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2 Catastrophe “Live” The Credit Crunch and the Really Big Crunch This chapter examines two media events that are linked by the prospect of global or even cosmic catastrophe at the dawn of the twenty-first century: the credit crunch—a term widely used in the British media to describe the global financial woes originating with the US subprime mortgage crisis and encapsulating the European sovereign debt crisis in late 2000s—and what we will be referring to as the “big crunch,” otherwise known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project developed at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, in Switzerland. We will discuss the staging of the LHC project in and by the media, comparing it with the credit crunch as a historically contiguous yet generically different media event. Such a comparative reading of the economic and the cosmic as contiguous yet different media events is justified on a number of levels. It is precisely through recourse to cosmological metaphors that Dhaval Joshi at BCA Research—one of the world’s leading independent providers of global investment research—has described the European crisis over the shared euro currency in November 2011: “Approaching a black hole, cosmologists define the event horizon as the point beyond which it is impossible to escape a guaranteed ultimate annihilation,” Joshi said. “The fascinating thing is you can cross this point of no return without realizing that your doom is certain. So the question is: has the euro area unwittingly crossed its own event horizon? We believe not, although it is getting dangerously close.”1 Significantly, Joshi captures the whole set of intertwined economic debates; political negotiations; falling financial indices such as FTSE 100, Dow Jones, or Nikkei and their graphic representations; and the ensuing business and personal financial losses with the all-encompassing term “event horizon,” a key breakthrough moment after which nothing will ever be the same—or even nothing will ever be, full stop. 30 Chapter 2 However, it is not just the ominous sense of something really bad happening to the universe as we know it that makes us stage this comparison between the impending economic and cosmic disaster here. It is first and foremost the construction of news items about these happenings as “media events” (of which Joshi’s diagnosis is just one example) and the ensuing but frequently overlooked processes of dynamic material mediation involved in them that are of interest to us. With this, we seek to contrast the idea of an atypical and actually or potentially catastrophic media event (the end of the cosmic universe as we know it) with that of an ongoing and more dynamic mediated event (the current undermining of the financial security and stability , which may or may not lead to the end of the socioeconomic universe as we know it). Through generating images and forms of knowledge, such as physics and journalism , the two events we want to look at here, in addition to describing the credit crunch and the big crunch, may be said to contribute to bringing about these two “crunches.” It is, we will argue, this more direct yet differentiated material connection between media and the events in question that draws our attention to problems of time as well as space, processes as well as objects, performativity as well as representation, mediation as well as media. Above all, the credit crunch and the big crunch reopen and enable us to restage the problem posed by Jean Baudrillard: that of the relation between the (catastrophic) event and its mediation. The credit crunch is something with which most citizens of the neoliberal world have had a first- or at least second-hand experience, both through being exposed to media stories about it and through witnessing the financial and emotional transformation to social and individual lives as a result of it. A wealth of media images easily spring to mind, including Wall Street, Tokyo, and London stock exchange traders in a state of animated despair; graphics tracking the dramatic devaluation of the yen, the dollar, the pound, and the euro; employees walking out of Lehman Brothers carrying cardboard boxes; and the prime ministers of Greece and Italy, George Papandreou and Silvio Berlusconi, visibly suffering the glare of global media while the presidents, chancellors, and prime ministers of countries less close to bankruptcy strive to maintain composure. On the other hand, the big crunch—whose physical and, indeed, metaphysical implications are not any less significant—may need some further explanation . The Observer...

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