Accident as a sign

"Side effects of cruising at the speed of light" - to be dealt with here
"Side effects of living in temptation" - Fatal Strategies, coming soon
both of these are lines from the Simple Minds song "Hunter and the Hunted" -- check out the live version if, y'know, you're into that kind of thing

I've been plucking around this idea of the accident as a sign since Wednesday but haven't come up with anything definitive. I figure I'll ramble here for awhile and see if, in the side effects of writing at the speed of...whatever, I'll get at something.

So, a sign represents first and foremost. So, what's the accident's signified? An essence? Something inherent to the essence of the accident's originary body?

It would seem so. So, let's say, Saussure style that, if we do this:

s/S
where S is "signifier" and s "signified"



then a working form from the museum could be something like:

<-- s

over

January 5, 1966, Feyzin, Rhône, France
Explosion at the Feyzin refinery; a metallic piece from one of the spherical reservoirs was projected: 17 people killed and 84 injured <-- is S

But what we immediately notice is that the signified isn't a complete sense of the accident but a single image, plucked out of a treasure trove of possible historical or aesthetic takes on this particular accident. What Virilio does exceedingly well is to aestheticize his museum entries in a way, that as I think Jake suggested last week, does, to a certain extent dehistoricize them. When we're cruising through culture, history, and life at the speed of light (or faster), an imploding building in Detroit can be a falling Trade Center tower. When we can't get our heads out of the water for a second, the individuality of the event becomes an aestheticized image of sorts.

At the risk of finishing at a spot of pseudo-structuralist intention, I think a way toward an understanding of the implications of accident-as-sign might be to move in a Wittgensteinian direction.

André Bazin, at the end of his extremely famous "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" essay, leaves us hanging with the closest thing writing on film has had to a cliffhanger endings: "On the other hand, of course, cinema is also a language."

If the accident is a sign, it, by default, belongs to a sign system. What is that system? How can we characterize it, and how can we intervene to press it toward our rhetoric's ends?