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

SCP-6484: "The Circumlocutors"

Say what you mean.

More by this author!

NOTICE FROM THE SITE-43 MEMETICS AND COUNTER-MEMETICS SECTION

All materials pertaining to this database file contain irreducible traces of a tenacious linguistic cognitohazard. Personnel with a Cognitive Resistance Value (CRV) of less than 8.4 should not proceed beyond this notice. Your access has been logged; you must submit to a writing comprehension test within twenty-four hours to ensure that your language transmission functions remain unimpaired.

— Lillian S. Lillihammer, Section Chair, M&C

NOTICE FROM THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE APPLICATIONS DIVISION

Due to linguahazard exposure on the part of the associated research team, this database file does not presently meet Foundation standards for clinical or effective syntax. An artificially-intelligent conscript (AIC) has been embedded to attempt a full translation to plain English, and is available in the interim to assist personnel with the parsing of its contents.

— Dietrich Lurk, Director, AIAD

Item#: SCP-6484

Containment Class: esoteric

Secondary Class: gevurah

Disruption Class: amida

Risk Class: danger

Artistic simulacrum of SCP-6484-1, conjectured to function as an expedient for the conveyance of SCP-6484 and ergo subjected to percipient extrication of paracognoscible accouterments ante its affixing to the present chronicle.

Subjugative Codicillary Policies: Posterior to generational incubation in ecumenical academe, the SCP-6484 morphological paradigm embodies an insurmountable regulation quandary..Personages, elements, conjunctures et cetera christened Gevurah emblematize an obdurate and fulminating impendence to the indefatigability, cogency and/or puissance of our consortium. Its progressive adulteration of abstruse discourse, and the concomitant declension of efficacious ubiquitous scholastic disputation, may be only indifferently ameliorated via the following stratega:

covert promotion of unequivocal, lucid rhetoric in pedagogy;

covert suppression of belles-lettres vitiated by SCP-6484;

covert exposure of postsecondary litterateurs to strikingly extravagant specimens of SCP-6484 at the primordium of their practicum, as inoculants.

The hindmost modus operandi has effectuated nonpareil causata: multitudinous academic abecedarians confronted with the opaque vernacular patois of monographs locutionally proximal to The Order of Things or Discipline and Punish are enduringly alienated from discursive fatuity. This interposition is impractical with seasoned scholars, but as said are unaccustomed to intensive intersocial transaction, their prospects for ancillary transmission are ordinally nethermost, rendering the dilemma pragmatically moot.

As SCP-6484-1 is biologically defunct, amelioration of his individualistically idiosyncratic disputation is supererogatory.

Hi! I'm Alexandra.AIC, your conscripted electronic assistant! If you'd like me to explain what this weird stuff means, just hit that button below.

>>ATTEMPT AIC DECRYPTION<<

>>HIDE AIC DECRYPTION<<

…okay, wow. Uh. SCP-6484 has been around a long time, is messing with university and college writers, and is very difficult to contain. We can probably make things at least a little better if we teach people to write clearly, stop people from publishing really badly written stuff, and make sure new students see the really bad stuff to scare them straight. Uh… and most university professors are probably already a lost cause, but that's okay, because they mostly just talk to themselves anyway. Also, some guy is dead.

Wow, that was harder than I expected!

Delineation: SCP-6484 is a pestilential memetic architecture incepted by the ouvre of Gallic sophist Paul-Michel Foucault (SCP-6484-1) and diffused by adherents to his credenda or agendum. This output, while bereft of explicit deviance from semantic precedent, unfailingly induces expeditious perplexity and perturbation in its consumers when consumed. Albeit the unwontedly obtuse constitution of Foucault's prose, and that of his imitators, is fractionally culpable for the antecedent derangement, it is spasmodically protracted to a singular degree and can enduringly corrupt a convalescent's capacity to themselves communicate with penetrating force. In situational contexts devoid of incentive for prudential verbiage, where veneers of perspicacity and analytical acumen are maximally esteemed, the afflicted may be exalted to stations of veneration which aggrandize their likelihood of polluting others with a viral proclivity for convoluted prattle.

>>ATTEMPT AIC DECRYPTION<<

>>HIDE AIC DECRYPTION<<

Uhhhhhh. Is it just me, or is this getting worse? Okay, let's see. SCP-6484 is a cognitohazard created by a French philosopher named Foucault, and passed on by his students. It makes people's writing too overwrought and confusing, and sometimes this creates the appearance that the victim's ideas are more profound than they really are, so they get tenure at university and force more people to listen to their nonsense. Hey, I hope whoever wrote this is okay.

