Το προπατορικό ατύχημα

by Paul Virilio, Βασίλης Τομανάς (Translator)

Προπατορικό αμάρτημα ή προπατορικό ατύχημα: όπως το τέλος/πέρας, η απαρχή είναι ένα όριο, και οι επιστήμες και οι τεχνικές δεν αποφεύγουν αυτό το κουσούρι περισσότερο από όσο η φιλοσοφία.
Στο βιβλίο αυτό, ο συγγραφέας τής "Πληροφορικής βόμβας" αναπτύσσει το ζήτημα του ατυχήματος των γνώσεων και της επιτακτικής ανάγκης για ένα "μουσείο των καταστροφών".

Βιομηχανικές ή φυσικές καταστροφές, που η αύξησή τους έχει γίνει όχι μόνο γεωμετρική, αλλά γεωγραφική, αν όχι και συμπαντική. Το πλανάσθαι ανθρώπινο, το εμμένειν σατανικό: σύμφωνα με αυτό το ρητό, η πρόοδος της σημερινής καταστροφής απαιτεί μία νέα νοημοσύνη, στην οποία η βασική αρχή της ευθύνης θα αντικαταστήσει οριστικά τη βασική αρχή της αποτελεσματικότητας/ αποδοτικότητας των παραληρηματικά επηρμένων τεχνο-επιστημών, που οδηγούν το μέλλον σε αδιέξοδο, στο τραγικό αδιέξοδο μίας έλλειψης μέτρου που εναντίον της είχαν ορθωθεί εξ αρχής ο ελληνολατινικός και ο ιουδαιο-χριστιανικός κόσμος.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, Politics

127 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Paul Virilio is a cultural theorist and urbanist. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military.

Reviews

[Steve Mentz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reads like two slim books in one: a speculative analysis of the legacy of Aristotle on accidents in postmodern context, plus a meditation on Chernobyl, 9/11, and a few other resonant world-changing catastrophes. Fun if usually more glancing than pointed.

Some lively lines that may find their ways into my book on shipwreck:

"To invent the sailing ship or steamer is to invent the shipwreck" (10)
"There is no science of the accident" (per Aristotle, 10)
"A society that unthinkingly privileges the present, real time, to the detriment of past and future, also privileges accidents" (23)
"Geopolitical ecology would also mean this: facing up to the unpredictable, to this Medusa of technical progress that literally exterminates the whole world" 41
"...the global accident that integrates..." 49
"Everything, right now! Such is the crazy catch-cry of hyper-modern times, of this hypercentre of temporal compression..." 100

[matthew harding · Rating 5 out of 5]

Throwing Deep Shade at the Anthropocene:

Oh man, but this is one slender but compelling polemic! The book has several "theses" which is true to form when it comes to Continental theory, but it's the smaller arguments that seem--pardon the pun--the most explosive. I think that one thread that weaves through the book is dealing with the observer effect in quantum physics, that being that if you observe a particle, you change it's trajectory. Now, think about media and society. Discuss!

One of the small arguments explains how media exposes us to the ongoing and increasing acts of disaster; however, the media can also hide these disasters behind a curtain of nostalgia when it all becomes too much for the public; however, media isn't through with you, not by a longshot.

While this example is not in the book, Virilio got me thinking. Let's take the broadcasting of the Vietnam War (let's not talk about CBS' ratings during this time, because it was all about 'public service,' right?) and the unfolding of the Watergate scandal. Around this time, All in the Family, a show that brought social commentary and critique to the masses, was the king of ratings, until it wasn't.
In its 1976-77 season, All in the Family gave up the lead to Happy Days, which featured Ron Howard--a throwback to the Andy Griffith Show--in the lead. This show was followed by The Waltons, Laverne and Shirley and Little House on the Prairie. Talk about ODing on nostalgia--and false nostalgia at that (everything was so perfect in the post-depression Walton's world)!

This period would be a fitting example of what Virilio sees as television's domination within the visual culture. Namely, the synchronization of emotions (26). This festival, or fetishistic period of false nostalgia was followed by "real life" crime shows like Hill Street Blues and Law and Order, which was followed by "Reality TV" where fake people in fake situations allegedly act in real ways--which competed with the "real news" of Turner Broadcasting's CNN, which gave rise to the alternative real news of Fox--CNN then had to change their programming to compete with Fox.

