This little piece was written to inaugurate a longer “intervention/workshop” delivered on the 28th June 2026 during a three-day event held at the community-run building and project called “Cassonade” in Molenbeek-Saint-Jean, Brussels. The event was entitled, “it’s a merciless format “Cassonade” is, in the words of the coordinators, “un laboratoire de solidarité urbaine fondé sur le ‘economie de don’” (an urban solidarity laboratory based on the gift economy). You can find out about and support the project, here: https://www.cassonade.be/
I responded to a post online for contributors and was asked to attend, along with lots of brilliant poets, writers and performers. There were workshops, interventions, readings, happenings, delicious foodings, card games, chilled and “cool” jean wearing, bouts of le Twister énorme and all-round anarcho-aesthetic frolicking.
My “intervention” started with the following remarks, after which the keen attendees wrote acrostics, presenting them to the group at the end. Apart from ironing out a few typos and making my grammar appear a little more sophisticated (or less opaque and ambiguous), I have left the piece as it was.
The exterior of Cassanade.
it’s a merciless format — c’est un format impitoyable
because some people like to live — car certaines personnes aiment vivre
and that really shows — et ça se voit
What’s this format without pity, implacable in its form, mercilessly formatting its planned this- and what-ness?
the immiscible mercilessness of autistic linguistic materialism
the immiscible mercilessness of autistic linguistic materialism
the immiscible mercilessness of autistic linguistic materialism
the immiscible mercilessness of autistic linguistic materialism
the immiscible mercilessness of autistic linguistic materialism
l’impitoyable immiscibilité du matérialisme linguistique autistique
l’impitoyable immiscibilité du matérialisme linguistique autistique
l’impitoyable immiscibilité du matérialisme linguistique autistique
l’impitoyable immiscibilité du matérialisme linguistique autistique
l’impitoyable immiscibilité du matérialisme linguistique autistique
“Miscible” means able to mix (or, perhaps, mixable which, in French, is “miscible”). “Immiscible” means unable to mix (or, perhaps, un-mixable which, in French, is “immiscible”). I’ll come on to a tenaciously incorrigible cleaving of the word in the moment.
the immiscible mercilessness of autistic linguistic materialism will explore with you the dialectical refusal of autistic linguistic practices to mix (or become miscible) with authoritarian, homogenising and hegemonic cultural codes. Through readings of some critical theorising, my own prose, and my own poetic practices, I will offer an “intervention” — and perhaps model your own “interventions” — demonstrating the possibilities of creative contraventions of neurodivergent-impelled writing.
What I’m going to do today is read a sort of introduction to set up the type of linguistic skullduggery I am referring to. I will then read/perform some critical passages, some excerpts from my soon-to-be-published book, Writing Autism: A Critique of Life, Language and Neurodivergent Cultures (Revol Press, 2017), and a little of my own poetry. When I finish with my pages, I will put them down on the floor and I have already given you copies of my opening remarks (including these). Please feel free to pick up the other pages and have a sniff, snuffle, fondle, fiddle, ponder or poke. I’ll take them back at the end, unless you want a very rubbish souvenir. I will be reading several poems today. Some of these — specifically from What’s That: Instead of Ego II — are acrostic poems.
What I would like you to do — if you want (you can do what you like (whatevs)) — is to create your own acrostic poems using any of the words from my writing — prose or poetry. You might, for example, write an acrostic from the word, “Immiscible”. You don’t have to write an acrostic, you could just scribble some words and then allow yourself to surf and riff on and through the material, somatic and aesthetic associations immanent — this word becomes important — in the words themselves. If you are brave, you can start tinkering straight away. However, you might want to allow yourself to get into the rhythmic groove of my irritatingly recursive, alliterative and pedantic prose and poetry before you start. You might, perhaps, offer a parody of my own work and style (I would love that. Parody is the greatest form linguistic battery, as I never say).
An acrostic using the letters from the word, “Immiscible”, and trying to illustrate stuff to do with the theme(s) of “non-mixing”, might look like this:
Il est chaud (pas passionné)
Mais peut-être les deux!
Merde! Il fait chaud!
Itching, sweat beads
Salt seeds the T-shirts
Chaffing and chasing
Ire as bodies evaporate
Bisecting street strollers
Labile with osmotic
Enervation and entropy.
Or you could concrete-poem the shit out of the word:
I [will] Maintain
Mon identité!!
Safe
[and] Critical
Isolation [to]
Betoken [my] Loathing [of]
EVERYONE!
In fact, you can write, cut, paste, mumble, dance, sway, dribble or do nothing or anything.
At the end, we can share some of your work, if you choose to. If not, that’s fine.
Decoratelier
Opening Remarks
“Miscible” means able to mix. “Immiscible” means unable to mix. Oil is immiscible with water, or water with oil, depending on your perspective. But this perspective, of course, fixes or petrifies our choices as only binary, like being pessimistic or optimistic, gay or straight, queer or hetero-normcore, doggo or catto, femme or high femme, top, bottom or vers (“towards” in French? I’m straightly confused). Language and its sister from another sinister minister of misery, thought, cannot abhor mixing antinomies, and “character” and fetishes are always boringly defined in relation to conceptually impoverished either/ors.
