FT252

[Twin_Star]

Re: Artful codger

The Greenhalg family (Artful Codgers) were referred to in both the earlier parts of this feature, with back refs to the coverage in Strange Days in FT245:22-24.

*digs out 245 and previous parts. feels a bit tittish*

 

[GNC]

I didn't think part III of the Hoax article was that bad, actually, considering a lot of it was theorising. Nothing wrong with that in the FT, in fact I would have thought most readers would welcome it.

 

[brotherluth]

Unnecessary use of obscure jargon whic was questionable regarding its context.

Your repeated (and inappropriate) use of the term 'postmodern' is beginning to sound like jargon, ramonmercano. Unless, that is, you can explain exactly what you mean by it in this context.

But I'm really here to ask which terms you consider to be "obscure jargon". Again, it would be more helpful if you could be specific.

 

[Marrowpod]

Ramonmercado he say:

FT is not the place for academic articles but even if it was I don't think the article [in] question would pass muster. Some good ideas, but badly communicated.

Insofar as Hoax! Part III was an academic article -- which I suppose one might call it, in that it left the fun stories of Parts I & II for a theoretical wrap-up -- it would appear from the evidence that FT was indeed the place for it. I mean, there it is, between pages wossname and thing, grinning at you, and with pictures besides.

This isn't something the writers can help you with. You should take it up with the editor. Who, I think it safe to say, had he not thought the piece appropriate to run, would have heaved it right back at us.

I would, actually, rather be discussing the ideas (which I thought were the problem), no matter how incompetently presented. Tho' I do wonder how one tells the dancer from the dance.

(I know, everyone's a critic.)

And criticism is always welcome. Even the loopiest reaction helps to clarify one's thinking and to refine one's expression. But you are not even offering loopy objections. You're making assertions, of a kind that offer nothing particular to latch onto, and using terms (like "post-modern" and "pseudo-academic") both inappropriately and inaccurately, as Bro Luth too has observed. This is frustrating; it is no help to anyone.

Meanwhile, I will say again, if anyone else stumbled over anything we said, feel free to enquire further, and we will conspire in an attempt to elucidate.

 

[47Forteans]

One of the many good things about FT is that it provokes debate, as seen on this message board and the letters pages of the magazinge (wish they'd print more of the loonier ones, to balance out the saner ones!). FT will also provoke amusement, bemusment, curiuosity, annoyance, etc, which any thought provoking magazine should provide.

 

[Mal_Adjusted]

Part III of hoax was very interesting.

FT needs more theorising / recontextualising of Fortean material.

whether hoaxing is substantial enough to carry the weight of theorising is another matter. Some more examples might have been helpful in explaining the thesis.

thanks for heads-up on Hilary Lawson's work
found a review here:
http://www.panmere.com/rosen/mhout/msg01029.html

might see if I can get it cheap somewhere.

oh aren't those photos of injuries urkkkk (but fascinating at same time.)

 

[ramonmercado]

Unnecessary use of obscure jargon whic was questionable regarding its context.

Your repeated (and inappropriate) use of the term 'postmodern' is beginning to sound like jargon, ramonmercano. Unless, that is, you can explain exactly what you mean by it in this context.

But I'm really here to ask which terms you consider to be "obscure jargon". Again, it would be more helpful if you could be specific.

Its not inappropriate (imho). The style used was one that is often found in post-modernist pieces.

I've been as helpful as I'm going to be in this case. The article was not easily accessible and was written (imho) in an excessively pseudo-acadmemic style. I'm not going to deliver a line by line analysis.

 

[ramonmercado]

Ramonmercado he say:

FT is not the place for academic articles but even if it was I don't think the article [in] question would pass muster. Some good ideas, but badly communicated.

Insofar as Hoax! Part III was an academic article -- which I suppose one might call it, in that it left the fun stories of Parts I & II for a theoretical wrap-up -- it would appear from the evidence that FT was indeed the place for it. I mean, there it is, between pages wossname and thing, grinning at you, and with pictures besides.

This isn't something the writers can help you with. You should take it up with the editor. Who, I think it safe to say, had he not thought the piece appropriate to run, would have heaved it right back at us.

