Crash Cultures – modernity, mediation and the material

 

 

At every moment of every day there is a crash event, affecting everything:

transportation, economics, politics, computing, bodies, brains, cups and plates, birds,

agriculture, chemistry, health, banking, manufacturing and so on, without end. Despite

being insured, insulated by method, knowledge, prediction, risk analysis and

technology against accidents, we are nevertheless permanently avoiding them. Every

crash is followed by calls for legislation: ‘it must never happen again’ – and yet it

always does. As roads and airways congest to the point of stagnation, we proclaim the

miracle of modern safety regimes, while remaining haunted by the ghosts of disasters

waiting to happen. As technologies advance, so catastrophe looms larger, threatening

fiscal and economic, as well as physical systems. But the crash brings it all back home.

From the crumpled remains of a Mercedes in Paris to the collapse of the World Trade

Centre in New York; from Black Monday on the money markets to Chernobyl’s

meltdown; from Crash to Titanic: from James Dean and Jayne Mansfield to Warhol and

Ballard – crashes are individuated, named, in order to prevent the sense that our

history, far from being one of steady progress, is in fact an incremental accumulation of

crashes. It preserves us from the fear of generalised catastrophe. All the better,

therefore, should the victims be famous, and all the worse if, as when a Boeing hit an

Amsterdam Tower block, effacing its illegal immigrant inhabitants, they remain

anonymous. Every crash can be located on a scale in accordance with the celebrity or

anonymity of its victims.

In analytic terms, every crash reminds us that we have stepped over the line

separating the benignly abstract from the horribly concrete, from ‘risk society’ to crash

cultures. How are we to study crashes, what method are we to use to ensure we absorb

all their impact? Crashes take place where method goes awol and control fails (at least

our control), where prediction runs up against its own inadequacies. Accident

investigators, scouring fresh craters for oracular black boxes, regularly pale in the face

of the profusion of fragmentary and merely suggestive evidence. The crash resists

interpretation – not least because it is an event, with singular dates and places, shot

through with time.

The taking place of events, their specificity, poses certain problems for their study.

What might be the theoretical or practical value of conclusions reached on the basis of

something so singular as an event? By definition, the conditions defining the event

could not be repeated, revoking in advance the possibility of generalising from any

such conclusions. Nor do events reach conclusions; they emerge and dissipate, ramify

and connect, impact and explode. With events, the real does not wait to be prejudged

or interpreted; rather it impacts on our senses, our emotions, our bodies – creating a

material effect that only in time will be reduced and shaped by discourse. The use of

the crash as a starting point in these essays is not as a scientific, forensic examination of

their causes and effects. We approach the crash as a symbolic and material event that

can produce insights about the experience of living in a modern, technologically

saturated world. It is through these events that we can intimate the force of our

conventionalised ways of seeing and being: the discursive management of the unruly

materiality of everyday life. It also draws attention to the interrelations between

inanimate machines and living bodies – the relations of dominance and submission in

industrial societies, or the convergence between them that in cyberculture poses new

challenges to the emancipatory politics of Marxism and feminism.

Crash Cultures