It is no longer a question of hiding an accident or failure, but of making it productive, psychologically speaking. Paul Virillio, The Primal Accident in The Politics of Everyday Fear. ed. Brian Massumi
Everything must work now, even, or especially, as it comes to ruin, catastrophe: Everything works. That's what's uncanny. Es funktioniert alles. Das ist gerade das Unheimliche, that it works, and that technology continues to rip and uproot man from the earth. I don't know whether you're frightened. I am when I see TV transmissions of the earth from the moon. We don't need an atom bomb. Man has already been uprooted from the earth. What's left are purely technical relations. Where man lives today is no longer an earth (Der Spiegel Interview with Martin Heidegger, p. 17). Technology is no tool and it no longer has anything to do with tools, but it provides an uncanny deracinating grid whose locality is a literalization of the Unheimliche, two ocular shapes spying on one another, the earth seeing itself from the moon, ripped out of its socket, axially dislodged, bleeding, rendering the centering effect of an A-bomb completely aconceptual. (Avital Ronell - The Telephone Book, p. 40)
Like fingerprints, everything (all processes, all thoughts, all feelings) must be dusted and made visible before they can be made to work. Thus, everything (including, maybe even especially, objects) must be made to testify, the testimonial (and secondarily the confessional; witnessing finds its home in an electronics communicational environment but it is also undone there through the penumbral rumorological apparatus which appears simultaneously, more fractal-like doubling which always seems to accompany techn), and witnessing, now being the prime moment of modern culture, a moment which seems to mimic the second scene of discovery in trauma (and which curiously coincides with Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame, providing us a ready nexus between celebritydom, media, and trauma. ) We are again close to Heidegger's saving grace in the midst of danger and Benjamin's placement of shock as a destroyer of aura and experience. The attempts to dispell the technofog of the twentieth century is always curated by those who (like Heidegger and Benjamin at the most ontological) must bring in a big blower from outside the auditorium to dispell the fog, (scraping the historical concretions off dasein or holding out for a weak messianic force) just as the partisans of early modern science attempted to dispell the miasma of superstition by turning on the scientific overheads. (Sunflower madness, a conversion that twists the light and turns it upon itself to the point of dizziness, the blacking out of the one bedazzled, who sees himself go from brightness and clarity to even more clarity, perhaps to too much sun. (Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p. 117)
However, it is a mistake to make too strong a linkage between technology and science. Technology seems to embody an extremely problematic chiasmatic moment: the collapse of distance at the very same instant that a distance is created through the creation of a prosthesis, or double, the moment of shock, catastrophe, collapse, trauma--this is also the unsettling moment of the uncanny, simultaneously creation and discovery, much like Cerenkov radiation at the schwartzchild accretion limit of a black hole. (This is a feeble radiation in the visible spectrum, which occurs when a fast charged particle traverses a dialectric medium at a velocity exceeding the velocity of light in the medium. It is thus a shock-wave phenomena, the optical analog of a sonic boom. The particle runs away from its own magnetic field. Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia, sixth ed.) It is not a question of information escaping the fate of such an ultimate collapse-through-accretion: information IS such a collapse. But arising simultaneously, through the dusting from collapse (all the accretions which have not yet reached the event-horizon but which are being drawn in, like debris collecting around some leak in the cosmic water tank of human history) are other figures, shades, surrounding the collapse, only figurations of noise perhaps (but indispensable to information according to Claude Shannon: the more information, the more noise), limned lightly just over the limits; or Benjamin's image of departed ones, deities perhaps, shades certaibly, presiding over the sacrificial pit from which blood is continually being spilt, the barbecue spit of history, smeared with bottled smoke, accompanied with canned laughter.