Work in Progress (from my paper for the international Symposium "The Secret Life of Objects")

“the question is not wether the presentation of a ‘Stimmung’ is truthful or not, but rather wether it touches (berührt) the observer or not”. We’re no longer dealing with clearly verifiable determinations of truth or falsehood. With his typically circular, enigmatic and inconclusive style, Flusser never delivers a theory for the interpretation of gestures, but rather a reading procedure that is not quantifiable or translatable in the order of discourse (at least in terms of scientific discourse). “The ‘Gestimmtheit’ liberates the ‘Stimmungen’ from their original contexts and turns them into aesthetic phenomena. They become ‘artificial’” (V.F.). That’s why we can say that the ‘Gestimmtheit’ isn’t an epistemological or ethical issue, but rather an aesthetic one. What one needs in order to be able to ‘read’ it is an inclination, a subjective attitude that has less to do with the determination of a clear meaning than with a certain disposition for experiencing sensations…

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