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The end of history?

rik maes
GUEST EDITOR
human history and at the same time introduces the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. Almost 20 years later, we know better! Vilm Flusser a less famous, but in many respects more thorough, CzechBrazilian thinker foresaw more or less the same discontinuity, though from a totally different perspective. The act of writing, he argued, was mankinds answer to the adoration of images primitive man produced to understand the world. Linear writing introduced historical thinking and historical consciousness. This transition from the mythical world into the historical one was further propagated by the invention of printing and the Industrial Revolution: everyone started living in historicity. Soon after the First World War, artists started experiencing the linearity of text as an oppression; poets like Mallarm and Apollinaire in France, Van Ostaijen in Belgium and Marinetti in Italy introduced visual effects in their texts. The numerical

aybe Francis Fukuyama became more famous by the title of his 1989 essay, The End of History?, than by the actual sustainability of its controversial thesis, ie that the end of the Cold War signals the end of the progression of

ABSTRACT: Guest editor Rik Maes discusses the potential end of historical thinking in the age of the technical image. Do intellectuals have a future?

division of Wittgensteins Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is another symptom of discomfort with linearity, the hegemony of which was only recently tackled by the advent of hypertext.

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Flusser argues that we actually pass through a fundamental change of the world by the invention of the technical image (photographs, film, TV, etc) and its sustaining mechanisms and institutions. These images are essentially different from their primitive counterparts as they are based on scientific theories and, in themselves, the logical consequence of texts becoming too complex and incomprehensible. Primitive images (myths) explain the world; technical images explain texts: history becomes a mere pretext for developing more and more complex technical images and computer programmes governing these images. Intellectuals, writers from way back, flee to images and imagination; it was no accident that limagination au pouvoir was the motto of the May 68 revolution. It seems as if the transition to a culture where text is subordinate to images, which are taken at face value as truth and endlessly replicated, is developing in an autonomous and almost automatic way. Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher who died last year, was perhaps the most outspoken technical images, to comment on techno-imagination and unmask the ideologies behind the seemingly autonomous technical advancements. If they dont succeed in this qualitative jump towards a new level of meaning, they become useless, in that they only deliver more pretexts for meaningless technical progress. As Moholy-Nagy, a famous photographer of the 1920s, wrote: Those who are ignorant in matters of photography will be the illiterates of tomorrow. Information management, in its broadest sense, is the discipline par excellence of the future. The transition from a culture that is orientated towards things to a culture that is primarily interested in simulacra information, is happening. Ownership of things, Rifkin states, is steadily being replaced by access, to physical things (leasing), but primarily to information. In the era of networks, suppliers who amass valuable intellectual capital are beginning to exercise control over the conditions and terms by which users secure access to critical ideas, knowledge and expertise. How does a man look who is no longer interested in things, but in information, symbols, codes and models? Maybe we resemble more the citizens of the French Revolution than our own children. As Flusser indicates: The new human being is not a man of action any more, but a player: homo ludens as opposed to homo faber. Life is no longer a drama for him, but a performance. It is no longer a question of action, but of sensation. The new human being does not wish to do or to have, but to experience. He wishes to experience, to know and, above all, to enjoy. He has programmes instead of problems. We die of things like unresolved problems; he will die of non-things like programme errors. If we think of him along these lines, he comes closer to us. (The Shape of Things, p89) This new man refuses to live in the world of collective steered manipulability that was typical of the era of the industrial machines but in a world of individual, unsteered freedom of the bottom-up society, where the order of the day is no longer making decisions in scarcity, but making choices in abundance. His own life is becoming more and more an intrinsically combined play of man and apparatus, a living together as cyborg. Near future, but ostensibly far away ...

representative, proclaiming that the end of history is not the culmination of human culture, as in the case of Fukuyama, but the collapse of the very idea of historicity. We are no longer a part of the drama of alienation; we live in the ecstasy of communication, he wrote. Images, argued Baudrillard, have gone through different stages: (1) the era of the original, the portrayal of a basic reality; (2) the counterfeit, masking and perverting reality; (3) the produced mechanical copy, masking the absence of the original; and (4) the simulated third order of simulacra, whereby the copy has replaced the original. Most famous is his interpretation of the first Iraq War as a simulacrum that did not take place. Of course, the Allied Forces dropped tons of bombs, but only to prove to themselves that there was an enemy to fight; Saddam Hussein, for his part, never committed troops to battle, they were only used as cannon fodder; and there was no final ordeal, as the war was declared finished with an undefeated enemy and an unvictorious victor. Yes, a lot happened, was Baudrillards reasoning, but the true war was only visible in the media, not on the battlefield. The new task of intellectuals is no longer to comment on reality, Flusser and Baudrillard agree, but to interpret

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