The Art of the Accident: Paul Virilio and Accelerated Modernity

Abstract

One urgent part of a reconstructed theoretical social and human sciences project in the twenty-first century is to conceptualize anew the ‘socio-technologies of connection, resilience, mobility and collapse in contemporary cities’ [1] especially in the wake of 9/11, 2001, and 7/7, 2005, all that has followed those events (Ali 2005; Armitage 2005; Conley 2005; Kureishi 2005; Thrift 2005; Virilio 2005a; Virilio 2005b; Virilio 2005c; Virilio 2005d). In this essay we consider critically one example of a theory of the ‘accident’ - the network failure or collapse or catastrophe or breakdown in what we term here accelerated modernity. That theory is provided by the French urban and cultural theorist Paul Virilio. Virilio’s theory of the accident is relatively little known and even less discussed. He is also a figure whose oeuvre has been generally imported into the English speaking academic world as essentially another, albeit quirky, complementary element in contemporary social theory following on from other French theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, when in fact Virilio has accurately characterized himself over the years as explicitly against sociology and, moreover, for, as he has put it, war and politics (Der Derian 1998; Armitage 2000; Redhead 2004a; Redhead 2004b). Moreover, Virilio’s consistent influences over the years have been photography, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Gestalt psychology, stained glass painting and anarchistic Christianity [2], a very different intellectual background to the ‘poststructuralists’ and ‘postmodernists’ with whom he is often misleadingly bracketed. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont (2003), in their ill-conceived ‘expose’ of the supposed scientific inadequacies of ‘French postmodernism’ and ‘postructuralism’, subject Paul Virilio to withering attack (the Virilio chapter is Chapter 10 in the second English edition) alongside Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Bruno Latour, and Felix Guattari amongst many others. Unfortunately for Sokal and Bricmont’s project, Paul Virilio has little in common with such figures other than nationality or Parisian residence. Indeed, as we shall see in this essay, Virilio has gone further with this self-labeling process and described his own distinct intellectual enterprise as that of a critic of the art of technology (Redhead 2004a). His theory of the accident, then, not surprisingly involves what we call here an aesthetics of the accident. Virilio however, in providing a perspective on the art of the accident in our increasingly accelerated and dangerous modernities, falls short of what is required in the contemporary urban sociological project. What is required, more generally, is in fact a reinvigorated sociology, not merely an art, of the accident.