The multiplicity of becoming-cunt

Dalrymple opens Patricia MacCormack’s The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene (2021) at random and sees this:

The multiplicity of becoming-cunt as an assemblage reassembles the tensors upon which it expresses force and by which force is expressed upon its various planes and dimensions.

The psychiatrist-writer comments:

I have known deteriorated schizophrenic patients to speak more sensibly and coherently than this.

You can, he says,

open the book at any page and find passages that startle by their polysyllabic meaninglessness combined with the utmost crudity.

MacCormack is professor of philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University. Her principal areas of expertise are

• cinesexuality
• theist occultism
• queer theory
• vegan abolition
• becoming-vulva theory
• necrosexuality
• post-human theory
• cineschizoanalysis
• tattooing
• the apocalypse as optimistic beginning
• horror films
• body modification
• human extinction
• mucosal monsters
• cinemasochism
• death studies

Dalrymple comments:

All that’s missing is a broomstick.

MacCormack’s œuvre is large and her works cannot be listed in full here because of space constraints, but some of the more celebrated titles are

• The Ecstatic Olfactory Face (2014)
• Becoming-Vulva (2010)
• Rebuilding the Fabulated Bodies of the Hoard-Warriors (2016)
• Perversion: Transgressive Sexuality and Becoming-Monster (2004)
• Queer Posthumanizm (2015)
• Video Nasties: the Definitive Guide (2012)
• Tortured Spectators: Massacred and Mucosal (2017)
• Feminist Becomings: Hybrid Feminism and Haecceitic (Re)production (2015)
• Zombies without Organs: Gender, Flesh and Fissure (2008)
• Nonhuman Queerings (2015)
• The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin (2006)

Dalrymple writes that MacCormack

looks as if she had strayed from the set of a cheap horror film, or perhaps from the set of a spoof of a cheap horror film. These days the real thing is difficult to distinguish from spoof.

He chooses another passage at random from The Ahuman Manifesto:

The negative value of the end of anthropocentrism is where the jubilance of the world begins. The everything else that comes at the end of these systems is primarily only really the end of the primacy of one isomorphic functioning mode of knowledge. Difference and proliferation which seethes beneath in a germinal state has the capacity to express when the anthropocentric mode is diminished to one of many ways, historical or majoritarian-hysterical.

The Manifesto has nearly 200 pages of this stuff. That someone — many people — can make a career of this kind of drivel (at public expense) is testimony, says Dalrymple, either

to our confidence in the strength and solidity of our civilisation, such that it can withstand almost any assault on its values or degree of corruption of its youth,

or

that we are approaching a final state of moral, cultural, and intellectual disintegration and collapse that must before long lead to its replacement by another, less frivolous, but not necessarily better, dispensation.

The problem seems to be that

cultural entropy is now inexorable. My only consolation is that people have been saying this for decades, if not for millennia.