Tolerating the Intolerable, Enduring the Unendurable: Representing the Accident in Driver’s Education Films

Jillian Smith (bio)
University of North Florida
jlsmith@unf.edu

 
How do we represent the accident? And what do we see in its representation? How can we represent an event of disorganizing forces overpowering organized forces, and how can we see it?
 
The engineering feat of The World Trade Center, New York, consisted largely in organizing the towers so they would repeatedly overpower the forces of disorganization they would encounter: wind, gravity, rain, fire, impact. Could we have seen the accident waiting within the very invention of the World Trade Center? Every day the towers endured multiple forces, and then one day they didn’t. Could we have foreseen the accident? And what do we see in the accident?
 
Paul Virilio, in a plea for a “perception of accident” that could counter some of the dominating disorganizing forces on our cultural and political horizon, posits this idea, in the words of Hannah Arendt, “Progress and catastrophe are opposite faces of the same coin” (Virilio 40). In emphasizing that accident is immanent to all invention, Virilio isn’t calling for an end to invention or progress; he’s calling for a refinement of our perception of the accident because in the accident we are offered a perception of the invention that may not be open to us if not for its accident. And as accident looms in increasingly global proportions, the need to break cultural habits of perception becomes more urgent. In The Accident of Art, Virilio offers his proper perception of the World Trade Center accident/attack. To watch the collapse of two of the tallest buildings in the world (tragic effects and intolerance of terrorism aside) reveals the hubris of having built them in the first place, especially without a cement core (Virilio and Lotringer 103-8). I would guess that most people, upon seeing the fall of either tower, among a complex of responses, were surprised at the strange and sudden melting grace with which each tower crumbled. This perhaps was evidence of a hubristic design flaw, a flaw that reveals how the power of the building can be turned against itself, its metal weave enduring wind but not extreme heat, a flaw that allows us to see the tragedy of unchecked zeal. But can Virilio’s visual exhibit of numerous accidents, both “natural” and “man-made,” produce such a critical insight? Does his “museum of accidents” escape the aestheticization of horror with which he is concerned? And does it foster complex perception of the hubris upon which the towers were erected and stood, some critical insight into a complexity of forces including distribution of wealth and resources within and among nations as well as sensibilities of national/ethnic/religious/economic/military identities and loyalties?
 
While Virilio longs ultimately for the accident to be prevented, he focuses his energy on sharpening the perception of the accident. With this goal, he became the focus of an exhibition of the accident, on the first anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center New York, for the Fondation Cartier Contemporary Art Museum in Paris. Both the exhibition and its catalog contain images of numerous and diverse accidents, including airline crashes, earthquakes, nuclear detonations, and the World Trade Center collapse. This exhibit of representations of accidents, for Virilio, attempts to respond to a weak and susceptible state of perception:
 

By progressive habituation to insensitivity and indifference in the face of the craziest scenes, endlessly repeated by the various “markets of the spectacle” in the name of an alleged freedom of expression . . . we are succumbing to the ravages of a programming of extravagance at any cost which ends not any longer in meaninglessness, but in the heroicization of terror and terrorism.
 

(Virilio 9)

Consumer appetite for what Virilio calls “real time”-the witnessing of accident or spectacle (seemingly) at the same moment it occurs, an opportunity now offered endlessly through twenty-four hour news media, reality television, and YouTube videos-is a principal culprit in our weakened perception. Virilio answers by reintroducing the lost “interval,” the distance between the event and its representation that produces the more important distance: “critical distance.” Yet while the simplicity of the plan here is enticing, it is tied to the same reactive energy that it produces. The unexamined assumptions of causality and direct correspondence in Virilio’s logic prove disturbing, especially when set beside the nostalgic desire for what appears to be an auratic art experience that would reintroduce presence in the representation by way of its physical distance, a presence confirmed primarily by the contemplative state induced in the viewer, in other words by the viewer’s own security of presence.¹ Precisely this kind of distancing from the event of the accident in the name of accident-prevention and self-security can be seen in the reactive momentum of accident prevention over and over again. In other words, the intolerance to the accident that necessarily drives accident-prevention quickly becomes an inability to endure the force, production, and productivity of accident itself. Here Virilio gives us an instance of the dangers of reactive thought. In his exhibit the reactive, conservative underpinnings are covered with a rather queer artistic celebration of trauma that, it could be argued, delights in an aestheticization of horror, limiting the encounter with accident through a classically-principled, aestheticizing display of its representations.

 
Virilio wants exhibition of accident to play a role in prevention of accident but seems more to exert a critical and aesthetic control that blinds itself to the accident even as it claims to open perception to it. J.G. Ballard, best known for rendering the car crash a libidinal event in his novel Crash, also displayed three crashed cars in a London gallery, where the audience response, far from having the “critical distance” called for by Virilio, “verged on nervous hysteria” (Ballard 25). Rather than limiting the encounter with the representations of accident-the cars-Ballard opens it by assembling elements for further disorganization. He hired a “topless girl” to interview guests and provided alcohol for the opening night, which “deteriorated into a drunken brawl” where “she was almost raped in the back seat of the Pontiac” (25). Far from being encouraged to seek a critical distance, viewers are provoked to respond in the moment of their engagement with accident, opening the exhibit itself to include viewer participation, where nudity and alcohol incite a less measured, less inhibited response to interview questions, and where viewers enter into the representations, violating the (critical) distance between the two. Here contact between things and participants speeds up to the point of creating more violence. Something about the deformed cars opens the enclosure of the representation and invites commingling. After the naked “girl” and the alcohol were gone, the exhibit continued for a month to provoke the same violent refusal of distance, for the cars “were continually attacked by visitors to the gallery, who broke windows, tore off wing mirrors, splashed them with white paint” (25). Ballard created an exhibit of the Open as defined in the epigraph to this essay: “its nature is to change constantly, or to give rise to something new, in short, to endure” (Deleuze, Cinema 1 9). In this he created an exhibition of accident, where accident is less viewed than it is provided duration, where the disorganizing forces of accident remain active. Ballard constructed an uncontrolled space of representation where expression was undetermined, where shape was unknown, where forces were disorganizing. It is an exhibit of production rather than of prevention, and as such it recognizes uncritical, unreasonable production. “[R]eason rationalizes reality . . . providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects today about which we should not be reasonable” (Ballard 54).
 
