Reading as Imagining

Vilém Flusser in his essay The Future of Writing describes writing as “transcoding two-dimensional codes into a single dimension” and states that “the original purpose of writing was to facilitate the deciphering of images”.   

 The translation from surface into line implies a radical change of meaning. The eye that deciphers an image scans the surface, and it thus establishes reversible relations between the elements of the image. It may go back and forth while deciphering the image. This reversibility of relation that prevails within the image characterises the world for those who use images for the understanding of the world, who “imagine” it. For them, all the things in the world are related to each other in such a reversible way, and their world is structured by “eternal return.”1

    This reversibility that is conjured through writing is one of the significant elements that differentiates writing from drawing. Through viewing drawing we can see the image directly, it is there, it has been created, yet when reading writing we must instead create the image ourselves in order to conceive it. Reading requires “imagining”, it requires the creation and invention of an image. Writing therefore, in the reverse, should involve the obliteration of the image, destroying what can be seen and instead invoke an unknown. Flusser argues otherwise, he states that writing does not destroy the image but instead explains the image. He observes that “by unrolling the surface of the image into lines, by unwinding the tissue of the image into the threads of a text” writing actually renders “explicit what was implicit within the image”. Consequently, according to Flusser, in order to understand and see what an image implies we need to transcode the image through the act of writing. It could therefore seem, that through this act, we are only needlessly obscuring the image’s implicit meaning with a further symbolic abstraction manifested in the textual form of an alternative sequence of images, were it not for one essential concept that the act of writing introduces - time.   

1 Flusser, “The future of writing”, Writings p64