The catastrophe now unfolding is nothing less than the disintegration of the biocultural niche of modernity.
Bildung and anti-Bildung: comments on fascism and the collapse of the biocultural niche of modernity.
History
without philosophy is only a screen on which to project the shibboleths
of our time, which is what the respectable media do (Nietzsche).
Thinking requires constantly overcoming the crippling effects of the Cartesian myth--the
ontological presupposition of the Cartesian self and its associated
rhetorical elements of consciousness, belief, motive, ideology, and
interest. Failure to do so has the effect, a priori, of blocking
conceptualization of questions of ontology, agency, intentionality,
habitus, networks and context.
from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (462):
In place of "sociology," a theory of the forms of domination.
In place of "society," the culture complex . . .
from Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale, 2004):
The
hatred and terror that drove people to such violence were shaped by
social tensions and religious beliefs, but the passions themselves
derived from deeply rooted fantasies, extravagent in their evocation of
demonic lovers and Satanic revels. These fantasies shared, for
the most part, a standard structure and a similar set of primary
themes. p. 7
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Figure 0. The Adventures of Dasein: From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States
Philosophy always arrives too late. . . . The Owl of Minerva takes flight
only as the dusk begins to fall: Rethinking "Modernity"
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Figure 0. From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States,
places our current situation in its biocultural and evolutionary
context. Figure 0 developed as a result of my encounter with The Social Origins of Language
(Oxford, 2014). This work is of singular importance, so much so that I
have assembled three sets of excerpts: a compressed summary; brief
excerpts; and extended excerpts (click on Language-Thinking-Education). Its key concept--biocultural niche--is fundamental to this site.
This site is a rhizome.
Its principle of production is transcendental empiricism.
It uses figurative elements, including graphs, tables, charts, and
maps, originally to advance an analysis of the historical trajectory:
the New Deal to Donald Trump, but the events of the second decade of
the 21st century, when viewed through the lens provided by The Social
Origins of Language, forced me to see that there was a bigger picture.
This bigger picture is represented by Figure 0. From the Origins of
Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States.
The historicity
of language and cognition, their biocultural embeddedness, and their
contemporary disintegration, is one of the fundamental questions posed
by this site. Because the media performs this decline of cognitive-discursive
performativity, the decay of reason is invisible within the cognitively
decaying public sphere. This
is the nihilism that Nietzsche anticipated. And this is the more
profound context in which to evaluate the cognitive-discursive
performativity of "Trump." Simultaneously, we must evaluate
the cognitive-discursive performativity of the "respectable" media in
its coverage of Trump. And, more generally, we must analyze the
cognitive-discursive performativity of the two-party system (see Semiotic Regimes: the Two-Party System).
Figure 0 is the irreducible minimum if one is to understand the New
Deal, "Trump," and the historical path connecting them. This is because "Trump" forces us to face the question of our primate heritage and its corrolary,
patrimonialism), on the one hand, and the fragility of civilization, on
the other. The catastrophe now unfolding is nothing less than the disintegration of the biocultural niche of modernity. The Lyons excerpt to the right establishes a framework; the excerpt from the Atlantic to the right is an early encounter (January 5, 2018) with the question of Trump's cognitive-discursive performativity. The secret to that performativity--its inner logic--is provided by Roper:
from Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale, 2004):
The
hatred and terror that drove people to such violence were shaped by
social tensions and religious beliefs, but the passions themselves
derived from deeply rooted fantasies, extravagent in their evocation of
demonic lovers and Satanic revels. These fantasies shared, for
the most part, a standard structure and a similar set of primary
themes. p. 7
But
this is the inner logic of the cognitive-discursive performativity of
fascism. Elsewhere on this site you can find how I arrived at
this formulation. In summary, it is as follows:
But first, a few words about fascism.
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Reading and Modernity, 1750-1936: From the Enlightenment to the New Deal
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Martyn Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing In the Western World (2010)
9. The Reading Fever, 1750-1830
("Everyone in Paris is reading . . . People read while riding in
carriages or taking walks . . . Women, children, journeymen
and apprentices read in shops. On Sundays people read while
seated at the front of their houses; lackeys read on their
back seats, coachmen up on their boxes, and soldiers keeping guard.")
10. The Age of the Mass Reading Public (“Between the 1830s and the
First World War . . . a mass reading public came into existence.”)
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11. New Readers and Reading Cultures ("The half century between the
1880s and the 1930s was the golden age of the book in the West.")
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The President Who Doesn't Read
"The President Who Doesn't Read," The Atlantic, January 5, 2018
Ironically,
it was the publication of a book this week that crystallized the
reality of just how little Donald Trump reads. While, like many of the
tendencies described in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, Trump’s indifference to the printed word has been apparent for some time, the
depth and implications of Trump’s strong preference for oral
communication over the written word demand closer examination.
“He didn’t process information in any conventional sense,” Wolff
writes. “He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that
for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate.”
Wolff quotes
economic adviser Gary Cohn writing in an email: “It’s worse than you
can imagine … Trump won’t read anything—not one-page memos, not the
brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with
world leaders because he is bored.”
In
March, Reuters reported that briefers had strategically placed the
president’s name in as many paragraphs of briefing documents as
possible so as to attract his fickle attention. In September, the
Associated Press reported that top aides had decided the president
needed a crash course on America’s role in the world and arranged a
90-minute, map-and-chart heavy lecture at the Pentagon. And amid the
hype over Wolff’s book, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough wrote a column
Friday saying that in September 2015, he confronted Trump over poor
debate performances, saying, “Can you read?” Met with silence,
Scarborough pressed again: “I’m serious, Donald. Do you read? If
someone wrote you a one-page paper on a policy, could you read it?”
Trump replied by brandishing a Bible from his mother and saying he read
it all the time—probably a self-aware joke, given Trump’s proud impiety
and displayed ignorance of the Bible.
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Approaching
fascism immanently (Four Phenomenological Bundles)
1. the mob at the capitol
2. language (cognitive-discursive performativity)
3. the innermost soul of fascism: The Sado-Sexual Eigenvector of
GOP Performativity: the stuff of fascism
4. state of the art scholarship
Excerpts from Eric D. Weitz, Weimar German: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, 2007/2018), chapter 9, "Revolution and Counterrevolution from the Right" (pp. 331-360).
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Fascism: Raw Data Jan.6 Arrestees
1. Mob at Capitol.
this is a raw and incomplete PDF that was the basis for
discussions between PF and RB that led to a series of
reconceptualizations, methodological as well as substantive. The
failure of much of local journalism to provide basic facts re.
employment (occupation and industry) led me to cut short my efforts
to do all 212 individuals that I was working with. As it turned
out, this was sufficient material to think about, analyze, and draw
conclusions from.
2. Regional breakdowns.
This was the second step in arriving at the tables of arrestees from
selected states that became the basis for the comments on this page:
3. Analysis. As we reviewed states and other datasets, it became evident that the analysis out of the University of
Chicago (and mainstream media coverage in general) fails to comprehend the major features of the dataset: Some Arrestees from the January 6th Assault on the Capitol (merge with Fascism: Data).
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Fascism: a close look at
the January 6 arrestees
A close look at
the January 6 arrestees reveals that, contrary to the Chicago Study1 and the New York Times, which claimed that "the
angry crowd at the Capitol . . . seemed to come
not from the fringes of American society but from white picket-fence
Main Street backgrounds,"2 what is found instead is a population in the process of
marginalization. The instability in their lives was manifested in
the difficulty of category formation. The standard occupational
and industry classifications3 are inadequate, indeed
misleading. Gyms, bars, tatoo parlors, restaurants, salons, and
gun shops occur regularly in the entire dataset. To view the
individual owners of these establishments solely in terms of their role
as "shop owners" is misleading. What we are really dealing with
is social networks, not Cartesian selves. Very few if any of the
arrestees were connected to mainstream occupations and industries: none
in manufacturing, none in the building trades, none in the modern
corporate sector. They could be better characterized objectively as marginal, and subjectively as grifters.4 (See Some Arrestees from the January 6th Assault on the Capitol. Merge with Fascism: Data). This is the sociological mire out of which emerged the mob of Jan
6. A psychoanalytic discussion of the dialectic between Trump and
his supporters is provided by
Eli Zaretsky, "The Mass Psychology of Trumpism" (London Review of Books, 18 September 2018). (See also Wilbur Cash on the proto-dorian convention) "Globalization" provides the context for the harnessing of the stuff of fascism.
The language of these arrestees can be seen here: Semiotic Regimes/telephone threats.
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Phenomenological Bundles (Transcendental Empiricism)
from Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007)
. .
