Source: Bigstock

Where there is no meaning, of course, there can be no refutation; and if one asked the author of this verbiage what, for example, “coherent objects-devices that can also tackle fraught issues of monumentality and identity, agency and resilience” actually meant (how would I actually recognize such an object-device that can tackle agency and resilience if it came walking down the street toward me?), one would no doubt provoke a torrent of polysyllabic gobbledygook that would make “Jabberwocky” read like a witness statement. The author’s mind is like a food mixer, and she creates from pseudo-erudite words a verbal minestrone.

Despite its meaninglessness, it nevertheless conveys something: the megalomania of the author and her dreadful ilk. She and they obviously claim the right to design the physical world in which we live (because they know best, which is proved by the failure of others to understand what they write), and even to mold the minds of the future. She and they are not just architects, but architects of the soul—just as Stalin called writers the “engineers of the soul.” Not satisfied with the supposedly humble calling of designing buildings that are graceful, beautiful, pleasing, harmonious, functioning, etc., they want to be philosopher kings (and, increasingly, queens).

People of good intelligence might laugh at the above nonsense, and in a properly ordered world they would be right to do so. It is worthy of nothing other than contempt. Unfortunately, however, we do not live in a properly ordered world: The lunatics are in charge of the asylum. Despite the most patent evidence of the writer’s terrible combination of mediocrity of mind and overweening ambition, she is a significant figure, a potential corrupter of youth.

It is fortunate for her, though perhaps not for the rest of us (at least in this context), that there is no justice in the world. If there were, she would be forbidden from publishing anything for the rest of her life. She would be sent as a farm laborer to a remote part of the countryside or as a supermarket shelf-stacker to a small provincial town, where the cerebral products that she would no doubt call her thoughts could do no harm. As it is, she represents the future, the future of meta-elements and integrated morphologies. Or is it meta-morphologies and integrated elements? It doesn’t matter; it’s all the same, and megalomania, like truth, will out.

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