Viewing the world as a Black Box is a keyword that comes up again and again in Vilém Flusser's books, but also in conversation with him. >> black box
The first black boxes were the Cameras, later came the Computers, and finally it is the whole World that is becoming similar to an apparatus that is programmed by people, but whose functioning no one wants to understand or can understand anymore. What is of interest is no longer the illumination of a problem, but the solution that eliminates this problem from the world. In Flusser's evolutionary model, a new way of thinking, a new code, is always created out of a crisis. The danger lies in eventually seeing the world only as a function of the program, that is, as a function of the black box. The program becomes the Fetish around which the world articulates itself. >> camera computer world problem solution crisis program fetish
Vilém Flusser is well aware of this almost religious dimension of computational thinking:
"If I take the word 'Problem' in its etymological sense, namely something that stands in my way, that has been thrown at me as an 'Object,' then I can take two positions on it. Either I can say I want to see through the problem. Or I can say to myself, I'm not going to live very long, behind this problem there are a whole bunch of others. What I'm interested in is finding a way to eliminate the problem if I act on it. This second point of view was previously considered the 'primitive' – magical – point of view. Now suddenly it does a somersault, and it becomes the rational point of view. Suddenly it turns out to be more rational to leave the problem unresolved and to solve it unresolved. I haven't really wrapped my head around this cybernetic attitude yet, but there is something religious about leaving the mystery in mystery. The fact that we no longer have to analyze, but leave the analysis to the computer, and that we can be content to solve the problems, is both an impoverishment and an enrichment. I am not yet clear whether the impoverishment or the enrichment is greater. Because the beauty of analysis, that is, the beauty of critical reason is a powerful argument after all. We lose the beauty of critical thinking and gain the beauty of the new imagination. I can't weigh that."
Vilém Flusser's models of thought are provocations, invitations to leave the safe positions of critical thinking and to try to understand the world from the interval, from the empty space between two historical certainties. Although Flusser proclaims the end of critical thinking, he himself remains attached to the critical gesture. Perhaps the new imagination, that is, the abandonment of criticism, is only a pretext for being able to criticize better:
"Look, I have the audacity to break new ground. Then let others come and correct me. I am very satisfied when I am proven wrong."
Isn't there also a certain goût de provocation ?
"A goût de provocation and above all a stylistic mishap. If one listens to me and reads, one has the impression that I claim. But I just want to create doubt. Everything I say sounds like a thesis, and a not very well supported one at that. Because you don't hear that there is always some irony in it. I don't take myself completely seriously after all. What I want is to provoke. To provoke in the true sense of the word: to evoke."
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FLUSSER, Vilém, 1996. Der Flusser-Reader zu Kommunikation, Medien und Design. 2. Aufl. Mannheim: Bollmann. Kommunikation & Neue Medien. ISBN 978-3-927901-67-4.
Harald Brandt, Provokateur des Denkens ( Provocateur of thought), p. 232–233.