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STUPID UNDERGROUNDS - MANN
staging area for recuperation. At the same
time, however, one should not dismiss the tattoo as merely
recuperated. The tattoo, like the T-shirt, transforms the
body into another agora, a corporeal mini-mall, but for
what we might call "fuzzy capital," part of the same "black
market," the underground economy shuttling at a dizzying
velocity between dreams of high finance and vows of
poverty, that we witness in small scale drug dealing, in
marginal rock bands, in various parasitical recycling
enterprises (used clothes, used CDs), in the distribution
of stupid "knowledge" (Amok, Loompanics, et al.), in stolen
technologies, in freelance sex-industry workers. Fuzzy
capital is an economy that is neither simply capital nor
effectively subversive, neither recuperated nor liberated,
but the collapse of any dialectical tension between them.
The tattoo retains none of the critical distance someone
like Hebdige or Orridge would like to claim for it, but
nonetheless this peculiar embrace of the apparatus of
recuperation, forcing oneself down the maw of commerce as
if one were really indigestible, is not the production and
circulation of a commodity like any other. The tattoo
makes the skin a zone in which capital thrives under the
aegis of its subversion and mutates even as it survives.
Lingis proposes a distinction between western or Japanese
tattoos that turn the body into a sign and those "savage,"
scarrified, African bodies on which tattoos are not
signifiers, not semiotic, but forms of intensification that
extend or distend the body's surface.32
The rhetoric of the stupid tattoo, however, as played out in Modern
Primitives and a burgeoning fanzine and e-mail network,
may render such distinctions unstable. It is no longer
simply that, under capital, everything becomes a commodity
and hence a sign (as in Baudrillard), nor that the
underground is a space in the interstices of a power that
is no longer hegemonically absolute but fractured and
therefore open to the oldest sorts of oppositional agency
and resistance; it is a question precisely of stupid space,
fuzzy space. The tattoo is recuperated as a commodity, a
sign, and yet it indicates that there is something
primitive and non-signifying about the sign, something
utterly atavistic about the commodity; stupid signification
and stupid intensification converge and, by this means,
inhibit an outmoded political critique. Is the girl on the
tube subversive or recuperated? Hebdige would have us
believe the former, in part because in his critical
imaginary he wants to identify
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