. the primary ontological unit is not independent objects with
independently determinate boundaries and properties but rather what
Bohr terms 'phenomena.' . . . phenomena do not merely mark the
epistemological inseperability of observer and observed, or the results
of measurement; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseperability of
agentially intra-acting components. . . . phenomena are not mere
laboratory creations but basic units of reality. The shift from a
metaphysics of things to phenomena makes an enormous difference in
understanding the nature of science and ontological, epistemological,
and ethical issues more generally. 33
. . . the primary ontological units are
not 'things' but phenomena--dynamic topological
reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/(re)articulations of the
world. And the primary semantic units are not 'words' but
material-discursive practices through which (ontic and semantic)
boundaries are constituted. This dynamic is agency."
141
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This new dialectic of international conflict and societal
crisis may well enable
a politics that resembles fascism to coalesce.
from Geoff Eley, Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930-1945 (Routledge, 2013)
So what is the nature of
the present crisis? Confining myself to the United States and by
extension to other parts of the late-capitalist world . . . I want to
suggest the following elements.
First, beginning in good Marxist fashion from the current
transformations of economic life, I would foreground the still
unfolding consequences of fundamental capitalist restructuring.
That would include deindustrialization; the dismantling of Western
capitalism's historic manufacturing base; post-Fordist transitions; the
transnationalization of labor markets and the re-proletarianizing of
labor; a new regime of accumulation ordered around the mobility of
capital and the spectacle of consumption; a regime of regulation
ruthlessly validating private accumulation and the gutting of public
goods; and the hypertrophied dissorder of a deregulated financial
center whose dominance is severed (or freed) from any apparent
mechanism of accountability or relationship to productive investment
[see FF to FDR]. This first element--the fiscal crisis of late
capitalism -- has profound implications for the conduct of government,
for the reliable stabilities of political order, for the organized
distribution of state power, and for the practice sovereignty.
Second, the entailment of late capitalist restructuring is a drastic
and thoroughgoing process of class recomposition. Class formation
in the United States is always highly regionalized, always porous to
cross-border migrancy on a vast scale, always structure around race,
always subject to extraordinarily effective mystification, always
construed into being something else [CDP]. Yet, by any objective
criteria, the working class of today — as a social category of wage-earners
dependent for a livelihood on the sale or exchange of labor power — is
larger, less secure, and less reliant on the collective solidarities of
residence, workplace, associations, and organized political agency than
ever before. Of course, even in the 1950s and 1960s the social
citizenship of some workers ( mainly skilled, male, white) — their job
security, higher wages and greater benefits, access to healthcare and
housing, expectation of pensions, limited recognition under the law —
always presupposed a much wider reservoir of cheap and disposable
labor power (mobil, low-waged, insecure, unprotected), whether located
inside the sovereign borders or iin the neocolonial elsewhere. In
these terms, the postwar experience of relatively humanized capitalism
remained no less beholden to globalized systems of exploitation of
natural resources, human material, and grotesquely unequal terms of
trade than the preceding era of imperialist expansion. Postwar
gains were embedded in the privileged prosperity of a metropolitan boom
whose very possibility rested on historically specific repertoires of
extraction and exploition operating on a world scale. But now
even that relative working-class prosperity stands reveal as a finite
and passing phenomenon. At an ever-accelerating pace, the social
relations of work have been transformed since the 1980s into the new
low-waged, semi-legal, and deregulated labor market of a mainly
service-based and transnationalized economy. This as-yet
unstoppable story of the de-skilling, de-unionizing, de-benefiting, and
de-nationalizing of labor via the rampant processes of metropolitan
deindustrialization and global capitalist restructuing has
comprehensively undermined the model of significant social improvement
around which so much of postwar poltical culture became built.
Not the least of the changes under way since the 1970s is thus a
re-proletarianization of labor. From our vantage point now [2013
pub. date] the relative working-class prosperity of the postwar boom
re-emerges as a highly contingent interlude in the life of a capitalist
social formation whose ordering principles look very different over the
fullest span of its history. From the mid 1970s, every element in
the potentially democratizing architecture of a postwar political
imaginary was brought under brutally effective political
attack.[Stayin’ Alive; Williams/Pontiac] By the 1990s, little
remained of either the practices or the principles, let alone the
material structures and institutional relations previously organizing
the political common sense. The social contract associated with
the New Deal and the Great Society was gone. (pp. 215-216) . . .
. This new dialectic of international conflict and societal
crisis may well enable a politics that resembles fascism to coalesce.
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the Stuff of Fascism (The Sado-Sexual Eigenvector of GOP Performativity)
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from Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale, 2004):
The
hatred and terror that drove people to such violence were shaped by
social tensions and religious beliefs, but the passions themselves
derived from deeply rooted fantasies, extravagent in their evocation of
demonic lovers and Satanic revels. These fantasies shared, for
the most part, a standard structure and a similar set of primary
themes. p. 7 See also Bryant
from F. Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 16:
Let us add at once that . .
. the existence on earth of an animal soul turned against itself,
taking sides against itself, was something so new, profound, unheard
of, enigmatic, contradictory, and pregnant with a future that the
aspect of the earth was essentially altered. Indeed, divine
spectators were needed to justice to the spectacle that thus began and
the end of which is not yet in sight . . . . From now on, man . .
. gives rise to an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as
if with him somethin were anouncing and preparing itself, as if man
were not a goal but onl a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise.
from Michael André Bernstein, Bitter Carnival : ressentiment and the abject hero (Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 28
. . . ressentiment is
trapped forever in the slights of the past. . . . . What
“empowers” someone afflicted by ressentiment is the intensely focused,
but impotent hatred with which he feeds his sense of having been
treated unfairly, and his hope of someday forcing others to suffer in
his place.
A typical telephone threat: Lawmaker Debbie Dingell Shares Phone Threat Audio
“You
fucking old, senile bitch, you’re as old and ugly as Biden,” the caller
says. “You ought to get the fuck off the planet. You fucking foul
bitch. I hope your family dies in front of you. I pray to God, if
you’ve got any children, they die in your face.”
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a standard structure and a similar set of primary
themes
(The Sado-Sexual Eigenvector of GOP Performativity)
from Levi R. Bryant,
Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the
Ontology of Immanence (Northwestern University Press, 2008)
A style or essence is what we might refer to as an identity of
difference, or an identity produced through difference. It is not
a type or a kind, but rather a rule of production, a genetic
factor. It is an identity that maintains itself through
topological variations. It is for this reason that we speak of
morphological essences or diagrams of becoming. 68
Although Deleuze himelf never makes reference to the notion of
topological essences, the theme can be seen to run throughout his work.
. . . Insofar as a topological identity is produced between the
variations a structure can undergo, Deleuze is also able to maintain
the being of concrete universals which are no longer opposed to
particulars. 70-71
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Envy Theory
1,2)Hate
aims to constrain an object perceived as bad. Its aim is malice:
to forcefully control, subdue, or destroy. . . . an outside other seen
as essentially hostile, strange, sinister, menacing, having threatening
intentions, and needing to be controlled, sometimes
by forceful means, and usually at a distance. . . . hate as an emotion
and destructiveness as its aim have correlates that are more directly
expressed in conscious awareness than does envy, whose center of
gravity is virtually unconscious.
3) Often, hateful attitudes and destructive intentions are felt as
fear. . . . Hate, fear and anxiety often coexist. . . . The
object of hate is regarded as an enemy needing to be actively and
aggresively contained.
4) Whereas hate is a deeply felt aggressive dislike, the term "hatred"
conotes a more enduring, complex aggressive emotional state
characterized by chronic development over time.
5)
6) Sadistic aggression, in particular, expresses itself as manic domination whose aim is subjegation, torture, or humiliation.
6) sadism and greed
7) an insatiable hunger for new good objects.
8)
11) envy and greed as internal states of mind combine to motivate the outward expression of aggression.
Stone, The Holocaust: an Unfinished History
carnivalesque scenes . . . the Nazis set in motion a license to
transgress and sparked a shared sense of elation . . . 68
. . . a frenzied need to kill the Jews was an essential part of Nazis’ self-understanding. 69
Alfred Rosenberg speech: “It is not only overcoming the intellectual
world of the French Revolution but also directly obliterating all the
blood-polluting germs that the Jews and their bastards were able to
develop unarested. 89 McMahon
No program of extermination had been worked out, no clear intentions
could be identified. A bottomless hatred and an inextinguishable
thirst for a range of ever harsher measures against the Jews were
always very close to the surface in the minds of Hitler and of his
acolytes. As both he and they knew that a general war was not
excluded, a series of radical threats against the Jews were
increasingly integrated into the vision of a redemptive final battle
for the salvation of Aryan humanity. 98-99
violent masculinity, scapgoating. 187
on Auschwitz: genocidal fantasy: 205. Israeli journalist |
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Hatred, anger, and rage; sadistic aggression; envy and greed
The
stuff of fascism is with us always; but the circumstances (at the right: Eley; below: Greene & Robertson) under which
the stuff gets taken up by various political elites1 and transformed
into politics vary.