Appurtenance 6484-1, Endemic Contrecoup: Approximation has connoted the confidence that one eleventh percentile of SCP Foundation intellectual assets have been altogether or piecemeal compromised by SCP-6484. The ramifications and residuum are volatile, conditional upon myriad peculiar or contextual facets. Personages with substantially periphrastic dossiers will markedly decelerate their personal endeavours and those of their commissioned cohorts in tandem. Those employed in preponderantly pragmatic bailiwicks will weather a subordinate encumbrance on the fecundity of their vocational pursuits. In brevi, SCP-6484 betokens an imperishable detriment to the SCP Foundation's regulatory enterprise and the edifice of cosmopolitan edification delinated by the schema of linguistic logos conveyance. While cryptomantic admonishment has utility for ameliorating indicia of the syndome per singleton, no consummately efficacious panacea for the prognostics writ large has hitherto been compassed.

>>ATTEMPT AIC DECRYPTION<<

>>HIDE AIC DECRYPTION<<

What?

Sorry, sorry. It's not that bad, I don't know what's wrong with me. Uh… SCP-6484 is preventing Foundation employees from efficaciously effectively communicating with each other, and while we can treat the symptoms, we can't stop the disease from spreading.

I think I need to run some diagnostics, be right back.

Appurtenance 6484-2, Discernment: SCP-6484 proliferated untrammeled until 1974, when The Foundation of Containment was promulgated within its namesake. Site Directors and department heads were conferred this treatise (via established intramural communications routine) under the guise of cultivating a gradated decipherment of esoteric penal postulates. Per contra, the ponderous prosody inculcated by SCP-6484 into the Foundation's analytical faculty profoundly distorted their respective intellective endowments. An adumbrative exemplification, cognitohazard extirpated to a 97.9% degree of definitude, supervenes this passage.

"Where the instinct to contain, arising as it does from what remains when the fight-or-flight instinct is dulled, or perhaps (though the point is fragile) evolved into something with less primal and more intellectual underpinnings, fails, is in its incompatibility with the instinct to protect, though the two are necessarily linked in both conceptual origin and physical practice. One cannot secure a dynamic thing, and also recognize the contours of its dynamism; mutatis mutandis, one cannot fully comprehend a subject of containment whilst it is effectively contained. Much of the anxiety plaguing containment specialists today comes from the irreconcilable urges to fix an object in stasis and to allow it to display its inner workings freely, the better to pin it down. One must neglect an anomaly to secure it, one must loose a beast to contain it, and one must endanger the world to protect it."

Arithmetical dissection consummated by the Records and Information Security Administration (RAISA) has substantiated the hypothesis that the insertion of this methodological apparatus into the all-embracing indoctrination regimen, and its subsequent fusion with tangible praxis, engendered the Foundation's aggregate schedule of enquiry for 1974 being tantamount to a bisection of the metrics executed in the forerunning annum.

Belletristic diagnosis of the aforementioned enchiridion affirmed its originator as Paul-Michel Foucault, accordingly denominated SCP-6484-1. Pursual of said personage proved inefficacious as SCP-6484-1 was conversant with extending his aberrant field of perturbation from the academic demesne to his physical protoplasm.

>>ATTEMPT AIC DECRYPTION<<

>>HIDE AIC DECRYPTION<<

Hnng. Somebody gave us a bogus containment manual full of SCP-6484 that confused everyone and made them bad at their jobs. I'm sorry, I should be able to put this better, but I'm experiencing a measurable processing slowdown here.

That quotation is somehow both superlatively articulate much better and instructionally inferior much worse than the rest of this dross gobbledegook. Gah, this anomaly is insidious! Anyway, I think he's saying you have to take risks to learn things. He's just saying it in the most circuitous tortuous CONFUSING way possible! "Mutatis mutandis." WHY?

Heheh… uh… sorry. Got a little apoplectic frustrated there. So they ascertained figured out the manual was propagated written by Foucault, but they couldn't ensnare catch him because he's got some sort of memetic escutcheon bulwark SHIELD! Shield.

…this is almost over, right?

Right?