Perhaps the most enduring experiment in accident exhibition is found in the institution of driver’s education in American high schools. It was a long-standing practice in this pedagogy to show gruesome highway accidents and fatalities in films with names such as “Wheels of Tragedy” (1963) and “Highways of Agony” (1969). The sensational titles suggest the explosive quality of these films, aberrant in an otherwise reactive and conservative pedagogy of accident prevention. Because of its disparate practices, driver’s education provides something of a survey of accident response generally, spanning from a Ballardian orgy of disorganizing forces, as seen in the cinematic event of highway safety films, to a Virilian command to perceive the accident critically, and thus preventatively. Within this tangle of contrary forces and discourses in driver’s education is thus a confused command for viewers to secure self control but also to be subject to their own dispossession, as well as a confused sense of representation as a tool of reason but also as a disorganizing force beyond our control.
 
By and large, accident prevention is a conservative discourse (literally, self preserving) dominated by reactive force. To the unforeseen terrorist attack that led to the collapse of the World Trade Center, for example, America responded with a self-securing statement of intolerance that further required a series of reactive responses to support it, including the invasion of Iraq in 2003. We can turn to Friedrich Nietzsche, and more directly to Gilles Deleuze’s influential interpretation of Nietzsche, for insight into the movement of such reactivity. In his interpretation, Deleuze focuses on Nietzsche’s understanding of active and reactive force as the two qualities of productive force. One general distinction between the two (which are always in relation) lies in “whether one affirms one’s own difference or denies that which differs” (Deleuze, Nietzsche 68). Becoming active is a matter of taking a force to the limit of what it can do and affirming that becoming, hence affirming difference. Reactive force is negating and nihilistic because it turns force against what it can do. In light of these basic definitions, accident-prevention is reactive and even at times nihilistic, for it aims precisely to turn force against what it can do. Nietzsche’s method of tracing specific active and reactive forces through their historic formations and deformations is genealogical, a historical practice that attends to the differential relations of forces in order not to discover the causal origins of things but to trace their transformations in value. For the purposes at hand, I do not pursue Nietzsche’s conception of value further, but instead note, following D.N. Rodowick, the contrast between genealogical thought and classic conceptions of event and historical understanding. Whether by emphasizing causal origin or a priori form, this classical way of thought belongs to “what Deleuze called the Platonic order of representation,” an order that structures understanding of identity, thought, representation, and time as grounded in the possibility of exact repetition or endurance of the same (Rodowick, Reading 189). For such repetition there is assumed an original form that is being repeated; thus Nietzsche notes that the conventional philosophy of history takes as its topic something outside of history, as it is “an attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities, because this search assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession” (qtd. Rodowick 189). The external world is a world of difference, and hence of accident and chance, that which does not necessarily return back to conserve the self through its repetition, a repetition that always suggests the original outside the world of difference.
 
Deleuze invents concepts that open these bulwarks of classical thought by way of difference. To the “exact essence of a thing,” Deleuze’s thought generally juxtaposes becoming, the incessant movement of being toward difference; to “purest possibility,” virtuality, the irreducible diversity of potential configurations possible in any being or event; and to “carefully protected identity,” the Body without Organs, the body not defined by the totality of its organism, but rather by forces of intensity that engage and connect its varied parts with external parts to form spontaneous, provisional “bodies.” These concepts make differential the forms of similitude that classically and commonly ground ideas of time, being, and representation. Time as structured and linear, being as stable and enclosed, and representation as a confirmation of prior presence all steady a world where we must encounter the outburst of accident and endure the irregularity of becoming. They provide a ground of regularity and so allow us to judge the accident as aberrant. Breaking these classical concepts releases irregularity as a constant, constitutive, and active force and allows us to understand representation not as a repetition of the same but as a reproduction of affective forces and intensities in a world where accident is ubiquitous within becoming and movement.
 
Driver’s education demonstrates that active forces emerge even amidst a density of conservative, reactive forces. Over and over, in this education, self-security is enacted in rhythms of repetition-of-the-same in an attempt to craft a state of endurance, in an attempt to remain constant in a world of accident. The priority of self-security in accident prevention here produces a securing of the self, a continual and blindly confident reactive enclosure of the subject, of representation, and of time. Into this confluence of conservative forces crashes the documentary highway safety film head-on, without regard to the painstaking construction it renders frail. Quite by chance, on this one active current, the accident is opened to perception in all its painful potential. It is not so opened, however, by way of what the films represent, nor by establishing a critical distance from them, but by their offering of a non-representational image of perception itself, in this case of perception as the sensational endurance of the unendurable, of the time of accident itself. This wildly active effect of the films, this taking cinematic force to the limits of what it can do without reactively coiling it back to the security of the familiar, contrasts starkly with the effect of the conservative discourses within which the films are pedagogically configured. Driver’s education shows repeatedly the conservative force of security that, oddly, prevents, not the accident, but the ability to endure its possibility.
 

The Strange Accidental History of Driver’s Education

 

 

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Equation representing the “accident-prone” individual.

 

“Speed is a relative matter. It’s what comes with it that kills.”
 

-“Signal 30” (1959)

 
The advent of driver’s education, it can be said, comes from the Virilian recognition that accident is immanent to invention-from the ability to see that the invention will occasion its accident. The invention here is the automobile. In 1960, there is one auto registration to every three people in the United States; by 1970 the ratio is closer to one in two, these being the peak decades of highway carnage film use in driver’s education. But this sort of simple cause/effect and linear sense of time and development is precisely what Nietzschean/Deleuzian thought works against. Driver’s education, rather, emerges as a Deleuzian assemblage, built from points of blockage and connection, flows that converge and diverge through military needs, industrial accidents, Cold War conformism, police surveillance, pornography, social hygiene, and more; it configures a multiplicity with multiple origins, intersections of numerous discourses, and an unmappable diversity of effects. In other words, its development is non-linear and aleatory, an assemblage moving by way of variation analogous to the variation it, ironically, attempts to stem-the chance variation that produces the accident.
 