What is the "stuff" of fascism? For starters, consider these excerpts from from Frank Ninivaggi, Envy Theory: Perspectives on the Psychology of Envy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).
from Samuel A. Greene and Graeme B. Robertson, Putin vs. the People: the Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia (Yale, 2019), p.
211
Economic dislocations resulting from the global
financial crisis of 2008-09 and the inability of
establishment political parties to formulate a coherent response have
reshaped politics in many countries, detaching the debate from clearly
articulated interests and policies. In the absence of a coherent
policy response, fringe politicians appeal to values, to exclusionary
notions of community, and to patriotism. The ability of such
appeals to sway millions of voters in the United States, the UK,
France, Italy, Germany and elsewhere is clear.
1a. from Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power. Volume II: The rise of classes and national states (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
It
is a basic tenet of my work that societies are not systems. There
is no ultimately determining structure to human existence--at least
none that social actors or sociological observers, situated in its
midst, can discern. What we call societies are only loose
aggregates of diverse, overlapping, intersecting power networks.
p. 506
America
has not so much been exceptional as it has gradually come to represent
one extreme on a continuum of class relations. America has never
differed qualitatively from other national cases. Differences
have been of degree, not kind. . . . Explanations asserting an
original and enduring American exceptionalism . . . have only a very
limited truth. p. 638
1b. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume 3 Chapter 1: Introduction
human
societies form around four distinct power sources – ideological,
economic, military and political – which have a relative degree of
autonomy from each other.
1c. G. William Domhoff,The Four Networks Theory of Power: A Theoretical Home for Power Structure Research
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from Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism
(Alfred A. Knopf, 2004):
It
may be that the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to
fascism is American: the Ku Klux Klan. . . . The first version of
the Klan in the defeated American South was arguably a remarkable
preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar
Europe. p. 49
From January 7, 1974 to August 21, 1975, Cliff Williams* and I had a
series discussions about the situation in the Auto plants in Pontiac
and Flint during the 1930s. Among other documents, he gave me the Detroit News clipping above. (For more see the The Cliff Williams page and Cliff Williams: NOTES)
Leftists of various stripes have viewed the Flint sitdown strike (Jan.
30, 1936-Feb. 11, 1937) as a dramatic victory for labor (see Occupy Detroit: A Look at 90 Years of Auto Strikes).
Yet immediately following the strike's settlement the fascist forces of
Homer Martin and Jay Lovestone** unseated the
elected leadership that had led the sitdown strike by administrative fiat.
As
can be seen in the excerpt at the right from the Charlie Yaeger
interview, at the time of the Cleveland convention in March of 1939 the
union in Buick included only 500 dues paying members out of a plant of
7,000. The situation was far worse in Fisher Body and
Chevrolet. And from the Art Case interview*** one gets a sense of
just how weak the union was in Fisher Body and Chevrolet during the
sitdown strike itself.
And Henry Kraus: almost nothing in Flint; nothing in Pontiac.
* Yellow Truck and Bus, Pontiac
** sent to Detroit by David
Dubinsky of the ILGWU in March of 1936 (book)
*** Art Case interview (Oral History: p. 6, Reuther Archives):
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Fascism in Flint, 1937
Detroit News, May 2, 1937 click here for full text
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The Stuff of Fascism (Being and Becoming)
Envy Theory
1,2)Hate
aims to constrain an object perceived as bad. Its aim is malice:
to forcefully control, subdue, or destroy. . . . an outside other seen
as essentially hostile, strange, sinister, menacing, having threatening
intentions, and needing to be controlled, sometimes
by forceful means, and usually at a distance. . . . hate as an emotion
and destructiveness as its aim have correlates that are more directly
expressed in conscious awareness than does envy, whose center of
gravity is virtually unconscious.
3) Often, hateful attitudes and destructive intentions are felt as
fear. . . . Hate, fear and anxiety often coexist. . . . The
object of hate is regarded as an enemy needing to be actively and
aggresively contained.
4) Whereas hate is a deeply felt aggressive dislike, the term "hatred"
conotes a more enduring, complex aggressive emotional state
characterized by chronic development over time.
5)
6) Sadistic aggression, in particular, expresses itself as manic domination whose aim is subjegation, torture, or humiliation.
6) sadism and greed
7) an insatiable hunger for new good objects.
8)
11) envy and greed as internal states of mind combine to motivate the outward expression of aggression.
Stone, The Holocaust: an Unfinished History
carnivalesque scenes . . . the Nazis set in motion a license to
transgress and sparked a shared sense of elation . . . 68
. . . a frenzied need to kill the Jews was an essential part of Nazis’ self-understanding. 69
Alfred Rosenberg speech: “It is not only overcoming the intellectual
world of the French Revolution but also directly obliterating all the
blood-polluting germs that the Jews and their bastards were able to
develop unarested. 89 McMahon
No program of extermination had been worked out, no clear intentions
could be identified. A bottomless hatred and an inextinguishable
thirst for a range of ever harsher measures against the Jews were
always very close to the surface in the minds of Hitler and of his
acolytes. As both he and they knew that a general war was not
excluded, a series of radical threats against the Jews were
increasingly integrated into the vision of a redemptive final battle
for the salvation of Aryan humanity. 98-99
violent masculinity, scapgoating. 187
on Auschwitz: genocidal fantasy: 205. Israeli journalist
To see more on this, we must turn to close analysis of the varietoes of cog dis persin the public spher.
beinf vs. becoming
the transcript approach of ressectable media
trump is always talkin' shit; the media always tasnslates this into
fact checking is a greater error than Trump's "lies"
think of genocide as a process--that is, as a verb.
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Fascism in Packard, circa 1942
Preferment
of Charges against Frank Buehrle by Kurt
Murdock,
President of PACKARD LOCAL U.A.W.-C.I.O. #190, held at the
local Headquarters at 6100 Mt. Elliott Avenue, in Detroit, Michigan.
April 3rd, 1942, at 7:30 P.M. (Buehrle v. Murdock proceedings, 1942,
Reuther Archives, Lindahl Collection, Box 5)
"Lynching" in Fisher Body press room, June 10, 1937, Pontiac
"Tar-dipping is Laid to Five" Detroit News 12-10-37
Addes Report April to June 1939 (Zaremba, box 6, Reuther Archives)
Geiger-Case-Mortimer-Addes Report
(Henry Kraus Collection, Reuther Archives) March, September 1938; January 1939)
The Harry Elder Report, September 2, 1939 (Detroit Regional Office, NLRB, in Smith Committee Files, National Archives, Washington D.C.)
FDR vs. the Slave Power: MEMO July 10, 1935
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Break/Media Critique
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Trumptalk/Media Critique
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Fascism and the Disolution of language and cognition4At issue: the cognitive
developmental modalities that span the entire history of the tribe
hominini
At issue: the cognitive
developmental modalities that span the entire history of the tribe
hominini, which contains the genus homo (the only extant variety of
which is homo sapiens) and the genus pan (this latter contains
chimpanzees and bonobos). Consider the excerpts from the work of
Donald, Wrangham and Wilson, Price and Feinman, Gomez, Tomasello,
Chase, Renfrew, Malafouris, Dunbar, Dupré and others in The Sapient
Paradox, regarding the ontologically indeterminate nature of homo
sapiens as cultural-historical primate.1 (See Marshal Sahlins on biology and culture.) The Social Origins of Language
builds on this work and resolves the paradox by opening up lines of
enquiry into the biocultural processes that led to the Enlightenment,
science and technology, the second Copernican revolution, the "Russian"
(cultural) revolution, and the New Deal/UAW.
Today
we--at least in the United States--are in the midst of an "event"
hitherto unthinkable: the decognification of major segments of the
American population: the dissolution of language
and
cognition; the undoing of modernity.2
In this regard "Trump" is a symptom of this process
of decognification. While from the beginning of the Trumpean
ascendancy jounalists provided some
critical analyses of of Trump's use of language (The President Who Doesn't Read),
what is required is that we put the Cognitive-Discursive
Performativity of "Trump" in the spotlight by deploying the
relevant theoretical frameworks for the analysis that this situation
requires.
