Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 7 Number 1, April 2006
_______________________________________________________________
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
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.