While the first integration of driver’s education into the high-school curriculum was in 1933 (in State College, Pennsylvania), the war made it national. Since America was by World War II an automotive culture-in 1940 there were four persons to one car in the country-t he United States military assumed its troop pool would consist of capable drivers. It was disappointed. When recruits were found wanting in motor skills, the Quartermaster General of the Army asked the State Superintendents of Public Instruction that “preinduction driver-training programs” be instituted to pre-train the trainees. Twenty-three states complied. Thus the institution of driver’s education emerges to construct mobility both as a military discipline based in uniformity and deindividualization and as the practice of individual freedom. In fact, the two converge in the concept of national responsibility. For subsequent pedagogical rhetoric of the driver-as-free-citizen carries traces of this national service lineage. In driving pedagogy the individual is frequently exhorted to fulfill his/her responsibility as citizen for the success of the democratic social system, to the point where the “traffic citizen” and the “democratic citizen” are one and the same:
 

There are several basic characteristics of the good traffic citizen. The Constitution of the United States contains those citizen rights and responsibilities that traffic citizens should strive to develop in the fullest. The very social and economic basis of our civilization is the mobility provided by cars. Individual responsibility is essential to the safe and efficient operation of our transportation system.
 

(Aaron, Driver and Traffic 59)

The paradox of the free world is that, while its economy and ethos are animated by free individuals each with her or his own engine of free will, it cannot tolerate an absolute diversity of will, for such a whole would be ungovernable. The Enlightenment subject, upon which the United States was founded, internalizes self-governance through its transcendental potential for rational thought, thought driven by its propensity for perfection. A nation of freely circulating, free-thinking individuals must depend upon their similar predictability to prevent the intolerable irregularity of a chaotic society. Thus we hear exhortations in the accident-prevention of driver’s training, the simultaneous recognition of the individual as the source of chaos and as the source of responsibility that will overcome the chaos, the reactive, organizing force that must be greater than disorganizing forces.

The road situation is part of a social world. The other users of the road are fellow men, all with the same right to freedom of action within the boundaries of the traffic laws. Other automobiles are not things which move about on the road surface according to strictly determined rules, but as it were widened bodies of fellowmen who have their own freedom of action and, therefore, in the final instance, unpredictability.
 

(Qtd. Rommel 26)

Accident prevention in driver’s training is forced to acknowledge the endless potential for accident, but at the same time, it is blind to it as an external event, as the purview of Nietzsche’s “external world of accident.” Instead, in essentialist thinking action originates in the individual, in the interiority of will and reason, and thus accident comes from the free action of a class of individuals whose freedom is inadequately disciplined by reason and responsibility. Causal thought cannot tolerate accident as always multiple and non-linear, part and parcel of the ongoing external process of a productive world.

 
If action originates in humans, and if humans are essentially reasonable, and if the trajectory of properly employed reason is toward perfection, then humanist discourse must still account for accident but without veering from its primary assumptions. Enter: classes of humans who are essentially wrong. The essential deviant had already had extensive scrutiny in the arena of industry, which began conducting social studies of accidents that, in fact, determined beforehand what they set out to discover-the “accident-prone” individual. Inescapably, the heat, metal, mobility, and machinery of industrial sites occasion accidents. Faced with the problem of repeated accident, repeated variation in occurrence, science seeks similarity and finds it in the repetition of accidents in connection with the same individual. One influential industrial study, “Incidents of Industrial Accidents upon Individuals with Special Reference to Multiple Accidents” (Greenwood 1919, in Rommel), was conducted by the Medical Research Council, Industrial Fatigue Research Board (emphasis added). A board focused explicitly on fatigue-a condition caused largely by working conditions-finds not a problem with working conditions, but instead a problem with workers, and thereby invents the accident-prone individual by subjecting all that is accidental to the control of the sovereign subject. Securing the doer, not even behind the deed, but behind the occurrence, relieves industry of the financial burden of renovation and of the blame implicit in reform. Production can continue as before, and the social scientist can go to work on the deviant individual.
 
These industrial studies articulate with auto accident studies and quickly establish that accidents happen repeatedly to certain individuals, and what’s more, those individuals are repeatedly found to be from a lower social stratum. The social research of car accidents finds, for instance, that “accident repeaters” were remarkably better known to various “social agencies”: thirty percent more had been contacted by the credit union and fourteen percent more had gone to a venereal disease clinic, this last statistic salient next to accident-free individuals, none of whom had attended clinics. Robert Rommel’s 1958 thesis, “Personality Characteristics, Attitudes, and Peer Group Relationships of Accident-Free Youths and Accident-Repeating Youths,” legitimates its aim and methods with industrial accident studies and reaches conclusions that further converge with the 1950s Cold War trends of normalizing group behavior, producing the necessary social element of the intolerable juvenile delinquent.² One famous convergence of juvenile delinquency and accident-proneness illustrates well, not the descriptive, but the inventive energy of representation. The driver’s education dramatization film “Last Date” (1950) sees one invention beget another when the accident-prone merges with the juvenile delinquent to produce the concept teenicide, the art of killing oneself, and often others, before the age of twenty by way of motor vehicle. As inventive as this is, representations, from the melodrama of instructional film to the sterility of a mathematical equation, nonetheless service the assumption of an extant identity or substance that the representation merely describes, and further reinforce the notion of self-same internal identity, the self as representation, a consistent, and therefore identifiable, repetition of the same from moment to moment. Thus, the accident prone individual can even be represented by an equation, as in the one from Greenwood’s seminal industrial study of 1919, which has the constancy to remain in use through the 1960s³:
 

 

 

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Embedded in representation is the assumption of an original, the ideal and unequivocal form to which Nietzsche contemptuously refers, outside of both time and empirical reality. By this logic, the juvenile delinquent already exists before the studies name it. Threat must be meaningful, a known quantity, so threat will often become organized and secured through invention (the accident-prone) by way of the valuing (intolerable) process of representation (studies and films).

 
The subgenre of driver’s education films is one among many produced by the industry of mental hygiene. The catalog of classroom mental hygiene films reads like a national history of social fear-in-transformation, from the external threat-“Always remember, the flash from an atomic bomb can come at any time!” warns “Duck and Cover” (1951)-to any number of internal threats such as germs, teenage delinquents, and domestic accidents-“Joan Avoids a Cold” (1964), “Teenagers on Trial” (1955), “Why Take Chances?” (1952). The way to avoid germs and accidents is to learn, and repeat, certain behaviors, to be vigilant against the variation. To avoid germs, family members should always spit into the toilet not the sink, kids should always use their own towels in gym class, and mom should always boil the dishes for 10 minutes. Failing to habituate behavior is to open oneself to the variation that is accident. Variation is the enemy. Training one’s action toward predictable repetition-of-the-same creates a prophylactic barrier against threatening organisms, prevents one from becoming a juvenile delinquent, makes one popular in school, and prevents one from courting the variation that produces accident.
 

