City of Transformation
Paul Virilio in Obama's America
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~Arthur and Marilouise Kroker~

It is surely the fate of every engaged political theory to be
overcome by the history that it thought it was only describing. So
too, Paul Virilio. His writings have captured brilliantly these
twilight times in which we live: _The Aesthetics of Disappearance_,
_The Information Bomb_, _War and Cinema_, _Speed and Politics_ --
less writing in the traditional sense than an uncanny shamanistic
summoning forth of the demonology of speed which inscribes society. A
prophet of the wired future, Paul Virilio's thought always invokes
the doubled meaning of apocalypse -- cataclysm and remembrance.

Cataclysm because all his writings trace the history of the
technological death- instinct moving at the speed of light. And
remembrance because Virilio is that rarity in contemporary culture, a
thinker whose ethical dissent marks the first glimmerings of a
fateful implosion of that festival of seduction, facination, terror,
and boredom we have come to know as digital culture. A self-described
"atheist of technology," his motto is "obey and resist."

But for all that there is a raw materialism in Virilio's reflection,
nowhere better expressed than in his grisly vision of information as
suffocation. In his theatre of thought data banks have migrated
inside human flesh, bodies are reduced to granulated flows of dead
information, tattooed by data, embedded by codes, with complex
histories of electronic transactions as our most private
autobiographies. Information mapping our lives -- process,
principles, concept, fact -- we have all become measurable. In
Virilio's writing what Hannah Arendt once described as "modern world
alienation" rides the whirling tip of history as the spirit of pure
negation that is everywhere today. Negative politics, negative
subjectivity, negative culture. It is impossible to escape the
technological accident that has become us.

But for all that history will not long be denied. Just as Nietzsche
once prophesied in _The Gay Science_ that with the birth of human
subjectivity, twisted and scarred and deliriously unpredictable, the
gods actually stopped their game of wagers and took notice because
something new was moving on the earth -- a going across, a tremulous
wakening, a pathway over the abyss -- so too with Virilio, the gods
of history take notice once again. And not just take notice, but
actively respond to the fatal challenge that is the thought of Paul
Virilio.

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." Harvard economists,
standing on the sidelines like a chorus of lament, wisely add that we
are now between "capitulation and panic" and "debt is good." That in
a world of over-extended economies, sudden loss of financial
credibility, and a seizing up of credit mechanisms everywhere, the
only thing to do, financially speaking, is wait for the capitulation
point -- that fatal moment when despair is so deep, pessimism so
locked down tight in the investor's heart, that everything just stops
for an instant. No investments, no hope, no circulation. And for the
always hopeful financial analysts, this is precisely the point to
begin anew, to reinvest, to seize financial redemption from despair.
Definitely then, not a speed economy, but a politics and economy of
complex recursive loops, trapped in cycles of feedback which no one
seems to understand, but with very real, very slow consequences: like
vanishing jobs, abandoned health care and trashed communities. In
_The City of Panic_, Virilio writes about the "tyranny of real time,"
"this accident in time belonging to an event that is the fruit of a
technological progress out of political control." For Virilio, we're
now interpellated by a complex, three dimensional space-time involved
in the acceleration of technological progress "that reduces the
extent, the fullness of the world to nothing."

Or something else? Not really a fatal oscillation between fast
technology and slow society, but hyper-technologies of global
financial manipulation that can move so quickly because, 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."

