Death at the Parasite Cafe

This text is an ethnographic text, if somewhat surreally. It invites you, its readers, not so much to agree with the evidence and the analysis set forth by me, its author, as to enter actively into the process of re-searching your own Historical and biographically given positions within what might be described provisionally as the postmodern scene of contemporary North America.² For it is indeed within the Historical materiality of this powerful scene that some (of us) are in contradictory ways struggling repeatedly to define, defend, and reconstruct the social forms in which we live and die; and to do this in relation to and often against others (of us) who feed parasitically off the flesh of those whose material chances they economically restrict and militaristically reduce. I am here (w)riting of (and against) those most privileged by current hierarchies of power, hierarchies that today operate under the nightmarish sacrificial sign-work of cybernetic-like compulsions toward a New World Order of systematic overdevelopment, transglobal CAPITAList hegemony and straight whitemale economies of logic, morality and pleasure. The technologically driven and culturally orchestrated shifts in the command, control and communicative character of such inFORMational hierarchies separate them from modern forms of power. Does this mean these forms of power are postmodern? Or is it better to designate such contemporary modalities of power as ultramodern? Although throughout this text these two terms are use somewhat interchangeably, I believe the term ultramodern to be more adequate.

THE LAWLESSNESS OF DEMAND BEFORE SUPPLY. It is the winter of 1991–92 within a memory-poor social geography of faded yellow ribbons and televisionary tales of recession-driven death squads, straight whitemale corporate gang sexual violence and economic harassment, and the always only apparent triumph of CAPITAL (almost) world-wide. Within this geography, within and along the borders of this New World Order, I’m trying to collage together a sociological story about some of the critical possibilities and limitations of social science in a world gone ultramodern. By employing collage (w)riting strategies I sometimes feel as if I’m inviting a dialogue between constructionism, as a potentially critical sociological perspective, and constructivism, as a militant “art form” committed to blurring the distinction between critical research and performative remembrance and to the political denaturalization of seemingly real social facts by such strategies as synchronic juxtaposition, montage, and noticeably open-ended assemblage demanding active audience engagement and participatory re(w)ritings. Sometimes I feel like I’m repeating myself.

Three bodies were discovered in the cafe that night. LYING face down amidst the fragments. One was the body of a man. The other two were women. According to available police reports they were some sort of stupidly queer, maybe even perverse, political activists. Their own disclaimers had been more modest. At various times they had referred to themselves as artists, teachers, performers or even copy(w)riters. They were often unemployed. At least the women. Some considered them to be construction workers. Others thought of them as storytellers. Locally they had acquired a reputation as unauthorized agents of social-psychoanalysis. Tricksters to say the least; all were believed to be sociological orphans. Rumors of secret (w)rites had been circulating; and there was considerable confusion as to whether those killed were social scientists or some ill fated characters fallen from the pages a baroquely tragic drama. “Whoever I am,” stated one of the dead women only hours before blasts of steel silenced her lips forever, “I am not an intellectual, properly speaking!”

It’s incredible to be here. I never thought I’d be writing these words in prison and with such fear. It’s (k)not exactly that I hadn’t seen it coming. It was always already there in a way in my dreams. And in those unspeakable places of anxiety that ate me alive while at work or when watching television. And in the tightness of my throat during sex. For far too long I had treated these symptoms as no-thing but sliding signifiers. But tonight, from the perspective of terror in which I find myself imprisoned, I re-member these fleeting sensations as more complex and contradictory. These are (k)not discretely bound texts imagined while asleep in person. These are material prefigurations of what is most unspeakable and symptomatic. In and through HIStory. In and through my body. What’s going on? I ask this question economically, in the most general sense of the word. From my point of view, a human sacrifice, the construction of a church, the dangers of sharing the same needle, or the gift of a jewel were no less interesting than the sale of wheat, international armaments or junk bonds.² What’s going on?