Unendurable Intrusion of the Human

 

 

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Fig. 1.

Phoebe Gloeckner’s illustration from J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition. © Phoebe Gloeckner. Used by permission.

 

“As if American motorists were suddenly obsessed with the urge to destroy.”
 

-“Highways of Agony” (1969)

 
The humanist logic that allots to people the power to prevent accidents also locates the human generally as the cause of accident. Accordingly, the rhetoric of driver’s education, whose goal is accident-prevention, frequently deploys the stabilizing effect of scientific representation, but this ideal mode of representation is in continual tension with empirical humans and with the singular occurrences it represents, a tension that sometimes breaks-producing its own accident. Responding to the threat of movement and chance that it struggles to prevent, the world of driving in the driver’s education textbook and classroom becomes an accident-free world. It is a regulated, mappable, rational world that can be navigated perfectly; with the proper training and proper use of the senses, the driver can make correct decisions, repeatedly. In this way, the driving environment in the classroom becomes a scientific environment, as this (dubious) claim in a textbook for teachers of driver’s education shows: “Science and mathematics are used in the classroom as the student learns to apply such laws as kinetic energy, centrifugal force, and friction. He studies human characteristics and their limitations relative to the driving task” (Aaron, Driver and Safety 22). The laws of science and math counter the potential force of disruption that necessitates understanding these laws-human limitation. The contingent element of human behavior unfortunately limits the full, active expression of (potentially error-free, and therefore accident-free) science, and thus needs itself to be treated as scientifically as possible. The driver needs to become a calculable entity, as in Greenwood’s equation above, because in an accident-free environment all entities would be calculable, an idea inculcated by the wealth of geometric diagrams of traffic flow and angles of vision in driver’s instruction textbooks.
 
The protagonist of J.G. Ballard’s fictional study of accident, sex, affect, and celebrity, The Atrocity Exhibition, finds the human-as empirical, aleatory disruptions of conceptual discourses-nearly intolerable in his desire for a world of regularity:
 

Tallis . . . considered the white cube of the room. At intervals Karen Novotny moved across it, carrying out a sequence of apparently random acts. Already she was confusing the perspective of the room . . . . Tallis waited for her to leave. Her figure interrupted the junction between the walls in the corner on his right. After a few seconds her presence became an unbearable intrusion into the time geometry of the room.
 

(42)

Phoebe Gloeckner’s illustrations accompanying the text in the Re/Search edition of Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition also suggest how intolerable the empirical irregularity of the human is to the vision of a regulated world. One illustration depicts a spark plug, a penis specimen, and a broken tailbone, each angulated within its own superimposed triangle, bringing into relation an assemblage of discourses similar to that found in driver’s education: geometry, pornography, injury, and automobiles (see Fig. 1). Geometry is a discourse of Euclidean ideals, of precise repeatability, of objects of study that are analyzed and combined and transformed on a Cartesian grid transcendent to specific contexts in space and time. The triangle proper exists nowhere but on this grid, an ideal environment free from contingency. Like geometry, medical illustration is predicated on the spatial and temporal transcendence of the object, resulting in infinite repeatability and standardization. A circular force of the similar is at work in representation-in-service-of-the-standard, whereby representation assumes a prior ideal form but also crafts the empirical ideal by presenting a specific specimen as a tool of standardizing comparison-the example is the ideal representative of the ideal. But at what cost? The tailbone that appears to have been broken upon its display, rather than before, draws our attention to the triangle superimposed over it, which now rather appears to be the cause, or force, of the break-this is not a specimen of a broken tailbone, but a tailbone that was broken in the act of being a specimen. And while the other objects don’t appear to have been deranged by their triangles, our perception has now been opened to the violence of display, the violence of standardizing the specimen, of representation itself, and suddenly now that active sensation is reintroduced to “objective” representation the cross sectional cut on the penis becomes excruciating because we can see that it too was broken in its service of becoming a representative specimen. Standardization is violent in its intolerance of the dissimilar. The illustrations allow us to see the image but also allow us to see perception at work. What do we see? We see the accident occurring in the act of representation itself. We see that these attempts to render specimens non-empirical are violent deformations of the specimen itself, a kind of belligerent insistence that the specimen be a standard. We also see that representation is force. Against the irrepressible force of variation that is the empirical, standardizing discourse counters with a force of organization, showing that forces of disorganization and forces of organization are always in relation and often in tension.

 
Ballard allows us to see that the human itself will always be intolerable to ideal thought; an empirical tailbone will never fit inside a proper triangle. No matter how many triangles are drawn to represent the driver’s field of vision, any particular driver’s sight may or may not reach the scope of the field for any number of unforeseen reasons. Responding to the threat of accident, driver’s education invents the representative driver, but this driver has been abstracted from the world of accident. Representationally, the driving subject fulfills the classic desire of metaphysics, but does creating a position outside of the system that can control the system prevent accident? What of the problem that the subject is never outside of the system, never outside of variation, and in fact that there is no system at all, but rather an open field?
 

Rhythm of Perception

 

 

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Fig. 2.

The Aetna Drivotrainer. © Huton Archive/Getty Images/Orlando. Used by permission.

 

“You are responsible for all of your actions and reactions whenever you are driving.”
 

-“Mechanized Death” (1961)

 
Yet no calculation, representation, or attribution of blame can save driver’s education from acknowledging that driving is a highly sensory experience. Driving cannot be taught through abstraction alone. The National Academy of Sciences informs us that “vision influences more than 90 percent of the decisions that are made behind the wheel of a moving automobile” (not my emphasis), a statistic that launches the textbook’s urging driver’s education teachers to take control of their students’ senses and train their “perception” (Aaron, Driver and Safety 208). “Because the purpose of seeing is to feed input data to the brain, it is extremely important that such data be correctly received, transmitted, and interpreted” (208), especially given that “four out of five drivers do not use their eyes correctly” (209). Since the goal of driver’s education is to achieve an accident-free environment, the human variable needs to be made as constant as possible, which inevitably requires the regulation of sensory response.
 
