Extract:
The fractal state then can be understood as a pharmakon, a means of producing something, in the political sense, simultaneously resistance and remedy, but whose nature, fractal, is antithetical to any coherent, unified order. Thus, as Derrida pointed out, the pharmakon is both the poison and the remedy. This is a complexity that enables realities to be represented outside and beyond the web of the hyperreal, disconnected and isolated as they are from any totalitarian or hyperreal presumption of order. The fractal nature of psyche, culture and politics in particular partake of the pharmakon, for our resistance to all unity, coherence and continuity, our antidote to any form of totalitarianism, abide in our DE centeredness, our framing of reality within mutually inconceivable domains, our isolated coherences fashioning an overall incoherence.
What’s that humming noise? It’s the corpse of George Orwell spinning in its grave.
George Orwell: Politics and the English Language
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.
I must have got out of the wrong side of the bed this afternoon. Roll on the end of the day.
