Issue No. 14 March 2007 — Accidental Environments
abstracts
Drawing upon the work of Johan Galtung, Pierre Bourdieu, Mike Davis, and other contemporary thinkers, this paper aims to establish a provisional framework for understanding the recent spate of global weather-related disasters not as arbitrary, independently-arising environmental accidents, but as expressions of “structural violence” - that is, the normal, unexceptional, anonymous, and often unscrutinized violence woven into the routine workings of prevailing power structures. In today's context, the damage wrought by our increasingly entropic weather system cannot simply be attributed to brute, accidental and nonhuman origins; indeed, it has increasingly drawn attention to our own culpability in destabilizing the climate and undermining the support systems that help to shield us from its unmediated effects.
In this sense, ecological violence – that is, the callous misuse and despoliation of nature itself – rebounds back upon us as structural violence, destroying lives and livelihoods, amplifying existing conflicts and inequalities, and exposing countless people to severe storms, floods, drought, fire, disease, displacement, and chronic food and water insecurity. Responding effectively to the structural violence of climate change will require a correspondingly structural program of social change, oriented not simply towards small lifestyle improvements and technological fixes, but towards achieving a greater degree of democratic control over economic life, refitting the scale of production and consumption to respect environmental limits, reweaving our social and ecological safety nets, and creating a culture that respects the integrity, value, and complexity of human and nonhuman life.
In his study of the effects of speed, Paul Virilio articulates a theory of the “accident” that locates the destructive side effects and loss produced by and immanent to technoscientific development across transportation, communication and medical technologies. This paper considers this thesis through an analysis of the nexus formed between the body and the mechanical ventilator, mobilising the framework of Bruno Latour and actor-network theory to argue the body is not discrete, but continuous with a heterogeneous range of materials and technologies. This approach exposes the accident to a range of ambivalences and possibilities, broadening it beyond Virilio’s limited and negative definition. The accident, then, is not simply something that happens to bodies, but rather is something that is integral to the body.
Don De Lillo's 1984 novel White Noise and Todd Haynes’s 1995 film [Safe] both depict "toxic events" which prompt crises of the body and of knowledge: the boundaries between normative and transgressive gendered identities and between legitimate and illicit knowledges are questioned. Moreover, in both texts the body and identity of a woman becomes the focus of this questioning; the ways in which these toxic events are acted out through the bodies of women reveals the implication of discourses of toxicity in discourses of feminine embodiment. Both Babette in White Noise and Carol in [Safe] suffer symptoms without cause, whose meaning the (masculine) discourses of medicine and psychiatry cannot articulate; they are converted from exemplars of normative gendered and sexual identity into deviants whose bodies exhibit a silent protest. In depicting the projection of crises of toxicity onto the body of a woman, these texts illustrate the persistence of cultural narratives which pathologise the female body and hystericize feminine subjectivity; the "authenticity" and "legitimacy" of a woman's experience of a crisis of embodiment is placed in question by dominant cultural narratives which construct feminine subjectivity as incapable of self-knowledge and female materiality as irrational. By placing the discourse of toxicity in these texts in the context of discourses of feminine embodiment, especially those of consumption (bodily and economic) and of pathology, I intend to explore how these conspiracies of the female body prompt crises of masculine knowledge, discourse and power.
Iconoclastic British architect and theorist Cedric Price is noted for the comparatively early incorporation of computing and other communications technologies into his designs, which he employed as part of an ongoing critique of the conventions of architectural form, and as part of his explorations of questions of mobility. Three key unrealised projects of his are examined here which explore these concerns. These are his “Potteries Thinkbelt” (1964-67), “Generator” (1978-80), and “Fun Palace” (1961-74). This paper explores his use of computing and communications equipment in these projects, as well as the theoretical influences (including systems theory and cybernetics) that informed his approach to designing them. These influences, it will be argued, are interesting for the way that Price employed them in the development of a structurally complex and programmatically rich architectural environment which was, simultaneously (and somewhat paradoxically), to be an “accidental environment”. In examining his work and evaluating its lasting significance, two arguments are developed. First, it is argued that Price's work is significant for its engagement with the self-contradictory idea of the “prepared accident”, in which meticulous planning and preparation are employed in order to encourage chance, serendipity, and accident. Secondly, it is argued that Price's work is important for its theoretical rigour and its early incorporation of computing and communications technologies. More specifically, his Fun Palace project in particular is significant as an early exploration of experimental forms of technologically mediated social interaction.
Drawing upon recent empirical studies carried out in the field of complex networks and Deleuzeguattarian assemblage theory, this article argues that by grasping the composition of what appears to be an increasingly accidental topology, we can enhance our understanding of digital network culture. Contrary to those authors who have pointed to the cold war origins of the Internet (a manifestation of network power) as an essential property that seemingly structures network identity, this article explores the role of the unessential in the open-ended evolution of network culture. By doing so, the author sets out to challenge the causality afforded to essences by considering the role of unforeseen emergent properties and the mode in which the action of subsequent future events and accidents can inversely impact upon the unity of network identity.
The article initially situates viral vulnerability as an unforeseen emergent property, which evidently destabilises the axiomatic robustness of the network. According to assemblage theory, such topological properties can emerge from the symbiotic interactions that can occur between the material and expressive components of an assemblage producing new territories, which in turn interface with the assemblage - decoding, deterritorializing and transforming its topology. It is argued here that network vulnerability is actualised within the complex topological interactions that occur between capitalist network power and a social multiplicity (the multitude). In this process of transformation novel topological properties emerge that can trigger seemingly anomalous future events and accidents, like viral contagion and spam pollution. These events and accidents are as much a part of the network composition as the planned events found in its militarised history. In this way, they replace essential causality with a mode of fuzzy intermediate determinism described by DeLanda as “laying between the two extremes of a complete fatalism, based on simple and linear causal relations, and a complete indeterminism” (Deleuze and the Open-ended Becoming of the World). Indeed, Deleuze argues that the divergent actualisation of topological forms “takes place entirely within the unessential” (Difference and Repetition 189). It is this machinic process that ensures that the identity of capitalist network power is never absolutely guaranteed.
The concept of “control society” arises from the post-structural formulations of a group of late 20th century philosophers and social theorists whose investigations into particular institutions in society show how definable regimes of thought and rationality come into being and become “normal”. These studies provide models that, when taken together, gesture toward an encompassing regime of thought, rationality and institutionalised action over Western society – what has been called “control society”. However, with few exceptions, studies of control environments take a high and abstracted view of the possibilities immanent in such a consolidation of rational regimes of thought and action. This paper responds to this gap in the literature to show how individuals participate in the accidental production of elements of “control” through their actions in the small, inter-institutional spaces of society.