# Vom Projizieren by Vilém Flusser
Are we actually becoming "post-modern"? In this question, the word "modern" is not understood as a buzzword, but as a synonym for "new-age". So, are we actually revising the Renaissance? But if so, what do we actually find fault with it and oppose it?
De Docta Ignorantia wikipedia 
In *De docta ignorantia* (Latin: On learned ignorance/on scientific ignorance), the Cusan (Nicholas of Cusa wikipedia ) proposes to mathematize thinking - to think numerically rather than literally. In doing so, he lays the groundwork for the modern age: he no longer bows to God, but over things.
And this not so much because "God cannot know better than we that one and one is two," but because the divine laws are encoded in words and the laws of nature in algorithms.
The recoding of thought from letters into numbers is a tremendous upheaval. It is quite another thing to try to decipher the literal laws of God or the numerical laws of nature. The divine laws can be broken with the help of sin, but the laws of nature cannot be broken, but only bent with the help of technology. At first, this upheaval appears as a change of mood: those who sin live in fear and trembling; those who use technology hope for progress. But then an existential problem arises: the question of why, in fact, God's laws can be broken becomes, "If the laws of nature cannot be broken, why, in fact, can progress set us free?" The Renaissance has caused an extraordinarily unsatisfactory reformulation of the question of freedom; and this is what we find fault with it.
But what do we have to counter it with? The more and more condensing suspicion that the laws - whether they are divine or natural - were set up by ourselves. That we are not subjects of the laws at all, but their projects. That we therefore have to bow neither before God nor over the things. This suspicion appears in the following question: How is it that the laws are built according to the rules of human codes? Why does "Thou shalt not kill" follow the rules of German/English (or Hebrew) grammar and free fall the rules of arithmetic? Doesn't it all look as if we ourselves codified the laws, then projected them, only to retrieve them by means of revelation and discovery? Should this suspicion be reinforced, then we would indeed have become "post modern": The modern age initiated by the Cusan would be over.
Modern times have always been aware of the inconvenience of recoding from letters into numbers. Descartes is an excellent example of this. In his time, things were still seen as extended things (*res extensae*). But numerical thinking (*res cogitans*) is not appropriate to such a world of things; for numerical thinking is clear and distinct, that is, there are intervals between the numbers.
Every number is clear because it is clearly distinguished (by an interval) from every other. If numerical thinking is applied to things, they threaten to slip through the intervals and remain unthought of.
Descartes' method of attaching the numbers of thought to the points of things shows the problem. The method of analytic geometry consists in recoding from arithmetic to geometry and then recoding from geometry to arithmetic.
In order to see this problem, we must try to take the standpoint of that time to the things. For us, of course, things are no longer extended things, but swarms of particles and therefore have the same structure as numerical thinking. For Descartes, on the other hand, it was a matter of adapting the structure of thinking to a world that was still "intact"(ideal/whole) at that time (*adaequatio intellectus ad rem*), and he tried to do this, by first geometrizing the world in the classical tradition and then arithmetized this geometry. Thereby he was aware of the fact, that the "intact" extended world presupposes a God, without whose help (*concursus dei*) the back-and-forth coding has no chance of success. This is the epistemological basis of modern science and technology.
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As I – Vilém Flusser said, this is no longer our problem, and in this sense we are indeed "post-modern". The modern age had confidence in the solidity of the material world, and we have lost this confidence. It is true that modern people - beginning with the Cusan - devoted their attention more and more to things and less and less to God, but this did not mean a disappearance of faith; for they believed in things, and such faith presupposes that things are "solid" somehow and somewhere. Only the less thorough modern scientists could therefore dispense with God as an "unnecessary hypothesis". The whole mathematization of thinking, i.e. all modern science and technology, is nothing but a strategy to get to the bottom of things, and this bottom can be nothing else than "meta physical". Therefore, the modern belief in progress, that one could save man (redeem him from his Alienation) by technical change of things, is actually only a variant (recoding) of the medieval one. We can no longer share this belief.
The question here is how we have lost this faith; how the suspicion could arise that we ourselves are the ones who project the things and thus God out, in order to then laboriously bring it all back again. The answer to this is: In the course of modern times, numerical thinking has penetrated ever deeper into things, but instead of hitting a bottom, it has dissolved things into wisps of mist floating in nothingness. But that is not yet the decisive thing. While it bent over the things, it has dissolved itself to wafts of mist floating in the nothingness. This ghostly process is euphemistically called "enlightenment", mistaking fog for clarity. Numerical thinking has explained itself by explaining things, and there is nothing left - only nothingness - to be explained. What is meant here by the word "post-modern" is precisely this final victory of the Enlightenment.