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The sapient paradox:
I wish to emphasize
particularly the ability of cultural evolution to transform the
developmental niche.
1. from Merlin Donald, "The sapient paradox: can cognitive neuroscience solve it?," in Brain. A Journal of Neurology. First published online: 2 December 2008.
Colin
Renfrew's keynote article in this volume focuses on what he calls the
‘sapient paradox’, a puzzle that has been a thorn in the side of
prehistory researchers for some time. There seems to have been a
long—in fact, inordinately long—delay between the emergence of
anatomically modern humans and our later cultural flowering. Both
genetic and archaeological evidence converge on the conclusion that the
‘speciation’ phase of sapient humans occurred in Africa at least 70
000–100 000 years BP, and possibly earlier, and all modern humans are
descended from those original populations.
Renfrew labels a later
period, extending from 10 000 years ago to the present, as the
‘tectonic’ phase. This has been a period of greatly accelerated change,
stepping relatively quickly through several different levels of social
and material culture, including the domestication of plants and
animals, sedentary societies, cities and advanced metallurgy. It has
culminated in many recent changes, giving us dramatic innovations, such
as skyscrapers, atomic energy and the internet. The paradox is that
there was a gap of well over 50 000 years between the speciation and
tectonic phases. The acceleration of recent cultural change is
especially puzzling when viewed in the light of the hundreds of
thousands of years it took our ancestors to master fire, stone tool
making and coordinated seasonal hunting.
2. from John Dupré, "Causality and Human Nature in the Social Sciences," in Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (Oxford, 2012)
. . . the human mind . . . involves a new level of capacity to transform the world beyond the organism. (291)
I wish to emphasize
particularly the ability of cultural evolution to transform the
developmental niche. And here, at least in contemporary developed
countries, it seems clear that humans have learned in quite recent
times to construct a remarkably novel environment for the development
of their young. . . . [T]hese prodigious changes to the human
environment, concretizations of our rapidly evolving culture,
profoundly affect the developmental resources available to growing
humans. For that reason their introduction should be seen as
representing major evolutionary change. (284)
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the dissolution of language and cognition: Trump's July 20, 2017 meeting in the Tank with the Joint Chiefs
the Tillerson ("He's a fucking moron") lemma
Even
before the 2016 election evidence
abounded in the public arena of a widespread dissolution of language
and
cognition. Because the media performs this cognitive decline, the
decay
of the cognitive-discursive performativities of modernity is invisible
within the
cognitively decaying media sphere.
Trump's meeting with the Joint Chiefs in the Tank on July 20, 2017 provides us
with a spectacular example--a performative tour-de-force--of this
accelerating disintegration of discursive and cognitive
performativity. We have a detailed description of this meeting in
A Very Stable Genius, chapter 9, "Shocking the Conscience.1 A close
reading of that chapter can be found here. The chapter in its entirety can be found here. The most striking aspects of the Tank meeting, as reported in A Very Stable Genius,
are the
primitive
cognitive-discursive performativity of the president, his brutish behavior
toward the Joint Chiefs, and the degree to which the Joint Chiefs were
flabergasted by this brutish stupidity. "He's a fucking moron,"
said Rex Tillerson.2
This
reporting of Trump's meeting with the Joint Chiefs provides with our
first definitive finding: Trump is cognitively-developmentally
incapable of functioning on the intellectual level required for a
modern president. This finding must be brought to bear on all
media reporting of Trump talk at rallies and press conferences.
This is the Tillerson ("He's a fucking moron") lemma.
A comparison of Trump's and FDR's cognitive-discursive performativity can be found here: From FDR to Donald Trump: a cognitive-discursive assessment.
Figure 0 provides a framework for such a comparison. In addition,
one should really study the cognitive-discursive performances
constituting the Lincoln-Douglass Debates. We thus have at
our disposal the cognitive-discursive performances of three Presidents
from the three critical periods in American history: the Civil War, the
New Deal, and the Trumpean ascendancy. And we also have at our
disposal the theoretical resources that enable a rigorous analysis of
these performances (Language-Thinking-Education). For starters, the reader should be aware of mainstream psychology textbook accounts3
of developmental processes and stages. Trump's
cognitive-discursive performativity is preoperational (ages 2 to 7
years old). This is what so flummoxes the liberal media, who
insist on sanewashing Trump's cognitive-discursive
performativity. Toddler Trump is on display in chapter 9 of A Very Stable Genius. If you want to know how Trump handles the intellectual
demands of the presidency, you have your answer in Rucker and Leonnig's
description of the meeting in the tank.
At the right we have a graphical representation of the debate
rules of Lincoln-Douglass and Harris Trump compared. Think attention span.
The
point? Normative assumptions about the unproblematic givenness of
Dasein--and on the nth day God created the Cartesian Self--such
assumtions collapse before the spectacle of "Trump" as symptomatic of a
general biocultural disintegration of modernity.
1. Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America (2020)
2. Slate, "Trump's Nuclear Meltdown" October 11, 2017)
3. The Development of Children (Sixth Edition) by Cynthia Lightfoot, Michael Cole, and Sheila R. Cole (2009),
and Development Through the Lifespan, by Laura E. Berk (1998)
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Attention Span I
The Harris-Trump and Lincoln-Douglass debates Compared: Attention-span
Harris-Trump (2024)
The debate begins at 9 p.m. ET and ABC News is the network hosting it.
There will be no live audience and no opening statements, according to
the rules released by the network last week.
The candidates will have two minutes to answer questions, two minutes for rebuttals and an additional minute for follow-ups and clarifications. The two candidates will also have up to two minutes to deliver closing statements at the end.
Harris and
Trump won't be able to ask questions of each other. Only the moderators
— ABC's David Muir and Linsey Davis — are permitted to ask questions.
The debate will last 90 minutes and will include two commercial breaks.
Lincoln-Douglass (1858)
The debates
consisted of a one hour opening speech, an hour and a half answer, and
a half hour rebuttal, with the two men alternating the privilege of
opening and closing. The contests drew immense crowds for the time, as
thousands gathered underneath the prairie sky to listen as two
political titans traded rhetorical thrusts and parries.
Anthony Fauci on Trump's attention span (from Salon (9-9-20), "Four stunning revelations Bob Woodward reveals about Donald Trump in his devastating new book "Rage"")
According
to "Rage," expert immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci — who has been part of
Trump's coronavirus task force — expressed frustration over
Trump's response to the coronavirus crisis, describing Trump's
leadership as "rudderless" and complaining to others that his
"attention span is like a minus number."
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|
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Attention Span II/ELITES
Future Forward PAC
Contributor
|
Occupation
|
Praxis
|
Amount
|
Michael Bloomberg
|
Bloomberg Inc.
|
privately held financial, software, data, and media company
|
$20,000,000
|
James Simmons
|
Euclidean Capital
|
James Simons, founded hedge fund Renaissance Technologies in 1982.
|
$6,600,000
|
Reid Hoffman
|
Greylock
|
venture capital firm. The firm focuses on early-stage companies in consumer and enterprise software.
|
$6,000,000
|
Marc Stad
|
Not employed
|
Marc
Stad is a tech investor and the founder of Dragoneer Investment Group,
which manages over $23 billion in assets. He has backed companies like
Airbnb, DoorDash and Uber, and was the youngest Commissioner in San
Francisco's history.
|
$5,000,000
|
Dustin A. Moskovitz
|
Asana
|
software
company based in San Francisco whose flagship Asana service is a web
and mobile "work management" platform designed to help teams organize,
track, and manage their work.
|
$3,000,000
|
Reid Hoffman
|
Greylock |
xx
|
$3,000,000
|
Fred Eychaner
|
News Web Corp.
|
|
$3,000,000
|
James Simmons
|
Euclidean Capital |
|
$2,500,000
|
| Fred Eychaner |
News Web Corp. |
|
$2,000,000
|
Kenneth Duda
|
Arista Networks Inc.
|
|
$2,000,000
|
| Fred Eychaner |
News Web Corp. |
|
$2,000,000
|
Eric Schmidt
|
Alphabet Inc.
|
|
$1,600,000
|
Reed Hastings
|
Netflix
|
|
$1,000,000
|
Jeffrey Lawson
|
Twilio
|
|
1,000,000
|
Erica Lawson
|
U. of Cal. SF
|
|
$1,000,000
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
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the people speak: comments
lack of hierarchical classification: Piaget's class inclusion problem
The
cry during the town hall riots of 'don't touch my Medicare' indicated
that these individuals did not grasp that Medicare is a government
program--they could not subsume the particular--Medicare--under the
general--government program.
concept or epithet? Talkin'
shit
Wolf's
comments on the Ed Show regarding his billboard (President or jihad?)
likewise indicate a similar cognitive limitation. When Wolf was
asked "what does jihad mean to you?" he ansered, "it's certainly not
one of us. It's something other . . . " For him jihad
was not a concept but an epithet. The use of words, such as
socialism, fascism, communism, and jihad that in modern language use
denote concepts are likewise used instead as epithets. Talkin'
shit involves epithets mixed in with standard pollitical terms like
tarriffs and imigration, but the latter play only a decorative
role. When trump talks tarrifs, as he did in NY Econ Club, it is
only in the context of talkin' shit. Trump is all performance; no
policy: he is cognitively developmentally unable to participate in real
discussions of policy issues, and strategic objectives. This is
the lesson we learn from takin chapter 9 seriously. This is what Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer discovered when they had their infamous meeting with Trump.
rage trumps reason
The
Left-Right 'debate' (Ground Zero Mosque Rallies) at a ground zero
anti-Islam demonstration could easily be seen as a mere difference of
opinion on where the mosque should be located, with one view based on
the constitution, the other based on a rage that trumps reason.