I would, actually, rather be discussing the ideas (which I thought were the problem), no matter how incompetently presented. Tho' I do wonder how one tells the dancer from the dance.

(I know, everyone's a critic.)

And criticism is always welcome. Even the loopiest reaction helps to clarify one's thinking and to refine one's expression. But you are not even offering loopy objections. You're making assertions, of a kind that offer nothing particular to latch onto, and using terms (like "post-modern" and "pseudo-academic") both inappropriately and inaccurately, as Bro Luth too has observed. This is frustrating; it is no help to anyone.

Meanwhile, I will say again, if anyone else stumbled over anything we said, feel free to enquire further, and we will conspire in an attempt to elucidate.

Its not just something for me to take up with the editors. Issue 252 is under discussion here.

I am offering objections, you are choosing to ignore them.

Your article was written in as style typical of post-modernists and your reaction is typical of that which comes from the PMs. It was opaque and excessively academic and imho even pseudo-academic.

I criticise you so I don't even qualify as loopy!

My assertions are just my opinion but your suggestions that my criticisma are both inaccurate and inappropriate are also just assertions. They are just opinions.

Even the opinions of such august authors are just that: opinions. They are not laws of nature.

 

[brotherluth]

Your article was written in as style typical of post-modernists and your reaction is typical of that which comes from the PMs.

Our 'reaction' was to (four times at least) invite you to clarify that which you thought was opaque. I doubt that this is what you think of as "typically postmodernist".

A thought on postmodernism:
As Bruno Latour observed, postmodernists "have accepted their adversaries’ playing field" - the modernist playing field, that is.

One of the thrusts of the article was to reject the modernist outlook (the 'modern conceit', I think we called it, of the social-nature dichotomy - p36). If, as Latour argues, postmodernism is just a strand of modernism (and I, for one, agree), then as far as content goes the article could hardly be (correctly) called postmodernist - more the opposite... it argued for the _non_modern. (Not the same at all, which is what I meant by inappropriate.)

As for style, that's of course another matter. I suspect, more so after hearing your 'noncriticisms', ramonmercardo, that there are others who floated with its drift more easily.

 

[ramonmercado]

You reject my criticisms therefore they become non-criticisms! Sad when authors who are used to dishing out are unable to accept critisism themselves.

I'm beginning to think that your article should be discussed on the Goldbricking, cons, conmen and frauds thread.

 

[brotherluth]

whether hoaxing is substantial enough to carry the weight of theorising is another matter. Some more examples might have been helpful in explaining the thesis.

There you are, Marrowpod, I said we should have negotiated a five-parter.

Seriously, Mal_Adjusted, you are right - as mention somewhere in the copious notes, there was much left out. (Freud's joke book, for example: 'Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious', and Mary Douglas's work on same.)

 

[brotherluth]

You reject my criticisms therefore they become non-criticisms!

I meant that you haven't defined them (your "opaque terms") specifically.

We would welcome your doing that.

 

[ramonmercado]

You reject my criticisms therefore they become non-criticisms!

I meant that you haven't defined them (your "opaque terms") specifically.

We would welcome it if you did/could.

I don't have the mag with me. But i really think it was the style of the entire article which was a problem. This is my genuine opinion, I enjoyed parts I & II, I even mentioned them (favourably) to people outside of Fortean circles.

I'm sure you are not evil and I have no reason to believe that you do nasty things to little furry animals. But I think you are over-reacting to criticism. I didn't enjoy reading the article and I doubt if I'm going to spend time going over it again to grade specific passages. I expect to be paid if I do a close textual reading!

 

[brotherluth]

You reject my criticisms therefore they become non-criticisms!

I meant that you haven't defined them (your "opaque terms") specifically.

We would welcome it if you did/could.

I don't have the mag with me. But i really think it was the style of the entire article which was a problem. This is my genuine opinion...

Fair enough.

I expect to be paid if I do a close textual reading!

:shock: How much per opaque term?

 

[ramonmercado]

How much per opaque term?

One tall flat white and a blueberry muffin.

