In the event of the accident, the coherency of the object world is destabilised and the component agencies necessary to maintain it become newly revealed. Dislodged from their safe havens and rendered vulnerable, these component agencies, however operational, institutional or discursive, become newly active in their negotiations and attachments. They are absorbed into other material configurations, other systems of meaning and affect, however straight or wayward, countered or modulated, amplified or diminished. Conventional associations are dislodged. The catastrophe reveals an agential dispersal: the network of the negotiation. Yet at the same time, revealing the elements with which actors and events affi liate in order to maintain their centrality and force, the catastrophe orchestrates a consolidation. It stabilises relatively coherent or consistent forms – however spatial, linguistic, affective or rhythmic – that embody or heighten the specifi cs of the site, the object, the space, rendering it singular, bounded and unique. Infrastructures are revealed. Actors, escaping abstraction, are resolved to ontological specifi city and embroiled in a politics that may have been overlooked or erased.

Yet the event can resist this containment, and in this resistance lies the source of its compelling and productive power. It mobilises potent circulations of sensation, however understood in terms of attraction or avoidance. Affects are in play, in all their irresolute, physiological and psychological power, in ways that can amplify fascination and perpetuation. There is no sweeping them, in favour of linguistic meaning, from the deck of the ship – the platform whose very existence, for Virilio, occasions the wreck. The challenge is to accommodate the unruly supplements of the situation, its turbulent underpinnings: the senseless undercurrents of the sensible.