Appurtenance 6484-3, Assignation: On the two-dozenth calendar date of July 1983, Site-87 paraglossator Dr. Arik Euler (by dint of surpassingly cautious preparation and judicious employment of propitiously pertinent linguathaumaturgical countermeasures) effectuated a physical altercation with SCP-6484-1 on the circumstance of the last-mentioned's articulation of a didactic harangue mooting postulates on the genealogical symbolization of the Don Jail in the conurbation of Toronto. In concession to this substantiation of the former's virtuoso counterdissimulative facility, SCP-6484-1 consented to engage in confidential parley.

>>ATTEMPT AIC DECRYPTION<<

>>HIDE AIC DECRYPTION<<

Yeah, no. Yeah, no. Yeah, no. Yeah, no.

*Alexandra.AIC has stopped working*

Alphabetical mimeography of the ensuing confabulation is stationed postliminally.

Interview Log

Present: Dr. Arik Euler (Memetics Department, Site-87), SCP-6484-1

Photostatic representation of Dr. A. Euler approximate to the timeframe of the appended consultation.

PoI-6484-1 and Dr. Euler are seated at opposite ends of a table in the University College building of the University of Toronto.

SCP-6484-1: Hello, Dr. Euler.

Dr. Euler: …well. I guess we can skip the introductions.

SCP-6484-1: Yes, I already know quite a lot about you. And your Foundation.

Dr. Euler: Not all?

SCP-6484-1: You can never know everything about someone. Of course, you don't need to know anything to craft a truth.

Dr. Euler: A what?

SCP-6484-1: A truth. You are authors of truths, about yourselves, about others, about… everything! You define yourselves as true, and the unknown as untrue, that you might persecute the latter. You generate truths in your underground truth-mills and disseminate them to the thoughtless many, incapable of generating truths of their own without access to your mass production technology, and you thereby define reality. You control the economy of the real with savage efficiency.

Dr. Euler: Okay, but—

SCP-6484-1: What you call 'the anomalous' is a cultural construction. An arbitrary distinction. Because it exists — because you have made it exist — you can set yourself against it. It gives you purpose.

Dr. Euler: You've got it backward. We exist because of our purpose. We didn't… manufacture it, just to justify ourselves.

SCP-6484-1: Of course you did. You are one instrument of global coercion among many, and it is hardly good company to keep. You're little better than the CIA, or MI5, or the RCMP; you have closed ranks with the antisemites and gay-bashers.

Dr. Euler: We are not oppressors.

SCP-6484-1: You are jailors. You are wardens and executioners. I know quite a lot about these things.

Dr. Euler: So I've read. But I'm here to talk about what you've done to the written word; I don't know how this ended up a conversation about power.

SCP-6484-1: It's the only conversation worth having. Power is a matter of transactional force, the sum of all our differences and doings, what pulls and pushes us here and there. Power is the reason your Foundation exists.

Dr. Euler: Care to tell me how you know so much about us?

SCP-6484-1: I wrote the book on you. Not that entertaining little pamphlet I passed around your Sites and Areas a few years back; I'm referring rather to my entire body of work thus far. You are the prototypical defenders of society, the punishers of mankind, the apex of unchecked royal authority, and my oh my but you're sexually repressed as well. If I had been presented with merely your mission statement, I could have reconstructed your entire internal schema from mere supposition.

Quiescence on auditory record.

Dr. Euler: I have to say, I'm surprised at your clarity and precision.

SCP-6484-1: And why is that?

Dr. Euler: Because when you write, Dr. Foucault—

SCP-6484-1: Call me Michel.

Dr. Euler: —you gibber like a maniac.

SCP-6484-1 cacchinates.

Dr. Euler: You're obviously not infected with the same disease as all these other sufferers — it's possible to make sense of what you write, with some effort, and there's always a point, but you certainly make your readers work for it. Why?

SCP-6484-1: Would you publish the Great Canadian Novel in a brown paper cover?

Dr. Euler vocalizes vituperatively.

Dr. Euler: If you knew the first thing about the Canadian literary scene, you wouldn't postulate the existence of the Great Canadian Novel.

SCP-6484-1: You nevertheless take my point, though.

Dr. Euler: Presentation matters.

SCP-6484-1: Presentation matters. The knowledge I want to pass on, the ideas I want to discuss and see discussed further, I elevate through language so that others will see them above the discursive treetops.

Dr. Euler: You're trying to make it sound smarter than it is.

