Panic Doughnuts

In a perfect media simulation of John F. Kennedy's famous '60s speech to all the Berliners, Ronald Reagan once visited the Berlin Wall and repeated the fateful political pledge: Ich bin ein Berliner. He probably thought he was only saying, "I am a Berliner", but like Kennedy before him, he was also saying in German, "I am a jelly doughnut."

So then, two Mr. Doughnuts at the Berlin Wall as perfect examples, not so much of Marx's prediction of the double return of history, first as tragedy and then as farce, but of history as an endless labyrinth of bad jokes.

Panic Encyclopaedia

The Doughnut

History never started, it never happened, or if it did happen it died a long time ago. The End of History is the blink-out of a dead class who reflect like a burnt star in the cracked mirror of production. Those who speak of the End of History are zombies caught in light of the final implosion of the virtual class. Those that remain outside this event horizon of first order code economies are still embedded in channels of materialist economies. Here the fissures of the everyday disorder manifest themselves as questions of labour, housing, nutrition, education, medical care, and education. The same everyday concerns of the many and small since the irruption of the Industrial Age. Those segments of digital power whose profits depend on an eschatology (a theory of endings) are bound by dialectical panic circle of Hegel, Adam Smith, and Marx.

The Hole

Remainder societies flow between local memories and geo-global re-calling of similar stories of survival and death. For these communities, 98% of the world, the End of History has little to do with the economic nirvana or the final stage of Democracy in the West. They were never a part of History, never a part of the meta-narrative of overcoming History, they existed only as points of definition of what History is not. For the Virtual Class the legitimation of digital command and control of the Hole, total integration of the social, both of the digital and non-digital field, marks the End of History. All History would then become re-run histories of crashes and spasms for an endless market growth. Any event, group, or individual that blocks, reroutes, or even questions the End of History is placed under media erasure or recomposed as a subsystem of the style market.

The Bite

The virtual class forgets that the End of History is surrounded by endless non-History. Societies outside the virtual teleology of time create transparent interference waves, variable convergences, implant counter-memories, interweave black holes, and alien stories. They bite deep into the parameters of the End of History, into the panic of linear time on a dead end road, deep into the predictable circulation of data. X-History mutants

eat off the dialectical corpse of the virtual class. They manifest event horizons without endings, or endings that have always already occurred, or infinite manifold endings. They pragmatically chew on the meta-deterritorialized engines that seek to phase out of History. Each bite returns the virtual class to the zones of embodiment at the edges of its end.

Crumbs

Each bite creates a spill of possible modes of resistance against the bad joke of the End of History: parasitic media interferences, invocations of concrete existences outside History, the passing of stories without ends or endless endings, manifestations of body thresholds beyond the virtual collapse, and ecstatic gestures of eating the sweet jelly at the centre of power without payment. So let the End of History come, everything will be the same as it was the day before History started. If History does End it will be as painful as watching another re-run of 90210 or eating one more day stale jelly doughnut. If this happens just switch it off when your sick of History moaning, or better, switch to your own food channel.

Ricardo Dominguez [rdom@thing.net]