Dupes of Non-Physical

Panic Money. Advanced capitalist economies now face the severest liquidity crisis ever as the economy itself begins to liquidate. Capital begins to disappear. Nowhere is this crisis more apparent than in the shattering of its chief icon - money. The money illusion has become real as the economy reverses itself. No longer does one find relevance in the wrangle over monetary policy, supply side economics, Laffer curves, revealed preferences or unrevealed preferences, but rather in the self-liquidation of value itself. Money is caught in the grand cancellation of the sign of political economy. It finds itself homeless and constantly put to flight. It is abandoning the "worthless" world of contemporary capitalism.
Money was saved from ruination by Marx who realized the shift from pre-modern production turned, finally, on breathing life (once again) into money as universal exchange-value. Hence money was given an extended life in its role as the externalization of the nineteenth-century self. Money could do things the body couldn't as it travelled about the social in high style hidden from view by the fetishism of commodities. But the bodies in the twentieth-century have been invaded, and blown apart. The fetishes have grown up. Consumption has regained the primitive ritual of symbolic exchange in its abolition of the modern.
Facing the onslaught of the cancellation of the referent, money finds itself circulating faster, and more violently, to maintain itself as the universal clinamen. But in the age of superconductors the chilling effect is immense as everything approaches the end of Einstein's world at the speed of light. In this world the parasitism of money begins to slow the process. This pushes money into even longer hours with the advent of twenty-four hour exchange. Yet, the "red-shift" in the velocity of circulation only hastens the disappearance of money from the planet prefigured in the vast sums for star wars.
Already money has given place to its opposite, credit, in the creation ex nihilo which marks all contemporary advances from insider trading to take-over bids. Just how far the game is up becomes evident in the repudiation of the debts of the large corporations, or of the working class. Everything is owned, possessed by the other so that the economy can only run "on empty". Money becomes the spent fuel of an over-heated reactor. Nobody knows what to do with it, yet all know it must be expended.
Money as value only appears at the vanishing-point of its afterimage. It is no longer one's filthy lucre, only that of the sanitized electronic display of the computer monitor. For money always moves on in its role as the chief vagrant of the collapsing capitalist economy.

Panic Noise. If the Newtonian law of gravity could postulate a real body whose objectivity is established by its mass, the (quantum) law of postmodernity eclipses this body by flipping suddenly from mass to energy. We now live in a hyper-modern world where panic noise (the electronic soundtrack of TV, rock music in the age of advanced capitalism, white sound in all the "futureshops") appears a kind of affective hologram providing a veneer of coherency for the reality of an imploding culture.
When mass disappears into energy, then the body too becomes the focus and secretion of all of the vibrations of the culture of panic noise. Indeed, the postmodern body is, at first, a hum, then a "good vibration", and, finally, the afterimage of the hologram of panic noise. Invaded, lascerated, and punctured by vibrations (the quantum physics of noise), the body simultaneously implodes into its own senses, and then explodes as its central nervous system is splayed across the sensorium of the technoscape. No longer a material entity, the postmodern body becomes an infinitely permeable and spatialized field whose boundaries are freely pierced by subatomic particles in the microphysics of power. Once the veil of materiality/subjectivity has been transgressed (and abandoned), then the body as something real vanishes into the spectre of hyperrealism. Now, it is the postmodern body as space, linked together by force fields and capable of being represented finally only as a fractal entity. The postmodern self, then, as a fractal subject - a minute temporal ordering midst the chaotic entropy of a contemporary culture which is winding down, but moving all the while at greater and greater speeds.
Similarly, the social as mass vanishes now into the fictive world of the media of hypercommunication. Caught only by all the violent signs of mobility and permeability, the social is already only the after-glow of the disappearance of the famous reality-principle. This world may have lost its message and all the grand recits - power, money, sex, the unconscious - may also be abandoned, except as recycled signs in the frenzied world of the social catalysts, but what is finally fascinating is only the social as burnout. The world of Hobbes has come full circle when the (postmodern) self is endlessly reproduced as a vibrating set of particles, and when the social is seductive only on its negative side: the dark side of sumptuary excess and decline.
Thus, power from the bounded, reserved and inert flips now into its opposite sign: the domain of the unbounded, spent and violent. And what better examplar of the unreal world of the social in this condition than music. Music/vibration as servo-mechanism enters directly into the postmodern body and passes through it without a trace, leaving only an altered energy state. Everywhere music creates the mood, the energy level, of the postmodern scene. Never seen but equally never shut out, music as panic vibrations secretes through the body of the social. Always ready to enter, it is also always ready to circulate. Being itself possessed, it does money one better by creating social relations which require no possessions. It may be "born in the U.S.A.", but it has become universal. Always in time, it (finally) prepares for the abandonment of history. Music, then, with no past, no future, no (determinate) meaning, but perfectly defining, perfectly energizing, perfectly postmodern. The liberal burnout of contemporary culture as taking the spectral forms, therefore, of fractal subjects, fun vibrations, and panic noise.

