CRA5 H26 (SA/2026)
'I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash ...' [1]
I.
How odd that after reading a k-punk post discussing J. G. Ballard's novel Crash (1973) - a post in which Fisher describes the work as deeply indebted to the imagery of Helmut Newton and "a perverse counterpart to Kant's kingdom of ends" [2] - I should go for a walk and immediately encounter the above vehicle ...
Some might say this is serendipitous; others may see it as evidence of synchronicity; personally, however, I think the term coincidence covers it.
But it's worth perhaps briefly considering these three distinct concepts separated by ideas of agency, meaning, and causality ...
II.
Serendipity involves the random occurrence of fortunate or pleasant events; i.e., unintentionally coming across things or finding oneself in unexpected situations that have some kind of positive value. I suppose we might see it as an elevated form of good luck and as something that allows happy accidents to become opportunities.
The term was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754, inspired by the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip (1557). For philosophers, serendipity requires sagacity - i.e., the active intelligence to
recognise the value of an unexpected finding.
Synchronicity is a bit spookier and refers to an acausal connecting principle bridging internal and external events; i.e., human psychology and the material world. Jung, who coined the term, described events that are connected in this rather special way as meaningful coincidences. For those who love to grant significance and structure to the universe and believe that their dreams really can come true, synchronicity is not only explanatory but evidence that these things exist.
Coincidence, meanwhile, is purely a statistical phenomenon with nothing spooky, meaningful, or necessarily fortunate about it. It's all about probability, baby! And the Law of Truly Large Numbers, which teaches that if enough independent variables interact over time, highly improbable intersections will occur purely by chance, carrying no inherent meaning or cosmic intent.
To put all that in a nutshell: while all three concepts involve intersecting timelines, serendipity requires you to be on the ball; synchronicity requires you to be prone to mysticism; and to understand the nature of coincidence requires an ability to do the math.
Notes
[1] J. G. Ballard, 'What I Believe', a prose poem originally published in the French magazine Science Fiction, Issue 1 (Jan 1984): click here to read on BJA Samuel's website.
[2] Mark Fisher, 'let me be your fantasy', posted on his k-punk blog on 27/08/2006, and included in k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), ed. Darren Ambrose (Repeater Books, 2018), pp. 44-48. The line quoted from is on p. 47.
