Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 7 Number 1, April 2006

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Lotringer, Sylvère and Paul Virilio, The Accident of Art, New York, Semiotext(e), 2005, 119 p. Distributed by MIT Press. ISBN 1-58435-020-2. Price: 9,95 pounds.

Reviewed by

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

Zheijiang University in Hangzhou, China

 

What biology is for Deleuze, Judaism for Derrida and psychoanalysis for Baudrillard, military culture is for Virilio. And why not? French theory needs somebody who explains everything by referring to technology, speed, and accidents. Virilio fills a gap – and he is unique. In a way, he is playing the role of the anti-theoretical theorist, which may make cynics say that this is just the reason why his texts are so easy to understand. I would hold that, in general, we can learn a lot from Virilio. Just eclipse the repetitions and occasional self-conscious statements, bring the simplifications down to a more realistic level, and you will find that Virilio is sharp-witted, brilliant, and inspiring.

            This is also the case with this published conversation between Virilio and the Franco-American theorist Sylvère Lotringer. Throughout the conversation, Virilio’s spontaneous reactions and his charmingly improvised style have not been overly edited. We learn much not only about art, speed and technology, but also about Virilio himself: about his education and his relationship with philosophy and the contemporary art scene. To me it became clear that, if Virilio lived in a country other than France, he would probably be engaged in cultural studies, while in his country he had to find a niche for himself between philosophy, aesthetics, architectural criticism, sociology…

In interviews and conversations, most people cannot avoid repeating a great deal of what they have already said in books beforehand. This is certainly also the case with this book. Having said that, who has read all of Virilio’s books? I could not find a complete bibliography of Virilio, but Amazon.fr offers no less than nineteen titles in French.

The present book is the third part of a trilogy of Semiotext(e) books. The preceding volumes were Pure War (1983, co-authored with Lotringer) and Crepuscular Dawn (2002, written by Virilio alone).

In general, conversations with theorists do not permit straightforward research into certain subjects but are meant to provide dispersed and supplementary insights, and this book is no exception. It is announced as a study of art from a culturological perspective. However, only the first two parts really deal with art. The third part is on Virilio’s activities as a promoter of his accident theory and his Paris exhibition “The Museum of Accidents.” In the first two parts, the accident theory is indeed linked to the subject of art. What the “accident theory” actually is, however, remains relatively unclear. In principle, Virilio establishes the commonsensical fact that 20th century art is marked off by accidents: there are “nothing but disfiguring events” (p. 20) since “art is the casualty of war” (p. 17). The authors illustrate this by talking about, for example, “Beuys the bombardier and war victim” (p. 16) or the fact that “automatic writing is a machine gun” (Lotringer, p. 16). The conclusion is that 20th century art goes through a crisis by nature (“don’t let anyone bug me with the crisis of contemporary art”, p. 17). Why? Virilio explains that today, accident and war are just one and the same thing (p. 17). For him, 9/11 was an accident because “there were no missiles involved…” p. 104.

He might be right but he does not do much to convince us either of this fact or of the validity of the extension of these reflections. The fact that we (and all contemporary art) are products of accidents is only rhetorically established (sometimes by advertising an anti-theoretical attitude: “I am not a philosopher… I am an essayist and I am working on my own turf”, p. 27; “I’m into speed and other stuff. I don’t discuss art”). On this relatively fragile ground, all further methodological shortcuts to ideas about contemporary art that “does not recognize death and suffering” (Lotringer p. 24) might appear fascinating within the flow of the conversation but can turn out to be even illogical when examined further.

One might have expected that Virilio’s insistence on “art freed of tragedy” be discussed in the context of virtual reality instead of traced back to the optimism of consumer society: “[Art] is dead, and above all, it has forgotten tragedy. Art is not free from tragedy. It is extraordinary to see to what extent accident was censured in the name of the cult of happiness, the cult of success. Comedy has dominated to the point that tragedy was erased” (p. 24). Further down, later statements about 9/11 are to some extent invalidated when Virilio explains that “what I am saying mostly concerns art in the 80s-90s… Everything we have talked about came to a stop in 1990” (p. 29).

The main problem of Virilio’s argumentation is, of course, the problem that clings to most Virilio books: it remains unclear for what reason the author confronts us with so much cultural pessimism, critique of progress, etc. Also in this book the answer, repeated several times, is the typical Virilio answer: that we should “call evil evil, and crisis crisis” (p. 72). “The arts of the 20th century are a disaster and they don’t acknowledge it” (p. 60). “I don’t mean that we should go back to engraving… I am saying: this is a catastrophic event, and if we don’t take it into account, every hope will be lost” (p. 67).

            I believe that reflections on “the accident of art” could have been led (even in a conversation) around a more theoretical notion of “the accident.” The accident is the event that is the most unlikely thing to happen, but when it happens, it looks more necessary than anything else. In a way, the accident is “more real” than reality. Along these lines, theory of accidents could also produce new insights about virtual reality or 9/11. Also for Virilio the “accident” seems to be a metaphysical model of existence when he says: “No, everything that constitutes the world has experienced an accident, and this without exception. This colossal dimension of the accident surpasses us, and that’s why I am so passionate about it” (p. 34). However, he does not pursue this research into the accident further. At some point, Lotringer pushes the “accident” towards a more philosophical horizon when pointing out: “Accidents used to be considered an exception, something that shouldn’t have happened and would take everyone by surprise. You see them on the contrary as something substantial, even rigorously necessary” (p. 98). And when saying: “Aristotle thought that ‘substance’ was absolute and the accident relative. For you it is the reverse” (p. 107). Virilio’s answer remains uninspired: “The accident reveals substance. We could replace ‘reveal’ with the word apocalypse.”

            Virilio is walking on his personal paths. Accident, he explains, can be replaced by “sin.” There is an “original accident” and “as soon as there is an invention, there is accident” (p. 87). Let us conclude that this is civilizational pessimism in the Freudian-Nietschean style. Not bad in itself but perhaps less original than the context of the argument lets assume.

What the book is lacking in systematic spirit is made good through an abundance of flashing insights into contemporary culture: “First Munch’s scream and then Beuys’ silence”; “Globalization is the denial of focus…” Virilio’s vivid mind and Lotringer’s suggestions (that are often interesting in themselves) make this book pleasant and enriching.

Unfortunately the copyediting has been a little careless, as endnotes do not match.