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.

David Irving often repeated the phrase ‘no holes, no holocaust’ when referring to the difficulty, since resolved, of finding remnants of an opening in the pulverised roof of one of the Auschwitz gas chambers through which Zyklon B canisters were introduced into the room. 1 This technique, which is sometimes more of a neurosis, is also used by climate damage deniers and other conspiracists. Here the detail is designed to derail.

The allure of the minor detail can, of course, be a means of throwing investigation off track via the subtle play of a logic of suggestion

The field of investigations involves an intricate dance between showing and masking, between hiding and drawing attention, withdrawing and exposing: all of which are strategic and tactical interventions in the field of the sensible. Simply put, it is often necessary to hide (for instance, one’s identity) in order to reveal (for instance, government secrets).

In the Spies for Peace case, making the location and kind of bunkers common knowledge was a way of pre-empting the preparations for war, of acting on its incitement.

The philosopher Brian Massumi has called this kind of action ‘incitatory’ – a research action ceaselessly producing its subject. Investigations could be considered incitatory in as much as they seek to provoke and bring into being a dormant, latent and undetectable phenomenon. 1

The eye finds illumination where the procedural rigidity of police work leaves unnoticed blind spots

The addition of a detail that needs to be taken into account implies a reworking of the idea of a whole. Such a tr