Specious Historiography
A review of Greg Siegel’s Forensic Media: Reconstructing Accidents in Accelerated Modernity
The theory of accidents and their causes and effects is a distinguished subject in the history of Western thought. From the time of Aristotle through to our present day, they fascinate and drive massive expenditures of time and energy in the hopes of understanding what happened and how. Greg Siegel’s book does an admirable job of presenting how philosophical and literary conceptions of accidents and those who investigate them have come together to inform engineering understandings and practices. In this post I’ll take a quick pass through some high points of the book and use it to think about incident investigation and review in the software industry today.
The Goal of the Book
To set us up, it’s important to understand what Siegel is trying to do. I think he puts it quite nicely, so I’ll quote from his Introduction:
Broadly, Forensic Media looks at the interrelation of accidents, forensics, and media in the culture of modernity, where “modernity” can be provisionally understood, following Matei Calinescu, to denote “a stage in the history of Western civilization - a product of scientific and technological progress, of industrial revolution, of the sweeping economic and social changes brought about by capitalism.” More to the point, this book is about how, since the nineteenth century, media technologies have informed and facilitated an ongoing project to deal with the problem of technological accidents, particularly high-speed crashes and catastrophes. Forensic-scientific in nature and method, this ongoing project, like the problem it enunciates, has multiple intersecting dimensions: cultural and institutional, practical and epistemological, material and ideological. My overarching contention in these pages is that accidents, forensics, and media are mutually implicated in the origins and evolution of a dominant tendency in modern technological thought, discourse, and practice. This tendency treats forensic knowledge of accident causation as the key to the accident’s solution, the rational answer to its constitutive riddle. It also treats such knowledge as a source of future technical improvement and, by further (and somewhat fantastic) extension, of future sociotechnological advancement, of progress on a civilizational scale. Forensic Media examines this peculiar complex of scientific attitude and cultural mythos by considering the ways and contexts in which graphic, photographic, electronic, and digital media have been adapted and deployed to informationalize, anatomize, and narrativize accidents of accelerated mobility. Throughout, I show how such devices have been pressed into service to forensically work on, work out, and work through such disasters: to scientifically detect and inspect them, to epistemically manage and discursively control them. In offering a new account of the historical links and cultural relays between accidents and forensics, I ultimately tell a new story about the corresponding connections between media, technology, and modernity.
Whew
In other words: Western thinking, and especially Western ‘technicians’ (a broad concept meant to include what we might casually call “engineers”), have increasingly had to deal with the consequences of the accelerated rate of change in society. That change comes from technologies produced by and since the Industrial Revolution. In this book, Siegel will study how that’s been done with a special focus on the role that media technologies have played.
But first, we need to understand what an accident is and why they are a problem that needs to be solved.
A Tour of Accident Theory
When I say “accident theory” I suspect many of the people who will read this post will think of this in terms of the ideas put forth in the academic domain broadly called “safety science.” Canonical thinkers include Jens Rasmussen, Nancy Leveson, James Reason, and Richard Cook. (here’s a whole bunch more, and info on them is conveniently assembled here.) However, that’s not at all the intellectual tradition that Siegel explores. And that’s great! Mostly because, if the “safety science” tradition has been your exclusive way of thinking about what accidents are then this book will present a brand new vista for you to explore.
Siegel takes his “accident theory” back to Aristotle. Aristotle put forward a theory that a substance was a self-sufficient thing composed of a form and the matter which instantiated that form. Any properties of that substance were called accidents, which meant that they could not suffice independently of a substance which ‘bore’ them. Probably the easiest way to understand the distinction is with counter-factuals: An accident is a property which a given substance may or may not have, neither of which is essential to it being what it is. For example, it is essential for a triangle to have 3 corners but the length of its sides is accidental so long as they can intersect and form internal angles which sum to 180°. So a given substance has some properties necessarily, which are what make it what it is in essence, and some properties contingently.
Early modern and Enlightenment science re-conceptualized this formulation when it began discussing ‘laws’ of nature, which are supposed to be eternal, inviolable, and universal causal explanations for phenomena so long as a given phenomenon meets a given law’s criteria; that is, if the appropriate conditions prevail then a natural law explains what happens with the rigor of necessity. Yet another way to think of this is to say that natural laws are the essential characteristics of the universe. This is what lead those who took a Cartesian-Newtonian worldview like Pierre-Simon Laplace to take the position of causal determinism, positing that one could in principle predict the whole course of the universe into the past and future if one knew everything about a given moment in time and space (cf. Laplace’s Demon).
