willplay its games and look back withcontempt on the animal seriousness ofpast generations.

INTERSUBJECTIVITY

The future culture of immaterial infor-mation, as exemplified by the new photo,will hold objects in contempt: it willconsume them without paying any atten-tion to them. In this sense, the humanbeing will no longer be subject to objects.No longer facing the universe of objects,the individual instead will be linked,through numerous channels, with otherpeople, and together they will exchangeinformation. This togetherness will standoutside space-time: all the others, whereverthey may be, will always be present withthe individual. One may call this sort ofexistence 'intersubjective', to distinguishit from subjective existence. It is impossibleto formulate as yet the categories of suchan existence. If one could, one wouldhave negotiated the abyss that separatesthe old form of existence from the newone.The new photo is thus an example ofthe emerging culture of immaterial infor-mation. All useful activities will beexecuted by apparatus. The individualwill become free to elaborate pure infor-mation in dialogue with all the others.This information will be stored inun-perishable memories. It will be total art,and every human being will become,potentially, a universal artist. The humanbeing will no longer exist as subject to anobjective universe but as a knot within asocial network which transcends space-time. This is, of course, utopian.Catastro-phies may be relied upon to prevent it.Still, it has become a technically feasibleutopia.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

This paper is based on four essays, two ofwhich

published in Brazil, "Natura1:mente"and "Pos-historia", in Portuguese; and two inGermany, "Fuer eine Philosophie der Foto-grafie" and "Ins Universum der TechnischenBilder", in German. It also contains elementsof an essay on the future of writing which is inprogress.

Flusser,

The Photograph as Post-Industrial Object