On the State of Affairs. A Small Philosophy of Design

Vilém Flusser (1920–1991), a younger contemporary of Walter Benjamin, one of the pioneers of media studies, created an unusual intellectual genre. In the form of brief and elegant philosophical essays, he reveals the semantic structures of our everyday world, its most important areas, and the transformations occurring within them. Flusser's analysis unfolds as a phenomenology of the ordinary objects and mechanisms surrounding us, of design and urban planning. At the same time, as he faces the onset of a new digital age, he discovers how pure digital form increasingly threatens to leave the materiality of our world in the past. In Flusser's paradoxical style of thinking, there is a fusion of his lived experience of the political catastrophes of the 20th century, a penetrating historical gaze into the past, and an understanding of the risks of a new civilization for the future of human freedom.