 

[escargot]

we will conspire in an attempt to elucidate.

I want 50p for reading that for a start.

 

[brotherluth]

How much per opaque term?

One tall flat white and a blueberry muffin.

Ah! You're a tall flat white man. There could lie the problem. I'm a short strong dark one, and Marrowpod's large red.

 

[ramonmercado]

How much per opaque term?

One tall flat white and a blueberry muffin.

Ah! You're a tall flat white man. There could lie the problem. I'm a short strong dark one, and Marrowpod's large red.

Thats just the coffee, when it comes to politics I'm a tall large red with libertarian tendencies. Here you even get a pic, i'm on the right of the photo, wearing shades, looking to my right.
http://www.indymedia.ie/attachments/aug ... v00056.jpg

 

[brotherluth]

Thats just the coffee, when it comes to politics I'm a tall large red with libertarian tendencies. Here you even get a pic, i'm on the right of the photo, wearing shades, looking to my right.
http://www.indymedia.ie/attachments/aug ... v00056.jpg

Good to put a face to a pseudonym, ramonmercado.

 

[Marrowpod]

Ramon he wrote:

I am offering objections, you are choosing to ignore them.

I was rather under the impression that we were addressing the objections and asking what, exactly, they consisted in, in some concrete sense. Perhaps I was mistaken. However, this must be getting dull for spectators.

So. Apart from wishing to distinguish myself from Bro Luth—for I take great satisfaction in shooting certain little furry animals dead whenever possible—I'll close my bit of this exchange with a sample of bona-fide po-mo gibberish, and let others decide how near the style of our article approaches it. Nearby stiff drink highly recommended.

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, multi-dimensional 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. ... 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. ... The mecanos-phere 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!

Gosh! Or what?

The offer to clarify any obscurities in our, er, discourse, still stands.

 

[Timble2]

Than looks a lot like one of those programs you used to find (one was called Babble IIRC) that you could feed a sample of text and they'd churn out text in the same style, but completely meaningless. The fun was to sneak a couple of paragraphs into a document, such as a company strategy report, to see if anyone noticed......

On topic, it doesn't much resemble the article, which was discussion and theories based on the previous articles, and which IMO wasn't dense or impenetrable...

When it comes to politics I'm a pale pink, wishy-washy, Guardian-reading liberal (I used to have a badge from our local anarchist bookshop that said this)

 

[ugerhard]

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, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis.

... snip.

Ah, Guattari.

For a nice discussion of inpenetrable, near nonsensical stuff like that, especially Guattari, see Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont "Intellectual impostures", which emerged from the so-called Sokal hoax: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/#papers (which was referenced in one of the FT hoax articles I believe).

 

[Mal_Adjusted]

(I suspect a mod might place this in the irony thread ...)

Jargon. A word decodes by assembling: a mobile army, a mob or mass of “blocks,” segments extruded from heterogeneous flows: flows with and without codes, flows of energy and of waste, flows of debt and of money, flows of food and of goods, flows of women and children, flows of pulsing affects and flows of intricate concepts. Speaking assembles together, connects and conjoins or pervades and envelops as many radically divergent elements as possible. Language is at once unifying and fluid, both normalizing and improvised, both static and evolutionary — a system of rules neither abstract nor essentially syntactical but rather constituting a radically material and pragmatic collective assemblage.

http://fractalontology.wordpress.com/category/deleuze/

also


from an online journal entitled Fractal Ontology

All methods for the transcendentalization of language, all methods for endowing language with universals…have fallen into the worst kind of abstraction, in the sense that they validate a level that is both too abstract and not abstract enough. Regimes of signs are not based on language, and language alone does not constitute an abstract machine, whether structural or generative. The opposite is the case. It is language that is based on regimes of signs, and regimes of signs on abstract machines, diagrammatic functions, and machinic assemblages that go beyond any system of semiology, linguistics, or logic. There is no universal propositional logic, nor is there grammaticality in itself, any more than there is signifier for itself. “Behind” statements and semioticizations there are only machines, assemblages, and movements of deterritorialization that cut across the stratification of the various systems and elude both the coordinates of language and of existence. That is why pragmatics is not a complement to logic, syntax, or semantics; on the contrary, it is the fundamental element upon which all the rest depend.—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 148.

http://fractalontology.wordpress.com/category/guattari/

all sounds very reasonable to me

 

[ramonmercado]

Existence is not dialectical, not representable. It is hardly livable!

