ABSTRACT
The concept of the ‘accident’ is making steady inroads into the social and political vocabularies of the twenty first century (e.g. Beck 1999; Der Derian 2001; Owens 2003). Paul Virilio, for example, argues that ‘daily life is becoming a kaleidoscope of incidents and accidents, catastrophes and cataclysms, in which we are endlessly running up against the unexpected’ (2003: 5). To fully appreciate the contemporary significance of accidents Virilio insists that we need to rethink the received wisdom on the topic. There is an established tradition going back to Aristotle that says the accident is only conceivable in terms of its relationship with some primary substance. According to this line of thinking, the substance of a thing is what is absolute and necessary; the accident is relative and contingent. Substance is essential; the accident, peripheral. The traditional way of thinking about the accident casts it as something that is unexpected, contingent, and constantly surprising – what Virilio (2003) calls the ‘unknown quantity’. Virilio’s most significant contribution to the theory of the accident is his argument that technologies and their accidents are immanent to one another. The invention or production of any technology is simultaneously also the production of its accident. As Virilio (1998: 20) likes to say, ‘The ship that sinks says much more to me about technology than the ship that floats’. At once pithy and profound, this insight allows, first, for an appreciation of how the creation and use of any technology is the beginning of a relationship to danger and risk. And, second, it carries the implication that any technology can be assessed on the basis of the accidents it produces. In this essay, I seize upon Virilio’s insights on the substance/accident relation-
ship, but shift the focus away from the technical objects he theorizes and move it to the topic of citizenship. In shifting the focus of theories of the accident to the political realm, I want to begin a critical questioning of how accidents are built
into certain technologies by which people become recognized as political subjects. In particular, I am interested in the accidents that emerge from ‘birthright’ (jus soli) regimes of making – and unmaking – citizenship.1 Following Virilio, I ask: What kinds of accidents are built into the substance of citizenship? What inclusions and exclusions are enabled when an ‘accident’ of citizenship is said to have occurred? What, in short, is the status of the accident as a political category? The OED defines the accident as ‘an unusual event, which proceeds from some
unknown cause, or an unusual effect of a known cause’. The accident is an exceptional occurrence and marks a departure from the certainties and security of the norm. The accident deals with unknowns, is indeterminate, and implies a relationship with risk and danger. The accident, perhaps unsurprisingly, usually carries a pejorative connotation: it is something to be avoided, not embraced. As a way of (not) being political, the ‘accidental citizen’ is similarly considered to be incidental, non-essential, and a potentially catastrophic exception to the norm. Accidental citizenship is nominal (not necessary), ephemeral (not essential), and dangerous (not desirable). However, if the undesirable citizen comes to be regarded as an accidental citizen, this implies that the opposite is also the case: that the desirable citizen is also an essential citizen, a citizen of substance. The opposition becomes not one of citizen vs. non-citizen, but between those citizens who are deemed essential and necessary and those who are dismissed as accidental and dispensable. The ‘accidental citizen’ is best understood as the abject counterpart to the
essential citizen. Historical precedents for unmaking citizenship through the discourse of the ‘accident’ can be found in the debate over the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent during the Second World War. In this context, the U.S. media explicitly raised the spectre of ‘accidental citizenship’ to make citizens of Japanese descent into undesirable and dangerous threats to national security. The Los Angeles Times editorial quoted below is a rather vicious example of how the discourse of accidental citizenship can be employed to transform the political identity of certain groups of American citizens from that of loyal subjects to dangerous enemies.
