Prosaic Mosaic

• בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ — Hebrew

•• Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἐποίησεν ὁ Θεὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν. — Ancient Greek

••• In principio creavit Deus cælum et terram. — Latin

•••• In the beginning God created the Heauen, and the Earth. — Early Modern English

••••• In terms of the preliminary period, a frankly outmoded hypothesized “divine” entity intitiated a core consultation exercise around a series of key constructive programmes vis à vis both the celestial but also terrestrial realms. — Guardianese


Elsewhere other-accessible…

Ex-Term-In-Ate! — interrogating issues around “in terms of”…
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I Say, I Sigh, I Sow #14

“In a very real sense, the Holocaust, as the ultimate moral and aesthetic obscenity, was also the ultimate drum-solo.” — Simon Whitechapel, 31i18

Toxik TikTok

“Libs of TikTok is shaping our entire political conversation about the rights of LGBTQ people to participate in society,” [Ari] Drennen said. “It feels like they’re single-handedly taking us back a decade in terms of the public discourse around LGBTQ rights. It’s been like nothing we’ve ever really seen.” — “Meet the woman behind Libs of TikTok, secretly fueling the right’s outrage machine”, The Washington Post, 19iv22.


Elsewhere other-accessible

Ex-Term-In-Ate! — interrogating issues around “in terms of”…
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Reading the Roons

In terms of core issues around maximal engagement with keyly committed core components of the counter-cultural community, one of the saddest, sorriest and sighfullest sights among them is that of the talented lad from the wrong side of the tracks who betrays his class by turning himself into a Guardian-reader, in terms of core cultural assumptions and behaviour.

Northampton’s Alan Moore has done it.

London’s Stewart Home has done it.

Huddersfield’s John Coulthart has done it.

How do I know?

[Readers’ Advisory: If you are easily disturbed, distressed and/or disgusted, please stop reading NOW.]

I know because

[I mean it. Stop reading or you may well regret it.]

I know because each of these talented lads from the wrong side of the tracks now bears the Mark of the Beast, metaphorically speaking.

[Last chance.]

Each of them has, on multiple occasions and without the minimalest micro-metric of shame or irony, deployed the key Guardianista phrase “in terms of”.

• For proof of Alan Moore’s deplorable delinquency, please see here.
• For proof of Stewart Home’s dep-del, please see here.
• For proof of John Coulthart’s dep-del, please see in the same place as you possibly saw or are-about-to-see Stewart Home’s, i.e. here.

So. After seeing and lamenting those horrific examples of class-betrayal, I thought I was hermeneutically hardened and would never again experience sadness, sorrow or sighfullness at the sight of a talented lad etc.

I was wrong.

As I learned when I read this interview in The Mail on Sunday:

There was a lot of negativity in terms of my mum getting frustrated with us as kids, messing around all the time, smashing things in the house and my nan lived in the same road, a few houses down. […] In terms of therapy, I have spoken to a few different people. I have never done a period of time where I have done two years with someone and it has been ongoing. […] Everything I am asking of those players in terms of hard work, honesty, trust, commitment…if I was just to turn round and say “I have had an offer, I’m off”, I honestly couldn’t do that to the players and the staff. — Wayne Rooney reveals his secret two-day drinking binges etc

Oh, Wayne, Wayne, Wayne. How could you do it? But I think we can easily guess where he was infected: it was during his therapy-sessions.


Elsewhere other-accessible

Ex-Term-In-Ate! — interrogating issues around why “in terms of” is so teratographically toxic…
All posts interrogating issues around “in terms of”…
All posts interrogating issues around the Guardian-reading community and its affiliates…

Gleet the Beatles

The Guardian incisively interrogates issues around the Scouse Superstars:

Just in terms of pure sales they still dominate. In the first half of the year in the US – half a century on from Ed Sullivan, screaming fans, the olds just not getting it – they sold more albums than anyone else; the only group that came close over that period were BTS, a group who are regularly compared to the Beatles in terms of their planet-straddling massiveness. — The Guide #10: the enduring appeal of the Beatles, The Guardian, 26xi21


Elsewhere other-accessible

Ex-Term-In-Ate! — interrogating issues around why “in terms of” is so teratographically toxic…
All posts interrogating issues around “in terms of”…
All posts interrogating issues around the Guardian-reading community and its affiliates…

The Grates of Roth

Van Halen’s Diamond Dave fails to sparkle:

In terms of music, it’s all Brit. It’s Freddie, Bowie and the guy in Zeppelin. Theatrically, you’re looking at Spider-Man, with a little Groucho thrown in. […] Pushing boundaries in terms of what [Van Halen] wore was never an ambition of ours, but it always seemed to be where we would end up. — David Lee Roth: ‘My advice for aspiring artists? Breathable fabrics’, The Guardian, 25vi2019.


Note that he said “Theatrically…” rather than “In terms of theater…” So he should’ve said “Musically, it’s all Brit.” Rather than using the ugly and pretentious “In terms of music…”


Hal Bent for Leather — Rob Halford talks like a Guardianista too

Maximal Mensual Metrics

Like all minimally decent and politically aware people, I am keyly — and corely — committed to anti-racism on a maximal basis by any means necessary. Monkey-funker.

