Despite important overlaps between Flusser's work and what, following Alfred Sohn-Rethel, is currently being referred to as “real abstraction," Flusser's philosophical approach to photography cannot, however, be conflated withthe economic abstractions decoded by classical Marxism (though Flusser does claim that the innovations of the photographer against the overcoding of the apparatusis the only revolution left open to us).6 The technical image for Flusser interrupts and indeed breaks with linear history and historical time, putting society into what he identifies as a postindustrial, and therefore postwork and postproletarian, mode in whichinformation dominates, and functionaries—that is, "human beings"—are neither “the fixed nor the variable," as they were in prior modes of production, but “merge" with the apparatus“into a unity."8 The increasingly complete incorporation of humans into the apparatus changes the relations of production. Flusser, without presuming to name or identify the meta-systemic principles in operation here, nonetheless acknowledges that the programs that constitute the photographic apparatusare programmed by higher-order programs:
Digitality andthe Media of Dispossession
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