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."
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