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    The Bag

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    flusserfluss
    The author describes the contents of a bag that was recently stolen but then found intact nearby. The bag contains folders with the author's correspondence, unpublished and published papers, manuscripts, outlines, and other documents. The folders are organized in different ways, including chronologically, logically, and disorderly. The author analyzes the various ways the contents of the bag and their organization could reveal aspects of himself, his relationships, perspectives, and memory structures to a potential thief examining the contents. However, the thief did not inspect the bag closely and thus missed opportunities to analyze its organization and gain insights into the author.

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    The Bag

    Uploaded by

    flusserfluss
    127 views3 pages
    The author describes the contents of a bag that was recently stolen but then found intact nearby. The bag contains folders with the author's correspondence, unpublished and published papers, manuscripts, outlines, and other documents. The folders are organized in different ways, including chronologically, logically, and disorderly. The author analyzes the various ways the contents of the bag and their organization could reveal aspects of himself, his relationships, perspectives, and memory structures to a potential thief examining the contents. However, the thief did not inspect the bag closely and thus missed opportunities to analyze its organization and gain insights into the author.

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    The author describes the contents of a bag that was recently stolen but then found intact nearby. The bag contains folders with the author's correspondence, unpublished and published papers, manuscripts, outlines, and other documents. The folders are organized in different ways, including chronologically, logically, and disorderly. The author analyzes the various ways the contents of the bag and their organization could reveal aspects of himself, his relationships, perspectives, and memory structures to a potential thief examining the contents. However, the thief did not inspect the bag closely and thus missed opportunities to analyze its organization and gain insights into the author.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    127 views3 pages

    The Bag

    Uploaded by

    flusserfluss
    The author describes the contents of a bag that was recently stolen but then found intact nearby. The bag contains folders with the author's correspondence, unpublished and published papers, manuscripts, outlines, and other documents. The folders are organized in different ways, including chronologically, logically, and disorderly. The author analyzes the various ways the contents of the bag and their organization could reveal aspects of himself, his relationships, perspectives, and memory structures to a potential thief examining the contents. However, the thief did not inspect the bag closely and thus missed opportunities to analyze its organization and gain insights into the author.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 3

    The bag

    (Vilem Flusser)

    *Omnia me mecum porto*. In plain English: Everything that I've written and
    published in the last 18 months is kept in a bag. The bag was stolen recently from a car
    parked outside a Paris hotel. It was found again in a nearby street with the contents intact.
    The thief found no value in them. A discarded literary judgement.
    The bag can be seen as a part of my *memory*. Whoever reads the papers it
    contains and the way they are ordered will recognise me, in a limited though intense way. I
    intend here to examine and analyse the bag. Not as if I myself were interesting but because
    the thief, if he had inspected the contents more carefully, would have found himself in the
    company of historians, archeologists, palaeontologists, psychoanalysts, and similar
    researchers.
    What is at issue here is a yellow leather bag equipped with a zipper. It contains
    different coloured folders. One contains my correspondence from june 1972 until now,
    including copies of my letters and letters addressed to me. Some of my letters have
    remained unanswered, and some of those that I have received I have never replied to. The
    letters are ordered chronologically. Another folder is titled: "unpublished papers". It
    contains about 30 essays in Portuguese, English or German concerning art criticism and
    phenomenology, the originals of which were sent to newspapers. These papers are
    unordered. Another folder is titled "published papers". It contains about ten essays
    published during my stay in Europe. They are arranged according to their date published .
    A further folder is titled "La Force du Quotidian" and contains a book manuscrpit - fifteen
    essays about things in our environment - it will be released in December in Paris. Another
    is titled "Ca existe, la Nature?" and contains eight essays. Both folders are arranged
    according to their content. A further is titled "New York" and contains outlines for a lecture
    about the future of television that I plan to hold next year at the Museum of Modern
    Art. Another is titled "Rio" and contains essays that my publisher in Rio de Janeiro will
    bring out soon. Another is titled "Talks" and contains outlines for lectures that I have held
    and will hold in Europe. They are not ordered. Another is titled "Bodenlosigkeit" and
    contains 100 pages of an autobiography that I began and never completed. Another is titled
    "Biennal" and contains references to the "XII Bienal des Arts" in Sao Paulo. The last has
    the title "Documentatos" and contains 'self-referential' certificates from government offices,
    universities and other institutions. This is then the semantic and syntactical dimension of
    the bag. The folders are firstly arranged *syntactically*. They are arranged in three classes:

