STUPID UNDERGROUNDS - MANN
Quack - Page 20

thing, then at least coordinated functions of the same mechanism. The stupid underground is thus both a regressive trap and a delusive utopia for those who mistake their play for a revolution that has already occurred. One could say the same for every program of social change. This bind is irreducible; there is no going beyond the delusion to reality and real political agency, any more than garden variety neurotics like yourselves can escape reality and live entirely in delusion. The empirical fact is invisible without the model, but at the same time the model eclipses it without releasing us from its demand. The map and the territory, the model and the real, the fantasy and the fact constitute each other as each other's excluded precondition. Revolutionary virtuality constitutes the very condition of the revolutionary project and guarantees its utter impossibility. The surrogate both constitutes and belies its truth, grounds it and undermines it, and the stupid underground offers a particularly stark instance of this vertiginous spiral of surrogations.

Quack

[17] What should one think of a Nobel Laureate who proposes, quite scientifically, the theory of "directed panspermia": that the nucleic proteins from which "life itself" arises were sent here from another star system? Or the notion that, since the biochemical structure of psilocybin spores resembles nothing else on earth, they too were exported, as the very seeds of consciousness, from somewhere out there? Or the proposition that language itself is a virus from outer space, or that time can be controlled by cutting up audio-tape and projecting images on top of one another? How to comprehend experiments in brain expansion through stimulation by electronic implants, or drugs; or what proposes itself as research into nanotechnology, in which tiny robots will someday patrol our bloodstreams scrubbing out cholesterol deposits and gunning down incipient cancers; or cyberprosthetics; or life extension through the ingestion of massive doses of vitamin compounds and amino acids?¹²  Or, to address our specific instance, what shall we make of reports of red and black rains, of frogs, fish, and highly-worked stones that fall from the sky? Charles Fort: "I have collected 294 records of showers of living things. Have I? Well, there's no accounting for the freaks of industry."¹³

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