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guest editor

The end
of history?
rik maes aybe Francis Fukuyama became more famous by the title of his 1989 essay,
GUEST EDITOR
M The End of History?, than by the actual sustainability of its controversial
thesis, ie that the end of the Cold War signals the end of the progression of
human history and at the same time introduces the universalisation of Western
liberal democracy as the final form of human government. Almost 20 years later, we
know better!
Vilém Flusser – a less famous, but in many respects more thorough, Czech-
Brazilian thinker – foresaw more or less the same discontinuity, though from a totally
different perspective. The act of writing, he argued, was mankind’s answer to the
adoration of images primitive man produced to understand the world. Linear writing
introduced historical thinking and historical consciousness. This transition from the
mythical world into the historical one was further propagated by the invention of
printing and the Industrial Revolution: everyone started living in historicity.
Soon after the First World War, artists started experiencing the linearity of text
as an oppression; poets like Mallarmé and Apollinaire in France, Van Ostaijen in
Belgium and Marinetti in Italy introduced visual effects in their texts. The numerical
ABSTRACT: Guest editor Rik Maes division of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is another symptom of
discusses the potential end of historical
thinking in the age of the technical discomfort with linearity, the hegemony of which was only recently tackled by the
image. Do intellectuals have a future? advent of hypertext.

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Flusser argues that we actually pass through a
fundamental change of the world by the invention of the
“technical image” (photographs, film, TV, etc) and its
sustaining mechanisms and institutions. These images
are essentially different from their primitive counterparts
as they are based on scientific theories and, in
themselves, the logical consequence of texts becoming too
complex and incomprehensible. Primitive images (myths)
explain the world; technical images explain texts: history
becomes a mere pretext for developing more and more
complex technical images and computer programmes
governing these images. Intellectuals, writers from way
back, flee to images and imagination; it was no accident
that “l’imagination au pouvoir” was the motto of the
May ’68 revolution. It seems as if the transition to a
culture where text is subordinate to images, which are
taken at face value as truth and endlessly replicated, is
developing in an autonomous and almost automatic way.
Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher who died
last year, was perhaps the most outspoken
representative, proclaiming that the “end of history” is
not the culmination of human culture, as in the case of
Fukuyama, but the collapse of the very idea of historicity.
“We are no longer a part of the drama of alienation; we
live in the ecstasy of communication,” he wrote. Images,
argued Baudrillard, have gone through different stages:
(1) the era of the original, the portrayal of a basic reality;
(2) the counterfeit, masking and perverting reality; (3) the
produced mechanical copy, masking the absence of the
original; and (4) the simulated “third order of simulacra”,
whereby the copy has replaced the original.
Most famous is his interpretation of the first Iraq War
as a simulacrum that “did not take place”. Of course, the
Allied Forces dropped tons of bombs, but only to prove to
themselves that there was an enemy to fight; Saddam
Hussein, for his part, never committed troops to battle,
they were only used as cannon fodder; and there was no
final ordeal, as the war was declared finished with an
undefeated enemy and an “unvictorious” victor. Yes, a lot
happened, was Baudrillard’s reasoning, but the true war
was only visible in the media, not on the battlefield.
The new task of intellectuals is no longer to comment
on reality, Flusser and Baudrillard agree, but to interpret
11
convergence
guest editor
technical images, to comment on “techno-imagination”
and unmask the ideologies behind the seemingly
autonomous technical advancements. If they don’t
succeed in this qualitative jump towards a new level of
meaning, they become useless, in that they only deliver
more pretexts for meaningless technical “progress”.
As Moholy-Nagy, a famous photographer of the 1920s,
wrote: “Those who are ignorant in matters of
photography will be the illiterates of tomorrow.”
Information management, in its broadest sense, is the
discipline par excellence of the future.
The transition from a culture that is orientated
towards things to a culture that is primarily interested in
“simulacra” information, is happening. Ownership of
things, Rifkin states, is steadily being replaced by access,
to physical things (leasing), but primarily to information.
“In the era of networks, suppliers who amass valuable
intellectual capital are beginning to exercise control over
the conditions and terms by which users secure access to
critical ideas, knowledge and expertise.”
How does a man look who is no longer interested in
things, but in information, symbols, codes and models?
Maybe we resemble more the citizens of the French
Revolution than our own children. As Flusser indicates:
“The new human being is not a man of action any more,
but a player: homo ludens as opposed to homo faber. Life
is no longer a drama for him, but a performance. It is no
longer a question of action, but of sensation. The new
human being does not wish to do or to have, but to experi-
ence. He wishes to experience, to know and, above all, to
enjoy. He has programmes instead of problems. We die of
things like unresolved problems; he will die of non-things
like programme errors. If we think of him along these
lines, he comes closer to us.” (The Shape of Things, p89)
This new man refuses to live in the world of collective
steered manipulability that was typical of the era of the
industrial machines – but in a world of individual,
unsteered freedom of the “bottom-up” society, where the
order of the day is no longer making decisions in scarcity,
but making choices in abundance. His own life is
becoming more and more an intrinsically combined play
of man and apparatus, a “living together” as cyborg. Near
future, but ostensibly far away ...
vol 9 no 1