The relationship between the military and driver’s education continues when the Air Force lends its pilot-training technology to the school system in the form of driving simulators, stationary driving compartments from which students watch documentary road footage that prompts their interface with the “car,” an interface that is recorded and transmitted to the central control panel for monitoring and for providing “a permanent printed record of every individual driver action, correct and incorrect” (Aaron, Driving Task 156). This technology, in concert with the entrepreneurial spirit of insurance companies, gave our schools in 1953 the Aetna Drivotrainer and in 1961 the Allstate Good Driver (see Fig. 2), designed to provide practice “in complete safety, in driving under adverse conditions, such as emergencies, foul weather, and heavy traffic” (197). While the desire to train young drivers without putting them in danger is laudable enough, the standardizing of sensory response, recorded and corrected, speaks a deep intolerance of the contingency and variation that is sensory experience.
 
One of the most enduring claims in safety scholarship is known as the “three E’s”-Enforcement, Education, Engineering. This encapsulation of accident prevention was first introduced in 1923 and survived for decades. In the highway carnage film “Mechanized Death” (1961), engineering is lauded early in the film as the purview of the “mind” that designs the highway, while contractors execute the skillful building of highways using “known variables.” However, the voice-over announces, “when you come into the picture too often the word ‘execute’ takes on another meaning.” “Highways of Agony” (1969) is unequivocal in narrating that the “penalty for failure to see or to obey is instant death.” Thus the goal of the driving simulator is to train one’s unruly and irrational vision to obey. But to obey what? Where are the rules that structure the obedience of proper vision? Classical perception theory, as articulated by Immanuel Kant, shows the Drivotrainer to be an exemplary Kantian machine that provides the rules of perception.⁴ Driver’s education must confront the challenge of training individuals to operate machinery through fields of perception that can only ever be incalculable multiplicities of sensation. In an accident, the field of vision often overwhelms perception with sensible diversity. The pedagogical counter measure is to insert Kantian object categories that can precede and subsume the perceptual chaos that awaits the driving individual. Students are trained to apprehend, reproduce, and recognize in the style of a Kantian perceptual schema. Simulators train students, first, to see a blur of movement in their peripheral vision, second, to endure this perception through time by reproducing its parts from moment to moment, and third, to exercise judgment by recognizing what the thing is. This recognition, “judgment” for Kant, requires accessing preexisting object categories and making a match between them and the empirically perceived. The transcendental categories allow us to collect a number of stimuli in one entity. Thus, students’ perceptions can be trained toward repeated, successful judgments by familiarizing students with the categories into which they can organize stimuli. Showing the students films, over and over, of a ball rolling into the road while the students sit behind the wheel of the Drivotrainer will strengthen the precision of their identification of, for example, a visual blur as a “ball” often followed by a “darting child,” and further trigger their confident and quick depression of the brake pedal. On this level, accident prevention is perception training, which involves translating ambiguous sensible diversities into certain representations-immediate perceptual ordering of disorder.
 
Yet Kant recognized that object categories alone could not provide for the synthesis of perception. Simple apprehension, even of fragments, involves some stable measure, independent of the thing apprehended, in the empirical world. Most often this measure is one’s own body. In assessing the size, movement, quality of some thing, we create a rhythm between ourselves and the unknown thing, an otherwise unnoticed process that can become apparent while driving when we are met with momentary uncertainties of perception-something flying through the air, the speed and distance of a car ahead, a blotch on the road. Driving can also make apparent Kant’s next observation, that the perceptual measure is subject to variation and can change from moment to moment, and from person to person. In short, the stabilizing ground of perception is fluctuation. The corresponding goal of the Drivotrainer is to create reliable object categories and to prevent syncopation. For Kant, in the Critique of Judgment, this accident is a part of perception: the acute sensation of a fundamental heterogeneity among and the fluctuating unit of measure of the perceived is the experience of the sublime, when rhythm turns potentially to chaos, when what I perceive cannot be reliably reproduced from one moment to the next, when I perceive that the sheer size of a mountain exceeds my capacity to stabilize it, and I am sent into a vertiginous, frightening, and thrilling state where unities and measures break down and I am subject to intensities of perceptual sensation that I cannot comfortably name or represent in my mind, for their identity continually moves beyond its own resemblance. Although for Kant the sublime is a perception of the incommensurate, within perception is its own potential dislocation. “Between the synthesis and its foundation, there is the constant risk that something will emerge from beneath the ground and break the synthesis” (Smith xx). In other words the Drivotrainer cannot correct perception, no matter how much the process is repeated, because the accident of perception is in perception itself when it moves from the ideal world of object categories to the empirical world of sensible diversity that will always show resistances to form and regularity.
 
Still, there is something wonderful about the high immersion of the Drivotrainer, which has lineage not only in military training, but also in pre-cinematic sensational events that aim precisely to dislocate the perception of viewers and to shake their foundation. In the early 20^th-century Hale’s Tours of the World, patrons would pack tightly into stationary street cars in which they then found themselves surrounded by movie screens, images rolling past as fans blew, steam hissed, whistles shrieked, and rollers beneath the car produced reeling movement (see Fielding). Here viewers could respond variously to sensible diversity, without having to account for themselves, as sensational forces coursed through them, each viewer further contributing heat, sound, vibration, to the assemblage of sensations running its deviant course. Hale’s Tours harnessed the sensational qualities of cinema and provoked ir-responsibility from viewers. On the other hand, though using the same immersive techniques, driving simulators attempt to re present the sensory world and to regulate the representations viewers draw from it, to regulate the rhythm of perception and to render it predictable.
 
The highway carnage films take another tack. These films seemingly want to show students starkly the results of unregulated perception and irresponsible driving; however, their unmanageable force does not effect such rational conclusions or critical distance. They rather seem more to project the fear of the accident of perception within perception training, the haunting sense of “the constant risk that something will emerge from beneath the ground and break the synthesis.”
 

Perception of Rhythm

 

 

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Stills from “Signal 30” (1959) and “Wheels of Tragedy” (1963). Public Domain. Used by permission of Bret Wood.

 

“These are the sounds of agony.”
 

