STUPID UNDERGROUNDS - MANN
Trajectory - Page 5

underground also begins to make the notion of the margin rather uncertain. One is reminded of the blank spaces at the edges of archaic, flat-earth maps, the monsters that lurk past the edges of the world. Cartoonish monsters, hardly worthy of a child's nightmare, and yet marking the place of an unimaginable destruction, of the invisible itself. Not marginal spaces, strictly speaking, since they cannot be mapped, since they are precisely beyond the limit: but at the same time an extra-cartographic reach that is preserved as a kind of threat, if you will, or seduction, if you would rather, to the very adventure of marginality. The stupid underground is not only the newest post-avant-garde, it is also, beyond that, the very image--quite critical, in its way--of the imminent and perhaps immanent suicide of every marginal project, a suicide that is not a demonstration, a gesture accompanied by notes to the Other, but the most rigorous renunciation of the symbolic order.² We move from the masterpiece to avant-garde art-against-art to non-art (folk, "brut", etc.) to the end of art (autodestructive art, art strikes) to the most vigilant refusal, a refusal that never puts itself on display at all; from mainstream rock to punk to industrial music to experiments in subsonic effects generators (Survival Research Laboratory, Psychic TV, Non) to utter silence; from rock-tour T-shirts to skinhead fascist costuming to criminal disguise and disappearance from every spectacle and every surveillance; from sexually explicit art to pornography and soft or "theoretical" S/M (masocriticism itself) to hardcore consensual sadism and masochism to pedophilic aggression to the consequent "knowledge" of the most violent sexuality carried out in the strictest secrecy.³ 

The stupid underground is the immanence and extension "to fatality and beyond" of becoming-sound, becoming-animal, becoming-libidinal,becoming-machine, becoming-alien, becoming-terror; it is the exhilarating velocity through cultural space of this fatal and yet never simply terminal movement. We should also note that even as one pursues these trajectories, the underground lends this Deleuzian rhetoric of becoming-X its most abiding cultural form: becoming-cliche, becoming-stupid. In the stupid underground any innovation can be, at one and the same time, utterly radical and worthless in advance. The trajectory past "cliche" is at stake here as well, a trajectory that takes us not into further innovation but into repetition itself: the repetition of a cultural adventure long after its

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