The
tepid rationality of the one
(L) was met with the emotional outburst of the other (R) that took a
particular form: given the ontological priority of rage over ideation,
the leap of illogic is understandable: a target must be found, the rage
against it justified. Redemptive violence (Paxton) is the order
of the day. This is the essense of Trump rallies unfolding.
This is what it all boils down to. Trump does not have a policy
on the border; border-talk is just a vehicle for the expression of
rage, a primitivized and degraded form
of Dasein. Yet MSNBC and others always take the bait, taking at
face value statements that contain words like tarriff and child-care,
thus missing entirely the primordiality of the Trump-audience
dialectic.
(Read
Eli Eli Zaretsky, "The Mass Psychology of Trumpism" (London Review of Books, 18 September 20)).
Trump's promise of mass deportations is nothing less
than a genocidal fantasy.
The cruelty is the point. "Trump" enables and embodies the latest
stage of capitalism--the predatory assault on the commonweal (GOP
elites), which coexists with with the more "rational" predatory
forces of globalization and financialization (bipartisan and democratic
elites). See Elites: Strategic and Otherwise.
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the people speak
The article from
the Huffington Post and the two videos below should be interpreted in
cognitive as well as
emotional terms.
Keep
Your Goddamn Government Hands Off My Medicare! Huffington Post,
June 27, 2010
Anti-Obama
Billboard: President? or Jihad?
November
23, 2009 MSNBC The ED Show (Video and transcript)
SCHULTZ:
.
. . what does jihad mean to you, Mr. Wolf?
WOLF: I think to me it means it's an extreme element of a struggle to
overcome somebody. It can be interpreted probably some different ways.
but to me it's-it's
certainly not one of us. It's something other than
what an American is, that I've been taught.
SCHULTZ: Jihad is religious war, is it not? The definition is religious
war. You must have put that word up there for something. Do you think
Barack Obama wants a religious war?
WOLF: I think it's definitely anti-Christian. Yes, I do.
Ground
Zero Mosque Rallies Sept. 11 CNN (at 1 minute in)
---->
L.
We believe in the same document. You just said you
believe in the Constitution.
R. I do believe in the Constitution
L. But you just said you don't.
R.
People were jumping out of the buildings; people were
disintegrating, all over the city
L. By terrorists. you can't
blame Muslims for the
work of the terrorists.
R. I'm not blaming Muslims. But
if they had the
respect that they claim they have . . .
L. Why should they have to appologize for
the actions of
radicals?
R. I would rather see no church than a
mosque right where
people are going to to . . .
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the Mattis Lemma:
"If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally
illiterate."
1. What
is it to be nominally literate but functionally illiterate?
General Mattis poses a fundamental question about the nature of
cognitive-discursive performativities. What kind of texts
ought one to have read in order to be a competent participant in policy
discussions with the Joint Chiefs? Here are some examples:
Samuel A. Greene and Graeme B. Robertson, Putin vs. the People: the Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia (Yale, 2019)
Samuel A. Greene and Graeme B. Robertson, "Putin’s rule depends on
creating foreign enemies — and domestic ‘traitors’. He initiates
conflict abroad to bolster support at home. But has he overreached this
time?" (Washington Post, February 24, 2022)
Henry E. Hale*, "The Continuing Evolution of Russia's Political System", in Richard Sakwa, Henry E. Hale and Stephen White, Developments in Russian Politics 9 (Duke, 2019).
Henry E. Hale, Patronal Politics: Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, 2015)
Read these excerpts to get a sense of the formal operational mode of cognitive-discursive performativity.1 The kind of books Mattis is referring to are works of
formal operational competence. In
general, it is not possible to engage in serious policy discucssions
unless one is formal operational and more (post-formal/critical theory).
2. For example, consider the 2008 Congressional debate on the
auto industry bailout. Democrats refered to the input-output matrix of
auto production (supply chain +) in the United States, and expressed concerns about the
systems impact of an auto industry collapse. Their cognitive
operations were focused on facts and concepts appropriate to a
discussion of economic policy.
On the other hand, the GOP confined iself to primarily moralistic
arguments and accusations about rewarding the bad behavior of auto
executives. Of course the attacks on Detroit, as the iconic
symbol of blacks and unions, were just one more performance of a r*c*st
semiotic. Absent from the set of GOP rhetorical elements were
economic data and economic concepts--a striking omission in a debate on
economic policy. Instead it is the shibboleths of a provincial
Protestantism that were repeatedly deployed.
Indeed, GOP economic policy statements are nothing more than the
shibboleths of a provincial Protestantism, and ought not be taken as
real conceptualizations of things economic. These statements are
easily debunked by real economists (Zombie Economics, see Paul Krugman,
Brad de Long on the Ryan kill Medicare "plan" krugman).
However, by taking them seriously (that is what Krugman does when he
addressed these statements as economic) the critics inadvertently lend
credibiity to the pre-scientific cognitive performativity of the
right. The specific performative domain of today's rightwing
politics is primarily preoperational and gestural. (Donald)
1. see Measures of Cognitive Performativity
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Trump's inner circle speaks
precausal reasoning (Lightfoot, Cole and cole, p. 279-80)
"Fauci Speaks His Mind on Trump’s Rages and Their ‘Complicated’ Relationship" (NYT 6-14-24)
Dr. Fauci’s first encounter with Mr.
Trump was before the coronavirus pandemic, at a White House ceremony
where the president signed an executive order that called for
improvements in the manufacturing and distribution of flu vaccines.
After the event, Mr. Trump remarked to Dr. Fauci that he had never had
a flu shot.
“When I asked him why, he answered, ‘Well, I’ve never gotten the flu. Why did I need a flu shot?’
I did not respond,” Dr. Fauci wrote. The implication was clear: The
doctor was flabbergasted to discover that Mr. Trump knew so little1
about the purpose of vaccines.
ego-centrism (and centration: child-care statement)
from "Woodward
book: Trump says he knew coronavirus was ‘deadly’ and worse
than the flu while intentionally misleading Americans, Washington Post 9-9-20
In a separate conversation recounted by Woodward, Mattis told Coats,
“The president has no moral compass,” to which the director of national
intelligence replied: “True. To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what
he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a
lie.”
functional illiteracy
from "Jim Mattis’s reading list offers a jarring contrast to Trump’s lack of intellectual curiosity," James Hohmann, Washington Post, 9- 4-19
"If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally
illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal
experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you,” Jim Mattis
writes in his new memoir, which came out yesterday. “Any commander who
claims he is ‘too busy to read’ is going to fill body bags with his
troops as he learns the hard way."
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the Mattis and Tillerson Lemmas Deployed
"collective monologues"
At
the right, three examples of trumptalk. The first, Trump's riff
on the civil war, is truly special. The absence of epithets
leaves trump's "mind" naked and exposed.
The second,
Jessica Grose's take on Trump's response to a question on child care,
tells us a great deal about the respectable media. Trump's
meandering reply, which in its inner structure is identical to his
comment on the civil war, has Jessica flumoxed: "Here's a brief snippet
that honestly I don't even know how to punctuate properly . . . .
Apparently, what he is saying here is that he would make child care
more affordable by raising tariffs on imports, though he did not
explain how that would work." Wrong, Jessica, Wrong wrong
wrong! he is not saying anything. But he is doing something.
The third, Kaitlan
Collins' interview of Maggie Haberman regarding Trump's response to a
question about the abortion pill Mifepristone, was similarly revealing:
"It wasn't even clear that he [Trump] understood; His answer was
incoherent; I don't know what he thought he was answering; As we have
seen him do with many other things, he just kicks it down the
road".
