TARGET: Paul Virilio's Museum of Accidents

Paul Virilio’s website and museum Unknown Quantity is comprised of an exhibition of images and art installations displayed from 29 November 2002 – 30 March 2003 at Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris. The website is a “Museum of Accidents.” It is our Target instruction for this course, and it serves as the basis for the purpose and application aspects of the method we will use to invent a fatal strategy. Virilio's home page states:

Unknown Quantity will attempt to explore one of the most important issues raised in Paul Virilio's most recent writings: the increasing development of accidents as an indirect consequence of man's inventions (par. 1)

I find Virilio's claim (through Paul Valéry and others) that our use of the instrument/technology is becoming transparent to our consciousness interesting. He suggests that that the object of use value is now taken for granted in such a way that its physical presence actually disappears or is absorbed into the outcome it permits (which, perhaps, is similarly taken for granted). If I am reading him correctly, Virilio seems to suggest that we are only conscious of our actions and the vehicles we use to communicate through when something goes wrong. He also suggests that in order to understand this (our) present reality we have to enter into the conscious space of the accident and see the world from that perspective. His whole project--his "inaugurat[ion of] a new kind of museology and museography" ("Foreword," par. 5)--highlights this outcome.

I tried to examine my reaction to the images in "The Museum of Accidents" (especially the exhibit space with the moving floor that simulates a catastrophe--in an interestingly controlled way). The static stillness of the images seems at odds with the events they depict. I was able to (I think) see Virilio's point about the consciousness of the accident--not literally, of course, because the accident itself is not conscious of itself as accident but only in my response to it. The accidents (particularly their static, removed nature in the images on Virilio's site) and my very conscious reaction to them not only enables my recognition of what has gone wrong in the images, but enables that recognition only in the context of my perception of the same scene without the catastrophe (which could be seen as being similarly static in the unconscious system of rules and processes that maintains its 'normality' and also make it unconscious to perception in everyday life). The image itself, divorced not only from its reality in time and in content but also given a new context by its surroundings (the website, the accompanying explanatory text, etc.) is peculiarly both present and absent. I think this has something to do with the performative nature of exhibition and the fact that these disasters are being displayed as art (another seeming problem area in my reception of the images).

Let us now accept Valéry’s postulate: if consciousness exists only for accidents and if things now operate only 'outside of' consciousness, the loss of consciousness of the accident, and of the major disaster, would amount not just to thoughtlessness, but to madness—the madness of voluntary blindness. ("Foreword," par. 13)

In the above excerpt, Virilio states that our everyday interactions in life are carried out outside of consciousness. Does he mean that we literally overlook the vehicles we use to interact with each other and function in contemporary society? If I consider the computer I am using to make this post, is it my inability to fully understand the series of software and hardware devices that are enabling my communication that is unconscious in me or am I unconscious (as in thoughtless) of what I am doing with my words here? I'm not sure, but I don't think that Virilio means the latter (although that might be up for debate). Perhaps an argument could be made that my use of language is unconscious because I take for granted that individual words have specific meaning without questioning that logic.

VIRILIO AS TARGET

We have to look at Virilio’s website in terms of its content as a way of thinking.  Virilio is looking at the accident as a metaphysical substance.  To return back to an earlier post, substance is what underlies/persists through change (Aristotle).  It is the definition of entelechy: what persists in its own being through change (class notes).  Substance is what is real; it becomes known through its accidents.

Virilio invites us to look at the accident in its modern guise.  He emphasizes the idea that the accidents on his website are unexpected.  They exist as the expression of potential but they also surprise (class notes). Professor Ulmer wants us to look at the accident and do with it what Aristotle did with literacy.  We need to look again at the nature of ontology in a new context.  This new context is a world of technicity, which we need to revisit without metaphysics because, at this stage in the CATTt method we are using, “we don’t have what the Greeks created of metaphysics yet.  Right now, we just want to read the world as presents itself to us” (class notes). 

We then have to invent a metaphysics because the Target slot needs to have a metaphysics; it needs to have a discourse (class notes).  We need to use electracy's fourth inference principle of conduction to make associations.  We therefore need to use aesthetics, the arts, as "a way to organize our information" (class notes).  With Virilio, we must try to "reduce the complication [of his ideas] to simplicity" (class notes).  In his "Foreword," Virilio states

If, in fact, invention is just a way of seeing, of grasping accidents as signs, as opportunities, it is high time to open up our galleries to the impromptu, to that “indirect production” of science and the techno-sciences that is the disaster, the (industrial or other) catastrophe. ("Foreword," par. 8) 

Professor Ulmer pointed out that Virilio specifically identifies the instructions for our Target in this sentence. We need to treat the accident as a sign.  We have to adopt a position of reversability: "we don't explain the accident, it will explain us.  This has bearing on Virilio's statement, quoting Paul Valery, that "'consciousness now exists only for accidents'" ("Foreword," par. 9).  "We want to make cultural use of the accident." The accident is primary; it shows us reality.  "It shows us who we are."  "We need to use it as a category to explain the nature of the real if we can read it and write it as a sign.

This new ontology happens in painting.  The 'grammar' was invented in modernist painting.  "Cezanne validated and expanded a new way to put space and time into an image.  He used color to do it" (class notes).


Paul Cézanne, Kastanienbäume im Jas de Bouffan (1885-1887)

 We need to know the eidos (“the distinctive expression of the character of a culture or social group” (OED)) of disasters.  In terms of our project Target, we need to think about the graphic properties of our accident and ask ourselves what sort of effects we can create graphically so a person can understand what we want to say and 'read' it (class notes).  "Art is intuitively intelligible because it addresses flesh" (class notes), as in the vulnerability in the presence and contours of the real.  "We will comprehend images through an embodied experience" (class notes).  By standing "outside the normal, expected position, [we will] notice" the world and, if I'm interpreting my notes correctly, we will notice our being in it as our own space, not the borrowed space of the general.

My attempt at an abstract design of the visualization of my accident is in the next post.