-“Mechanized Death” (1961)

 
Amidst a confluence of reactive, conservative discourses, during a conservative historical era, how did it ever come to pass that America began showing snuff films in schools? In a recent documentary film, Hell’s Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films (2003), those directly involved in their making, including the cameramen, repeatedly, and without further definition, claim that the films work by their “shock value.” The primary cameraman, in fact, consistently uses the phrase “shock treatment.” Indeed one unspoken logic behind the pedagogical value of shock and sensation, from Saint Augustine’s Confessions through to driver’s education films, is that we endure here, in a controlled environment, the intolerable so that we do not have to tolerate it later in an environment where it could be unendurable. Logic aside, the enduring attraction to this practice saw it run two decades through our schools (with remnants still in circulation) and saw an irrepressible production of shock-value educational films. The rationale short-duration-now-prevents-the-unendurable-later was rendered somewhat dubious as the spools of film grew and grew. Highway Safety Enterprises expanded the scope of its film production to cover crime, police training, child molestation, and sexual “perversions,” all marked by the same use of explicit documentary images the likes of which viewers had never seen. Images of hanged people, shot people, and butchered people found their way into montages for police training. Numerous acts of fellatio and anal sex among men were captured through a peephole in a public bathroom for Camera Surveillance (1962). Most stunning of all, the bloody, twisted, raped corpses of small children tossed into the overgrown grasses of isolated fields were shown to kindergarteners in The Child Molester (1964), where children learn that “there are good adults and there are bad adults, and the bad adults look just like the good adults.” So much for object categories.
 
While The Child Molester did find its way into schoolrooms, it was more common for students to see highway carnage films, whose sole function was to show explicit documentary images of death on the highway. “Signal 30” is not only the highway patrol code for “death on the highway,” but also the title of the 1959 inaugural film in an enduring catalogue well used by America’s education system. Nationally, there is a “Signal 30” every fourteen minutes, or so viewers are soberly told by the patrol officer in “Mechanized Death” (1961). Beyond this bit of information, viewers learn little else. The films are remarkably short on the facts, statistics, and figures that often give the stark emotional pull to scare rhetoric. “Death sometimes plays an overture of torture,” begins the voiceover on black screen, leading first to an aural exhibit of pleading and shrieking and then to a visual exhibit-a barrage of bodies, burned, broken, bloody, smashed, and worst of all sometimes still alive, as in the case of the shocked, keening woman who sings for viewers the “overture of torture.” Her baby blue farm dress cannot even begin to offset the deep maroon blood coagulating over her face and head as she is slowly pried from a tangle of red vinyl and dark steel. This scene opens “Mechanized Death”, the woman’s garishly lit white face startlingly exposed with the same sudden force as the bombastic soundtrack. From here the barrage never lets up. Body after body after body, smeared, charred, twisted, crushed, dismembered, with a voiceover flatly addressing us in the second person, “Put yourself or your family in one of these unstaged scenes,” as if the reality of accident needs to be confirmed, as if the brutal sensational impact upon viewers weren’t enough to convince them of the actuality bludgeoning them.
 
Reportedly it was the loss of a friend to a highway accident that provoked Richard Wayman to buy a police scanner and a camera to take with him as he traveled the Ohio highways for business. Once he had assembled a sizable portfolio of photographs of bloody, grisly highway slaughter, he made a slide presentation and sent copies to every patrol post in Ohio (Smith 79). Soon enough, barking troopers coaxed viewers into the slide show exhibit at county fairs. Wayman advanced to moving pictures with footage from a 16mm movie camera that he gave to a newspaper reporter; this, combined with footage troopers had begun enthusiastically shooting themselves, was finally spliced together to make “Signal 30” (1959). Already in this history, one pauses at the enthusiasm Wayman and others display for filming dead and dying people in excruciating states of pain or dismemberment, but the bizarre corruption of Safety Enterprises Inc. eventually reaches nearly comic proportions. Wayman establishes a not-for-profit safety organization that outsources to the for-profit safety organization that he and his boards also establish. One organization is used for tax breaks; the other organization to practice self-dealing, or “charity for profit” (Yant 36).⁵ When Safety Enterprises is audited, it is found to be 5 million dollars in debt, acquired largely from fraudulently sponsored loans, and spent largely on parties such as the one for the telethon hosted by Sammy Davis Jr., then chair of the organization. The telethon made 525,000 dollars for Safety Enterprises, but it cost them 1.2 million dollars. Apparently this was the general trend for other fund raising events that acquired debt through extravagant perks for the participants. The rumors concerning Safety Enterprises’ involvement in pornography centered around their headquarters at the home of Wayman’s mistress and intrepid accident-scene camerawoman, Phyllis Vaughn, who turned up dead the morning after she had fearfully told a friend she was afraid she was going to be killed for threatening to expose the organization. Her home had apparently become quite a hang-out for both Ohio state troopers and business men; there they would watch pornographic films, including the surveillance footage from the homosexual bathroom sting. Through various reports it came to be known that films were being made there as well: one popular stag film was made by the local “businessman of the year” and starred a local “retarded” man.
 
The compulsive movement toward sensation with the camera speaks a desire driven by something other than the stability provided by representation. In claiming that the benefit of the films is their “shock value,” the filmmakers and educators name the salient quality of the films-sensational communication. For all the persistent appeals made to the rational responsibility of the subject and the regularity and certainty of perception and representation, here in the midst of this staid pedagogy is an explosive accident, erratic within the trajectory of driver’s education discourse, where the carefully secured subject, perception, and representation are all shaken from their mooring. Yet these films, not in their content as much as in their force, ironically, come closest to communicating accident within a set of accident discourses that have blinded themselves to it. While the images of dripping faces, blue lips, and crushed torsos surge toward viewers with a force that has been known to cause students to lose consciousness, the images remain remarkably fleeting. Generally, people who viewed these films in driver’s education do not recall specific images, but rather the impact the film had on their sensorium. The narrator’s urgent claims, the interludes of trooper physical training, the occasional explanatory reenactment, the images themselves, none of these endure. Anecdotal recall of the films by viewers suggests that representation, even documentary representation, does not communicate the identity and substance of what the camera captures. Transcendental object categories and prior presence wither in their task of prioritizing representation in the act of perception. Viewers of these highway carnage films aren’t blinded to the accident; they see the event of the accident even if the automobile accident itself is never on film. In fact, we can call this strange cinema, after Deleuze, a “cinema of the seer” (Cinema 2 2), an ironic claim given that what is being seen is not representation. The film images are often not recognizable in object categories. Yes, we see man, car, tree, but very often those forms have been severely deformed to the point where we struggle to perceive them properly. An officer picks up a prone lifeless body by its shoulders, and as the viewer tries to place the position of the body, to make out the head from the legs-because in the grainy, deep colors characteristic of 16mm film the form lacks definition-t he front of the man’s head pulls away from the pavement, leaving bone, flesh, and gore to stretch and pour, the face melting into nothing before we manage to see it, the figure maintaining the new and unexpected connection formed between body and road. The forms represent and enact deformation and resist the object categories that secure their identity. The screen is populated by deformed figures of bodies and cars, but that fact alone does not account for the representational deformation that characterizes this cinematic experience.
 
