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Stupid UndergroundsbyPaul MannDepartment of EnglishPomona CollegePostmodern Culture v.5 n.3 (May, 1995)pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.eduCopyright (c) 1995 by Paul Mann, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with thefair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it maybe archived and redistributed in electronic form,provided that the editors are notified and no fee ischarged for access. Archiving, redistribution, orrepublication of this text on other terms, in any medium,requires the consent of the author and the notificationof the publisher, Oxford University Press.Zone[1] Apocalyptic cults and youth gangs, garage bands andwolfpacks, *colleges* and phalansteries, espionage networkstrading in vaporous facts and networks of home shoppers forillicit goods; monastic, penological, mutant-biomorphic,and anarcho-terrorist cells; renegade churches, dwarf communities, no-risk survivalist enclaves, unfundedquasi-scientific research units, paranoid think tanks,unregistered political parties, sub-employed workerscouncils, endo-exile colonies, glossolaliac fanclubs, acnedanorexic primal hordes; zombie revenants, neo-fakirs,defrocked priests and detoxing prophets, psychedelicsnake-oil shills, masseurs of undiagnosed symptoms, bitterexcommunicants, faceless narcissists, ideological dragqueens, mystical technophiles, sub-entrepreneurial dealers,derivative *derivistes*, tireless archivists of phantomconspiracies, alien abductees, dupe attendants, tardyprimitives, vermin of abandoned factories, hermits, cranks,
 
opportunists, users, connections, outriders, outpatients,wannabes, hackers, thieves, squatters, parasites,saboteurs; wings, wards, warehouses, arcades, hells, hives,dens, burrows, lofts, flocks, swarms, viruses, tribes,movements, groupuscules, cenacles, isms, and the endlesslymultiplied hybridization of variant combinations of allthese, and more.... Why this stupid fascination withstupid undergrounds? What is it about these throwawayfanzines and unreadable rants, these neo-tattoos andrecycled apocalypses, this mountainous accumulation of declassified factoids, these bloody smears, this incrediblenoise? Why wade through these piles of nano-shit? Whysubmit oneself to these hysterical purveyors, thesehypertheories and walls of sound? Why insist on pickingthis particular species of nit? Why abject criticism,whose putative task was once to preserve the best that hasbeen known and thought, by guilty association with sofatuous, banal, idiotic, untenable a class of culturalobjects? Why not decline, not so politely, to participatein the tiny spectacle of aging intellectuals dressing inblack to prowl festering galleries and clubs where,sometime before dawn, they will encounter the contemptuousgaze of their own children, and almost manage to elide thatevent when they finally produce their bilious reports,their chunks of cultural criticism? No excuse, nojustification: all one can put forward is an unendurablehabit of attention, a meager fascination, no more or lesscommanding than that hypnosis one enters in the face of television; a rut that has always led downward and in theend always found itself stuck on the surface; a kind of drivenness, if not a drive; a *critique*, if you canforgive such a word, that has never located any culturalobject whose poverty failed to reflect its own; a rage tofind some point at which criticism would come to an end,and that only intensified as that end-point receded andshrunk to the size of an ideal.[2] Then if one must persist in investigating theseepi-epiphenomena, perhaps compelled by some criticalfashion (no doubt already out of vogue), perhaps merely outof an interminable immaturity, why not refer the stupidunderground back to all the old undergrounds, back to the
 
most familiar histories? Why not cast it as nothing morethan another and another and another stillborn incarnationof an avant-garde that wallows in but doesn't quite believeits own obituaries, and that one has already wasted yearsconsidering? Why not just settle for mapping it accordingto the old topography of center and margin, or some otherarthritic dichotomy that, for all their alleged postness,the discourses we are about to breach always manage to dragalong behind them? Why not simply accede to themock-heroic rhetoric of cultural opposition (subversion,resistance, etc.) that, after a generation of deconstructions, we still don't have the strength to shake;or to the nouveau rhetoric of multiplicity (plurality,diversity, etc.), as if all one needed was to add a fewmore disparate topic headings to break the hold of a Onethat, in truth, one still manages to project in the veryact of superceding it? Nothing will prevent us--indeednothing can save us--from ransoming ourselves again andagain to the exhausted mastery of these arrangements;nothing will keep us from orienting ourselves toward everydifference by means of the most tattered maps. But at thesame time we must entertain--doubtless the right word--thesheer possibility that what we encounter here is not justone more margin or one more avant-garde, howeverimpossibleit will be to avoid all the orders and terms attendant uponthose venerable and ruined cultural edifices. We mustremain open to the possibility that this stupid undergroundposes all the old questions but a few more as well, that itmight suggest another set of cultural arrangements, othertopographies and other mappings, however unlikely thatmight be. In any case, whatever vicarious attractions thestupid underground offers the bored intellectual gropingfor a way to heat up his rhetoric, if not his thought,whatever else we might encounter here, it is important toinsist that you will not find these maps laid out for yourinspection, as if on an intellectual sale table, and ratedfor accuracy and charm. No claim is being staked here; noone is being championed, no one offered up on the criticalauction block as the other of the month. There is nothinghere to choose; all the choices have already been made.One can only hope, in what will surely prove an idle
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