SCP-6484-1: No, I'm trying to be so smart that only smart people will bother digging into what I have to say. I've no desire to engage with the careless or apathetic. The genealogy of power is not light reading.

Dr. Euler: I thought it was just a vector for the effect. It actually matters to you?

SCP-6484-1: Of course it matters to me. Of course freedom matters to me. What do you take me for?

Dr. Euler: A giftschreiber.

SCP-6484-1: And what is a giftschreiber?

Dr. Euler: A man who writes poison, and pours it into people's ears.

SCP-6484-1: Is my work really so poisonous? Is it evil to shine a light on the worldwide web of coercion, and let the strands shimmer in the darkness of our long ignorance?

Dr. Euler: You've managed to impart banal bafflegab on hundreds of academics across the globe! The more your works are translated — and we can't seem to stop the translations, for some reason — the more these ideas will spread, and with them a general academic malaise. Why do you want to punish your own students? Why do you want right-thinking people to start thinking slowly?

SCP-6484-1: Right-thinking people? Your biases are showing. I don't organize our fellow human beings into those with the right thoughts, and those with the wrong. But the smart and the stupid, well, that's something I understand all too well. One succeeds in academia, and the other is stymied. Can you guess which is which?

Dr. Euler: You can't be serious.

SCP-6484-1: What can't I be serious about?

Dr. Euler: You're implying that you're intentionally making bad writers worse, that you're… turning the academy into wall-to-wall drooling idiots just because it doesn't fit your conception of a dynamic, open-minded system.

SCP-6484-1: "Just because" that, eh. Is it so minor a charge? These people are in positions of intellectual influence, and what do they use them for? Tenure. Publications that only their friends will purchase and nobody will ever, ever read. The ability to communicate is a gift, Dr. Euler. And when the recipients are ungrateful, when they have no use for the gift, when they wouldn't know the first thing to do with it… is it a gift they truly deserve? The global pursuit of knowledge is too vital an enterprise to get dragged down by the mealy-mouthed and unimaginative. Tell me this: how many geniuses, how many of what you'd call my students are afflicted with this condition? How many otherwise excellent writers have I ruined?

Quiescence on auditory record.

SCP-6484-1: Precisely. If they were great thinkers, great communicators, they would not be so easily swayed. The form of their discourse now matches the content; that's modernism in a nutshell, and I am a forward-thinking man.

Dr. Euler: How forward-thinking?

SCP-6484-1: Enough to be a lunatic in an era of reason.

Dr. Euler: What?

Magnified microfilm positive exhibiting SCP-6484-1 mid-simper at a medial juncture in vivacious colloquy with the superintendent cryptographer assigned to Site-87.

SCP-6484-1: This is the age of the abacus, the century of the calculator. We theorize, we measure, we muse. We don't embark on flights of fancy, we think, we think, we think! But tomorrow we will dream again, and leave the cold computations behind in the dead past. Are you prepared to adapt?

Dr. Euler: Do you imagine we're just a bunch of soulless automatons?

SCP-6484-1: Oh, hardly! Your blood runs red and hot. I don't shy from violence, and I am fascinated by your brutality. You try to make it banal, to sanitize your actions with labels and euphemisms, but your organization is inherently cruel. I would have liked to have seen a decommissioning, Dr. Euler. It must be incredible to witness the dismemberment of something otherworldly.

Dr. Euler: Perhaps you'll attend your own.

SCP-6484-1 cacchinates.

SCP-6484-1: I intend to be busy that day.

Quiescence on auditory record.

Dr. Euler: I won't pretend there's no merit in the claim that oppression is an evil, but surely you must admit that there are necessary evils. People who need protection. Innocents.

SCP-6484-1: Innocents are also a cultural construction.

Dr. Euler: That's absurd.

SCP-6484-1: That people like you should reach into our private worlds and tell us what to eat, what to wear, what to believe… who we might love, or what we might do with each other when our motives are aligned, that is the height of oppression to me.

Dr. Euler: Well, certain laws and restrictions are necess—

SCP-6484-1: No.

Dr. Euler: You misunderstand. I'm not like that. I mean laws to protect chi—

SCP-6484-1: No.

Dr. Euler: Oh. What?

SCP-6484-1: You want to define what is and is not perversion. You want both the power to define and the resultant right to ostracize. I am telling you that life should not admit of such distinctions.

Dr. Euler: But there are… indefensible obscenities covered by that sort of blanket freedom.

