Generations
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Written in the 1960s and unpublished until 2017, Generations is Vilém Flusser’s largest work and the foundation for many of his later theories on media and post-history. In this ambitious study of the Modern Age, Flusser traces a devastating shift in Western civilization that ultimately leads to the modern “apparatus”: the impersonal, cybernetic system of self-programmed objectification that has become our reality.
Flusser presents history as a recurring struggle between generations, with each new generation overturning the values of the former and eventually drifting into a state of existential avoidance. This cycle becomes the basis for a powerful diagnosis of the modern condition. Flusser identifies a critical shift toward self-worship and collective will in humanity’s understanding of progress and divinity during the Renaissance. This shift foregrounded our path toward an automated world driven by apathetic functionaries serving the apparatus and widespread fascist irrationalism, catastrophically realized during the Holocaust.
With surprising relevance to the digital present that gradually empties the world of its grounded reality, Generations offers a striking account of humanity’s relationship to technology, algorithms, and systems of control. Flusser’s concept of the “apparatus” anticipates the modern experience of being shaped by social media, bureaucratic systems, and oppressive technologies. Arguing that contemporary humanity exists in a state of slow existential stagnation rather than dramatic apocalypse, the book asks and answers a pressing question: how did we get here?
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Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) was born in Prague; emigrated to Brazil, where he taught philosophy and wrote a daily newspaper column; and later moved to France. The University of Minnesota Press has translated a dozen of Flusser’s works, among them Into the Universe of Technical Images, Does Writing Have a Future?, Gestures, Vampyroteuthis Infernalls, and What If?
Rodrigo Maltez Novaes is an artist, translator, researcher, and editor. He was a resident researcher at the Vilém Flusser Archive in Berlin between 2009 and 2014. He has translated several works by Vilém Flusser, including On Doubt, also published by the University of Minnesota Press.
