title, the original work is available through publisher
return to more works by land here
observation 1:
synkar’s review:
kicker: flusser, in a wonderful and creative act establishes an alien that could rupture human subjectivity, only to neutralize it by conscripting it the same anthropocentric narrative he thinks hes using it to battle, all to reach the most mundane synthesis possible.
p.27 - my first though upon encountering the top review of this book, together with the ending chapter, is the following "hmm, no, i liked it more when it was subtle. as i turned the page, he explicitly states what you just stated here. now it becomes a drawn out anthropocentric ethical sentimental dilemma, when before that, both his postulations of the vampire and his postulations of its reflection in us appeared accidental enough to be subtle, i liked it more when it wasnt fixed and ordered. here i fished out a review of the exact attitude this book promotes, a toxic humanism. whats the point of questioning alienation through the alien whilst also being afraid to approach the alien".
already at the beginning of the work, flusser admits that it is a fable about men, not about the alien. he says he considers nothing human foreign to him, but since by the end of the book its subtly revealed that he doesnt recognize anything foreign at all, even though he makes use of the capital other many times, as well as of the term alien in a few considerations, he believes that anything that "is-with-us" is foreign enough to introspect and steal from it, whilst also being with us enough to be able to make existential sentimentalities about, and to see our reflection within it. however, his subtle discoveries of the other clearly surpass mans reflection, because on numerous occassions he makes fundamental categorical differentiations between the romantic vampire alien and man, so much so that they are ontically and physiologically seperable down to their logical limits. man's ability to interact with art (which is to flusser every technic act) and culture (which is to flusser a puristical and false anthropic dichotomy) will have it so that we are fundamnetally seperated from the ability to interact with objects and peers, and to raise false dichotomies over them, and apparently so to the degree that modernism liberates us from this divide by heralding in an age of information, that somehow is supposed to fill in for our existentially-reflective purpose and fill the ontic and phyisiological gaps that paint our experience and provoke the differences between man and squid. flusser's squid is alive and well, but he kills it before the book even starts, as is clear, its a simple sociological metaphor, yet halfway through the book its clear that this squid is already more intelligent than man, let alone what its capable of doing to transform man even further.
but no, since man belongs with the world, and all that belongs is related to man, and all that is related is not foreign, therefore, the transformative value of the other, lyotard's inhuman or levina's face that cannot be reduced, is suspended in order to serve as a tool for man's self-exploration. the imposed limit of man is called fourth by the power of the vampire squid, but immediately recalled when it is shown that all biology is an imperfect construct and therefore somehow lacking the divine power of the logic of the final cause? he wastes this first chapter arguing that he's not sketching a zoology but a structural-existential inquiry, yet all he does is transpose and compare dichotomies in the most zoologically clinical way possible. the actual inquiry in fact begins where the book is supposed to already be surpassing it, whereas the first chapter dissapoints its goal of avoiding being a zoology, when it so clearly follows the structure of an infographic diagram. one that, likely at the time felt quite revolutionary indeed, be it that flusser's own predictions about the modernistic information economy would have brought his own attempted inquiry into a banal cliche. his comments on imperfection strike me as odd, given that he says about convergent evolution 'at both the biological and “spiritual” level, we are the result of stupid chance, both imperfect beings full of defects. not-so-intelligent “constructions”. it is because we are imperfect that we seek to complete ourselves in the other.' whilst later claiming about this same squid that 'they do not “make”, they “complete”. his creation is not “made”, but “perfected”. that is why when he creates, vampyroteuthis does not experience the perfidy of the object but the perfidy of the other' as well as, concerning this very information-requiring interaction 'he does not want to violate objects by imposing new information onto them; in order to be informed it is the other that has to be violated'.
i am not claiming the hypocrisy of relating an imperfect being with its ability to perfect something, but rather the much more subtle direction of arguing on account of the reflective power of mechanistic evolution, simultaneously speaking of the limitations of its directions, the strenghts and weaknesses of its features, whilst also arguing against the ability for the abilities of the inhuman to not be collapsed into the human reflection. flusser thinks hes arguing on behalf of a human perspective when arguing about the inhuman, whilst also imposing this human perspective into the very narrative that disables his own perspective from being nothing but. the final cause of novel possibility, the possibility to reach the inhuman perspective, the abyssal, interior, expressive, ephemeral, anti-object, ahistorical paradigm, is cut short by the objective goal of modernism (the modern ideals - communication, originality, inner expression, dialogism, anti-objectuality), by flusser's affective desire to impose this process onto the reflective and critical paradigm. this colonizer mindset keeps flusser away from ontological rape, from tentacle hentai.
he avoids symbolic beastiality by forming the squid into the human, after already having formed it away from it. this is not about reaching the inhuman but the non-human, the irrelevant to the human, and flusser's direction takes him even further than he anticipates, because he anticipates nothing at all, but gets quite far anyways. in the beginning of the book he claims he doesnt want to, then he does so anyways near the end of the book, only to, in the last chapter, argue that there is no way for us to expose ourselves to it without immediately stealing its subjectivity for ourselves. however, as he envisions the squid as something that completes the world, how can a human, which in his ontic zoology rests upon particular complexes, ever achieve the modernity of the squid, if he is limited by the experience of a non-transcendental, non-immersive touch? the human touch is a wall, whereas the squids touch is a liquid immersion. flusser envisions the squid's erotic consummation as the ability to predate over the memory of the other, to transfer information, to cannibalize and really encounter the enviornment in its liquid state, in its post-organisticity. flusser does the same thing when he envisions completion in the idea of its consummative decency, in the imperfection of a perfect act. instead of taking the objective world as the grounds for the recognition of the immediate state of the other, he takes this correspondence to signal that man's auto-capturing interaction with the world is propelled into the state of the squid's artistic impulse, by objectifying and shaping into a tool this very erotic consummative act. flusser wants man to erotically consummate the objective cultural ground of the squid, and to turn it into a tool of reflection for mankind. but he has recognized that an imperfect squid has a perfect consummative ability that is heterogenous to its very subjectivity, not to its objective reflectivity. he already discovers the foreign, but lets go of it, precisely because he requests of himself to keep fulfilling the role of man. however, he's never quite honest enough about his desire regarding this fact. if he were to do so, it would be far more revolutionary, for at the very least he'd be attempting to bridge the gap between man and the foreign rather than collapsing it.
'the horror... is that vampyroteuthian social behaviour is not opposite to ours... but our own most noble motives and gestures.'