Tracing the Continual Present: Yoko Tawada and Vilém Flusser¹

Abstract

Contemporary German‐Japanese author Yoko Tawada and Czech‐born, German‐speaking media theorist Vilém Flusser constitute an unlikely pair for analysis. Yet, both have produced multilingual oeuvres resistant to systematization and intensely preoccupied with the medium of writing. In her fiction‐essay “An der Spree” from the 2007 collection Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte, Tawada cites Flusser's essay “Letters of the Alphabet” from his 1987 collection Does Writing have a Future? Recalling Flusser's depiction of the Latin alphabet's imagistic roots, Tawada rediscovers and retraces written signs (letters, logograms, and numerals) in Berlin. This essay argues for two key critical products of Tawada's contact with Flusser. First, Tawada reveals the Eurocentrism in Flusser's theory of writing and Western media theory more generally. Second, Tawada's narrators' acts of writing and reading produce continual presents, which in turn revise Flusser's linear‐teleological understanding of writing and time, and a common conception of our current age as one of simultaneity.