Dupes of Non-Physical

To dismiss McLuhan as a technological determinist is to miss entirely the point of his intellectual contribution. McLuhan's value as a theorist of culture and technology began just when he went over the hill to the side of the alien and surrealistic world of mass communications: the "real world" of technology where the nervous system is exteriorised and everyone is videoated daily like sitting screens for television. Just because McLuhan sought to see the real world of technology, and even to celebrate technological reason as freedom, he could provide such superb, first-hand accounts of the new society of electronic technologies. McLuhan was fated to be trapped in the deterministic world of technology, indeed to become one of the intellectual servomechanisms of the machine-world, because his Catholicism failed to provide him with an adequate cultural theory by which to escape the hegemony of the abstract media systems that he had sought to explore. Paradoxically, however, it was just when McLuhan became most cynical and most deterministic, when he became fully aware of the nightmarish quality of the "medium as massage", that his thought becomes most important as an entirely creative account of the great paradigm-shift now going on in twentieth-century experience. McLuhan was then, in the end, trapped in the "figure" of his own making. His discourse could provide a brilliant understanding of the inner functioning of the technological media; but no illumination concerning how "creative freedom" might be won through in the "age of anxiety, and dread". In a fully tragic sense, McLuhan's final legacy was this: he was the playful perpetrator, and then victim, of a sign-crime. TC-AK-85&86


Nietzsche is, then, the limit and possibility of the postmodern condition. He is the limit of postmodernism because, as a thinker who was so deeply fixated by the death of the grand referent of God, Nietzsche was the last and best of all the modernists. In The Will to Power, the postmodernist critique of representation achieves its most searing expression and, in Nietzsche's understanding of the will as a "perspectival simulation", the fate of postmodernity as a melancholy descent into the violence of the death of the social is anticipated. And Nietzsche is the possibility of the postmodern scene because the double-reversal which is everywhere in his thought and nowhere more so than in his vision of artistic practice as the release of the "dancing star" of the body as a solar system is, from the beginning of time, the negative cue, the "expanding field" of the postmodern condition.
Nietzsche's legacy for the fin-de-millenium mood of the postmodern scene is that we are living on the violent edge between ecstasy and decay; between the melancholy lament of postmodernism over the death of the grand signifiers of modernity - consciousness, truth, sex, capital, power - and the ecstatic nihilism of ultramodernism; between the body as a torture-chamber and pleasure-palace; between fascination and lament. But this is to say that postmodernism comes directly out of the bleeding tissues of the body - out of the body's fateful oscillation between the finality of "time's it was" (the body as death trap) and the possibility of experiencing the body (au-dela of Nietzsche) as a "solar system" - a dancing star yes, but also a black hole - which is the source of the hyper-nihilism of the flesh of the postmodern kind. PM-AKDC-9&10


What is the Panic Encyclopedia? It's a frenzied scene of post-facts for the fin-de-millenium. Here, even the alphabet implodes under the twin pressures of the ecstasy of catastrophe and the anxiety of fear. From panic art, panic astronomy, panic babies and panic (shopping) malls to panic sex, panic perfect faces and panic victims, that is the postmodern alphabet. Not then an alphabetic listing of empirical facts about the modern condition, but a post-alphabetic description of the actual dissolution of facts into the flash of thermonuclear cultural "events" in the postmodern situation.
As the dark, reverse and imploding side of all the modernist encyclopedias, Panic Encyclopedia begins with the fateful discovery in contemporary physics that ninety percent of the natural universe is missing matter, just disappeared and no one knows where it has gone (physicists most of all). Panic Encyclopedia argues that with the triumph of science and technology as the real language of power in postmodern culture, that ninety percent of contemporary society is also missing matter, just vanished and that no one knows where it is gone (sociologists most of all).
Indeed, since we are probably already living in post-millenial consciousness on the other side of the Year 2000 (calendar time is already too slow: Jean Baudrillard was correct when he said recently in the French newspaper, Liberation, that we should take a vote to jump immediately to the Year 2000 and thus end the interminable and boring wait for the millenium), we are the first human beings to live in the dead zone of a fatal attraction between postmodern science and popular culture. More than we may suspect, panic science is now the deepest language of consumption, entertainment, politics, and information technology just as much as the oscillating fin-de-millenium mood of deep euphoria and deep despair of contemporary culture is the ruling ideology of postmodern science.
Between ecstasy and fear, between delirium and anxiety, between the triumph of cyber-punk and the political reality of cultural exhaustion: that is the emotional mood-line of Panic Encyclopedia. Here, in fact, panic has the reverse meaning of its classical sense. In antiquity, the appearance of the god Pan meant a moment of arrest, a sudden calm, a rupture-point between frenzy and reflection. Not though in the postmodern condition. Just like the reversal of classical kynicism (philosophy from below) into postmodern cynicism (for the ruling elites) before it, the classical meaning of panic has now disappeared into its opposite sense. In the postmodern scene, panic signifies a twofold free-fall: the disappearance of external standards of public conduct when the social itself becomes the transparent field of a cynical power; and the dissolution of the internal foundations of identity (the disappearing ego as the victory sign of postmodernism) when the self is transformed into an empty screen of an exhausted, but hyper-technical, culture. Panic? That is the dominant psychology of the fully technological self, living at that vanishing-point where postmodern science and culture interpellate as reverse mirror-images in a common power field. If the hyper-technological self is also "falling, falling without limits", this may indicate that it, too, is already a post-fact in the post-millenial alphabet, with one final (literary) existence as an entry in the Panic Encyclopedia.
Consequently, the Panic Encyclopedia is all about a double complicity. Postmodern science as the social physics of a fading cultural scene, and postmodern culture as the sure and certain source of the ideological theorems of contemporary science. We understand panic science as postmodern political theory in the intensive, but disguised, form of a theory of a fading nature at the fin-de-millenium; and we read postmodern culture - from panic Hollywood, panic viral computers and panic finance to panic urine - as explicit materializations of the catastrophic, but hyperreal, formulations of postmodern science at the levels of fashion, money, liquid TV, and sex. PE-AKMKDC-15,16&17


