Virilio's wager is that the accident is not what befalls a technology from outside but what that technology secretly is. Invent the substance and you have already invented its catastrophe: the ship carries the shipwreck, the airliner the crash, the reactor the meltdown. If that is true, then the whole modern arrangement, which treats progress as a stream of benefits shadowed by regrettable and separable mishaps, has the metaphysics backwards, and the accident is the truth the substance was concealing all along. From this single inversion the book derives everything: a demand that we stop hiding catastrophes and instead exhibit them, in a "Museum of the Accident"; a periodization in which the local, situated accident of the industrial age (a ship in the North Atlantic on a certain night) gives way to a planetary "integral accident" carried at the speed of telecommunications; and a claim that after the accident in substances comes the accident in knowledge itself, which attacks not this or that habitat but rationality's power to anticipate.
The reconstruction below follows that through-line as it moves across the book's ten chapters: the invention thesis and its Aristotelian pedigree; the deliberate blurring of accident and attack in the media; the museological program and the synchronization of collective emotion that displaces the older standardization of opinion; the pairing of ecology (a symptom) with eschatology (a horizon); speed as the hidden variable, named dromology; and the final globalization of the accident into a foreclosed world with no outside. The book is repetitive by design, restating its core formulations in varied wording chapter after chapter; that recurrence is itself part of the argument, so every locus of a recurring formulation is captured in its own place below, and a recurrence map at the end lets the pattern be read across the book at a glance.
Read it also as a period document. Its present tense is the immediate aftermath of 11 September 2001, the Toulouse AZF explosion of 21 September 2001, the Madrid Atocha bombing of 11 March 2004, and the run-up to the US presidential election of November 2004; its recurring political object is the confusion, deliberately maintained by the "administration of fear," between the accident and the attack.
Paul Virilio. The Original Accident. Translated by Julie Rose. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Originally published as L'Accident originel (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2005).
The book grew out of the exhibition Ce qui arrive ("Unknown Quantity"), which Virilio organized at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in 2002–2003 and conceived as a prefiguration of a future Museum of the Accident (page 7). It runs to two parts and ten chapters: Part I — 1. Caution (pages 3–8); 2. The Invention of Accidents (9–14); 3. The Accident Argument (15–22); 4. The Accident Museum (23–30); 5. The Future of the Accident (31–37); 6. The Expectation Horizon (38–46); 7. Unknown Quantity (47–53). Part II — 8. Public Emotion (57–69); 9. The Original Accident (70–82); 10. The Dromosphere (83–101). All page references below are to this edition.
The book opens by naming two features that set the present against every prior civilization. The first is speed; the second, which follows from it, is the accident. Virilio takes both from a single sentence of Marc Bloch's and treats the pairing as the book's premise.
page 3"One feature, the most distinctive of all, pits contemporary civilization against those that have preceded it: speed. The metamorphosis occurred in the space of a single generation."
The historian Marc Bloch, noted in the 1930s, quoted by Virilio.
page 3"This situation involves a second feature in turn: the accident. The gradual spread of catastrophic events not only affects the reality of the moment but causes anxiety and anguish for generations to come."
The stakes of the whole book are stated here as a matter "of the utmost urgency": to make the accident an object of study and exhibition rather than something merely suffered. Everyday life has become a broken mirror in which what "crops up" does so ever faster and, at the limit, simultaneously.
page 3"From incidents to accidents, from catastrophes to cataclysms, everyday life has become a kaleidoscope where we endlessly bang into or run up against what crops up, ex abrupto, out of the blue, so to speak … And so, in this broken mirror, we need to learn how to clearly make out what crops up more and more frequently and, more to the point, more and more rapidly, in an untimely fashion, perhaps even simultaneously."
page 3"Faced with this state of affairs in an accelerated temporality that affects customs and moral standards and art every bit as much as the politics of nations, one thing stands out as being of the utmost urgency: to expose the accident in Time."
