Paul Virilio on the Credit Crunch
Even though described by Sokal as “diahorrea on a page” - Virilio is always worth reading. From here
“I am not a vigilante. I do empathise with critics who say that some people have made obscene profits. I do not deny the damage caused by the accumulation of riches in a few hands. But to merely criticise this acceleration of profits and History, this “galloping avarice”, as Eugene Sue called it, while remaining in the materialist framework of profit, is a deficient, reductionist analysis.
What is happening is much more complex, and profoundly disturbing. We have gone into someting of a different nature. This economy of wealth has become an economy of speed. By the way, this is the problem the Left is currently facing. The Left is stuck in its old framework, states that capitalism is dead, and now thinks that more social justice will come about. This is a bit hasty deduction. We do really have a major problem on our plates.
If the state does not take stock of this ‘futurism of the moment’, we might well see instead a capitalism runing riot without bounds whatsoever”
Writing in the mid 1990s, Jean Baudrillard made the (not so startling) observation that global debt has been permitted to rise to such astronomical levels for the simple reason that everybody knows that it will never be paid. Baudrillard described an emergent phase of the economy, whereby it had come to exist in a ‘parallel universe’, detached from its material tethers and growing exponentially into the ether. Much of what Baudrillard wrote then seems particularly relevant now:
“In fact, the debt will never be paid. No debt will ever be paid. The final counts will never take place … The United States is already virtually unable to pay, but this will have no consequence whatsoever. There will be no judgment day for this virtual bankruptcy. It is simple enough to enter an exponential or virtual mode to become free of any responsibility, since there is no reference anymore, no referential world to serve as a measuring norm.”
