The Original Accident [Paperback]

This is a book about accidents and catastrophes. Virilio says that throughout the course of the twentieth century, man-made disasters have been gradually proliferating and gaining a sort of momentum. From the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, to the first great aviation disaster -- the exploding of the Hindenburg in 1937 -- and on down to Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, the Space Shuttles, etc., man-made catastrophes have been appearing with an alarming frequency. Indeed, Virilio says, catastrophes are being mass produced, for every invention is simultaneously the invention of its own special type of destruction. To invent trains is to invent derailment; to invent ships is also to invent the shipwreck, and so on. The problem is, Virilio says, we are now living in a global age in which the coming catastrophe will take on a planetary scale dimension. He says that we appear to be headed for some unspecified global information catastrophe, although he does not give any specifics about what he thinks this catastrophe may be about; only that we are headed for something big. For accidents are a direct function of speed, and the faster we go, the greater the dangers of having accidents multiplies. Now we are moving at lightspeed, for video screens have collapsed time and space to instanteity, reducing everything to a kind of eternal present, in which there is no reference to past or future, only the "now."

Virilio writes with an apocalyptic feel, and he even suggests that the ecological movement, with its concern for natural catastrophes, should develop a parallel eschatological movement, in which certain individuals apply themselves to the study of accidents in an attempt to forestall the coming global disaster. He even thinks we should have a huge Museum of the Accident, which will focus our attention on this mostly neglected shadow side of technology in hopes of increasing our awareness of these disasters.

Virilio belongs to a certain type of avant-garde thinking, for his Museum of the Accident invites a certain comparison with J.G. Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard, prior to writing that book, had put on an exhibition of car crashes, which is exactly the type of thing Virilio advocates here. Andy Warhol, too, was fascinated with car crashes, and the filmmaker David Cronenberg belongs with this group, as well. Other members of this school of thought would include the novelist Doris Lessing or the culture historian William Irwin Thompson. All of these thinkers and artists are part of a millenial group of those who are not pacified into a state of zombification regarding the "marvels" of technology, but who instead recognize that we cannot keep up this overstraining of the planet at this kind of breakneck speed forever. There are limits to growth, and the greater and more complex the technologies, the larger and more spectacular will be the accidents generated by them.

Virilio is alarmed by how comfortable and accepting we seem to have become regarding the accidents generated by our technological society. But this is not a normal way of life, by any stretch of the imagination, for technological proliferation at ever faster and ever greater speeds is not only dangerous, it is pathological.

Reading Virilio makes one realize just how strange our current way of life really is, for banal environments are invisible to those who live in them, as McLuhan never tired of pointing out. It requires the eyes of an artist or the metaphors of a great thinker to draw our attention to the strangeness of our technological environments in order to make us aware of what we are doing.

Virilio has much in common with that other great French thinker of media, Jean Baudrillard, the difference being that Virilio's writing is clearer and more accessible. I recommend this book highly. The only complaint I have is that Virilio does not go into more detail about specific accidents and their cultural implications. And the first half of this short, 100 page book is by far more interesting than the second.

The reader will find the thoughtsphere of Virilio's mind to be a rather unique place to visit, I think.

SEE ALSO MY YOUTUBE VIDEO "JOHN DAVID EBERT ON PAUL VIRILIO"

--John David Ebert, author of "The New Media Invasion" (McFarland Books, 2011)

Having exhausted my nerves on various occasions reading 'The Information Bomb', 'Open Sky' and 'Negative Horizon', I continue to subject myself to the hysterical ravings of this irrascible luddite. While many of the proposals put forth in this book are sober and sound- the idea of 'inventing accidents' is a clever twist on Marxist dialectics, as is Virilio's impassioned plea for a science of accidents, the moral urgency of which is obscured by a style overloaded with silly neologisms - the hyperbolic conservatism of it all strikes me as rather distasteful. Note the many references to 'our democracies', 'the legitimate state' and the 'democratic process', all of which are redolent of Lyotard's odious obsession with radical evil, the desperate paranoia of Milner and Agamben (true to form, Virilio has his own post-Heideggerian take on the fatal, irrevocable moment when everything started to go wrong), the blithe apologetics of the New Philosophers. To exacerbate matters, Virilio would have us believe that the destructive drive towards hyperspeed and technological innovation are now fully autonomous, having unfettered themselves from the lash of their cruel taskmaster, Capital. There is a tragic, ahistorical anthropology here, one that pillories the latent excesses of hubristic man, all of which have been given free rein in a resolutely anthropocentric universe that verges upon total disintegration. Augustine without a hope of salvation or reprieve. What, then, is left for us to do, if not to salvage the sodden scraps of communal being (the electoral order, which Virilio seems to endorse without reservation, despite his admission of its 'spectacular', mediatized nature) in a bid to apply the brakes on Enlightenment Reason? Now that we are all aboard the shipwreck of disaster, we can hope for nothing more than a miraculous clinamen that will bend, however slightly, the fatal course of its trajectory. Virilio, in the last reckoning, is Jurgen Habermas on a mix of barbiturates and amphetamines.

› Go to Amazon.com to see both reviews  3.0 out of 5 stars