Hey! I like that bit.

I will ensure that sentence is debated at the upcoming Communist University (CPGB Summer School).

The CPGB Summer School has some sessions of interest to Forteans. Last year the entire Sunday was given over to Radical Antropology Group but sadly this year, their sessions are scattered throughout the week.

Tuesday August 11 4.45pm-7pm
Science and human origins: What we think we know about primitive communism and why we think we know it
Chris Knight (Radical Anthropology Group)

Wednesday August 12 2pm-4.15pm
Asiatic social formation debate: The origins, social form and evolution of medieval Rus
Boris Kagalitsky; Hillel Ticktin (Critique); Mike Macnair (CPGB)

Thursday August 13 2pm-4.15pm
The origins and evolution of religion
Camilla Power (Radical Anthropology Group)

Friday August 14 4.45pm-7pm
Neolithic: what we mean by revolution and counterrevolution
Lionel Sims (Radical Anthropology Group)

The venue
Raymont Hall, 63 Wickham Road, New Cross, London SE4

More info at: http://cpgb.wordpress.com/

 

[brotherluth]

At risk of justifying ramonmercado's 'inappropriate' remarks about writing (and thinking) style, a few words in support of Deleuze & Guattari...

Lines of flight... rhizomatic thinking... deterritorialization... reterritorialization... assemblages...

It seems odd, and indeed, inappropriate, to me that self-professed 'Forteans' would rather be breast-fed 'weirdness at £4.25 per month than confront the prospect of being properly duffed up by new ways of thinking, and new terms to kick start it.

New terms = jargon = opaque... yeah, right.

A Thousand Plateaus incomprehensible? To dyed-in-the-wool rationalists, perhaps. Fort will be turning in his grave.

 

[Marrowpod]

Rhizome:
"A continuously growing horizontal underground stem that puts out lateral shoots and adventitious roots at intervals. ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from Greek rhizoma, from rhizousthai ‘take root,’ based on rhiza ‘root.’"

Rhizomatic thinking... yes, that does make sense. But if you'd popped that one into your patch of the copy, Bro Luth, your co-writer would have been heading south and west with fresh-honed secaturs. And vice-versa I have no doubt.

Just an excuse, really, for a coded message: Triptych, ectoplasm, booklet, even?

 

[escargot]

I'm a pale pink, wishy-washy, Guardian-reading liberal (I used to have a badge from our local anarchist bookshop that said this)

You used to be able to choose from a huge range of badges saying '****s against the bomb', such as 'Vegetarians' or 'Motorcyclists' or 'Medical Students'. I wore my 'Guardian Readers against the bomb' badge with pride. 8)

 

[Timble2]

I'm a pale pink, wishy-washy, Guardian-reading liberal (I used to have a badge from our local anarchist bookshop that said this)

You used to be able to choose from a huge range of badges saying '****s against the bomb', such as 'Vegetarians' or 'Motorcyclists' or 'Medical Students'. I wore my 'Guardian Readers against the bomb' badge with pride. 8)

I had a "Well Meaning Guardian Reader Against The Bomb" badge (again from the anarchist bookshop)

 

[escargot]

Y'know, I think that's the same one I had. Probably still have it in a box somewhere in the loft.

Was it black with white lettering, with the word 'Guardian' in the same font as on the newspaper?

 

[47Forteans]

Y'know, I think that's the same one I had. Probably still have it in a box somewhere in the loft.

Was it black with white lettering, with the word 'Guardian' in the same font as on the newspaper?

The only badge I have is for the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. :madeyes: Whilst I don't wear it, I do leave it about in odd places (hidden in a cup, or the fruit bowl, etc) when guests are about and likely to find it. I do this for my own amusement, and that's all that matters!

Just how a badge for an English political party ended up in Australia is a story for another day...