Expounding a New View of Accidents

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

                                                 new? not really: i mean, 
             charles perrow published "normal accidents" in 1984 ... 
                                                                       kfl

    ps. do also see luhmann's studies on "ecological communication" and on "the 
     sociology of risk". 


Dave Monroe schrieb:

> The New York Times
> Thursday, December 26, 2002
> Expounding a New View of Accidents
> By ALAN RIDING
>
> PARIS, Dec. 21 — Accidents happen. In fact, they have
> always happened, from the asteroid that presumably
> wiped out the dinosaurs to the great fire that razed
> central London in 1666. But there are accidents and
> there are accidents. A good many, like earthquakes and
> tornadoes, are unavoidable acts of nature. But many
> more are human accidents provoked by the very
> technology that we celebrate: they represent the dark
> face of progress.
>
> Paul Virilio, 70, a French urbanist, philosopher and
> prolific writer, began developing this thesis after
> the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in the United
> States in 1979. Now, he believes, we are more
> accident-prone or rather, technology and
> communications have made accidents more global in
> their impact. In his view, if an accident was long
> defined as chance, today only its timing and
> consequences are hard to predict; the accident itself
> is already bound to occur.
>
> To underline the importance of this unwelcome variable
> to modern society, Mr. Virilio is promoting the
> creation of a Museum of Accidents. "The museum's
> purpose would not be to 'spread fear' but to confront
> what is no longer a chance event," he explained.
> "There is an increasingly present cumulative reality
> related to a sudden globalization in which accidents
> and terrorist attacks have merged to become an
> anonymous undeclared war."
>
> Now, as a sort of pilot project for a Museum of
> Accidents, Mr. Virilio has been given a chance to
> illustrate what he means in an unusual exhibition
> called "Unknown Quantity," on display at the Cartier
> Foundation for Contemporary Art here through March 30.
> Accompanying it is a large catalog in which, amid
> myriad photographs of every imaginable natural and
> man-made disaster, Mr. Virilio elaborates on his
> argument that recalling accidents is the best way of
> avoiding them.
>
> It is not an art show as such, although the
> foundation's two first-floor galleries have been given
> over to works by three American artists: a reassembled
> version of Nancy Rubins's "MOMA and Airplane Parts,"
> which evokes a crash; a forest of aluminum tubes by
> the New York architect Lebbeus Woods, which he calls
> "The Fall" and which suggests the protruding ruins of
> the World Trade Center; and a sound installation by
> another New Yorker, Stephen Vitiello, which translates
> light and movement into a symphonic murmur.
>
> On a lower floor the accident theme is addressed more
> literally in movies, videos and photographs evoking
> hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, deadly train
> derailings, plane crashes, the explosion of the space
> shuttle Challenger and the devastating explosion of a
> chemical factory in Toulouse, France, last year. This
> section, though, is dominated by the attacks of Sept.
> 11, 2001.
>
> It may be arguable whether the destruction of the
> World Trade Center can be termed an accident, but Mr.
> Virilio contends that it falls into a new category of
> "war disguised as accident" because it had the
> surprise element of an accident, but used technology —
> two aircraft — as the weapon. "Thus humanity's
> technology is turned against itself," he explained.
> "But this risk is present in all technology. If you
> build a plane for 800 passengers, one day you will
> have 800 dead."
>
> Four films in the show address Sept. 11....
>
> [...]
>
> The fire at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine in
> 1986 is presented as perhaps the most dramatic example
> of sophisticated technology running amok. Images of
> the ruined reactors are in the show, but the accident
> is also addressed at length in a filmed conversation
> between Mr. Virilio and Svetlana Aleksievich, who
> interviewed hundreds of witnesses and victims of that
> disaster for her Russian-language book "Voices From
> Chernobyl: Chronicle of the Future."
>
> "The victim of the Chernobyl accident was science,
> knowledge, even consciousness," Mr. Virilio says in
> the film. "The consciousness accident is also a
> reality. We had an extraordinary example of it with
> Auschwitz. Now, in a way, Chernobyl, like Auschwitz
> and also like Hiroshima, is a consciousness accident —
> that is, there is no insight into this event because
> it exceeds consciousness."
>
> "In a sense, the Chernobyl accident foreshadowed a new
> kind of warfare," he went on, "terrorist war, wars in
> which you cannot differentiate between attacks and
> accidents, where the declaration of war does not
> exist, where there are no uniforms, no flags, where
> there is simply evil-doing."
>
> If Mr. Virilio at times has to work hard to squeeze
> every form of disaster into his accident thesis,
> "Unknown Quantity" does convey the potent idea that as
> technology advances it leaves accidents in its wake.
> Yet if inevitable, can they still be called accidents?
> Today oil is pouring from the sunken tanker Prestige
> off Spain. In reality, the ship's rusting single hull,
> which ruptured in rough seas, was an accident waiting
> to happen. Perhaps Mr. Virilio has a point.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/26/arts/design/26ARTS.html
>