The move that governs the rest of the book is museological. Against the "admission of powerlessness" Valéry diagnosed, Virilio proposes to reverse the usual concealment and build a museology that exhibits the accident in every register, including the happy accident.
page 4"This admission of powerlessness in the face of the surging up of unexpected and catastrophic events forces us to try to reverse the usual trend that exposes us to the accident in order to establish a new kind of museology or museography: one that would now entail exposing the accident, all accidents, from the most banal to the most tragic, from natural catastrophes to industrial and scientific disasters, without avoiding the too often neglected category of the happy accident, the stroke of luck, the coup de foudre or even the coup de grâce!"
The Aristotelian pedigree of the thesis is stated here for the first time, and immediately turned into the invention series that recurs throughout the book. This is the load-bearing formulation of the entire work.
page 5"According to Aristotle, 'the accident reveals the substance.' If so, then invention of the 'substance' is equally invention of the 'accident'. The shipwreck is consequently the 'futurist' invention of the ship, and the air crash the invention of the supersonic airliner, just as the Chernobyl meltdown is the invention of the nuclear power station."
Valéry is enlisted twice to convert the point about tools into a point about consciousness: awareness survives only as awareness of accidents, and function exists only outside consciousness.
page 5"On this score, let's hear it again from Paul Valéry: 'The tool is tending to vanish from consciousness. We commonly say that its function has become automatic. What we should make of this is the new equation: consciousness only survives now as awareness of accidents.'"
page 5"This admission of failure then leads to a clear and definitive conclusion: 'All that is capable of being resumed and repeated is fading away, falls silent. Function only exists outside consciousness.'"
The industrial-serial argument grounds the thesis in a datable ledger of mass-produced accidents, the specific dates and disasters that Virilio returns to across the book.
page 5"… it is only logical today to note that the twentieth century did in fact swamp us with mass-produced accidents one after the other, from the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 up to the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, to say nothing of the Seveso chemical plant disaster of 1976 or of the Toulouse fertilizer factory disaster of 2001."
Two coinages arrive here that recur later: the "intelligence of the crisis in intelligence," and philofolly, the reversal of philosophy into a love of the unthinkable.
page 6"… meaning allow the accident in turn to become automatic, the urgent need for an 'intelligence of the crisis in intelligence' is making itself felt, at the very beginning of the twenty-first century — an intelligence which ecology is the clinical symptom of, anticipating the imminent emergence of a philosophy of post-industrial eschatology."
page 6"Such a situation would then mean embracing the swift reversal of philosophy into its opposite — in other words, the birth of philofolly, a love of what was repressed as radically unimaginable, unthinkable, whereby the insane nature of our acts would not only stop consciously worrying us, but would thrill us and captivate us."
The chapter closes by naming the program and its occasion: the "imperative of responsibility" requires exposing accidents, and the Fondation Cartier exhibition is offered as its prefiguration. A witness to European nihilism supplies the chapter's darkest line.
page 7"Actually, the imperative of responsibility for the generations to come requires that we now expose accidents along with the frequency of their industrial and post-industrial repetition."
page 7"This is the whole point of the exhibition at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain as well as its avowed aim. A test run or, more precisely, a prefiguration of a future Museum of the Accident, the exhibition aims first and foremost to take a stand against the collapse of ethical and aesthetic landmarks, that loss of meaning we so often witness now as victims much more than as actors."
page 8"In fact, as one witness to the rise of nihilism in Europe puts it: 'The most atrocious act is easy when the way leading up to it has been duly cleared.'"
The chapter presses the invention thesis into a definition: the accident is an "unconscious oeuvre," an uncovering of what was already there. The artificial accident, unlike the natural one, is the direct issue of a motor or a material.
page 9"Creation or collapse, the accident is an unconscious oeuvre, an invention in the sense of uncovering what was hidden, just waiting to happen."
page 9"Unlike the 'natural' accident, the 'artificial' accident results from the innovation of a motor or of some substantial material."
