The study examines Fluxus mail art as a practice of epistemic disobedience within the Cold War postal system. Far from a neutral channel of communication, the post operated as part of what Michel Foucault terms the episteme: a regulatory framework that shaped the visibility, legitimacy, and circulation of knowledge through stamps, routes, and formats. Stamps in particular served as miniature instruments of ideology, transmitting national identity and political narratives in every letter. Against this apparatus, Fluxus artists intervened by appropriating and disrupting its visual and procedural conventions.
Robert Watts parodied official philately through counterfeit stamp sheets and vending machines, undermining the authority of bureaucratic design. Ray Johnson’s “New York Correspondence School” destabilised closure in correspondence by transforming delivery into an open-ended, participatory network. Mieko Shiomi’s “Spatial Poem” series extended this logic globally, incorporating delay, disappearance, and fragmentation into a decentralised archive. Ben Vautier’s “Postman’s Choice” further exposed the system’s dependence on procedural certainty by rendering the postal worker an unwilling co-author. As a whole, these practices foreground the fragility of sending and receiving, a structural condition akin to Derrida’s envoi, while situating that fragility within the regulated frameworks that Foucault identified as the basis of knowledge circulation.