PERFORATIONS 14: MONEY

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

You want it, you need it, you love it, you hate . . . oops! Sounds a little like the opening of our recent call for the sex issue! But then that's not so surprising. The relationship between the circulations of desire and the circulations of exchange value are indeed close. The disappearance of the `gold standard' in most areas of human conduct -- economics perhaps just being the most `viscous' -- has put everything into freefall and threatens to blast the whole arena of `money' (everything also has to be put into quotes now) and economics into a stratospheric condition of `global warming' based on a planet-wide infomatics based on speed and asymptotically approaching simultaneity. The very abstractness of capital exchange begins to merge with the abstractness of data exchange, creating a culture whose even immediate outcome is difficult to predict. But one prediction is that the old category distinctions will no longer function quite as well. Political infrastructures, economic infrastructures, and cultural institutions seem to be fusing under the relentless assault of technological infrastructural progress.

Marx's prediction of the demise of capitalism, after it had cornered all the markets/raw materials/etc and had nowhere else to go for it's pyramid scheme, chain-letter scale of values (labor at the bottom, commodities in the middle, capital formation at the top), turned out to be somewhat premature. Through data networks, information itself has become a raw material for exploitation, one that, unlike the entropic bound state of materiality, feeds on itself, in what seems, at the end of the second millennium of human history, to be an infinite iteration upward. Hegel would be proud but is this really true? Is even the fetishistic, specter-like nature of commodities undergoing yet another round of evanescence, sign-system feeding on sign system now, mutual evacuation. "Everything that is solid disappears into air". Thanks for the meme-ories!

(Into this feverish hypersphere, it might be well to inject a dose of `reality': the gap between the haves and the have-nots in the United States economy is now among the largest [if not number one by now] in the world. Does the net facilitate closure of that gap, is it exacerbating it, or no relation at all? Plato's khora could be conceived as a sieve-like structure -- like a net -- that sorted/separated. Are we all now in the process of being tagged and logged, then shunted into the appropriate demographic marketing categories on a global basis?)

Digicash, community-spawned exchange structures, even barter for god's sake, the disappearance of labor (well, in some places on the globe and it's total unconcern for human welfare in other places), what does Value REALLY mean?, automation, even the very idea of an n-hour work week at all, But How Will We Survive? Who Will Take Care of Us? Who will take care of THEM? Who is taking FROM us? Who are WE taking from? Are Technology and Money co-terminous? (forget the old debates about tech and science).

You probably know the drill by now: send us your ideas, your stuff, (your money even); at the very least exchange something with us, in the Great Loop of Surculation. It's never too late. until it's over. And it's never over unless.... (now where'd I leave that comet?!!?)

All media accepted but should be digitally potable.

GET TO IT!! MAKE THAT MONEY! WHIP THAT HORSE!!