The Tutankhamun / Chernobyl pairing supplies the chapter's signature image: to cover the faulty reactor with a "sarcophagus" was to invent the nuclear accident, just as Carter "invented" the tomb by finding it.
page 9"In 1922, for instance, when Howard Carter stumbled across Tutankhamun's sarcophagus in the Valley of the Kings, he literally invented it. But when the Soviet 'liquidators' covered the faulty Chernobyl reactor with a different kind of 'sarcophagus', they invented the major nuclear accident, and this, only a few years after the one that had occurred at Three Mile Island in the United States."
Aristotle returns as the authority who denies that a science of the accident is possible, which lets Virilio replace "accidentology" with "archaeotechnological invention" and lay out the invention series in full.
page 10"'There is no science of the accident,' Aristotle cautioned a long time ago. Despite the existence of risk studies which assess risks, there is no accidentology, but only a process of fortuitous discovery, archaeotechnological invention. To invent the sailing ship or steamer is to invent the shipwreck. To invent the train is to invent the rail accident of derailment. To invent the family automobile is to produce the pile-up on the highway."
page 10"To get what is heavier than air to take off in the form of an aeroplane or dirigible is to invent the crash, the air disaster. As for the space shuttle, Challenger, its blowing up in flight in the same year that the tragedy of Chernobyl occurred is the original accident of a new motor, the equivalent of the first shipwreck of the very first ship."
page 10"An indirect invention of the breakdown of computer (or other) systems, look at the economic upheaval in the financial markets when suddenly, with the stockmarket crash, the hidden face of the economic sciences and technologies of automated dealing rears up, like the iceberg before the Titanic, only on Wall Street, in Tokyo and in London."
The etymological engine of the book is stated here: accidens as "what crops up," substare as "what is beneath," so the accident is a "technoanalysis" of any knowledge.
page 10"And so, if, for Aristotle some little time ago and for us today, the accident reveals the substance, this is in fact because WHAT CROPS UP (accidens) is a sort of analysis, a technoanalysis of WHAT IS BENEATH (substare) any knowledge."
page 10"… so much so that the mechanical unconscious once flagged by psychoanalysis here proves its validity as a proof through absurdity of the fatal recklessness of scientists when it comes to knowing about major risks."
Freud and Berger are brought in for a single move each: accumulation ends chance (so the accident is now an industry), and error is inseparable from skill (so the accident is inseparable from the speed at which it surges up). The visible/invisible speed distinction that will govern the dromology chapters is stated here.
page 12"'Accumulation puts an end to the impression of chance,' wrote Sigmund Freud, some time between 1914 and 1915. Indeed, after the twentieth century and the sudden capitalization of tragedies and catastrophes of all kinds, we really should draw up the bankruptcy report on a technoscientific Progress that the nineteenth-century positivists were so proud of."
page 12"If we take the realm of private car ownership, for example, the way the carnage on the highways has become commonplace is Freudian proof that the accumulation of traffic accidents largely puts an end to 'chance' — and the multiple security systems our vehicles are equipped with don't alter this fact one iota: in the course of the twentieth century, the accident became a heavy industry."
page 12"… as the essayist, John Berger, likes to claim, in any case ('In every creation, whether it involves an original idea, a painting or a poem, error always sits alongside skill. Skill is never presented on its own; there is no skill, no creative talent, without error'). But this is because the accident is inseparable from the speed with which it unexpectedly surges up."
page 13"In fact, the visible speed of the substance — that of the means of transport, of computing, of information — is only ever the tip of the iceberg of the invisible speed of the accident. This holds true just as much for road traffic as for the traffic of values."
page 13"In his Physics, Aristotle remarks at the outset that it is not Time as such that corrupts and destroys, but what crops up (accidens). So it is indeed the passage of Time, in other words the speed with which they crop up that achieves the ruin of all things, every 'substance' being, in the end, a victim of the accident in the traffic circulation of time."
The chapter ends on Malraux, who supplies the counter-thesis Virilio's whole book worries at: that culture is what raises man above accident.
page 14"… since, as Malraux said, 'culture is what made man something more than an accident in the Universe.'"
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