By one measure, the global economic meltdown is Virilio's accident, a
searing demonstration of the truth of Virilio's proposition that
every technology is born with a necessary accident in mind. This time
it is not a trainwreck, a robotrader or even 9/11, but a massive
financial accident. Here, the brilliant software innovations and
computerized trading programs that run so much of the world's economy
move so quickly but respond so slowly to the complex information
feedbacks of recursive loops of bank failures and toxic debt and
storms of warring political opinions that they do the only logical
thing possible. They quickly, globally, and simultaneously abandon
their own hyperreal world of virtuality, and go to ground in a panic
search for authentic value. The machine to machine communication that
makes the posthuman economy possible wants, in effect, the gold
standard of real, measurable value. It demands the bottom line, the
unleveraged mortgage, the real asset that its digital operations have
worked so zealously to accident. And just when you think you have
finally got the financial capitalists -- those unfettered
deregulators -- they instantly reverse course saying "Now that the
capital is gone 'something different' is needed -- an emergency
provider of equity." That emergency provider, of course, is us.

But maybe it's not an accident at all. Perhaps Naomi Klein's theory
of always predatory capitalism as a "shock doctrine" is correct. Or
Robert Reich's statement that, "It's socialism for Wall Street and
capitalism for the rest of us." Perhaps we're experiencing a
carefully planned accident, a trajectory of the catastrophic, that
was allowed to run freely to its fatal destiny. A culture under the
sign of the "tyranny of the code, where we find ourselves
biologically driven to unlock a code, where computer code literally
reinscribes our genetic code and reconfigures our brains. Virilio
suspects this. He most of all is an artist of the art of war, a
theorist who understands that dromology has no real meaning outside
of logics of capture and endocolonization and predation. When modern
world alienation, Hannah Arendt's "negative spirit," found its
quintessential historical expression in the past eight dark years of
Republicanism, it not only set out to accident the world, but it has
succeeded, probably beyond its dreams, in doing so. Thinking the
Middle East in terms of the _Book of Revelation_ literally required
world catastrophe for Armageddon, for a fatal clash of civilizations
and ancient religions, which would usher in the seven years of the
Anti-Christ, and thereupon the Revelation. Thinking American
political economy first, and then world economy, in terms of a
permanent paralysis of the progressive movement has meant just what
Thomas Frank's recent book described as the "wrecking crew." The
party is finally over, the hosts are packing up to flee the premises,
and everything is wreckage. Out of the coming crisis of massive state
over-indebtedness and hyper-inflation can come only Democrats as
night watchman of the Tower: the imposition of a new austerity state
for non-fungible labor -- blue-collar workers, the weak and the
dispossessed; the intensification of the disciplinary state to
control the inevitable social unrest; and for the always unrepentant
capitalist class, a massive reliquidifying of all the capitalist
marketplaces of the world, with the state willingly held hostage,
just as Virilio predicted, by demonologists wrapped in the masquerade
of bankers and financiers and investment dealers. At this time, at
this place, at this trajectory of the catastrophic, Kevin Phillips'
admonition "bad money always follows bad money," gets it just about
right.

Or is it the reverse? 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. It's the electricity of the technological noosphere. It's the
primal impulse, the desperate hope, of many progressive human hearts.
It's why beyond all the rules of normal politics that the popular
American Will -- the world Will-- now unifies into a common current
of information flows, of house-to-house organization, of state to
state campaigning, of immense financial support by a microphysics of
small donations -- over 3 million at last count--, without illusions,
without false hopes, that is on the verge of creating in American
politics a truly transformational movement.

Marshall McLuhan once noted correctly that the United States is the
world environment. Ironically then, just as the United States
triggered Virilio's global accident, it just might be on the verge of
*accidenting the accident*, revealing that the City of Panic can also
be an American City of Transformation.

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Arthur and Marilouise Kroker are the editors of CTheory. An earlier
version of this work was presented at Trajectories of the
Catastrophic, a symposum exploring the ideas of Paul Virilio. The
event was organized by Peter Maravelis at City Lights Booksellers and
Publishers and the San Francisco Art Institute in conjunction with
the Consulate General of France in San Francisco.

In early 2009 we will edit with Peter Maravelis, a special issue of
CTheory on the work of Paul Virilio. The issue will include, among
others, essays based on the work presented at the symposium.

Trajectors of the Catastrophic
http://www.trajectoriesofthecatastrophic.net