Heterologias

Just as Jean Baudrillard long ago warned, the hyperreal, simulational world of
derivatives, credit swaps, and mortgage backed securities long ago
blasted off from material reality, reaching escape velocity, and then
orbiting the world as star-like high finance satellites -- purely
virtual satellites which have no real meaning for the rest of us as
long as they stay in space as part of the alienated, recursive loops
of advanced capitalism. But when the meltdown suddenly happens, when
that immense weight of over-indebtedness and toxic mortgages and
credit derivates plunge back into the gravitational weight of real
politics and real economy, we finally know what it is to live within
trajectories of the catastrophic. Economists are quoted as saying the
financial crisis effects "everyone on earth." Is this Virilio's
"global accident?" Quite certainly it is panic finance: that moment
when the credit mechanisms necessary for capitalist liquidity slam
shut, a time made to measure for Virilio's brilliant theory of bunker
archeology, with each bank its own toxic bunker of junk assets, each
banker a born again socialist. For example, always vigilant automatic
circuit breakers working in the darkness of night recently prevented
a global plunge of the futures market. Allan Greenspan throws up his
hands, exclaiming "I'm in shocked disbelief."