Panic Zombies (Carson and Letterman). If advertisements are the truth-sayers of the TV programs, which are their media vehicles, then Alpo Dog Food names the Johnny Carson show correctly. Johnny and Ed are America's favorite pets. The show occurs between prime time and sleepy time, with all of the nocturnal pleasure of a regular bowel movement.
The Carson Show is, anyway, a real panic scene. Not, however, panic of the frenzied type, but the reverse: panic inertia. An unchanging format for a static submass, which has disappeared into the white suburban Bantus, and taken to Carson as its nightly excremental habit. As Carson likes to insist, it's just entertainment: he's the parasite; the audience, the bored voyeur; and the guests, changing particles in promotional culture.
And David Letterman? He is the Johnny Carson of the Reagan youth generation. A little cynicism, a little humor for a generation that the American political philosopher, Michael Weinstein, has described as distinguished by a "strong sense of self, but a weak ego".
As a graduate of Ball State University in the middle of Indiana, Letterman has moved his Hoosier personality from the regions into the center of New York media culture. With Letterman, the dinner party runs its course from hospitality to hostility to the hospital. Letterman is, in fact, the perfect predator: of his audience (his popularity rests with denigrating the audience); of his guests (celebrities are brought out as living targets); of himself (as a supposedly unlikely talk show host); and of TV (Tonight with David Letterman parodies the medium of talk shows).
While the secret of Johnny Carson's success is as a cultural parasite; Letterman is a media predator. Here, America at night finds its final destiny as a Hoosier predator, alternating between envy and resentment. PE-AKMKDC-261&262


What is generally taken as "extremism" in the U.S., is the opposite of the collective state of political apathy that is maintained by those in positions of power. There are two ways of understanding the phenomenon. First, the relative quiescence and political ignorance of the American population represents an opportunity, a field of action, for "activists". The lack of political consciousness is fertile ground for manipulation based upon the most exaggerated claims. In this sense, apathy tends to encourage "extremism". Second, the presence of "extremists" works to the benefit of those in positions of power and authority who are quick to explain that any deviation from the political orthodoxy of the moment will degenerate into "irrationality" and violence. Social criticism is thus a sign of irresponsibility. In other words, the myth of "consensus" implies the creation of scapegoats. Over the past twenty years individuals like Joseph McCarthy, Lyndon LaRouche, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, etc. have succeeded in imposing themselves upon the public by profiting from the civil apathy and political ignorance of the North-American population through the process of scapegoating. Products of the myth of "consensus", these men have also contributed to its destruction. TL-LP-34


The myths of communism and capitalism, then, as floating signs - degree zero-points - for the cancellation and imminent reversibility of all the polarities: the mutation of the (socialist) struggle for justice into cynical power; and the materialist dream of the (liberal) flight from politics into the triumph of cynical ideology. Like "strange attractors" in astrophysics which can exercise such a deadly fascination because of their ability to alternate energy fields instantly, the myths of state capitalism and state communism are alternating sides of the rationalist eschatology: the symptomatic signs of the appearance of the bimodern condition.
Bimodernism? That is the contemporary historical situation in which the great referential polarities instantly reverse fields, changing signs in a dizzying display of political repolarization. A violent metastasis in which all the referential finalities of the political code of the twentieth century - capitalism and communism most of all - begin to slide into one another, actually mutating into their opposites as they undergo a fatal reversal of meaning. No longer justice versus the acquisitive instinct, power versus ideology, (socialist) history versus (consumer) simulation, or (economic) liberalism versus (political) democracy, but now the instant reversibility of all the referents. A fatal eclipse of the empire of the sign in which capitalism and communism do a big historical flip. Not just the myth of capitalism in desperate need of the communist "other" to sustain itself or communism as a barrier against the universalization of the commodity-form, but now communism aping the economic form of primitive capitalism, and capitalism taking on the political form of the command economy of late communism. The capitalist societies, then, as the forward frontier of the communist valorization of power; and communist societies as the last and best of all the primitive capitalisms. In one, the inspiring faith in commercial accumulation and the resuscitation of law of value of the production machine; and in the other, the radical depoliticization of the population, its actual body invasion, by a totalitarian image-reservoir under the control of a cynical political mandarinate. In one, the recuperation of the productivist myth of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a policy of economic reconstruction; and in the other, the Leninist use of all the mass organs of media manipulation as a way of coordinating private opinion with the war machine. IP-AKMK-ix&x