What the media is doing here is always the same: playing ping pong over the abyss, "smothering the truth of the facts" about our world (27). "Suicide bombing or accident? Information or disinformation? From now on, no one really knows" (19).
The entire decade reminds of of the joke about the guy who picked the wrong sh*t-filled room in hell: "Alright everyone, break's over! Back on your heads!"

Ironically, there are those today who cry out "Fake News!" and then retreat behind the very screens that broadcast other forms of disinformation that lead these folks to see themselves as somehow "woke" on media.
In one sense, while earlier TV alternated between fact and fiction (and fictive fact), the new media is being birthed from the old as we can see in the rise of Fox and now the hyper-conservative media larvae are popping open in the last days of a Trump presidency.

Virilio predicts all of this. It's not "If you build it, they will come, it's "If you build it, the disaster comes." We fail to understand that our technologies are double-edged with the beneficial edge giving way to the edge that brings trauma and disaster.

While my example shows the media wrestling with its doppelganger, according to Virilio, it gets worse: "[The] break up of social order will be triggered by extreme emotional fragility of an aberrant demographic polarization [imagine] tens of millions of inhabitants [...] interconnected in a network [...] of collective emotion [that will] likely do away with all democratic representation, all institutions, promoting instead a hysteria, a chaos of which certain continents are already the bloody theater" (68-9). It doesn't get much better than this, folks! Sure, Virilio hedges with his addition of "likely," but "MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN" anyone?

I should mention that Virilio wasn't just a "French" theorist, but a "Catholic" French theorist, which should remind you of other firebrands like Jacques Ellul and Ivan Ilych.

The point of Virilio's book is not simply to throw shade, or to lob a searing polemic at the masses: the point is to offer an explanation of the reality that is still hidden from us. It's interesting that we live in this jaded, cynical post-truth, post-structuralist, post-modernist age and because of this we assume that we are likewise cynical, jaded and "post" whatever; however, Virilio says no, you're just conditioned to think that you're on the other side of something when you're really still soaking in it. Reading this book is a bit like actually being in Christopher Nolan's Inception. "Wait. Is THIS the reality that we thought we came from, or just another dream, or was the original reality only an avatar of the dream?"
(Note: Speaking of this desire for unending growth and progress, the last chapter offers as an example the German automaker industry's reasoning for lifting all speed limits on the autobahn: if you limit a car that can drive in excess of 180kmh to a mere 120kmh then you are dooming the industry and already sealing the worker's fate to a life of unemployment. Virilio says that what you are really doing is sacrificing the road-accident victim to the illusion of progress. I am reminded of certain republican politicians who were ready to sacrifice people to Covid-related deaths so that the economy could be saved.)

If you don't think that we are still locked within the positivist/"progressivist" paradigm just look at sports doping (the belief that the body can be perfected indefinitely) can be applied to our turbo-capitalism and beyond if we consider globalization. Virilio quotes Rene Girard regarding media's role in all of this:
"With media coverage of competitions, all-out performance-enhancement is uncontrollable. If opponents were till now simple obstacles to the acievement of the 'desire for victory,' it is as the obstacles they represent that they are now valued. The 'desire for an obstacle' has now taken over and so now what is sought is adversity, not the adversity" (81).

All of this can be applied to any facet of socio-political life these days. As a matter of fact, you should apply it. What Virilio is doing in a less-than-subtle way is applying the quantum theory of observer effect in physics on whole populations, and it ain't pretty.

Looked at in another way, what Virilio is doing is doping Rene Girard's mimetic theory, giving it a snort of Continental crack, and then shoving into a crowded room that Virilio would call the Dromosphere (modern life that is characterized by speed/rapid change).


We all know that Osama Bin Laden craved the attention of the media machine, but so does every other fledgling terrorist cell. Unfortunately (I am at a loss for words here, so I'm being semi-factitious), in our media-saturated age, our military machine no longer looks towards a national adversary, but an amorphous cloud of terror filled with "faceless and homeless people 'hell-bent' on collective suicide" (82). We will do whatever it takes to defeat this amorphous enemy and...

