Tuesday 07th September 2010 09:22:49 AM

mediaspace_09 > an online curator discussion

online curator discussion

global accident?

Just as it fits so much to today’s actuality I like to post some excerpt of Arthur and Marilouise Kroker’s City of Transformation / Paul Virilio in Obama’s America article, which I came across on networked_performance.

It also hints to the fact that politics and financial issues are knowingly that much intertwined .. so will stockmarkets rise with the win of Obama? .. if he wins. Or will subconscious fear stand in the way of a substancial change which would effect the world globally? And which signal will it send out to the world when the country that stands so generally for ‘the western mind’ can overcome such deep preconceptions?

Are we beyond Speed and Politics? What characterizes contemporary politics is the unstable mixture of speed information and slow movements. Like the slow implosion of the manufacturing economy, the slow rise of evangelical visions of catastrophe, the slow ascent — the slow ubiquity — of the speed of technology, the slow descent of culture into the cold state of surveillance under the sign of bio-governance. You can see it everywhere. In the world economy, the speed of mortgage backed securities, credit swap debt offerings, and complex derivatives always seeks to move at the speed of light. Iceland is the world’s first country actually liquidated by hyperreality with debts amassed at light-speeds now constituting 10 times its national wealth. Like Michel Serres’ the perfect parasite, the Wall Street financial elite has worked a perfect number on the host of the world economies — implanting unknown levels of toxic debt everywhere in the circulatory system of finance capital, from China and Japan to the European community. Waking up to the danger of hot debt moving at light-speed when it is definitely too late, Japanese bankers suddenly declaim that “It is beyond panic.” Wall Street types say it is “panic with a capital P.”
[…]
In 1996 Virilio may have originally predicted a “global accident” that would occur simultaneously to the world as a whole. Only twelve years later in the last autumn days of 2008 — exactly 40 years after the tumultuous political events of 1968 — is it possible that Virilio’s “global accident” has itself been accidented? Slowly, inexorably, one resistor at a time, one mobilization, one march, one individual dissent, one collective “no” at a time, with what Antonio Gramsci called the dynamism of the popular will, the global accident flips into a global political transformation. Signs of this at first political, and then technological, recircuiting of the popular will are everywhere. Entire empires have suddenly vanished, global social movements are everywhere on the rise, imperialisms have been checkmated, and the first tangible hints of a truly transformational politics is in the air.
[……] >>> read entire article

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