Accident as Form

PhD project by Sebastien Fanzun

The project is intended as a cultural, and in particular literary, contribution to the reappraisal of 20th century automobile culture from the point of view of the automobile accident. Automobile-based individual transport represents an unprecedented success story, which becomes all the more astonishing when one considers the enormous negative side effects: Apart from ecological problems, the phenomenon of car accidents should be mentioned above all. The project will analyse sources from the period of the gradual genesis of automobile culture, i.e. the early 20th century. Special focus will be placed on textual treatments of the car accident. The aim is to show how two fundamental tendencies in the treatment of the car accident emerge early on: A first one, which in the course of the interconnection of automobilistics with an ideology of liberalistically-bourgeoisly conceived, capitalistically promoted individualism, has to systematically repress the accident as an unpleasant "collateral event", stage it as a completely contingent mishap or else keep it quiet; and a second one, which positions the event of the accident and its thematisation precisely against that ideology by showing how much the accident event is paradoxically systematically produced and only becomes a contingent moment in its ideological dressing up. By means of the accident, as these texts of the second kind demonstrate, it is possible to show how the interpretation of an event only arises in conflict, but is in no way a natural given. The event of the car accident thus becomes a field of ideological negotiations in which every formulation is fought over. Insurance texts, diaries, letters, narratives, medical reports, court records, poems, manifestos and newspaper articles are only a few of the genres in which the car accident is negotiated. Central to this is always the question of whether the accident event is one of contingency or one of predetermination; in other words, whether the accident is an unpleasant, contingent mishap within a structure or rather a necessary consequence of the structure. Of particular interest for the present project is thus finally the question of car accident and theory, which will be pursued with a view especially to Russian formalism, but also to cybernetics and systems theory.