Special 3rd World Rapping Urban Lesbian Single Black Mothers for Peace Issue
We are the alternative that they have left behind but cannot escape. We are the alternative to the endless alternative, the alternative to national guilt, national suicide and national armageddon. We are the rebels who rebel against the rebels, the counterrevolution to the revolution, the people, who, when the noise has grown loud enough and there are fires in the streets, step out and show a better way. -- Sultan Knish: The End of the Alternative Media
"Apocalyptic cults and youth gangs, garage bands and wolfpacks, *colleges* and phalansteries, espionage networks trading in vaporous facts and networks of home shoppers for illicit goods; monastic, penological, mutant-biomorphic, and anarcho-terrorist cells; renegade churches, dwarf communities, no-risk survivalist enclaves, unfunded quasi-scientific research units, paranoid think tanks, unregistered political parties, sub-employed workers councils, endo-exile colonies, glossolaliac fanclubs, acned anorexic primal hordes; zombie revenants, neo-fakirs, defrocked priests and detoxing prophets, psychedelic snake-oil shills, masseurs of undiagnosed symptoms, bitter excommunicants, faceless narcissists, ideological drag queens, mystical technophiles, sub-entrepreneurial dealers, derivative *derivistes*, tireless archivists of phantom conspiracies, alien abductees, dupe attendants, tardy primitives, vermin of abandoned factories, hermits, cranks, opportunists, users, connections, outriders, outpatients, wannabes, hackers, thieves, squatters, parasites, saboteurs; wings, wards, warehouses, arcades, hells, hives, dens, burrows, lofts, flocks, swarms, viruses, tribes, movements, groupuscules, cenacles, isms, and the endlessly multiplied hybridization of variant combinations of all these, and more....
"Why this stupid fascination with stupid undergrounds? What is it about these throwaway fanzines and unreadable rants, these neo-tattoos and recycled apocalypses, this mountainous accumulation of declassified factoids, these bloody smears, this incredible noise? Why wade through these piles of nano-shit?
"Why submit oneself to these hysterical purveyors, these hypertheories and walls of sound? Why insist on picking this particular species of nit? Why abject criticism, whose putative task was once to preserve the best that has been known and thought, by guilty association with so fatuous, banal, idiotic, untenable a class of cultural objects?
"Why not decline, not so politely, to participate in the tiny spectacle of aging intellectuals dressing in black to prowl festering galleries and clubs where, sometime before dawn, they will encounter the contemptuous gaze of their own children, and almost manage to elide that event when they finally produce their bilious reports, their chunks of cultural criticism?
"No excuse, no justification: all one can put forward is an unendurable habit of attention, a meager fascination, no more or less commanding than that hypnosis one enters in the face of television; a rut that has always led downward and in the end always found itself stuck on the surface; a kind of drivenness, if not a drive; a *critique*, if you can forgive such a word, that has never located any cultural object whose poverty failed to reflect its own; a rage to find some point at which criticism would come to an end, and that only intensified as that end-point receded and shrunk to the size of an ideal. -- Prologue to a Paper by Paul Mann | Postmodern Culture v.5 n.3 (May, 1995Posted by gerardvanderleun at August 21, 2012 9:17 PM
Bring lots of fire.
Posted by: Mikey NTH at August 22, 2012 5:19 AMIn the final section, the essayist anticipated Burning Man:
"Why so much stupid-critical fascination with the desert? Foucault dropping acid in Death Valley is the perfect journalistic figure of the final cause, if you will, of theory itself. You go out into the desert to escape the social world, have visions, go native, clear a space to begin again, look into whatever abyss, encounter gods,escape in order to be able to return, die in order to be
reborn, fast, find yourself, find the secret government installations that indicate the truth of power, wait for UFOs, make art that is immune, for a few seconds, to galleries, write a book about America to sell back in France. The desert is at one and the same time the national park or disneyworld of the stupid underground, and the sublime landscape of critical theory. The only plants that grow there are fear and the ideal, twined gracelessly around one another. Everything is preceded by its negation, even negation itself. The desert is the atopic capitol of nomadology, the smooth space of the erasure of cultural space, the very ground of the zone. It is the parenthetical frame of every topology. It is unconquerable, the purest outside, and identified with a range of heroic colonial subjects (native-Americans, Africans, Arabs) with whom critical theory currently wishes to associate itself; it is also, by this very means, the incorporation and hence cancellation of every one of these figures. Its flatness, however mountainous, makes it the perfect modernist surface; its emptiness and marginality, the perfect postmodern one. As the deadest of lands, its sublimity is far more productive than the most picturesque Alpine declivity. It is sacred and empty, the illimitable locus where waste is inflated into a spiritual value; even God goes there to die. It is the expression, the sentence, of silence. A figural silence, first of all, but also the possibility of an actual cessation. All one's dreams of rigor run aground there. Everything dead goes there to die again. A place to write hysterical essays on the end of criticism. And a place for dead vows: nothing further obliges you to return to criticism. An end to it."
"It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." -- Karl Popper N.B.: Comments are moderated to combat spam and may not appear immediately. Comments that exceed the obscenity or stupidity limits will be either edited or expunged.
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