Description
Book SynopsisAn imagination of possibilities, of miscalculations, of futures off-kilter
“Probability is a chimera, its head is true, its tail a suggestion. Futurologists attempt to compel the head to eat the tail (ouroboros). Here, though, we will try to wag the tail.” —Vilém Flusser
Two years after his Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, the philosopher Vilém Flusser engaged in another thought experiment: a collection of twenty-two “scenarios for the future” to be produced as computer-generated media, or technical images, that would break the imaginative logjam in conceiving the social, political, and economic future of the universe. What If? is not just an “impossible journey” to which Flusser invites us in the first scenario; it functions also as a distorting mirror held up to humanity.
Flusser’s disarming scenarios of an Anthropocene fraught with nightmares offer new visions that range from the scientific to the fantastic to the playful and whimsical. Each essay reflects our present sense of understanding the world, considering the exploitation of nature and the dangers of global warming, overpopulation, and blind reliance on the promises of scientific knowledge and invention. What If? offers insight into the radical futures of a slipstream Anthropocene that have much to do with speculative fiction, with Flusser’s concept of design as “crafty” or slippery, and with art and the immense creative potential of failure versus reasonable, “good” computing or calculability. As such, the book is both a warning and a nudge to imagine what we may yet become and be.
Trade Review"While the universe Flusser created with his previous book,
Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, explores a single alternate lifeworld coherent in its mirroring of the human species by a cephalopod, each scenario in
What If? suggests a variety of new ideas, given the speculative, projecting nature of their setting—in the best and most creative sense of ‘what if’—in the past, the present, or the future."—from the Introduction
Table of ContentsIntroduction: What If? Into the Slipstream of Flusser’s “Field of Possibilities”
Anke Finger
First Scenario: What If . . .
Part I. Scenes from Family Life
Second Scenario: Grandmother
Third Scenario: Grandfather
Fourth Scenario: Great Uncle
Fifth Scenario: Brothers
Sixth Scenario: Son
Seventh Scenario: Grandchildren
Eighth Scenario: Great-Grandchildren
Part II. Scenes from Economic Life
Ninth Scenario: Economic Miracle
Tenth Scenario: Foreign Aid
Eleventh Scenario: Mechanical Engineering
Twelfth Scenario: Agriculture
Thirteenth Scenario: Chemical Industry
Fourteenth Scenario: Animal Husbandry
Part III. Scenes from Politics
Fifteenth Scenario: War
Sixteenth Scenario: Aural Obedience
Seventeenth Scenario: Perpetual Peace
Eighteenth Scenario: Revolution
Nineteenth Scenario: Parliamentary Democracy
Twentieth Scenario: Aryan Imperialism
Twenty-First Scenario: Black Is Beautiful
Part IV. Showdown
Twenty-Second Scenario: A Breather
Afterword
Kenneth Goldsmith
Acknowledgments
Notes
