Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth

The accident is to technology what the incident is to history.

Perhaps we can make an analogy with what Paul Virilio said about the accident – that it is the most revealing way to understand technology: where a black box is opened and the components that make a train, an aeroplane or spacecraft are spread out, when the modes of assembly and their implicit imperatives become momentarily transparent to interrogation.

The eye investigates the office; these are investigations often conducted against the very state agencies – such as the police or the military – that usually monopolise investigation.