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…

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)