TWILIGHT OF THE PARASITES - ULTRAMODERN CAPITAL AND THE NEW-WORLD ORDER

This text explores the economic, sex/gender, and racialized passage of CAPITAL from its modern to its ultramodern phase Here the parasitism of CAPITAList power shifts to a New World Order of social domination b ased, not simply upon the exploitation of human labor, but upon the te chnological invasion of human bodies by cybernetic feedback mechanisms , high/speed image-processing, and self-liquifying social control. Roo ted in ''military metaphysics '' and a whitemale imagination of flexib le economic accumulation, the HIStorical emergence of ultramodern CAPI TAL signals a dangerous new ritual environment for contemporary social problems. It also presents important theoretical, methodological, and political challenges to the critical sociological imagination. Struct ured as an analytic collage, the paper asks that we, as social scienti sts, reflexively double back upon our own complicities with current in formational modalities of power, so as to jam or uproot the most ''pos sessive'' features of cybernetic culture. Originally ''performed'' as part of the 1992 SSSP Presidential Address, the text includes visual i mages used during that presentation. It also includes a discussion of the relationship between telecommunicative mediums of memory and the e clipse of HIStorical awareness, the ultramodern police bombing of the Move community in Philadelphia, and a critical analysis of CAPITAList appropriations of Voodoo-based religious practices and other African-A merican styles of resistance.