He saw the financial market, with its obsessive will to quantification, as the perfect instance of his totalizing system, his ‘eutrophication’ or ‘veil of Maya’ – a web of abstraction so complicated that it asphyxiated what it was supposed to explain before collapsing inevitably under its own weight. The artificial, the less-than-real, was once conceived as a kind of hell, he wrote. Yet today the less-than-real is prized more than gold, and the quaint stuff of the tangible – the underlying, as it has become known – exists only as raw material for new and lucrative abstractions. The financial corporation has become a machine for producing unreality; why do we desire this unreality? Why do we model ourselves on this machine? We know that what we call the corporation (Texier wrote) first appeared in Europe’s Middle Ages, signed into law by the Pope in AD 1250. It was conceived as a legal persona ficta – a ‘fictive person’ that had many of the attributes of a real person.