As a theme for this series of seminars, I propose the title “The Double or Nothing.” For some of you this phrase will bring to mind various games of chance and competition. I am thinking here of a form of games—“winner take all” and the like—the appearance of which displaces the more archaic games of simulation and vertigo.² Today the simulated return of such archaic forms is evident in both science and the popular culture. Indeed, the realization of what’s ultramodern in the guise of what’s primitive is a disturbing element of our current “postmodern scene.” This scene may appear archaic but is in actuality driven by a variety of ultramodern addictions to a competitive technological exteriorization of the mind. Whose mind? The mind of those most compelled by a repetitious desire to control one’s fate and capture “her” every chance. The exteriorization of such a mind parasites upon the enactment of games of simulation and vertigo. As reflexive social forms, these games were once the province of generous gift exchange, festival, and the ecstasy of both pagan and shamanistic rites of healing. Today, they are being telecommunicatively reprocessed and then sold for profit. This gives games of simulation and vertigo a previously unimaginable competitive edge.³ Unlike earlier enactments of such rites, contemporary simulations operate seductively but without reversing the willful compulsions of modern power to competitively master all odds.

She was a dark skinned cunt double of somebody for sure. Can you guess who? One day, just before Labor Day, little Reno Heimlich, I mean Oli North Jr. (this is me when I was a little white boy wanting to be a hero) set out for the midway. I never really wanted to be George Bush, although I did want to be a top secret agent. I guess this was because I wanted to rise to the top rather than start at the top. I was a good little cute white boy, kind of skinny and uncertain, but I imagined myself far more. I had a haircut just like Oli North Jr. I was Oli North Jr. And, since my dead father was a sign and my alive father was a sign-maker, I got into the State Fair without paying. Or at least I thought I wasn’t paying. Who was paying? Somebodies must be paying? In the back of a company vehicle. LYING low, keeping secret(s). It was the 1950s.

Genocidal Forgettings. U.S. History. Ultramodern CAPITAL. What are the psychic bodily and collective cultural costs of living off the material ruins of others? How does “one” live with a self secured by the virtually memory-less enactment of restrictive economic and military violence against others? At work each day. In the market. In the bedroom. On the highway. In the airwaves radiating white toxic male wasteproducts into the bodies of others. Feeding parasitically off the sacrifice of others’ flesh. Without saying that’s what you’re doing. Even in the men’s room. To and with each other. Complicit in a global politics of exploitation. And its pleasures.

A detached entourage of metropolitan and mostly white male-minded parasites were gathering in the office-studio-laboratory-space station. I felt it would be difficult to pass among them, but then I’ve always been anxious about screen tests of any sort. Rada Rada appeared more composed. This was by far the largest assembly of corporate raiders I’d seen—a disconcerting mix of some the leading BIG BOYS. Telecommunicating screen to screen, each appeared equally intense as one after anOther the raiders prepared themselves for the thrill of the pure and beautiful buy-out. Having ravaged the Savings and Loans industry, futures seemed limitless. Like Japanese totems dressed in new German electronics with Texas accents and Israeli recorders, these raiders seemed almost Otherworldly. A white noisy buzz of telematic feedback fills the air. And since the global entrance to all BIG BOY corporate-office-tower-industrial-park-research-inFORMation-security-systems-banking-pleasure-palace-shopping-mall-designer-sports-stock-market-enterprises were hourly chem-dusted and image-scanned for bad odors, unpleasant visuals and other irregular memories, the scent of missing Guatemalan bodies, dead dark skinned U.S. infants without food or proper medical care, as well as the stateless plight of Palestinian “refugees” went virtually unnoticed. Not unnoticed but virtually unnoticed. “Yuppies from Mars,” whispered Rada Rada.

What, besides something unspeakably racist, could George Bush have had in mind when, in campaigning against Ronald Reagan for the Republican Party nomination for President in 1980, he used the phrase “Voodoo economics” to describe Reagan’s plan for strengthening U.S. CAPITAL? Mindful that Bush would later adopt such policies as his own, the Black Madonna Durkheim gave me several texts on Voodoo by Zora Neale Hurston (among others), saying, “You white folks should remember that ecstatic religious forms continued in this country long after you genocided the Native Americans.” She suggested I look into the matter.

Tick tock. Tick tock. I find myself spinning uncertain how to proceed. My eyes/“I”s cross-circuit through the screen that becomes me and I buy a lot and give a little. Repeatedly.