No, Maggie, he is not just kicking "it" down the road. There is no "it."
Perhaps this
excerpt from a SUNY-Cortland website will help us understand the
relationship between media and trump. Media hacks are primed to
engage in the "issues", such as they are, that make up the meat and
potatoes of the two-party rhetorical field. One must understand
the prime (though only implicit) directive of two-party discourse:
never mention anything related to "globalization." That is, one
must not--repeat, NOT--confront the situation as described by Geoff Eley in his concluding remarks in Nazism as Fascism. What we get with the media's engagement with trumptalk is akin to the collective monoogue described below:
from SUNY-Cortland website
Throughout
most of the preoperational stage, a child's thinking is self-centered,
or egocentric. According to Piaget, during the preoperational stage a
child has difficulty understanding life from any other perspective than
his own. In this stage, the child is very me, myself, and I oriented.
Egocentrism
is very apparent in the relationship between two preschoolchildren.
Imagine two children are playing right next to each other, oneplaying
with a coloring book and the other with a doll. They are talking to
each other in sequence, but each child is completely oblivious to what
the otheris saying.
Julie: "I love my dolly, her name is Tina"
Carol: "I'm going to color the sun yellow"
Julie: "She has long, curly hair like my auntie"
Carol: "Maybe I'll color the trees yellow, too"
Julie: "I wonder what Tina's eyes are made of?"
Carol: "I lost my orange crayon"
Julie: " I know her eyes are made of glass."
These type
of exchanges are called "collective monologues". This type of monologue
demonstrates the egocentrism of children's thinking in this stage.
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Trump speaks (word salad)
Donald Trump Takes Shots At Nikki Haley For Civil War Remark
This stuff is covered by respectable media as a "debate" on the civil
war. The exchange between Niki Haley and Donald Trump was no
debate, but rather a symptom of a general cognitive degeneration in the
public space of the semiosphere.
The civil war was so
fascinating, so horrible, so horrible, but so fascinating, it was, I
don't know, it was just different. I just find it, I'm so
attracted to seeing it, so many mistakes were made. see, there
was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with
you, I think could have been negotiated that, because I was reading
something and I said that this is something that could have been
negotiated, you know. there was just for all those people to die,
and they died viciously. That was a vicious vicious war.
Abraham Lincoln, of course, if he negotiated it, you probably wouldn't
even know who Abraham Lincoln was. He would have been president,
but he would have been president, and he would have been, he wouldn't
have been the Abraham Lincoln would have been different, but that would
have been okay. It was a hell of a time. And you think of
it today, I would have absolutely stopped Putin. He would have
never gone in. And he didn't, you know, for four years.
There was never even a thought of it going in. And that was the
apple of his eye.
Jessica Grose, Opinion Writer: "Trump’s Child Care Plan Is Nonsensical" (NYT 9-6-24)*
On Thursday at the Economic Club of New York, former President Donald
Trump was asked a question about whether he would commit to making
child care more affordable. In a two-minute response, he offered a pile
of nonsense. Here’s a brief snippet that honestly I didn’t even know
how to punctuate properly:
We had Senator Marco Rubio
and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very
important issue. But I think, when you talk about the kind of numbers
that I’m talking about, that, because the child care is child care,
couldn’t, you know, it’s something you have to have it in this country,
you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to
the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at
levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very
quickly and it’s not going to stop them doing business with us.
Apparently, what he’s saying here is that he would make child care more
affordable by raising tariffs on imports, though he did not explain how
that would work.
Trump called Maggie Haberman to complain about helicopter story. Hear what she told him (CNN, August 10, 2024) re Press Conf Mara Lago Friday Aug 8
Kaitlan Collins: Mifepristone . . . was something that Trump was asked about. He would
have the FDA block access, or limit access to it, if he becomes
president . . .
Maggie Haberman: It wasn't even clear that he [Trump] understood what
the question [regarding the use of Mifepristone] was, to be honest. His answer was incoherent,
and it was something about support and voters, and the question was
about FDA regulations, and about justice department enforcement, so, I
don't know what he thought he was answering. He suggested to Time
magazine many weeks ago that he was going to have a major announcement
about this, and that he felt very strongly about it, and as we have
seen him do with many other things, he just kicks it down the road by
saying he'll talk about it at a later date, as he did with a question
yesterday about an abortion referendum in his own state and how he'll
vote on it.
* For more on this, see 'Incoherent word salad': Trump stumbles when asked how he'd tackle child care (NBC News)
See Overview for links
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Talkin' Shit: the Roper Theorem, the Tillerson and Mattis Lemmas, and the Sado-Sexual Eigenvector of GOP Performativity
The Zaretsky Transformation
compare with Zaretsky
this extremely valuable analysis of a trump rally is made even more valuable by bringing in Zaretsky and From FDR to Donald Trump: a cognitive-discursive assessment
Nevertheless, The 9 Elements misses the cog-disc performativity
of talkin' shit. Many of Philbrick and Wu's categories bleed into
one another under the sign of talkin' shit.
patrimonial dimension of trumptalk
sado-sexual
dialectic of identit
capacity for language; liminal zone. Dupre on developmental pathways
Daniel Dor, Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis, The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014), p.4
. . . in the case of many nonhuman primates, dominance asserted through
violence or threat is the internal principle of social organization . .
. [Among humans] . . . primate-style dominance is periodically
overthrown and then restored, only to be overthrown and restored again
and again.
What is the performative essence of fascism?
| Themes
Savior (pomposity--see Zaretsky)
Insults Talkin' Shit
Deceipts Talkin' Shit
The hits Talkin' Shit
Political violence Sadism
Policy promises/Trump agenda Talkin' Shit
Digressions disintegration of language
Anti-democratic statements Talkin' Shit
Stumbles see Meeting in the tank
Doing vs. Saying. Media's fundamental "mistake": the reduction of
a situated cogntive-discursive performance to a mere transcript (what trump seems to be saying . . .)
Doing: what is happening (in the audience) when Trump is talkin' shit?
Talkin' Shit and telephone threats
|
findings so far: The Roper Theorem; the Tilleson lemma; the Mattis lemma
|
The Nine Elements of a Trump Rally
By Ian Prasad Philbrick and Ashley Wu Oct. 8, 2024, NYT
|
Talkin'
shit involves epithets mixed in with standard pollitical terms like
tarriffs and imigration, but the latter play only a decorative
role.
Talkin' Shit is the name of the phenomenological bundle that contains the Lacan-Atwater signifying chain. There are two kinds of talkin' shit: the punchy epithetical jab,
and the more lyrical "they're comming, the rapists, murderers,
etc." (add Kamala . . . mental)Both of these are sado-sexual in character and
content. This is the stuff of fascism. (Franzen) more
mellow expression of thee same. A poor substute for a
full-troated genocidial fantasdy
findings so far: The Roper Theoremt; the Tilleson lemma; the Mattis lemma
The
hatred and terror that drove people to such violence were shaped by
social tensions and religious beliefs, but the passions themselves
derived from deeply rooted fantasies, extravagent in their evocation of
demonic lovers and Satanic revels. These fantasies shared, for
the most part, a standard structure and a similar set of primary
themes. p. 7
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the dissolution of language
and
cognition
Elite colleges shocked to discover students 'don't know how' to read books: 'My jaw dropped'
Lindsay Kornick
Fox News Thu, October 3, 2024 at 7:00 AM EDTˇ3 min read
THE ELITE COLLEGE STUDENTS WHO CAN’T READ BOOKS
To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
By Rose Horowitch Updated at 10:57 a.m. ET on October 1, 2024. the Atlantic
talk.collegeconfidential
https://talk.collegeconfidential.com
/t/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/3674564)
the best article I have seen on TrumpInterviewTalk (compare with TrumpRallyTalk)
Trump Crumbles When Pressed on Economic Policy in Tense Interview, BY NIKKI MCCANN RAMIREZ, RYAN BORT
OCTOBER 15, Rolling Stone
|
|
Break
|
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The
stuff of fascism is with us always
The
stuff of fascism is with us always; but the circumstances (at the right: Eley; below: Greene & Robertson) under which
the stuff gets taken up by various political elites1 and transformed
into politics vary.
What is the "stuff" of fascism? For starters, consider these excerpts from from Frank Ninivaggi, Envy Theory: Perspectives on the Psychology of Envy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).
Hatred, anger, and rage; sadistic aggression; envy and greed
Read Zaretsky
from Samuel A. Greene and Graeme B. Robertson, Putin vs. the People: the Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia (Yale, 2019), p.