Panic Waiting. Alex Colville's painting, Woman in Bathtub, is a powerful evocation of the postmodern mood. Here, everything is a matter of cancelled identities (the background figure has no head, the woman's gaze is averted), silence (broken only by the ocular sounds of surveillance), and waiting with no expectation of relief. In The Will to Power, Nietzsche spoke eloquently and prophetically of a new dark age which would be typified by passive nihilists, driven by despair over their own botched and bungled instincts towards predatory styles of behavior, and by suicidal nihilists, who would always prefer to will nothingness rather than not will at all.
Following Nietzsche, Woman in Bathtub is a haunting image both of the postmodern self as a catastrophe site and of the meaning of paradox as the deepest language of postmodernism. In this artistic production, an aesthetics of seduction (the muted colours of cool art) counterpoints the presence of inner decay; and the promise of human companionship as reciprocity is immediately cancelled by the reality of communication as radical isolation.

Panic Questions. To the question posed by one American reader: "Is The Postmodern Scene sadistic?", we respond that sado-masochism, in the postmodern condition, is not what it used to be. The Postmodern Scene works also to show that sado-masochism is now a little sign-slide between the ecstasy of catastrophe and the terror of the simulacrum as a (disappearing) sign of the times. Anyway, what is sadism in the age of the hyperreal but the sense of living today on the edge between violence and seduction, between ecstasy and decay? And why not? The postmodern mood can alternate so quickly between hermeticism and schizophrenia, between the celebration of artifice and nostalgic appeals for the recovery of nature, because the self is now like what the quantum physicists call a "world strip", across which run indifferent rivulets of experience. Neither fully mediated nor entirely localized, the self is an empty sign: colonized from within by technologies for the body immune; seduced from without by all of the fashion tattoos; and energized by a novel psychological condition - the schizoid state of postmodern selves who are (simultaneously) predators and parasites.
And to question: Must The Postmodern Scene be so pessimistic? We would respond that hyper-pessimism today is the only realistic basis for a raging will to political action. This in a double sense. First, cultural pessimism is the only sharpening of the will which permits us to break forever with all of the liberal compromises which seek only to save the appearances at the dying days of modernism: the desperate search now for the recuperation of the subject (in the age of the disappearing self); the valorization anew of value itself (at a time when value is the deepest language of the technological will to the mastery of social and non-social nature); the turning back to the critique of the commodity-form (in the age of panic money); and the triumphant return of the new historicism (when history has already imploded into the Baudrillardian scene of a smooth and transparent surface of hypercommunication). And second, pessimism is a deliberate intellectual strategy for breaking beyond the cyberspace of telemetried bodies and culture. We seek to create a theoretical manoeuvre in which hypermodernism implodes into the detritus of its own panic scenes. Why? It is our conviction that the catastrophe has already happened, and that we are living in a waiting period, a dead space, which will be marked by increasing and random outbursts of political violence, schizoid behaviors, and the implosion of all the signs of communication as western culture runs down towards the brilliant illumination of a final burnout. PM-AKDC-ii>vii