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STUPID UNDERGROUNDS - MANN
On "Stupid" - Page 8
On "Stupid"
[5]
Intelligence is no longer enough.5 We have witnessed so
many spectacles of critical intelligence's dumb complicity
in everything it claims to oppose that we no longer have
the slightest confidence in it. One knows with the utmost
certainty that the most intense criticism goes hand in hand
with the most venal careerism, that institutional critiques
bolster the institution by the mere fact of taking part in
their discourse, that every position is ignorant of its
deepest stakes. Each school of critical thought sustains
itself by its stupidity, often expressed in the most
scurrilous asides, about its competitors, and a sort of
willed blindness about its own investments, hypocrisies,
illusory truths. And one can count on each critical
generation exposing the founding truths of its predecessors
as so much smoke and lies. Thought, reading, analysis,
theory, criticism has transported us to so many Laputas
that we should hardly be surprised to encounter a
general--or perhaps not general enough--mistrust of
intelligence as such. What is most "subversive" now is
neither critical intelligence nor romantic madness (the
commonplace is that they are two sides of the same
Enlightenment coin) but the dull weight of stupidity,
spectacularly elaborated, and subversive only by means of
evacuating the significance of everything it
touches--including the romance of subversion itself. To
abandon intelligence because it has been duplicitous or
built such grandly inane intellectual systems might seem to
be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but if
rejecting intelligence is rejecting too much, never
underestimate the stupid exhilaration of *too much*; and
flying babies are a nicely stupid image, quite suitable for
a record cover. Let us insist that we are not arguing for
poetic madness breaking out of the prison of reason, nor
for the philosophical acephalism of Bataille and his
university epigones, still helplessly playing out the
dialectic of the enlightenment. The rationalization of
unreason is not much of a remedy; that is why we took the
trouble to diagnose the recuperation and critical
evacuation of Bataille. What confronts us in the stupid
underground is also the rationalization of unreason, but it
is accompanied by a much more naked idiocy, sheer stupidity
posing as value, as the last truth of culture, value
without value, and an irresistible lure for suicidal
reason. That is,
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Stupid Underground Index.
It is on
along the sleepy Anacostia River in the District of Columbia, USA.
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