Ether 17 A Giant Stock Exchange

Within immaterial culture, consumer goods lose their natural meaning and become fully abstracted as empty forms, ready to be filled with a variety of meanings that we apply to them depending on context. Immaterial culture makes possible a system of consumption beyond cynical reason in which even the most sinister or foul objects can be desirable. Whoopi Goldberg collects negrobilia, Bruce La Bruce films gay porn in which Nazi Skinheads ejaculate onto the cover of Mein Kampf, and Andrea Dworkin, an anti-porn activist, writes pornographic rape fantasies.

These objects are wild signs, free-floating signifiers that carry opposed meanings simultaneously. All objects are now wild signs. Unable to represent anything specific themselves, they instead become part of the mechanism of circulation, which has become a goal in and of itself. Money, as Hal Foster observes, the guarantor of value, has become the ultimate wild sign. Gold is locked away at Fort Knox, too heavy to move while the value of currency is tied to abstraction and desire. With nothing underwriting it except Derridean différence, the economy is sustained only because of the continued inevitability of circulation in the network.