Pós-história e educação em Vilém Flusser

Abstract

In 1839 – according to Vilém Flusser's (1920-1991) notion of history - the first technical image in civilization appears – the photography - an image created by a device, a post-industrial product, the result of a dark “camera” (black box). This technical image introduces a new hermeneutical horizon to human understanding of the world. Since then, the complexity of the devices starts to create “meanings” of the world and reproduce them. Thus begins the greatest ontological transformation in culture and, therefore, in social communicological models. The first great communicological model – conceived generically – was the demonstrative rational writing (alphabetical composition of the world as Paideia) and, in modernity, the Gutenberg galaxy. The alphabetic communicological model – even considered in its rhetorical structure – begins as an attempt to demystify and explain traditional images (not elaborated by apparatus), it emerges, the concept and the theory. At this stage, the school is the place of theory. School and writing, among other events, are foundational elements of our understanding of history. Along with the multidiversity of languages and representational idiomatic capacities, cultures elaborate through history "hermeneutics" that can be transmitted to future generations, this transmission, creation, and propagation of the "real" can be understood, provisionally, as education (Paideia). Such education means that there must be an ontological support named as the communicological issue of a given culture where individuals interstructure asymmetrically, inserting themselves in the culture as a possibility to weave and weave themselves historically. Until modernity and then with the nominated “bourgeois revolutions”, the communicological issue of the “history of humanity” occurred as a hermeneutic world of languages, writing and the conceptual and dialogic way of interpreting the totality (cosmos). With the technical image, post-history begins to dawn. Post-history is the civilizing condition when technical images and encoding devices become predominant over concepts in the transmission of the cultural “message”. This condition is characterized by the “totalizing” codification of the social communicological issue by increasingly insistent, centralized, automatic, and totalitarian devices. The preponderance of devices, in this situation, starts to “program” history: it is a post history in the form of apparatus/devices (Ge-Stell), employees and programmers. The work that follows inquires about the condition of education in the face of concepts surpassed by technical images, that is, education in post-history in Vilém Flusser.