211
Economic dislocations resulting from the global
financial crisis of 2008-09 and the inability of
establishment political parties to formulate a coherent response have
reshaped politics in many countries, detaching the debate from clearly
articulated interests and policies. In the absence of a coherent
policy response, fringe politicians appeal to values, to exclusionary
notions of community, and to patriotism. The ability of such
appeals to sway millions of voters in the United States, the UK,
France, Italy, Germany and elsewhere is clear.
1a. from Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power. Volume II: The rise of classes and national states (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
It
is a basic tenet of my work that societies are not systems. There
is no ultimately determining structure to human existence--at least
none that social actors or sociological observers, situated in its
midst, can discern. What we call societies are only loose
aggregates of diverse, overlapping, intersecting power networks.
p. 506
America
has not so much been exceptional as it has gradually come to represent
one extreme on a continuum of class relations. America has never
differed qualitatively from other national cases. Differences
have been of degree, not kind. . . . Explanations asserting an
original and enduring American exceptionalism . . . have only a very
limited truth. p. 638
1b. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume 3 Chapter 1: Introduction
human
societies form around four distinct power sources – ideological,
economic, military and political – which have a relative degree of
autonomy from each other.
1c. G. William Domhoff,The Four Networks Theory of Power: A Theoretical Home for Power Structure Research
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Fascism: the Dialectic of Stuff and Circumstances
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the Stuff of Fascism
The Sado-Sexual Eigenvector of GOP Performativity: the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain
from
Wikipedia:
(Lee
Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy)
As a member of the
Reagan administration in 1981, Atwater gave an
anonymous interview to political scientist Alexander P. Lamis. Part of
the interview was printed in Lamis's book The Two-Party South, then
reprinted in Southern Politics in the 1990s with Atwater's name
revealed. . . . Atwater talked about the Republican Southern Strategy
and Ronald Reagan's version of it:
Atwater: As to the
whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent,
Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights
Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new
Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn't have to do that. All you
have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the
issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal conservatism,
balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.
Questioner:
But the fact
is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the
racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by
cutting down on food stamps?
Atwater:
You start out in
1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say
"nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like
forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so
abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these
things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct
of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously
maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if
it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away
with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me —
because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much
more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more
abstract than "Nigger, nigger."[8][9]
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the New Deal
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Action Networks (Networks of Power) Instead of "Class"
Elites: KE & New Deal (Maza*) "Third Force"
*
Maza describes the biocultural niche of modernity as networks of
power-discourse
central to what has become known as the French
Revolution.
Fig. 1a, The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal state, is an organizational chart of the Roosevelt
administration circa 1936. This particular social formation
(TS+FF) emerged out of the Eastern Rate Case of 1910, played a critical
role in the industrial side of the conduct of the First World War (when
FDR, Frankfurter, and the Taylor society linked up), and became, as
Figure 1a indicates, the socio-cultural infrastructure of the New Deal
state.
Fast forward . . . The crisis of the 1930s--the Great
Depression--was the central question of that period, addressed head-on
by FDR and the New Dealers in the Democratic Party. The crisis of
the twenty-first century--only poorly captured by the term
globalization--is addressed not at all by today's Democratic
Party. Perhaps this is because the Democratic Party, by the
1990s, had become--with NAFTA--the party of globalization. The
result of this failure to address the central question of our
time--globalization--is what made Donald Trump possible. JAN 6
The Democratic Party has become the party of globalization. We have to change that.
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*
Maza describes the biocultural niche of modernity as networks of
power-discourse
central to what has become known as the French
Revolution.
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Figure 1a. Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind:
The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal state
Source: "Membership List, May 1927," in the Morris L. Cooke Papers, box 66, FDR Library,
and The United States Government Manual 1937. Also: the Papers of John M. Carmody
The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal State: Career Matrix
Ordway Tead, "An Interpretative Forecast of the NRA: Is the Trend Toward Fascist or
Socialized Self-Government?" Bulletin of the Taylor Society, August 1933
For context see Elites: Strategic and Otherwise
"Liberal Businessmen" Ezekiel
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Elites: Capital
Elites
are in part defined by the input-ouput matrices (really existing
markets, praxiological flows) of the major sectors of the American
political economy (Fig. 1). Such matrices are shorthand ways of
referring to inputs of money, raw materials, intermediate goods, and
services; and outputs of raw materials, intermediate goods, finished
goods, and services.
Commodities in International Trade includes much of the transportation
and services infrastructure primarily dependent on such trade and thus
belongs to the imput-output matrix of the latter: shipping, railroad,
insurance, legal and other services. (W. Averill Harriman Wiki
article). Elliot A. Rosen, Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Brains
Trust: from Depression to New Deal (Columbia University Press, 1977),
although not conceptualizing it as such, gives a compelling description
of Commodities in International Trade in action around the candidacies
of Al Smith and Newton Baker. Also see Irving Katz, August
Belmont; a political biography (Columbia University Press, 1968).
The Securities bloc was the object of analysis by Louis D. Brandeis in
his book Other People's Money. Brandeis used the results of the
Pujo Committee's Investigation of Financial and Monetary Conditions in
the United States (see Pujo Committee Interlocking Directorates
1912). A defining moment in the conflict between the emerging
mass consumption sector and the Securities bloc was the Eastern Rate
Case of 1910, out of which emerged the Taylor Society. (see
unfinished tables HERE.)
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U.S. Political Economy by Sector, 1910 to 1939
input-output matrices: capital formations and the two-party system
Elites: Strategic and Otherwise
KE2019
The New Deal and Capitalism (notes)
Elites in the Mobilization of Ressentiment
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Capital: the Mass Distribution Sector
In
Fig. at right I look at the major sector in the Taylor Society. I
have proceeded immanently, taking the 1927 member list of the Taylor
Society and arranging the firms according to their place in the flow of
money and goods. These are actually quite large firms in relation
to their specific field of economic activity; they are technologically
progressive; and are intellectually among the vanguard of
capitalists. To refer to them as small and provincial is flatly
wrong. Even to refer to them as competitive, while not flat-out
wrong, is misleading. Steve Fraser's study of Sidney Hillman
describes the joint union-management efforts to stabilize the market by
taking labor out of competition.
provincial "small" business are the "base" of the GOP. Another "base" is the mob at the capitol.
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Taylor
Society, 1927: Mass
Distribution, input-output flows
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Elites: Political: UAW-Unity Caucus
What
made this whole site
possible is the literary and cognitive capabilities of the
bildungs-proletarians and plebeian upstarts whom I interviewed
Figure 1b, The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943: Intersubjectivity, Shared
Intentionality, and the Extended Mind (Bildungsproletarians and
Plebeian Upstarts), is a map of sources. While I interviewed
veterans of the organizational struggle from the Conner Avenue area on
the far east side of Detroit (Briggs, Budd Wheel, Hudson, and Chrysler), and workers from Fleetwood, Ternstedt,
and Ford on the west side of the city, the most intensive work was done
with veterans of the organizational struggle on the near east side:
Michigan Steel Tube, Chrysler Highland Park, Murray Body, Dodge Main,
Midland Steel, Detroit Steel Products, Packard, and Plymouth, and with
veterans of the organizational struggle in Flint (Fisher 1, Chevrolet, and Buick) and Pontiac (Pontiac Motors, Yellow Cab).
What
made this whole site
possible is the literary and cognitive capabilities of the
bildungs-proletarians and plebeian upstarts whom I interviewed. These
bildungs-proletarians inhabited the biocultural niche of modernity. In
this regard they had more in common with the New Deal vanguard of
Figure 1a than they had with the “masses” of their fellow workers in
the plants. For this reason it was
possible to co-construct a discursive web incorporating all the
interviews that, in another context, could be referred to as the
extended mind of the Unity caucus.
I had no idea at the time (the
mid-1970s) that these interviews would prove to be critical to a
reconceptualization of modernity as a mode of cognitive-discursive
performativity that includes the concepts of biocultural niche and bildung.
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figure 1b.
A Geography of Dasein
The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943:
Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind
Bildungsproletarians and Plebeian Upstarts
the UAW, 1933-1943: a working notebook
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Action Networks (instead of class): 2/2
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Then, In the mid-1970s I had further discussions with the
bildungsproletarians and plebeian upstarts who led the efforts to
unionize the auto industry in the 1930s. Figure 1b. The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943,
emerged out of these discussions with veterans of the formative years
of the UAW. This map was only constructed in the time of Trump,
although the interviews that produced it were conducted in the
mid-1970s. Thus, it is only recently that I realized that the Unity
caucus was a fusion of bildungs-proletarians and plebeian upstarts,
was the vanguard of modernity in the factories of southeastern
Michigan, and was organically related to the Keynesian elite in the New
Deal state.