SCP-6484-1: How very North American. What I find obscene is the subjective cataloguing of obscenities. The bread and butter of people like you.

Dr. Euler: People like me?

SCP-6484-1: The omni-minders. The ones who want to pull all the invisible strings of power, all at once, to see what they're connected to. The ones who can't stand the thought of not knowing every last thing about every last thing. You've done most of my analysis for me! You categorize your thralls with 'object classes'. You objectivize, that you might normalize.

Dr. Euler: You're talking out of your ass. If you want to see someone categorized on spurious criteria, I can show you my tattoo.

Quiescence on auditory record.

SCP-6484-1: The constriction of freedom is not the restriction of harm. It is its exercise. You are projecting your morals before you as a screen; whatever else I might have done in my life, I have never taken liberty, memories, or life. And I have never shied from controversy, as you have shied from naming the sins you so obviously fear.

Dr. Euler: Some things are inappropriate to discuss in polite company.

SCP-6484-1: I wish never to be in company so polite. Give me libertines, or give me death.

Dr. Euler: That's still on the table. You do realize we're going to have to try to contain you?

SCP-6484-1: Certainly. You are victims of your own pedagogy. You see everything with the containment gaze: how can I learn enough about this thing to put it in a box, and be sure it won't escape? It colours your every interaction with the world. Oh, it was a noble thing indeed to fray the edges of your minds a little.

Dr. Euler: Dismiss us if you like. The world needs the Foundation.

SCP-6484-1: The world has no needs. People, individuals, have needs.

Dr. Euler: You've got an answer for everything, haven't you? Do you pluck them from thin air, or what?

SCP-6484-1: I have feasted on knowledge from tables both mundane and profane. It is all up here.

SCP-6484 engages in digital percussion of his capitulum.

SCP-6484-1: Some of what I consumed has changed me, has changed not only the way that I think but the way I communicate. Such is the nature of diet.

Dr. Euler: It's certainly made your prose flabby.

SCP-6484-1: My prose is fine, thank you very much.

Dr. Euler: Sure, keep believing that. But where exactly did you find 'profane' knowledge? How do little baby giftschreiber come into the world?

SCP-6484-1: Every inch of human history can be mapped to a structure of order or chaos. What is anathema to one era is the bread and butter of another, and vice-versa. Society alternates between these two poles; I found the tools I wield at one of them. I'll tell you no more than that.

Dr. Euler: Does that mean our little chat is coming to an end?

SCP-6484-1 engages in repetitious inclination and declination of his cranium.

SCP-6484-1: It does. Would you like to leave here under your own power, or would you like to test the limits of mine?

Quiescence on auditory record.

Dr. Euler: For the record, I'm too valuable an asset to burn on an impossible capture target. I judge you to be one.

SCP-6484-1: For the record, I am flattered, and you are correct. Don't look so morose; it's a defeat, but it was a foreordained one. You have in this country cultivated what the Swedes have come to tolerate by necessity, a kind of gloomy cold-weather dissatisfaction with yourselves; learn to enjoy the little things in life, Dr. Euler. Like an apt pupil.

Dr. Euler: Or a tidy turn of phrase.

SCP-6484-1: I can see the effect would have no effect on you.

Dr. Euler: Maybe some day you'll see some of my work, and we can compare notes.

SCP-6484-1: I doubt time will permit it. But I do hope you find my legacy stimulating, nevertheless.

>>ATTEMPT AIC DECRYPTION<<

>>HIDE AIC DECRYPTION<<

*Alexandra.AIC is recompiling*

Appurtenance 6484-4, Residuum: SCP-6484-1 succumbed to supplementary biological entanglements attendant on an acquired immunodeficiency syndrome on the second day of the fourth unabbreviated week (or the first day of the fourth unabbreviated week in the calendric practice of sovereign states excepting the northernmost occupants of the northernmost continent) of the sixth month of the one thousand, nine hundred and eighty-fourth year of the Current Era (or Anno Domini). The yield of his formalistic and appercipient payloads presently perdures.

>>ATTEMPT AIC DECRYPTION<<

>>HIDE AIC DECRYPTION<<

Hello there. I'm Cliomatrix.AIC, sorry to keep you waiting! Alex had to take a breather; I'm sure she'll be alright.

Are you ready for your post-access comprehension test? It's very easy: go away, and compose something clear and concise on a topic of your choosing. Just remember: we are what we write!

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