"If everything is allowed in order to avert the end of the world, then it is the end of everything" (82).

This book is difficult to read not because it's hard to understand--oh no, it's quite easy to follow the incendiary logic--it's difficult because it can push you towards cynicism. For those not afraid of a little deep thinking, I would prescribe reading Gianni Vattimo's book, The End of Modernity, as a sort of antidote for any underlying symptoms of cynicism. Better to live as a "positive nihilist" than a dower cynic!

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

If the cover itself did not provide sufficient forewarning, you are probably not going to do much better than THE ORIGINAL ACCIDENT if you are in the market for Virilio at his most apocalyptic. This is not just a book about accidents and their retroactively foundational role in progress (military, technical, broadly scientific), but implicitly a book about what he calls "the integral accident" or "the Great Accident." We are dealing, fundamentally, as Virilio more or less states, w/ an eschatological vision implying a future of unimaginable catastrophe (and a near-certain termination of our particular civilization). Progress and the acceleration of reality itself. Terrorism, hyperviolence, hate, and fear. Minds synchronized to screens that bombard us w/ audiovisual information from near and far in an eternal present. Ecological horror. What is most refreshing about Virilio is that he is comfortable in his role as diagnostician. He has no answers, and he doesn't read tea leaves. The future he paints is opaque, and he projects future tendencies without painting vivid pictures, which would be pure folly. Some of the finest writing I have read by Virilio comes in the last two chapters. It is here that he really takes off, and where he is most harrowing. From Aristotle he cribs the notion that time is the original accident, and beneath the surface engagement w/ worldly affairs, there sits here a major problematic of space and time. So if this is not exactly a book explicitly about ontology, it is certainly a book 'of' ontology. As always, he pulls some fascinating and disconcerting examples out of his hat at near every turn. And he has a kinetic facility w/ gripping language that makes me think more of William Gibson than of other philosophers. This is not a frequently discussed book, but it may well be the best of his I have read. I feel he got better and better. Reality, of course, seriously started to catch up w/ him. If you are going to read him, I recommend this book particularly, but the later stuff in general.

[Andrew Bourne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Virilio is a man in a catapult, aimed at the bulwark of his own death; he is a baby born on a crashing airplane. There is no time for traditional philosophical reasoning and really no point--all his books can do is exclaim, and more and more hysterically from chapter to chapter, as we all go down with the flaming ship.

Yes the atom bomb will eat our bodies off, yes the media today is a fear-mongering information bomb beaming catastrophe after catastrophe directly into our over-heating brains, yes genetic engineering will grab the big baton straight out of God's hand and we'll club ourselves into mutants with it! Why hide in a museum Paul? Let's jump in the volcano together, diseased, crazy, bald, and with pockets full of cash.

Click this: http://www.onoci.net/virilio/pages_uk...

[Samir Rahi · Rating 3 out of 5]

zoom zoom straight to doom

3.5 stars

this book is not virillio’s first work on accelerationism and, as such, new readers (or those who only read snippets of his work in the form of debate cards like myself) may find themselves on unstable footing coming into the work.

the core thesis of the accident as the inevitable conclusion of progress is interesting, but the advocacy of a ‘museum of the accident’ was, to me, a bit lacking.

also the sequencing left something to be desired - not sure why the book ended the way it did.

all in all still worth the read.

[Eliana Lazar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Too much speed, you get the speed of light, inertia, polar inertia

[Matt Sautman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A strong critique of speed’s impact on modernity that emphasizes the power of unintended consequences.

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clearly one of theorist Paul Virilo's more mainstream texts in the phenomenological examination of globalism, systemic risk, technical progress, and the imminent terminus inherent in the museum of the accident. If one is looking for a strong but readable entry into Virilio's thought, I'd recommend The Original Accident before other more technical or artistic texts.

[Lukáš · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I love about Virilio is that despite writing roughly on the same topic all the time, in every next book by him, there is always something new that adds a few new dimensions to what I've read by him before.

[Xiomara Blanco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heavy read but very interesting.

[Maia · Rating 3 out of 5]

great writer, uses sententiousness but i think says a lot, but this repeats a lot so not sure, hence 4