This is also why I am a corely — and keyly — committed member of the Guardian-reading community. If I am ever tempted to relent a micrometre in terms of the maximality of the metrics of my core commitment to anti-racism, the Guardian is there to remind me of what anti-racism is corely committed to achieving…

It’s been a turbulent year for race in Britain. So what next? — At the end of Black History Month, we ask prominent Black British figures to assess where the UK stands in terms of equality and cohesion, The Guardian, 30×21

Terminal Transgressivity

“If this work is about hell,” he says, “it’s not only about hell in terms of content. It’s also about hell in terms of its hellishness in terms of production.” — maximally maverick artist Jake Chapman describes how he and his brother Dinos made the transgressive sculpture Hell (2000), as quoted in Simon Garfield’s In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate the World (2018)


Elsewhere Other-Accessible

Ex-term-in-nate! — incendiarily interrogating issues around “in terms of”…
All O.o.t.Ü.-F. posts interrogating issues around “in terms of”…


Peri-Performative Post-Scriptum…

Yes, this was an über-ideal quote for posting on the 23rd in terms of the month… But I was so taken with it that I couldn’t delay any longer. And anyway: it is the 23rd of the months in base 11. (I.e., 2111 = 2 * 11 + 1 = 22 + 1 = 23.)

Guat Da Fack?!

From Intellectual Impostures (1998) by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont:

To conclude, let us quote a brief excerpt from the book Chaosmosis, written by Guattari alone. This passage contains the most brilliant melange of scientific, pseudo-scientific, and philosophical jargon that we have ever encountered; only a genius could have written it.

We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multidimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously. A machinic assemblage, through its diverse components, extracts its consistency by crossing ontological thresholds, non-linear thresholds of irreversibility, ontological and phylogenetic thresholds, creative thresholds of heterogenesis and autopoiesis. The notion of scale needs to be expanded to consider fractal symmetries in ontological terms.

What fractal machines traverse are substantial scales. They traverse them in engendering them. But, and this should be noted, the existential ordinates that they “invent” were always already there. How can this paradox be sustained? It’s because everything becomes possible (including the recessive smoothing of time, evoked by Rene Thom) the moment one allows the assemblage to escape from energetico-spatiotemporal coordinates. And, here again, we need to rediscover a manner of being of Being — before, after, here and everywhere else — without being, however, identical to itself; a processual, polyphonic Being singularisable by infinitely complexifiable textures, according to the infinite speeds which animate its virtual compositions.

The ontological relativity advocated here is inseparable from an enunciative relativity. Knowledge of a Universe (in an astrophysical or axiological sense) is only possible through the mediation of autopoietic machines. A zone of self-belonging needs to exist somewhere for the coming into cognitive existence of any being or any modality of being. Outside of this machine/Universe coupling, beings only have the pure status of a virtual entity. And it is the same for their enunciative coordinates. The biosphere and mecanosphere, coupled on this planet, focus a point of view of space, time and energy. They trace an angle of the constitution of our galaxy. Outside of this particularised point of view, the rest of the Universe exists (in the sense that we understand existence here-below) only through the virtual existence of other autopoietic machines at the heart of other bio-mecanospheres scattered throughout the cosmos. The relativity of points of view of space, time and energy do not, for all that, absorb the real into the dream. The category of Time dissolves into cosmological reflections on the Big Bang even as the category of irreversibility is affirmed. Residual objectivity is what resists scanning by the infinite variation of points of view constitutable upon it. Imagine an autopoietic entity whose particles are constructed from galaxies. Or, conversely, a cognitivity constituted on the scale of quarks. A different panorama, another ontological consistency. The mecanosphere draws out and actualises configurations which exist amongst an infinity of others in fields of virtuality. Existential machines are at the same level as being in its intrinsic multiplicity. They are not mediated by transcendent signifiers and subsumed by a univocal ontological foundation. They are to themselves their own material of semiotic expression. Existence, as a process of deterritorialisation, is a specific inter-machinic operation which superimposes itself on the promotion of singularised existential intensities. And, I repeat, there is no generalised syntax for these deterritorialisations. Existence is not dialectical, not representable. It is hardly livable! (Félix Guattari 1995, pp. 50-52)

Perfect Performative Pairing

Salt and celery, cheese and chocolate, yams and yoghurt — some things just taste better together. But that’s true of much more than foods and flavors. As a keyly committed core component of the anti-racist community, I’m proud and passionate to report that it’s also true of ideology and “in terms of”:

Unsurprisingly for a 200-year-old institution, the Guardian has not always got it right in terms of race coverage. — From slavery to BLM: the ups and downs of 200 years of Guardian race reporting, The Guardian, 6v21

For me, anti-racism just wouldn’t be the maximally moral movement that it is without a steady seasoning of “in terms of”. They’re a perfect performative pairing in an atrabiliously imperfect world.


Elsewhere other-engageable…

Ex-term-in-nate! — interrogating issues around “in terms of”
All O.o.t.Ü.-F. posts interrogating issues around “in terms of”…