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STUPID UNDERGROUNDS - MANN
the descent from the head--or from the blank,
acephalic space left by the decapitation of reason and the
king--down through the obscene, grotesque comedy of the big
toe digging in the mud; the descent from the rotting
flowerhead of the heliotrope into the obscenity of roots
and Marx's "old mole." In Bataille's formulation, one
might say, the proletariat becomes revolutionary by being
stupid, by being blind: the marxian mole at the opposite
pole from Enlightenment reason becomes, for Bataille, the
figure of revolutionary criticism itself. For Bataille, in
other words, despite every attempt to go beyond good and
evil, to ruin the very order of morality itself, everything
depends on an inversion that retains the structure of the
moral axis, and, indeed, repeats its "historical" reversal:
the repressive ethical order of the straight world versus
the perversion and hence pleasures of hell, or at least of
bohemia. Evil be thou my good; perversion be thou my
knowledge. But the inversion is never constant. It is
never a matter of simple reversal: the poles are not
stable, value is determined by opposition alone. Either
pole can be good, either pole can be evil: up and down are
indiscriminately positive or negative, so long as they
remain counterposed. The fixed form of the vertical axis
provides for a certain abitrary migration of value up and
down the line. It is a question of what one Blake critic
calls "perspective ontology."4
In Blake's terms, "the eye altering alters all"; an angel
consigns us to the inferno of his own imagination, which becomes
a pastoral paradise if we believe it so; heaven is thus recast as an
oppressive zone of paternal law. "They became what they
beheld," but what they beheld is what they projected,
either through an active or a reactive imagination. What
one must emphasize here is not romantic faith in the power
of the imagination, which one might well find rather
dubious, but the pure phenomenality of this binary mapping
and the ease with which, it appears, the poles can be
reversed, flipped back and forth endlessly from hell to
heaven to hell, from suffering to pleasure to suffering (a
masocritical vacillation in its own right), from
"ressentiment" (and hence complicity) to revolution and
back to the order of the Same. The stupid underground is
available to any ontological or ideological reformulation,
and hence a place to test the following paradox: all
cultural zones are both overdetermined and blank.
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