A CATTt for The Museum of Accidents

Note: all quotes below reference Paul Virilio's forward to Unknown Quantity, a 2002 exhibit that prefigures his ultimate (not yet realized) project for a Museum of the Accident.

Objective/Purpose:
*to expose the accidents ("and the frequency of their industrial and postindustrial repetitions"), which we encounter as witnesses and/or victims, to current and future generations, thereby promoting "a critical distance from excesses" and "a homage to discernment"

Contrast:
*news media, which Virilio calls "a museum of horrors"
*according to Virilio, news media "always precedes and accompanies the upsurge of even greater disasters [than those which it has already covered]...[b]y progressive habituation to insensitivity and indifference in the face of the craziest scenes" and "a programming of extravagance at any cost which ends not any longer in meaninglessness, but in the heroicization of terror and terrorism."  (In other words, the media makes terror--and its various personifications--into heroes in the sense that they have now become vital to the appeal/buzz created by the news; the news commands a greater market share over our cultural attention to the extent that it renders horror/terror as a urgent, threatening object.  Furthermore, in many cases, the news media can amplify an otherwise insignificant event or person, making that event/person into a spectacle of horror for all the world to experience instantaneously and respond against with threats/acts of terrorism...recent example: Pastor Terry Jones.)
*Virilio also seems to attribute two related effects to news media: (1) a societal shift from citizens-as-actors to citizens-as-witnesses; (2) "the fading of ethical and aesthetic points of reference"

Theory:
*Paul Valery assessment of the novelty of the 20th century (eg., the sudden and rapid emergence of unprecedented questions/problems, the reduction of memory/temporality to the "event-instant," the automation/mechanization of function, the imperative to remain conscious of accidents)
*Aristotle's metaphysics (eg., "the accident reveals the substance")

***

The progressive qualities of scientific knowledge tend to obscure its accidental, disastrous qualities from our (collective) consciousness.  Virilio infers that all the great technical innovations/discoveries that characterize the 20th century will give rise to an equally unprecedented degree of global accidents/disasters in the 21st century.  Hence the need for a cultural institution--a museum of accidents--to ensure that this string of inevitable(?) accidents be given a profound/monumental place within the existential territories future generations will inhabit--that they not become automatic or denied via "voluntary blindness to the fatal consequences of our actions and inventions."

In order to avoid succumbing to such voluntary blindness, Virilio says we urgently need to cultivate "an 'intelligence (ie., an understanding) of the crisis of intelligence'...an understanding of which ecology is the clinical symptom."  As far as I can surmise from this passage, I gather that Virilio sees ecological/relational thinking as an early indicator (symptom, in that sense) of or first step toward achieving the critical distance and discernment he calls for at the end of his forward to the exhibit.

We already have intelligence--the thought that has built and continues to advance the "thought technologies" guiding contemporary technical innovation at an exponential rate.  The crisis of intelligence is evidently referring to the unprecedented accidents/disasters--accompanying intelligent technical innovations like a shadow--that occur ever more frequently on an increasingly global scale.  This brings us to the intelligence of the crisis of intelligence, which must, as a ecological enterprise, act as a kind of meta-intelligence and bootstrap the intelligence of technical innovation though a relentless cognitive mapping of the accident/disaster.  To inscribe the accident/disaster perpetually upon collective consciousness is "to take a stand against the fading ethical and aesthetic points of reference."

***

Virilio's tale is of course his not yet realized museum of accidents, and, drawing upon my reading above, I would posit that for this particular project his Analogy is perhaps ecology (in a general sense) and his Target is collective consciousness as archived/embodied/cultivated through public cultural institutions.

Also important, for our purposes especially, is Virilio's statement about invention.  He claims that invention is a way of seeing/grasping accidents as signs and opportunities.  The Museum of Accidents, then, would seems to promote this way of relating to the accident: as a heuretic encounter with "the indirect production of science" and "the shadow of technical innovation."

Little Flags

Featured in Paul Virilio's exhibit Unknown Quantity, Jem Cohen's short film Little Flags draws on footage he captured at a Gulf War victory parade in New York City (~1991).  

The film seems to be suggest two distinct parts. 

