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STUPID UNDERGROUNDS - MANN
Sur la Plage - Page 55
grotesquely parodying it; it negates the limits of the
text by exaggerating them in the very act of
transgressing them; it negates the romance of
dissemination by proving that nobody finally buys it,
that eventually everyone wants to be recognized as some
kind of author, even if only the author of a crime; it
negates the romance of the death of the author by
provoking our possessiveness about the corpse. Only in
the double transgression that reveals property as theft
and belies the gift is the deepest economy of the work of
art revealed. Plagiarism is nothing more than the
appearance of this economy. That is why it must be
suppressed.
"All culture is plagiarized." To constitute it thus
risks normalizing the crime and challenging culture as
value, culture itself. That is why a certain order of
plagiarism must be isolated, scapegoated, ostracized,
treated with the utmost revulsion, reconstituted as a
taboo. Here again we encounter at least some of the
reasons why victims of plagiarism feel polluted, why
those involved in a case sympathize and identify with the
transgressor even as the crime repels them, why
plagiarists are often the most vehement defenders of
literary property rights. Plagiarism is the necessary
exclusion of the founding crime of cultural capital.
Hence the real threat of plagiarism would lie not in the
act itself, but precisely in its normalization, by means
of which the crime would no longer be isolated and cast
out, the pollution would remain general. By participating
in the romance of the merry plagiarist, however much it
indicts the crime of literary property, the stupid
underground only reinforces, in reverse image, the
singularity of plagiarism. One therefore dreams of a far
more anonymous and widespread plagiarism, an epidemic of
nameless plagiarists (is such a contradictory figure even
conceivable?), of a magnitude and virulence prefigured
but already immunized by the stupid underground.
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Implicit everywhere in this account is the
masocritical dimension of plagiarism. If plagiarism as
repetition can be recruited into a critique of
originality--a critique that is already rather dated,
already in the process of being forgotten, a critique
that may be said only to have paved the way for the
amnesiac resurgence of the expressive subject,
Scenewash Kiosk |
Lobbies |
Marginalia |
Luxmachina |
Rhesus
Lily Artwatcher |
Chainthinker |
Situationist |
Bookskellar |
Mailscene
Stupid Underground Index.
It is on
along the sleepy Anacostia River in the District of Columbia, USA.
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