Dupes of Non-Physical

KROKER


The Postmodern Scene evokes, and then secretes, the fin-de-millenium mood of contemporary culture. It is a panic book: panic sex, panic art, panic ideology, panic bodies, panic noise, and panic theory.
Indeed, the text itself should be read as immanently postmodern. Thus, for example, while Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment was written in response to the outbreak of the fascist mind, The Postmodern Scene is written in response to the outbreak again of the dialectic of enlightenment. In an age where computers reify the meaning of memory and panic sex is the language of the postmodern body, then it may still be salutary to meditate anew on historical remembrance as the basis of politics. The Postmodern Scene, while thriving in the detrital scenes of cultural amnesia, is also a market of remembrance. Decay/ecstasy, hyper-pessimism/hyper-optimism, memory/amnesia: these are the double signs under which this text has been written. If this sounds paradoxical, ambivalent and contradictory, this just means that like the quantum age which it seeks to describe, The Postmodern Scene is a quantum, that is to say postmodern, sign of its times.
For who can now speak with confidence of the future of a postmodern scene when what is truly fascinating is the thrill of catastrophe, and where what drives onward economy, politics, culture, sex, and even eating is not the will to accumulation or the search for lost coherencies, but just the opposite - the ecstatic implosion of postmodern culture into excess, waste, and disaccumulation. When technology of the quantum order produces human beings who are part-metal and part-flesh; when robo-beings constitute the growing majority of a western culture which fulfills, then exceeds, Weber's grim prophecy of the coming age of "specialists without spirit"; and when chip technology finally makes possible the fateful fusion of molecular biology and technique: then ours is genuinely a postmodern condition marked by the deepest and most pathological symptoms of nihilism. Not just science as the will to power, but also medicine as an empty will to knowledge (of the lascerated body), penology as a grisly will to surveillance of the body politic, and ethics itself as enucleated within the dynamic language of instrumental activism. The Postmodern Scene is, therefore, a catastrophe theory for a hyper-modern culture and society which is imploding into the seductive simulacra of its own dark, and negative, sign.
Consequently, a deep (panic) thematic runs through the text. It explores the passive and suicidal nihilism of contemporary culture from the shifting perspectives of popular culture (Sunshine Reports), classicism (Sign Crimes), poststructuralist philosophy (Sliding Signifiers), and art (Ultramodernism). Whether viewing the postmodern scene from the perspective of its first theorist (Augustine), its philosophical precursors (Nietzsche and Bataille), its artists (Fischl, Chirico, Magritte, and Woodman), or its key social theorists (Baudrillard, Serres, Foucault), it is the same thing, just speeded up a bit. Thus, if the writing moves at hyper-speed to the point of trying to achieve escape velocity from the language of positivist sociology and conventional ideological discourse, that is because The Postmodern Scene also seeks to evoke a certain literary mood - panic reading - as a way of participating directly in the ruins within and without of late twentieth-century experience.
Refusing (with Nietzsche) the pragmatic compromise which only seeks to preserve, The Postmodern Scene can recommend so enthusiastically panic reading because it seeks to relieve the gathering darkness by a new, and more local, cultural strategy. That is, to theorise with such hyper-intensity that the simulacrum is forced finally to implode into the dark density of its own detritus, and to write so faithfully under the schizoid signs of Nietzsche and Bataille that burnout, discharge, and waste as the characteristic qualities of the postmodern condition are compelled to reveal their lingering traces on the after-images of (our) bodies, politics, sexuality, and economy. Hyper-theory, therefore, for the end of the world. PM-AKDC-i&ii


What is postmodernism? It is what is playing at your local theatre, TV studio, office tower, doctor's office, or sex outlet. Not the beginning of anything new or the end of anything old, but the catastrophic, because fun, implosion of contemporary culture into a whole series of panic scenes at the fin-de-millenium. And so, some panic theses as a seismograph of the postmodern mood.

Panic Politics. It's fun time under the big top when the portable politicians of the postmodern parade come to the parodic dome. The clones are out, wired to the computer consoles; electronic waves piercing the body politic agitating the crowd to glee with each melodramatic surge. Hurray! Hurray! To that age of reversals, an age as Nietzsche describes it that "wants publicity and that great actors' hubbub, that great drum banging that appeals to its funfare tastes". It's time to get on the merry-go-round as quantum politics begins its spin under the barrage of particle beams from the repeating cannons of the cathode rays.
Postmodern politics begins with Mark Gertler's Merry-go-round (1916). The soldiers, sailors and business men mount up on the automated carrousel of hysteria. Each cloned in magical threes, mirrored imaged, breasts protruding, backs curved in the ellipsoid arc ready for the high speed chase. The horses are genetically pure, beyond mutation, beyond the cancerous errors of nature poised for the visciousness of the war to come - a ready automated machine. Yet what is this, the protruding buttocks, rounded open and fleshly white? The solar anus open to the culture of fun/fear ready to receive consummation as the carrousel picks up speed.
Politics becomes the flashing anus of promises of the better world constantly present as the carrousel becomes the succession of white strobe-like flashes and as the waste system runs into the now of party time. The cries of the paraders poised on the edge of aggression and terror, unable to dismount, caught in the imploding vortex of the fashion swirl. Tunics pressed, hats in place, mouths open ready for the distortion of the cyclorama.
It is just this world of Gertler run now at hyper-speed which, through the distorted images of the carrousel, creates the holograms that characterize the political. The path of Presidents, or Prime Ministers, trace/race after images across the nation. Cameras with open shutters hopeful that the celluloid will inscribe the sunny soul of the nation from the black hole of paranoid politics. Just as the video camera in the President's office oversees Red Square equally well as surveying the latest troop movements. Instant on, instant politics, instant off.