Accordingly, one has to distinguish between two converging (though mutually implying) tendencies in modern times. One tendency is gradually dismantling faith in the solidity of the world of things, the other faith in the solidity of the subject in this world of things, and these two tendencies are presently beginning to collide. Here it must suffice to briefly mention four of these tendencies – two of the first type and two of the second. The selection of these four tendencies from numerous others follows purposefully: they shall facilitate the understanding of the emerging "post-modern" way of thinking and practice.
**The first tendency shall be called the "physical world view".** The world of the things shows itself as a scattering of particles which float in four crossing and overlapping relation fields. The particles form clumps (for example atoms), but they have the tendency to scatter more and more uniformly, so that the clumps are to be regarded as temporary coincidences in the universal tendency to uniform scattering. (As an aside, our brains are also such randomly formed clumps, only they are far less likely than atome). It has turned out that the particles themselves are divisible, only this division has progressed at present so far that the question arises whether these particles of the particles (for example the quarks) are not better to be regarded as symbols of the numerical thinking than as particles of the thing world. But probably such a distinction is no longer of interest; because the physical world view has as a whole the unmistakable character of a projection of the numerical thinking. It is no longer "sensuous".
This leads to **a second tendency, which shall be called "neurophysiological"**. One begins to understand how the "sensual" world, the world perceived by the bodily senses, comes about. Punctual stimuli are received by nerve fibers, according to a "digital" principle: each individual stimulus is either received or rejected ("1-0"). The received stimuli are electromagnetically and chemically processed in the central nervous system and result – in a not completely transparent way – in the perceptions of the extended things. The stimuli are the data from which the extended things are composed. The perceived world is a projection of data processing. (Although Descartes tried to doubt the senses, he did not have sufficient knowledge). The processing of data into perceptions, however, does not take place in an isolated nervous system, but this system is coupled with others. Perceptions are processed in function of other perceptions, which are somehow stored in the system. It turns out that the stored perceptions were largely fed there from other nervous systems. They are the input of an output of other nervous systems.
This leads to **a third tendency, which shall be called "psychological"**. One has begun to analyze the psychic processes - not only perceptions, but also sensations, desires, judgments, decisions, etc. - of the human being. - etc. It has been found that the "conscious" mental processes - the so-called "I" - do not form a definable unit. They are processes which are based on a tissue of "unconscious" collective psychic processes and which are not only fed by this tissue but are also largely controlled by it. This fabric reaches far beyond the human being, easily encompasses all living things and frays downward. The "I" proves to be a kind of tip of an iceberg dissolving in the collective and crystallizing from there. It turns out to be an ideological reification of psychological processes. Moreover, it becomes clear that even on the "conscious" level there is no question of a definable identity. Rather, it is an inter-subjective networking through which information is produced in constant exchange. From this point of view, the "I" is to be seen as a reservoir into which information flows, where it is processed and provisionally stored in order to be passed on. In this respect, the "I" appears as a constantly shifting node of an intersubjective tissue, which sits on top of a collective "unconscious" psychic tissue.
This leads to **the fourth tendency, which shall be mentioned here and called "existential"**. Phenomenological investigations have shown that the modern problem of cognition (for example the Cartesian one) is wrongly formulated. The latter assumes that cognition presupposes a cognizing subject and an object to be cognized. The phenomenological investigation, on the other hand, shows that cognition is a concrete phenomenon from which the subject and the object of cognition are extrapolated only afterwards. It shows that the concrete "life-world" is a field of relations - whereby cognition is only one among numerous relations - and that the subjects and objects in it are to be regarded as abstract extrapolations to be "bracketed". This becomes clear in the attempt to define a given subject. Then it turns out that the "I" can identify itself only in relation to a "You"-saying other and that this relation is reversible ("dialogical"): "I" and "You" are dialogical poles. Some "hard" core of the "I" (a "self", a "soul") turns out to be a logical and existential un-thing/nonentity.
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In addition to the four tendencies mentioned above, two further ones should be mentioned. In genetics, it is apparent that individual organisms are to be regarded as "phenotypes" through which a networked stream of genetic information flows, over which the organisms have no influence. And in ecology, individual organisms are seen as functions of networked ecosystems, not as autonomous systems. Comparable insights into networked fields of relationships are offered, for example, by linguistics, cultural analysis, or cybernetics.