But this raises a problem: If the universe’s essential characteristics are its laws and those laws dictate how everything in and of the universe behaves, then how could there be anything contingent? What is an accident?
Siegel contrasts this neat story with other theories like that of an “enchanted,” so-called “primitive” (by folks like E. E. Evans-Pritchard), worldview. In that worldview, to ask “why” something happened is to assume an intentional, perhaps magical or spiritual, agency at work in the world. Instead the “civilized” technoscientific worldview one asks “how” and therefore does not assume agency, since the laws of nature are not agents per se. (Yet the fact that there is no intention means that things ‘just happen’ due to shear coincidence, which we colloquially call an “accident.”)
Another factor Siegel points out is the psychological calming effect that providing a causal explanation has. When something disturbing happens, an explanation gives one a sense of power over the situation. A sufficient explanation is one which satisfies us, i.e. restores a feeling of power and security in the world.
These aren’t all of the ways Siegel thinks of accidents (I don’t want to spoil the book) but I think they get across the point that the idea of “accident” has changed - it has a history.
Detective Stories
Siegel’s real focus of the book is looking at the technologies used in “forensic engineering.” Forensics, he argues, came about in the modern era with the rise of interest in detective novels, a la Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Meanwhile, engineering emerged with the Industrial Revolution as a role that culturally usurped guilds’ craft work. (Yes, I’m side-eyeing fans of Petroski.) Engineers, with their single-minded focus on using technical objects to enhance profitability, implicitly bought into the Whig theory of history that assumes that time is linear, progress is possible, and that it’s made by studying accidents of the past. Conducting that study provides the intrepid investigator with the insights to build a better mousetrap in subsequent iterations of the artifact.
That investigation is what is called “forensic engineering,” and Siegel identifies several interesting technologies which are still with us today. Charles Babbage, for instance, invented a type of telemetry instrumentation for railway locomotives, and flight recorders are still in regular use in airplanes today. For Siegel, distinguishes these devices from other types of safety equipment like armor is the role of temporality. Armor is something that immediately secures people and objects, but telemetry data can only help after the fact and can only express its value in the future. The data generated must be reviewed at a later time and can be used to justify changes to ‘work out the kinks’. Thus it relies upon a progressive theory of history in order to be valuable.
The Little Engine that Could?
What makes Siegel’s book so good, I think, is that it raises the question of progress. The idea that things can get better is a pretty bedrock assumption these days. Certainly it undergirds capitalism with its assumptions technology can be made better, which makes enterprises more profitable, and that more profit can and should be made because that makes things better for everyone (cf. neoliberal theories from the likes of Friedman and Hayek). But this hasn’t always been the case, as older historians demonstrate in their works. For example, Robert Irwin notes that 14th century Islamic historians like Ibn Khaldun were profoundly influenced by the ruins of ancient societies in North Africa and didn’t subscribe to a notion of progress.
That skepticism does have a contemporary voice in the safety sciences and in software. As my colleague Fred said: “This is all going to hell anyway.” Assuming this is a broadly felt sentiment, it may be worthwhile to ask why people keep it up if they don’t believe in it. I think it’s because capitalism forces people to take an ironic and fundamentally disingenuous stance, affirming something they don’t actually believe, because otherwise the discipline of the market would have them thrown out on the streets for being a disgruntled worker.
Setting that aside, one may wonder how it all keeps working if progress isn’t “true.” Donald Mackenzie investigated this in his book An Engine, Not a Camera. He argues that capitalism and the industrial production that its engineer make doesn’t actually require truth. Models, whether of finance markets or technical artifacts, can be false and still have productive effects which many believe to be progressive. Remember that calming phenomenon mentioned earlier?
Does progress happen? At best I think it’s unclear. Siegel notes that the death and destruction of the Great War disabused the 20th century of a naive theory of progress which thought that it inevitably happens. That’s part of what led to investments in disciplines like cybernetics: feedback and feedforward could smooth out the path ahead. Forensic engineering provides a feedback loop and thus a control mechanism for the future; learn from the past so you don’t repeat it. But is that “progress?” Cybernetics would call it homeostasis, a dynamic equilibrium of capitalism doing its thing and history doing its thing.
On that note, I’ll wrap it up here. Forensic Media is well worth a read for anyone interested in engineering, industrial production, and the history of ideas.