The Tendency the Accident and the Untimely: Paul Virilio's Engagement with the Future

Crogan, Patrick

Abstract

This article explores the issues for contemporary critical practice raised by Paul Virilio's engagement with the future. Virilio's project is an ongoing attempt to theorize cultural, political, military and techno-scientific developments in terms both of the speed at which those developments occur and the different speeds ('metabolic' and 'vehicular') which they impose on the modes and forms of existence. Virilio's work represents a key moment in the addressing of what I will call (after Derrida) the aporia of speed confronting critical work today. This aporia concerns the need for critical thought to move both slowly - with reference to traditional, established historico-critical interpretative frameworks - and quickly - at the ever-increasing speed(s) of techno-scientific developments that call into question the very viability of those conventional interpretative frameworks. Virilio's engagement with the aporia of speed is necessarily an engagement with the future, for his effort to maintain a critical discourse at the 'leading edge' must encounter the mainstream discourses of a 'future perfect' that accompany, promote and even generate techno-scientific progress. At a more profound level, Virilio's work addresses not only these technophilic discourses but also the humanist conceptions of space, time and history that allow both celebratory and critical discourse to be articulated (including his own). My examination of Virilio's encounter with these fundamental conceptions focuses on his theorization of the tendency and the accident, for an understanding of these is crucial to understanding how his work engages with questions of space, time and history. Indeed, Virilio's work is best thought of, I will argue, as an ongoing series of 'tendential analyses' that privilege the accident over the 'substance' of any given techno-scientific development. But these tendential analyses do not (or do not only) posit alternative, more pessimistic accounts of the 'future perfect'. In his paradoxical theorizing of the accident as unforeseeable but nevertheless substantive and non-contingent, Virilio approaches the aporia of speed - the dual necessity and impossibility of critical thought. His work is not so much another futurological discourse as it is a discourse that tends toward an experience of the untimely. It is this tendency that is its most valuable contribution to the criticism of the future. © 1999, SAGE. All rights reserved.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 1, 1998
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 1999
• Deposit Date: Jan 30, 2017
• Journal: Theory, Culture & Society
• Print ISSN: 0263-2764
• Electronic ISSN: 1460-3616
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 16
• Issue: 6
• Pages: 161-176
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/02632769922050926
• Keywords: Paul Virilio, speed, technology, culture
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/1096197
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/02632769922050926
• Contract Date: Jan 30, 2017