Accident of the Century
Ozlem Ozkal. Domus M  Dec-Jan 2000: 165-168.

 

Y2K can't be the end of time - it's too obvious. / Wired, April 1999

The machine is a concept based on working and generating work. So it is impossible to answer the question ‘What would happen if it did not work?’ by following the familiar discourse of technology. It is no longer the machine which is spoken of when it does not work, but accident. Just as computers are said to crash when they stop working. Or like the predicted year 2000 crises expected if computers as a whole stop working.

In that case it might be thought that technology and accidents are contradictory concepts. But however much accidents might define the negative aspect of technology, do they really begin where technology ends, or could they be another function of technological apparatus?

Discussing the term ‘techne’ in his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle says “techne loves chance, chance loves techne.” In this action which follows a specific logic in bringing a form into being, even if the effective cause is the subject of the action, the process resembles that of nature in which disparate factors can influence one another and the result in an unplanned way. With the passage from the renaissance to the industrial revolution, the foundation of the mathematical universe and the transformation of techne into technology, the element of coincidence was weeded out and distanced from the concept of technology. This was not merely a process of eliminating variable and indeterminate elements for the sake of standardization, but relates to the fact that accident cannot be conducted by science. In his Metaphysics, when declaring that the cause of accident (to sumbebekos) is neither of necessity nor always, and that therefore there can be no scientific treatment of accidents, Aristotle defines accident as ‘all that attaches to each thing in virtue of itself but not in its essence, as having its angles equal to two right angles attaches to the triangle.’ The sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees, which makes two times 90 degrees or two right angles. Two right angles are not part of the essence of a triangle (being indeed an apparent contradiction), but exist in the virtue of the triangle. Therefore two right angles are an ‘accidental’ quality of a triangle.

As a result of this argument, as claimed in guarantee certificates today, it could be concluded that ‘every machine has and should have a fundamental function.’ But even if the function of a carpenter’s hammer is only to hammer nails, that does not mean that you cannot dig the garden with it or hit someone over the head. The latter may not be a hammer’s intended function, but they are accidentally attached to it.

In speaking of speed in The Art of the Motor, Paul Virilio asks why cars are designed to crash. In this day, no car producer would think of designing a car in the form of a carriage. Even if the car’s basic function is transportation, speed is encoded into cars primarily by their form. Every car may not be fast, but speed remains a virtue of cars. In that case, it is obvious that so long as cars are used, accidents are inevitable. The existence of airbags, special breaking systems and many other precautions are proof of this.

Although technology continues to be presented as an instrument serving to achieve a goal, and guarantees continue to limit it to specific uses designed to achieve that goal, it is possible to find examples of design accidents that jokes with this everyday model of technology: like Dr.Q who turns up with curious toys in every Bond film. These gadgets, none of which function as they should, carry out not the apparently intended function, but the ‘accidentally’ encoded functions laid down by Dr.Q. Laser pens, umbrellas which grip peoples heads when they are closed, rocket launching cigarettes and lipsticks, hairbrushes and shoes which can be used as telephones, cameras which are Geiger counters, watches which can be almost anything, cars that can dive and ski-bicycles that can travel on water (the latter went on the market after the film, and are today part of the paraphernalia of every holiday resort). Just as all these gadgets can be used as weapons, those that we expect to be really weapons are not really weapons, like the piton gun which is indeed a climbing equipment that fling out ropes. Bond, from time to time makes jokes with Dr. Q’s technologies as well. He can use his magnetic watch to unzip a Bond girl whereas he was supposed to grip his opponent’s weapon with it. In Tomorrow Never Dies, when Dr.Q appears as an Avis employee to give Bond a telephone which can be a remote control and a car which is to be thrown off a roof later as a trap, and asks Bond what insurance policies are required, Bond demands ‘maximum coverage’, and declares, “Accidents do happen.”

In speaking of Dr.Q what matters is the sense of a different relationship with technology. Rather than a Dr. Frankenstein who believes that nature can be controlled by the instruments of technology but is destroyed by an accident of his own making, it reveals the possibility of another generation in which technology and accidents can coexist. Just like the people of Octavio Butler’s post-war world who forget how to speak as the result of a virus, Bruce Sterling’s aged people who live with the trauma of rejuvenating their bodies, Connie Wills’ women who inject themselves with ammenerol so that they never menstruate, and William Gibson’s addicts living in the matrix. These protagonists who exist through their own particular technologies tell the stories not of technologies which are under control, but of its accidents - the son Frankenstein. Their alliance with technology is actually not much different from the hackers who exist thanks to computers and computer accidents. Although the presentation of technology as a tool appears to propose a simpler and more casual relationship, it in fact requires an increasingly large dose of control. Yet meanwhile we live in a universe of accidents in which answer phones can be a security measure, ballpoint pens can be hypodermic needles, rubber washers can be skis and computers can be used to conceal information, steal it, or divide every number by 00 as if it were an ordinary mathematical operation. Perhaps technology is no longer an extension/a part of us but the whole within which we exist.