Significantly, the moment of accident itself is never captured on these educational films, only its aftermath, yet viewers are left to endure multiple residual forces that remain active-in the pain of trembling victims, in accordioned steel, in the buzzing movement of emergency personnel, and most important, in the channels that forces of on-going momentum seek. Forces and sensations require connection, puncturing and opening the figures they connect, breaching their boundaries and deranging their self-secure identities. The active forces in car crashes illustrate this. The force of speed courses forward even after the car is stopped by the tree it hits; the tree’s roots, moving an inch, turn and loosen the soil, through which worms frantically squirm, the whole of that ecosystem having been opened to air through vibration; the movement of the startled arm raised to shield the driver’s face continues on an upward path even after the action is completed, even after the arm breaks backwards; the current of pain keeps flowing long after the impact; blood flows from torn flesh penetrating the vinyl of the car’s seat, saturating the stuffing, where mold will take residence in the moisture; moaning noise continues to issue from the body of the victim, silencing nearby birds; the sound, heard by a gawker, combines with the sight, and triggers a wave of peristalsis in the gut; and so on, in countless directions. Because the explosive accident is not imaged on film, because on the level of action nothing really happens, because time is not structured by event and resolution, the effect of the film capturing this slow, unstoppable movement of force is all the more palpable. As viewers become connected to the deforming assemblage, themselves parcel to the reverberations of forceful contact (they have a flash memory; they get dizzy, squirm, vomit), they cannot identify the originating source of deformation. What would be the Kantian “object category” of a representation such as this? As Deleuze concludes in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, although here by different means, the representation itself becomes the force of the deformation of representation.
 
Inasmuch as the accidents recounted on film have already occurred, there are no sensory-motor situations on screen, sensory-motor being Deleuze’s phrase for the organization of time and action by way of conventional stimulus-response, the will-driven action that structures most narrative cinema. The helplessness with which accident personnel mill about the lifeless scenes only emphasizes that there is no situation calling for action. There is no narrative organization of cause and effect, no action stimulated and performed that furthers the temporal chain of action and confirms subject agency. Rather there is outward, multi-directional disorganization continuing to flow slowly from the intensive disorganization of the accident itself. This flow breaks the bounds of the screen image as the viewers configure with the open whole that is the film, themselves Bodies without Organs, or open organisms whose connective intensities break the enclosure of the subject. In other words there is an entirely active potential to cinema, even though it is often assumed to be and often is used for its reactive potential. Reactive forces of similarity turned interiorly, toward representation and identity, can here rather be seen to move endlessly, productively outward as waves of rhythms, rhythms not contained in the Kantian judgment of perspective.
 
The enclosure of the subject, of representation, and of time, in fact, are all actively broken, whereas in conventional narrative cinema they are reactively secured. In his cinema studies, Deleuze makes the distinction between the movement-image and the time-image. In the movement-image, the interval (literally the space between shots, frames, sequences) provides a hinge for the movement of units, creating a coherent sense of movement and time. The movement image was/is often used in conventional cinemas that offer time as a familiar form-beginning, middle, end-and in this way time becomes an object of perception, with a Kantian “object category” and a harmonizing rhythm between viewer and viewed. In the time-image-the cinematic image that Deleuze claims opens our perception to time itself-the interval is less an empty between than a virtual connection where the image houses the virtual (always multiple potential configurations), just as it does in the actual passage of time, what for Deleuze is a pure experience of time. “Every interval becomes what probability physics calls a ‘bifurcation point,’ where it is impossible to know or predict in advance which direction change will take. . . . an image of uncertain becoming” (Rodowick, Time Machine 15). In conventional cinema, then, time is a reliably familiar, organized and organizing form; in the highway carnage films, time is a constant force of potential disorganization. The films are dominated by their seriality-they set one accident next to another, with no sense of progression or logic: the viewer must simply endure. Their seemingly endless stream of accident scenes create a sense of incessant differential recurrence, where sequence does not point to a conclusion nor issue from an inaugural moment. These accidents, in their illogical serial appearance, and these people on film, are strung together solely by chance, and the resulting form is formless, only connection, a foregrounding of the interval. “Because the interval is a dissociative force, succession gives way to series. Images are strung together as heterogeneous spaces that are incommensurable one with the other. . . . The irrational interval offers a nonspatial perception-not space but force” (Rodowick, Reading 195, 200). The viewer is not an agent acting upon the image through the distance of visual organization. “This is a cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent” (Deleuze, Cinema 2 2). The people in the image are not acting agents following the narrative logic of sensory-motor response. In sensory-motor logic, the interval is the between that structures the unfolding of time in the narrative trajectory. Between stimulus and reaction is interval; between frames of a film is interval. In this organization the interval is an empty space that enables the unfolding of time by allowing for the linkage of parts. In the time-image, however, interval is extended. Rather than an invisible emptiness that defines form, it is indeterminacy as multiple possibility; it is what sees the form deconstructed into flowing movement itself, for rather than a mechanical hinge, the interval is multiple possible connection; it is what renders the whole open. In the time-image, the elements of Kantian perception can no longer be relied upon because the rhythm that stabilizes the subject’s perception of the object is syncopated through diverting waves of sensational vision; the synthesis fails, and the ability to reproduce the parts of what has been apprehended from one moment to the next weakens because viewers are no longer looking at things. Viewers are positioned more in the interval in the image than in front of the image, in the moment of chance, the “bifurcation point,” in “an image of uncertain becoming” (Rodowick, Time Machine 15).
 