    [A] Dialogues (the correspondence folder)


    [B] Discourses to others (lectures and manuscripts)
    [C] Discourses

    about myself (documents) The first class would have given the thief a view into the
    structure of my relationships with others, what connects me to them, who rejects me, and
    who I reject. The second class would have allowed the thief to see me from "within", and
    how I try to make myself public. The third class would have allowed him to see me in the
    way the establishment does, my mask, via which I play my public role. The knowledge that
    the thief thus gains would be problematic for the following reasons: (1) The authenticity of
    the papers would need to be checked (2) The authenticity of the documents contained
    therein would have to be checked. The thief would be required to make a close reading of
    the texts and of their contexts. The folders are also arranged semantically.

    Again they are arranged into three classes:

    [A] Factual information (documents, sections of letters, lectures and manuscripts).


    [B] Interpretations of facts (lectures and manuscripts)
    [C] Expressions of emotion and value (letters, and beneath the surface in most
    manuscripts).

    The first class would have offered the thief a view into my "objective-being-in-the-world".
    The second the way in which I maintain a distance therefrom. The third a view of my
    "subjective and intersubjective-being-in-the-world. From this he might have held the keys
    to the subjective and objective position we find ourselves in. All this, of course, cautiously.
    The facts could be misunderstood or misinterpreted, and the emotions and values expressed
    dishonestly, as much by me as by others. The thief would have to "decode" and "de-
    ideologise" the messages contained in the bag.

    The folders are also arranged structurally. Again there are three classes:

    [A] Chronological arrangement


    [B] Logical arrangement
    [C] Disorder.

    The first structure puts us in mind of geological and botanical formations. The second of
    encyclopaedia and computers . The third of genetic information. Together they reveal a
    picture of the structure of the human memory. What is missing however is a "formal
    structure" of the kind found in "alphabetical arrangement". Without this the thief might
    have concluded a defect in my way of thinking. The interaction of the ordered and
    disordered structures in the bag would have given the thief the opportunity to contribute to
    Jaques Monods problem "coincidence and necessity". The bag is a fertile hunting-ground
    for "structural analysis".

    Finally the folders are arranged according to their relationship to the


    bag itself. Two classes result:

    [A] Folders that are in the bag so that they can be kept in mind.
    [B] Folders that are there to keep things that are not there in mind.

    The letters, manuscripts, and essays belong to the first class, the unfinished autobiography
    to the second. This reveals two functions of the bag(and of memory): to keep things in the
    present and to bring things into the present. The real situation is nevertheless much more
    complex. Some papers in the bag point to the future (the "New York" folder and the
    unpublished manuscript); thus proving the function of memory, namely to construct
    designs for the future. The thief could have recognised all of this. Not, however, this: This
    article itself which the reader has before him is found in the bag in the folder titled
    "published papers". The article is not only concerned with the bag, it is not just a "meta-
    bag" but a part which the thief could not have studied. The thief could never have
    recognised this aspect of the bag.
    I always carry the bag with me. We all do this only my bag is more readily
    available. The question is: can our bags be stolen from us? Or would they always be found
    again a few blocks away, intact? Put differently; firstly: are we lighter and therefore
    progress more quickly into the future when our bags are lifted from us? And secondly; are
    these living or dead weights in our bags? The bag is too complicated to give a satisfactory
    answer to these questions. In any case it's good that from now on the questions themselves
    are kept safely in the bag.

    [From Vilem Flusser, Nachgeschichten, Bollmann Verlag, Duesseldorf, 1990.


    Translated from German 1998 by Michael Stapley for nettime-zkp5]

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