Thus, the modern numerical thinking has led to a dissolution of things and of thinking itself, and thus has caused the modern faith to crumble from within. The consideration of this leaves a gloomy impression. The great enterprise of "modernity", which begins with the recoding of thought and leads to science, technology and enlightenment, shows itself to be a murderous and suicidal enterprise - and this not only on the "theoretical" level discussed here, but above all in its practical (political) consequences, such as Auschwitz, Hiroshima, environmental pollution and the nuclear threat. In fact, many, perhaps most, cultural critics hold this pessimistic view. Beginning with Nietzsche and continuing through existential philosophy to Barthes, Foucault, and Baudrillard, there is talk of "death," be it of God, be it of science, be it of humanism. Therefore, the term "post-modern" is to be understood as a rather desperate rejection of modernity. But such cultural pessimism is by no means compelling.
Originally, the recoding of thought from letters into numbers, thanks to which the modern era was set on track, was probably done in order to achieve clarity and distinctness of thought. However, in this effort we can already see the attempt to adopt a new, no longer submissive attitude to the world and to life. With time, one became more and more aware of the fact that with the numerical thinking a change of dimension was made. For literal thinking, the world and the human being in it are linear, processual, an "event". For numerical thinking, the world and man are punctual, mosaic, a "decomposing and assembling." With the recoding of thinking from historicity into system analysis and system synthesis, thinking has become more abstract: It has receded from unidimensionality into zero-dimensionality. This is already evident in Descartes: although he still considers the world of things to be extended, he assumes that we can analyze ("calculate") it in points. This assumption is, by the way, the epistemological basis of modern times: numerical thinking has a structure not adequate to the extended world, but it is, strangely enough, nevertheless more suitable than literal thinking to get a grip on the world of things.
This modern contradiction contains the germ of the present decomposition of the world of things into fields of relations. It is obvious to overcome the contradiction as follows: Instead of assuming that numerical thinking is not adequate for the structure of the world, but can be measured against it, it can be assumed that the structure of the world can be adapted to the structure of thinking and actually does so whenever one bends "over" it: not *adaequatio intellectus ad rem*, but *rei ad intellectus*. However, such a reversal of the epistemological problem requires the abandonment of belief in a world independent of thought, and this is difficult. That is why for a long time there was an effort to adapt numerical thinking to supposedly processual "realities", and differential calculus is an example of this effort. However, one became more and more aware of the fact that numerical thinking adapts things to itself (see Industrial Revolution), that it forces the "realities" to adapt to it. In practice, this led to the abandonment of differential equations in favor of digital calculation. The pragmatic success of calculating made the abandonment of the belief in a world independent of thinking and thus the dissolution of things into relational fields compelling.
Hand in hand with this, however, goes a parallel development. The retreat of thinking from linearity into zero-dimensionality offers it a distance from itself: It becomes critical of itself. This is clearly expressed in Kant, but the consequences of this distance become perceptible only at present. The subject becomes an object to itself, in all its parameters. The person/human being becomes calculable, not only as a physical and physiological, but also as a mental, social and cultural "thing". All his parameters become analyzable, decomposable into points: perceptions into stimuli, behavior into actomes, decisions into decidemes, language into phonemes, cultures into culturemes. Human phenomena previously considered (and therefore reified) as processes, such as imagination, judgment, political and economic power, even the sex drive and the instinct for validity, decompose into elements. Curiously, this recession of the subject from itself is first understood as a glorification of the individual. Indeed, this typical modern schizophrenia first leads to a series of anthropologies interpreted as self-knowledge. The self-recognizing (and having recognized) person/human being liberates itself calculatively (technically) from the things it knows. The striking example for such a "humanism" is Marxism. But it is in the essence of the matter that the individual does not prove to be indivisible but arbitrarily divisible. As the object of calculation, the human being dissolves into intersecting networks of physiological, psychological, social and cultural relations; and the human being as the subject of calculation dissolves in calculation itself. This is the infamous "death of humanism".
However, all this is not a cause for nihilistic pessimism. The retreat of thinking from the line into the point (which is nothingness) is not only a movement of calculating - of analyzing the world and human being - but just as much a movement of computation: of synthesizing worlds and human beings. It is true that with the onset of numerical thinking a step is taken towards decomposing things and human beings to "nothing". But it is equally true that with it the field for the projection of alternative worlds and people becomes free. At present, most of us are impressed by the symptoms of dissolution. Everything around us - environment, society, consciousness - and with it everything in us - values, meanings, decisions - is about to disintegrate. But there are just as many symptoms of an incipient projection of alternatives.
A new, post-humanistic, "post-modern" Anthropology is in the making. After we have enlightened ourselves as a nothing in nothing - as a knot of interconnected relations that nothing connects - we can only begin to negate this nothing. Such a negative anthropology ("neg-anthropology") is not only a theoretical philosophical view (a negative faith), but above all a practice. An example shall prove this.