STUPID UNDERGROUNDS - MANN
Sur la Plage - Page 51

the apparent boundary between art and life, so the stupid underground seeks the dissemination of fun past the demarcation of entertainment centers, the permeation of fun into all aspects of life, or else. Fun is the register of the total aestheticization of experience. The rock band is a fantasy conjunction of work and fun; the day job is sabotaged because it is not fun; drugs are fun until one ends up in a recovery program, which will insist to you that you can have fun now without drugs. It might be a force of revolt in a world where the work-ethic dominates, but such a world no longer exists. Fuzzy fun socializes pleasure, removes it from a strictly libidinal economy, pressures capital to satisfy us when it is clear that it cannot, and dissipates the gravity of its potential critique in the most critically trivial acts.

Sur la Plage

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1. Plagiarism has etymological roots in kidnapping, specifically the stealing of slaves or the enslavement of freemen. The plaga too is a Net.

2. In 1987, an "International Festival of Plagiarism" (actually just a few venues in London and San Francisco) announced the coming-out of sign-theft.³³  What had always been characterized as the most obscene, insidious, pathetic attempt to pass off someone else's text or authorship as one's own now wrapped itself in the heroic banner of anarchism and marched forth as a fierce political and moral attack on the aesthetic economy. Perhaps the very depth of the cultural revulsion against plagiarism guaranteed its eventual adoption, its stupid privilege, as a weapon of choice. This neo-plagiarism claimed its noble lineage from Ducasse's "Plagiarism is necessary; progress demands it"; from the Bakunist line that "property is theft"; from the Situationist economics of theft and gift and its strategies of detournement; from a highly conventional critique of the rather convenient specter of authorship as "bourgeois individualism" (Stewart Home: plagiarism is "collective creation"); and from the rise of various technologies for that greatly facilitate image recycling, such as electronic sampling (the bard of the '60s gives way to the recording engineer, the dubber and mixer, the DJ of the '90s).³⁴ Plagiarism announces itself as the most modern of all compositional modes, since it recognizes (i.e., it sees

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