“Miscible” — so my two etymological dictionaries inform me, not my formal education — was coined by medieval Latin tinkerers from “miscibilis”, with the nounified version being “miscibility”, which sounds like a 90s girl band (For One More Predictably Short Exploitative Period, Simon Cowell presents “MissCibility” [canned cheers]). These learned medieval miscreants (creantively creative, perhaps) associated another prefix — “im-” — with depravity, or the opposite of possible: im=NOT possible. To be “im-miscible”, therefore, is not to mix according to natural laws (and Latin is, of course, the most im-portent and portentous of natural laws. Just ask Boris Johnson).
Latin is im-mune from historical materialist critique, incongruously im-mutable (despite being invented by furtive folks who needed to eat and shit too). Latin is im-partial (and the last word in im-parting justice. Hence the lofty sounding legal jargon, such as: Actio non datur non damnificato; animus nocendi; ceteris paribus; compos mentis; contradictio in adjecto (yes, contradiction is what is added by my historical materialist take down of Latin’s supposed sophistication). Or, to put the last sentence in forbiddingly impenetrable Latin: Ita vero; id quod huic opinioni de cultu linguae Latinae exquisito detrahendo additur — ratione scilicet ad classes sociales et materialismum historicum spectante — est ipsa contradictio.)
As we witnessed, just now, Latin is im-mensely im-pressive (just ask Boris Johnson’s stupified enablers), particularly in and nudge-imming up to the “maculate” — as “im-maculate” — thereby conferring its obfuscatory power. To be im-(i.e. NOT) miscible, then, is to be im-potent, not potent with potential or im-potential, perhaps (not to be confused, for fear of censure and derision, with in potentia, from the Latin in (“in”) + potentiā, which is the ablative singular form of potentia (meaning “force; power” (hence: a potential for force)).
Of course — as we no doubt all know — the “im-” prefix also signals “in” or “on”-ness. For example, if you im-pute something to somebody — such as blame or a crime —, you say (probably unfairly) that that person is responsible for it (re-ponsible?). You are inputting im-putation. If you im-bibe ideas, values, or qualities, you absorb them into your mind. To bibe, then, it seems, is to resist absorption. To im-bibe is to either consciously or unconsciously become infused with stuff. If something im-pinges on you, it affects you in some negative way. (Do imps impinge impishly?) Is an impinge ever a positive “-pinge” (“I’m pinge-positive today, thanks for asking”). I suppose the “Im-”prefix – not – would make “impinge” not-pinge. Don’t not pinge all over me (which is a confusing instruction and one which sounds like a coquettish request (he really wants a bit of a pinge. He definitely wants it)). In which case — if you are not careful —, you might be vulnerable to an im-puting or im-putation of a pinge. You want to be pinged upon, you slut.
So, immiscibility is not mixing. But “immiscibility”, with the prefix detourned as “in”, would mean in-mixed-ness (as a noun). As such, the “im” of this newly coined perversion — immiscible (adjective) (meaning, “in-mixed”) —, and which we have just created, has quite potent linguistic and material potential (potency in potentia, we might say). In other words, the potency of the immiscible might be silently merciless in its in-filtration of language, culture and society. Hence, “not mixing” becomes — in the sly hands of this piece — a stealthy miscibility, im-manent (inside) the apparently im-penetrable liquid of linguistic palatability (or in-gestion). (Is what we have just done a form of revolutionary linguistic metabolism?).
Poets hard at work on their acrostics
the miscillaneous implications of immiscible autistic linguistic materialism:
a manifesto
immiscible autistic linguistic materialism — both as “not-mixing” and “in-mixed” — might represent a critically creative im-broglio — meaning something difficult, confusing and complicated —, a rebuff and thorny barb against oppressive linguistic, discursive and situational ableism. Autistic language, bodily comportments and all-round jerky awkwardness might be critically in-mixing at the very same time as offering a potent refusal of the sequestering and festering dis-ablements of absorption. Not mixing is an immanently dialectical commentary on the apparently immovable edicts to mix.
immiscible autistic linguistic materialism might represent the un-witting or im (not)-wittingly im-passioned im-pediment, offering im-pending critique — linguistic and bodily — of the im-positions foisted by normality, im-posing its messy contingencies, blurts, tics and tenacious temperaments on cultural, institutional and communicative practices that always-already im-ply constraint. (Don’t im-ply my ply as I’ll ask why my ply is implied).
immiscible autistic linguistic materialism may be making ex-plicit the im-plicit: im-provisingly im-poverishing cliché, re-poverishing (perhaps) language as re-purposed im-pulse, re-fusing conventional miscibility but/by/and re-im-posing the im-manent reminders of all that is outside the compromising circumscriptions of linguistic hegemony.
immiscible autistic linguistic materialism might respond to the claim that it is awkwardly and pathologically immiscible by offering a stealthily unhealthy critique of prefixes in order to assert a radical right to re-im-bursement for the damages or losses its im-witting operatives have suffered by their marginalisation and social and cultural im-miseration.
immiscible autistic linguistic materialism is — finally — the prefix-fondling and frotting fetish, gleefully, radically and anarchically im-molating any hints, directives and social and political acts of the brutalisation of the marginalised, im-pugning the reactionary logics im-manent in hegemonic discourse and norm-comportments of all that is apparently “immiscible” and surplus to ordered compliance. Is such an activity an example of being annoyingly in-tractable… No. Let’s not get started (here, at least) on the implications of that word and the assumptions im-manent in its prefix.
So, with these words and torturous linguistic wranglings in mind, ear and craw, let’s write some acrostics.
Acrostics done! Look at those smiles!