Questions of Access and Excess a Translator’s Preface

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.