The bildungs-proletarians component of that fusion was made up mostly
of communists and socialists. It was these bildungs-proletarians
around whom formed the action networks of plebeian upstarts who created
the modern UAW in the late 1930s.
What made this whole site possible is the literary and cognitive
capabilities of the bildungs-proletarians and plebeian upstarts whom I
interviewed. These bildungs-proletarians inhabited the biocultural
niche of modernity. In this regard they had more in common with the
New Deal vanguard of Figure 1a than they had with the “masses” of their
fellow workers in the plants. For this reason it was possible to
co-construct a discursive web incorporating all the interviews that, in
another context, could be referred to as the extended mind of the Unity
caucus.
All of us historians who interviewed these workers back in the nineteen
seventies and eighties were not only struck by their powers of mind,
but also by what can only be described as their strength of character.
They were the embodiment of civic republicanism.
I had no idea at the time (the mid-1970s) that these interviews would
prove to be critical to a reconceptualization of modernity as a mode of
linguistic and cognitive performativity that includes a concept of
biocultural niche and bildung.
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3. Joe Bidinger, Pete Olshove, and Chester Podgorsky in
front of one of the large presses that produced
the siderails for the
frame. In this interview Joe Bidinger describes the step-by-step movement of metal
from raw input to finished output.
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Cliff Williams Page
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Fascism at the Rouge, circa 1941
from Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit:
Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (Basic Books, 1995), p. 82
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Reading and Modernity: 1750-1936
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Martyn Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing In the Western World (2010)
9. The Reading Fever, 1750-1830
("Everyone in Paris is reading . . . People read while riding in
carriages or taking walks . . . Women, children, journeymen
and apprentices read in shops. On Sundays people read while
seated at the front of their houses; lackeys read on their
back seats, coachmen up on their boxes, and soldiers keeping guard.")
10. The Age of the Mass Reading Public (“Between the 1830s and the
First World War . . . a mass reading public came into existence.”)
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11. New Readers and Reading Cultures ("The half century between the
1880s and the 1930s was the golden age of the book in the West.")
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To read
a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to
the reading.
I think that that kind of concentration, and focus,
and attentiveness, is hard to come by.
from Maryanne Wolf, Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (Harper Collins, 2018), p. 179
The seriousness of the current
reality means that at the present rate, the majority of eighth-grade
children could be classified as functionally illiterate in a few years' time.
from Philip Roth unbound: interview transcript (Daily Beast, October 30, 2009)
Tina
Brown: You said in an interview that you don’t think novels are going
to be read 25 years from now. Were you being provocative or do you
believe that to be true?
Philip
Roth: I was being optimistic about 25 years really. No, I think it’s
going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them, but
it’ll be a small group of people—maybe more people than now read Latin
poetry, but somewhere in that range. . . . To read a novel
requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the
reading. . . I think that that kind of concentration, and focus,
and attentiveness, is hard to come by. It’s hard to find huge numbers
of people, or large numbers of people or significant numbers of people
who have those qualities.
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Critical Theory?
History without philosophy is only a screen on which to project the shibboleths of our time.
Thinking must first emancipate itself from the Cartesian myth--the
ontological presupposition of
the Cartesian self and its associated
rhetorical elements of consciousness, belief, motive, ideology
and
interest. Failure to do so has the effect, a priori, of blocking
conceptualization of questions of
ontology, agency, intentionality,
habitus, networks and contexts.
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from Imanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (A 51/B 75) p. 107 (Hackett Publishing Co., 1996):
Thoughts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.
from Eckart Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: a Systematic Reconstruction (Harvard, 2012)
.
. . concepts have their basis in functions, by which Kant understands
“the unity of the act of bringing various representations under one
common representaton.” (A68). A concept is a rule for combining
certain representations (and thus also a principle for excluding
certain others).
To make concepts out
of representations one must be able to compare, to reflect, and to
abstract, for these three logical operations of the understanding are
the essential and universal conditions for the generation of every
concept whatsoever.
from Levi R. Bryant, Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence (Northwestern University Press, 2008)
. . . . so long as philosophy assumes that thought has a natural
affinity with the true . . . a specific form of objectivity (natural
common sense), and bases itself on the model of recognition, thought
cannot help but become unconsciously trapped in its own implicit
presuppositions which are culturally, historically, and socially
contingent. . . . Deleuze thus begins with a critique of the
transcendental subject as a structure consisting of invariant
categories. (17)
from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (462)
In place of "sociology," a theory of the forms of domination.1
In place of "society," the culture complex . . . 2
t
from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (Preface)
What
I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come
differerently: the advent of nihilism.3
1. networks of power; elites: strategic and otherwise
2. biocultural niche, cognitive-discursive performativities
3. see Nihilism
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Fascism: "He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting."
Robert C. Gordon, “Race,” in R. J. B. Bosworth, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Fascism
(Oxford, 2009), p. 315
In this longue durée
perspective, the problems of moving from the specifics of race within
single fascist regimes to a ‘fascist common denominator’ may fade in
comparison with the possibility that racism lies at the core of the
modern nation and modernity itself.
Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale, 2004):
The
hatred and terror that drove people to such violence were shaped by
social tensions and religious beliefs, but the passions themselves
derived from deeply rooted fantasies, extravagent in their evocation of
demonic lovers and Satanic revels. These fantasies shared, for
the most part, a standard structure and a similar set of primary
themes. p. 7
"It’s Just Too Much: A Florida Town Grapples With a Shutdown After a Hurricane," New York Times, 1-7-19.
I
voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” an employee of the
Federal prison in the Florida Panhandle said. “I thought he was going
to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting."
It was the pictures of Palestinians swimming and sunning at a Gaza
beach that rubbed Yehuda Shlezinger, an Israeli journalist, the wrong
way. Stylish in round red glasses and a faint scruff of beard, Mr.
Shlezinger unloaded his revulsion at the “disturbing” pictures while
appearing on Israel’s Channel 12.
“These people there deserve death, a hard death, an agonizing death,
and instead we see them enjoying on the beach and having fun,”
complained Mr. Shlezinger, the religious affairs correspondent for the
widely circulated right-wing Israel Hayom
newspaper. “We should have seen a lot more revenge there,” Mr.
Shlezinger unrepentantly added. “A lot more rivers of Gazans’ blood.”
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Modernity as a Mode of Cognitive-Discursive Performativity (4)
This article (click here for full text) provided by Cliff Williams (Pontiac, GM
Truck and Bus, UAW local 159) is
an eye-opener. It pulls the rug out from under the Enlightenment
phantasies that saw in the Flint sit-down strike the fulfillment of the
social democratic hopes of yesteryear. I will deal with this
throughout this site. (see fascism in GM, Ford, and Packard) That I can deal with it at all is due to
the fact that my interviewees (who were mostly bildungs-proletarians)
were embedded in the biocultural niche of modernity. These
bildungs-proletararians were intensely rather that merely
literate. They were quintessentially modern.
What made this whole site possible was the literary and cognitive capabilities of the bildungs-proletarian whom I interviewed.
In addition, some of these interviews forced me to
include the more nebulous concept of jouissance, which I now (March 2024) see as the psychological side of bildung. (See especially Alcorn in the page Bildung: References.) When discussing such concepts of experience as bildung and jouissance--that is, when discussing sensibilities--see John L. Brooke's "There is a North": fugitive slaves, political crisis, and cultural transformation in the coming of the Civil War (U. of Mass. 2019).
It was these bildungs-proletarians around whom formed the action
networks of plebeian upstarts (the Unity Caucus) who created the modern
UAW in the 1930s. From the standpoint of praxis both
the Unity Caucus and the Keynesian elite should be conceived of as
vanguard formations within the biocultural field of Progressivism. Hence the juxtaposition of Figures 1 and 2.
What made this whole site possible is the literary and cognitive capabilities of the bildungsproletarian whom I interviewed.
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Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture by Krimsky, Sloan and Hammonds (Columbia, 2011). See review by Rob DeSalle in The Quarterly Review of Biology,
Vol. 87, No. 2 (June 2012), p. 160. Also: Traces of History:
Elementary Structures of Race, by Patrick Wolfe (Verso, 2016 )
Michael E. Staub, The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and
Intelligence between Brown and The Bell Curve (The University of North
Carolina Press, 2018)
Ken Richardson, Genes, Brains, and Human Potential: The Science and Ideology of Intelligence (Columbia, 2017)
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