I have earlier on this blog written about the thinker Paul Virilio. He is famous for his critique of modern technology and of our inability as humans to see the intrinsic (an unavoidable) danger of the technological systems the contemporary society is dependent upon. I have for some time searched for a particular quote from Virilio and today I found it. He says in an interview:
If you, like me, find Virilio's quotes to be a form of super dense theory, then go to this page where you can read many similar quotes.
- "To invent something is to invent an accident. To invent the ship is to invent the shipwreck; the space shuttle, the explosion. And to invent the electronic superhighway or the Internet is to invent a major risk which is not easily spotted because it does not produce fatalities like a shipwreck or a mid-air explosion. The information accident is, sadly, not very visible. It is immaterial like the waves that carry information."
(Virilio, Paul and David Dufresne (Interviewer) and Jacques Houis (Translator). "Cyberesistance Figher - An Interview with Paul Virilio." in: Apres Coup Psychoanalytic Association. January 2005.)
If you, like me, find Virilio's quotes to be a form of super dense theory, then go to this page where you can read many similar quotes.
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"death is not the teleological destination of life, a sort of ontological magnet that propels us forward: ... death is behind us. Death is the event that has always taken place at the level of consciousness. As individual occurrence it will come in the form of the physical extinction of the body, but as an event, in the sense of the awareness of finitude, of the interrupted flow of my being-there, death has always taken place. We are all synchronized with death—death is the same thing as the time of our living, in so far as we all live on borrowed time." The Posthuman, 133
That is the inception of an idea, thing, object, theory, or other entity is, within this different expression of temporality, also the inception of its death. According the politics of hope and affirmation of new materialism, the affirmation of the accident is written into its invention. It is not a consequence of teleological 'being' but rather a figuration of becoming-accident, a line of sight within the cartography in which it is localized.
In this context, I am concerned about the notion of the inventions invisibility as "immaterial" but rather as a unforeseen assemblage that is constantly becoming and shifting through a notion of difference that is non-binary, non-representationalist.