The first part is a loud, abrasive montage of close-ups shots: groups of people chanting and cheering, each looking on at some spectacle the film never shows us.  The camera (ie, Cohen) is on the move, sometimes spinning 180 degrees at the sound/reaction of the crowds and sometimes bumping into people as they try to weave between one another.  

Then the screen goes black and silent for a couple seconds.  

In this unofficial "second part" of the film, most of the crowd has left.  The city streets are covered with the parade's debris; new sets of pedestrians (apparently not there to see the parade) walk solemnly over the white mess, shuffling through it like snow.  Unlike the "first part," the camera relaxes into a few still, contemplative moments: papers whirl around and fall among the bases of skyscrapers, a man with a suit and briefcase walks alone down a long paper-covered street, a toddler sleeps through it all in a stroller as his mom stands motionless in the street.  The audio track too has slowed down to a drowning crawl, until the music fades on the image of a young woman sitting in the middle of another street.  And then the film ends with a man picking up little American flags  amidst the mounds of trash, while we hear the ambience of parade noise and, above it, another man chanting (almost robotically), "Let's all celebrate; 250,000 dead."

The Post-Industrial Accident

In an interview called "Surfing the Accident," Paul Virilio explains his theory that a new kind of accident has emerged--an accident that is contemporaneous with exponential speed and global scope of current technical innovation.

Just like there has been a change in the nature of the accident somewhere in the eighteenth and nineteenth century - from the natural accident towards the industrial accident - we now witness a fresh transmutation of the accident: from the industrial accident to its post-industrial successor. This transmutation is accompanied by a very substantial increase in scale. The industrial accident is still the kind of event that "takes place." The post-industrial accident, on the other hand, goes beyond a certain place, you may say that it does no longer "take place," but becomes an environment. The disaster that befell the Titanic involved only its passengers; the Millennium Bug will involve everybody on this Earth.

What bothers me most about the apparent logic of SB 6 is the belief that problems with the public education system can be treated (and solved) in the manner of an industrial accident/disaster.  That is, while the bill targets and seeks to reform instances where failure 'takes place' (in the most empirical, data-driven sense), supporters of the bill (and even many who oppose it) do not realize that the logic of the bill 'becomes an environment.'  This industrial treatment of the accident (ie, failing students/schools) is precisely what engenders disaster on a post-industrial scale.  Evaluation mechanisms have an enormous influence over day-to-day curriculum decisions, each subject/discipline requires its own form of thinking, and the learning strategies of K-12 accompany students as they enter college or the workforce.

By suiting educational practices to the evaluation mechanism (ie., standardized, multiple-choice tests), we impose restrictions over how much of the thinking unique to a subject/discipline can actually be exercised in the classroom.  How can the generative/creative thinking so crucial to the resolutely qualitative/subjective subjects (eg, art, music, English, humanities, etc) be mobilized or even approximated by the multiple-choice format?  FCAT questions dealing with literary passages, for example, generally remain anchored in sheer comprehension/regurgitation and occasionally ask students to choose among several interpretations and select the "correct" one, as if that interpretation was an inherent/eternal property of the work itself, independent of a reader's reading of the work.   

ABCDE: A Found Footage Experimental Documentary

In April of 2010, Florida legislators passed a bill (SB 6 in the senate and HB 7189 in the house) designed to improve public education K-12. Among other things, the bill proposed that schools pay teachers according to, in large part, how well their students scored on standardized tests such as the FCAT. Fortunately, Governor Charlie Christ vetoed the bill. While this video is not exactly a work of activism, its chief aim is to dramatize (via experimental video techniques such as looping and repetition) the uncanny experience of schools in which standardized testing has become an "evaluation machine" gone crazy.

More specifically, having had some time to reflect on the video, I see the video playing upon several routine aspects of the year I spent teaching English at a Florida public high school: passing out worksheet upon worksheet of FCAT practice materials, making copies upon copies of those materials, enduring the gossip and complaints of fellow teachers during faculty meetings, watching generic teacher training videos at mandatory workshops (after which we teachers, in place of any real discussion, had to complete the same type of worksheets we had to give our students), and, most of all, pacing around the room proctoring students as they stared blankly at FCAT questions and bubble sheets on a weekly basis.