The ongoing enigma of Trystero

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jun 18, 2009, at 3:04 PM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:

> How cool, how trendy, to be one of the Elected preterite who  
> communicates clandestinely, without the use of electronics.


	Stupid Undergrounds

	Secret

	We have mapped the stupid underground as the capital of the
	culture of resentment, of a strict, self-indulgent, and self-
	evacuating reaction, lamely proposing "new" models and
	modes of existence that nonetheless can never be entirely
	reduced to the dialectics of recuperation, and that, even as they
	sacrifice themselves to such a facile criticism, gather their critics
	into a suffocating embrace and cancel critical distance itself. But
	there is more at stake than this peculiar and essential
	contradiction. Here we will follow the line of what Deleuze and
	Guattari call becoming-imperceptible toward an underground
	beneath the underground, one that does not make itself
	available to the critic's screens, a strange disappearance from
	discourse, from both recuperation and its stupid collapse, an
	ars moratorii, a withdrawal or disengagement from the
	discursive economies that render null and void a thousand
	pretensions to resistance and subversion, an embryonic turning
	away, an internal exile (in all of the complex associations of that
	interiority), a secret that the critic must finally postulate precisely
	in the absence of all evidence. If, in one famous analysis, as we
	have noted, everything now is coming up signs, everything is
	rendered instantly spectacular, simulacral, obscene, we must
	assume that there are at least a few who have learned their
	lesson, a few for whom the lacerating parodies of the stupid
	underground no longer suffice, a few who have cancelled all
	bets and turned themselves out, declined any further reaction
	and gone off the map.
	Paul Mann: Masocriticism, pg. 189

	Eyes showing nothing: "I don't swing that way," he said. "Yours
	either." Turned his back on her and ordered a drink. Oedipa
	took off her badge, put it in an ashtray and said, quietly, trying
	not to suggest hysteria, "Look, you have to help me. Because I
	 really think I am going out of my head."

	"You have the wrong outfit, Arnold. Talk to your clergyman."

	"I use the U. S. Mail because I was never taught any different,"
	she pleaded. "But I'm not your enemy. I don't want to be."
	CoL49, PC pg. 90