STUPID UNDERGROUNDS - MANN
Stupid Gurus - Page 25

of scientific metaphors--fractals, chaos, strange attractors, fuzzy logic, black holes, cyberthis and cyberthat--as even more abstractly metaphorical terms in cultural criticism. They are nothing but the ornamental fringes of critical fashion, and yet they indicate the possibility that one might begin to conceive of culture as a space regulated by strange "natural" (and still quite technical) laws concealed beyond the reigning social and political terms, and at the same time cloud over this possibility with the toxic vapor of myth.¹⁴

Stupid Gurus

[20] The fashionable mathematics of fractals, precisely in the reduced form pilfered by what once were humanists and who know virtually nothing about it, provides us with the figure of a sort of zeno-graphically receding infinitesimal repetition--the sub-cell reproducing the topography of the whole organism, which can therefore no longer be defined simply as whole.A fractal and still quite vulgar marxism is there to translate this process into the most familiar critical terms: the market reproducing itself morphologically in the stupid underground, as the base always reproduces itself, but in its movement into that alien space also mutating, deformed, transformed.¹⁵ So also a fractal etc. psychoanalysis could translate the same movement into terms grounded in the structures of identification. We find this fractal descent, for instance, in the cult or fandom, which reproduces the ideological body of the leader or hero through specific sorts of identification, in the beliefs, clothing, and ritualized gestures of the disciple, the wannabe, the wannabelong. There would be no underground if someone did not lead us down there, if we were not conducted by a desire to be and belong to the one we recognize there, behind whom even more shadowy and indeterminable figures and forces are concealed. We would not be driven there if the underground did not offer us a stupid imaginary, the delirious hope of parasitical symbioses, vampiric feasts (of course the arrangement is reciprocal: leader and follower feed off each other), spectacular plagiarisms, personality implants, image clonings, synthetic transference, absolute interpellation, stupid communion with the one.

Scenewash Kiosk | Lobbies | Marginalia | Luxmachina | Rhesus
Lily Artwatcher | Chainthinker | Situationist | Bookskellar | Mailscene