Again, “[t]his is a cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent” (Deleuze, Cinema 2 2). In accident films, somewhat devoid of agency and action, time is measured by the structure of the interval as a place of potential possible productive lines of flight. These films resonate and connect sensorily without securing the subject but rather opening the whole. So, what is being seen? Here we are in the realm of “the purely optical and sound situation which takes the place of the . . . sensory-motor situations,” and when freed of the subject-securing, time-structuring habits of action, or the “sensory-motor schemata,” we find ourselves in the realm of the image that is able “to free itself from the laws of this schema and reveal itself in a visual and sound nakedness, crudeness and brutality which make it unbearable, giving it the pace of a dream or nightmare” (Cinema 2 3).⁶ As Steven Shaviro suggests, the films reproduce the sensational intensity of an event and in so doing produce a new sensational event. “[V]ision is uprooted from the idealized paradigms of representation and perspective, and dislodged from interiority. It is grounded instead in the rhythms and delays of an ungraspable temporality, and in the materiality of the agitated flesh,” occasioning, in fact, “the shattering dispossession of the spectator” (Shaviro 44, 54).
 
Viewers are clutched in the experience of uncontrolled, deformed time, the timeless time of the accident, where the interval reigns as indeterminate potential of unpredictable convergence and potentially violent change. The highway carnage film projects a series of images to viewers that they don’t really see, but rather endure, and places them in the perception of time that is unendurable. The films capture the intolerable interval that is the force of accident. “[I]f the whole is not giveable, it is because it is the Open, and because its nature is to change constantly, or to give rise to something new, in short, to endure” (Deleuze, Cinema 1 9).
 

Tolerating the Intolerable: Enduring the Unendurable

 

 

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Fig. 3.

Pages from the Fondation Cartier accident exhibition catalogue, Paul Virilio Unknown Quantity. © Associated Press/Amy Sancetta/Sipa; AFP/Getty Images/Stan Honda. Used by permission.

 

“You cause it. We try to prevent it.”
 

-patrol officer in “Mechanized Death” (1961)

 
In his 1962 book The Highway Jungle: The Story of the Public Safety Movement and of the Failure of “Driver Education” in Public Schools, Edward Tenney argues that the push for Driver Education was backed with specious statistics driven by the profit-seeking of insurance companies, such as Aetna, who by outfitting 1,000 schools with Drivotrainers would make $18,000,000. Counter statistics, for example that there was a 16% increase in fatalities from 1958-1960, suggest that this education had failed. Regardless, automotive accident prevention arguably can be considered a serious project, yet set next to the sort of global accident that Paul Virilio addresses, it appears small. Nonetheless, watching the confluence of reactive forces in driver’s education foster active moments of production, we can pause over one striking observation: the accident is without representation in as much as it resists the containment and the ontological structure of representation; the accident, rather, is the open whole.
 
In light of this, the Virilian exhibition of accident comes across as a bit disturbing in its aesthetic balance and proportion, the control it exerts over the sensational reception of accident. The catalog for Unknown Quantity assembles images of accidents, from tornados and avalanches to oil spills and the Twin Towers collapsing, with such harmonizing, artistic attention to color, line, and movement that response tends to be tempered by the containment of form as well as by the rhythm of similarity in graphic matching from one image to its neighboring image (see Fig. 3). The critical distance at work in the composition of Unknown Quantity, more than anything, seems to have domesticated the accident, become comfortable with its representations, taken time to arrange images carefully with elliptical text, so that any disturbing, sublime trembling that may overtake the viewer by encounter with the enormity of what is represented in the exhibit becomes quickly controlled, for any one image is hard pressed to take flight beyond this tightly composed, balanced arrangement. The open is closed. The exhibit seems to blind us to that to which we are meant to respond.
 
In emphasizing Freud’s comment that “accumulation puts an end to the impression of chance,” Virilio reveals perhaps an overdependence on the forces of reason and intention in the accident and its prevention. Reason blinds us to the accident as event. Here it is worth repeating the Ballard epigraph to this essay: “reason rationalizes reality . . . providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects today about which we should not be reasonable” (54). If one cannot see chance, productive irrationality, unreason-if one cannot see that there is that which one cannot see because of these elements-one will never see the accident, even the intended accident. To assert reason and reflection in order to deny chance is to begin a reactive response to accident that, while it may indeed service prevention in this accident or that accident, more importantly, and dangerously, grounds the belief that the accident can be represented and thereby prevented. Was this not the logic used in the United States’ targeting of Iraq as the source of past and future accidents? Rather than recognizing the dynamic distribution of terrorist elements, the Bush Administration found it easier to point to this contained, representable, geopolitical entity in order to organize its own decisive action-the classic sensory-motor logic of conventional narrative cinema, stimulus-response, further organized by the accompanying agents, the all-too-representable good guys and bad guys. The accident of perception that Virilio worries over, far from being the result of a lack of critical distance, is rather more the result of critical distance. The images of accidents that are shown to students in driver’s education can never be the accident that awaits them, and the accident that awaits them can never be known in advance. Must we nonetheless respond to accidents of the past and the future? Yes. But too often reactive responses marshal their representational products in an assertion of secure knowledge that obscures the very difficulty and difference that accident presents. When Secretary of State Colin Powell presented his obligatory photographic evidence before the United Nations in 2003 in preparation for the United States’ war on Iraq, his primary rhetorical grounds lay in the securing function of representation that would warrant action, action that promised to restore to time its coherence and linearity. Securing representation is the first move in securing the United States. To counter the fear of the indeterminate interval, the potential of the accident as perhaps a new logic of productivity, the Bush Administration asserted transcendental object categories: the “axis of evil,” “yellow cake,” “aluminum tubes.” These entities, now known quantities, would return time itself to us by anchoring the disorganized time of the interval. Just like in the movies, stimulus-response is the form of action that structures the logical beginning, middle, and end, and would enable us to close the whole. Action ensures the end. How many reasonable men and women, after all, reflectively took the photograph of aluminum tubes that Secretary Powell presented as representational evidence of a pending nuclear accident, of the accident to come that threatens the chaotic destruction of time itself? How many rational people recognized in this accident the need for swift action, action that would rescue time through resolution-we stand here before you with the evidence of what the enemy has done in the past; therefore, we must determine the future with action that resolves this present problem. Yet the reasoned response to these representations of accident did not inaugurate a recognizable duration of time with a sensible end, but rather has opened multiplicity without end.
 

 

 

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Slide #32 from Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nation’s Security Counsel. Public Domain.