The stupid underground can be mapped onto a familiar and perhaps quite objectionable psychotopography: it is a zone
of the repressed of culture and thus, according to this model, both a pathological site giving rise to all sorts of pathogenic surface effects, and a therapeutic matrix, place where impacted energies may be guided toward a prope sublimation. The stupid underground presents itself aboth a symptom of the disease of capital and an indication of the direction of its cure. But in the stupid underground, as in so many other sites, the direction of the cure often leads back into the disease; or the cure itself turns out to be nothing more than a symptom. For instance, in the terms of one standard hypothesis, the stupid underground reproduces the pathology of Other, of jnthe Symbolic order, in the very attempt to avoid it, like the alcoholic's prodigal son who is so repelled by his father's disease that he can only end by becoming an alcoholic himself; at the same time, it is a kind of paranoid rechanneling of obsessions and defenses, a way to nreconceive the social world by means of, indeed as a psychosis.
read here: ehttp://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.595/mann.595
