Figure Zero Post=Election
Figure 00
FigureZeroJune24
Figure Zero July
Figure Zero September
Figure Zero
FigureZeroBackup
index2023July B
Labor
indexindex
From the New Deal to Donald Trump
TEXTS, GRAPHIC MATERIALS, & DATA SETS
(including Timelines and Maps)
clinton
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From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States
Evidence
abounds in the public arena* of a widespread dissolution of language and
cognition--a catastrophe of the first order (an ontological catastrophe). Because the media performs this cognitive decline, the decay
of reason is invisible within the cognitively decaying public arena.
The historicity of language and cognition, their biocultural
embeddedness, and their contemporary disintegration, is one of the
fundamental questions posed by this site.
Outside
of this framework--The historicity of language and cognition--"Trump"
becomes unintelligible. Thus, in order to use this site,
the reader must read these excerpts from
Daniel Dor, Chris Knight, and Jerome Lewis, The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014): long excerpts. A shorter summary and brief excerpts can be found here. Read the summary and short excerpts now. Sinha and Shilton et. al. bring us up to date.
Sinha, C. (2021). Artefacts, symbols, and the socio-cultural dynamics of niche construction, in The Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution (Oxford, 2021).
Shilton, D; Bre ski, M; Dor, D; Jablonka, E (February 14, 2020). " Human Social Evolution: Self-Domestication or Self-Control?". Frontiers in Psychology. 11: 134.
The Social Origins of Language should be seen as the product of the kind of thinking inaugurated by Immanuel Kant and completed by G. W. F. Hegel (The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy).
Names can be taken as signposts along the way to the current scene:
Marx, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze . . .
*As distinct Habermas’s concept of the public sphere.
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indexMay2023
KE2013
PhiloNotebook
Sitemap
Temp Storage
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Donald Trump and the Adventures of Dasein:
Figure 0. From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States
larger image much larger image
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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.
Figure 0. From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States,
places "The Great Leader" in its biocultual 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.1 Its
key concept--biocultural niche--is fundamental to this site.
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 performativities of modernity is invisible within the
cognitively decaying media sphere.
The historicity of language and cognition, their biocultural
embeddedness, and their contemporary disintegration, is one of the
fundamental questions posed by this site. This is the nihilism that Nietzsche anticipated.
The Social Origins of Language helps to situate this
existential catastrophe of which "The Great Leader" is an index. The concept of biocultural niche
enables us to see
this catastrophe. It is the intention of this site to incorporate
discussions of “intelligence”2 within the broader framework of
SOOL. Here intelligence means cognitive-discursive performatiity
(Ceci, On Intelligence, Harvard, 1996). See Biocultural Niche: Language, Thinking, Education. Vygotsky
1. Figure 0 is the irreducible minimum if one is to understand the New
Deal,The Great Leader, and the historical path connecting them. This is because The Great Leader 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. (See excerpts from Dor et. al. and de Waal at the lower right.) The catastrophe now unfolding is nothing less than the disintegration of the biocultural niche of modernity.3
This is the result of an evaluation of the cognitive-discurive performativity of the Great Leader.Figure 0. From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States,
places "The Great Leader" in its biocultual 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.1 Its
key concept--biocultural niche--is fundamental to this site.
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 performativities of modernity is invisible within the
cognitively decaying media sphere.
The historicity of language and cognition, their biocultural
embeddedness, and their contemporary disintegration, is one of the
fundamental questions posed by this site. This is the nihilism that Nietzsche anticipated.
The Social Origins of Language helps to situate this
existential catastrophe of which "The Great Leader" is an index. The concept of biocultural niche
enables us to see
this catastrophe. It is the intention of this site to incorporate
discussions of “intelligence”2 within the broader framework of
SOOL. Here intelligence means cognitive-discursive performatiity
(Ceci, On Intelligence, Harvard, 1996). See Biocultural Niche: Language, Thinking, Education. Vygotsky
1. Figure 0 is the irreducible minimum if one is to understand the New
Deal,The Great Leader, and the historical path connecting them. This is because The Great Leader 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. (See excerpts from Dor et. al. and de Waal at the lower right.) The catastrophe now unfolding is nothing less than the disintegration of the biocultural niche of modernity.3
This is the result of an evaluation of the cognitive-discurive performativity of the Great Leader.Figure 0. From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States,
places "The Great Leader" in its biocultual 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.1 Its
key concept--biocultural niche--is fundamental to this site.
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 performativities of modernity is invisible within the
cognitively decaying media sphere.
The historicity of language and cognition, their biocultural
embeddedness, and their contemporary disintegration, is one of the
fundamental questions posed by this site. This is the nihilism that Nietzsche anticipated.
The Social Origins of Language helps to situate this
existential catastrophe of which "The Great Leader" is an index. The concept of biocultural niche
enables us to see
this catastrophe. It is the intention of this site to incorporate
discussions of “intelligence”2 within the broader framework of
SOOL. Here intelligence means cognitive-discursive performatiity
(Ceci, On Intelligence, Harvard, 1996). See Biocultural Niche: Language, Thinking, Education. Vygotsky
1. Figure 0 is the irreducible minimum if one is to understand the New
Deal,The Great Leader, and the historical path connecting them. This is because The Great Leader 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. (See excerpts from Dor et. al. and de Waal at the lower right.) The catastrophe now unfolding is nothing less than the disintegration of the biocultural niche of modernity.3
This is the result of an evaluation of the cognitive-discurive performativity of the Great Leader.Figure 0. From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States,
places "The Great Leader" in its biocultual 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.1 Its
key concept--biocultural niche--is fundamental to this site.
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 performativities of modernity is invisible within the
cognitively decaying media sphere.
The historicity of language and cognition, their biocultural
embeddedness, and their contemporary disintegration, is one of the
fundamental questions posed by this site. This is the nihilism that Nietzsche anticipated.
The Great Depression was a catastrophe of the second order: it did not destroy the biocultural niche of
modernity. On the contrary, Reason flourished during the New Deal. The Great Depression merely ruined the lives of millions people and
brought into question the post-Reconstruction political-economic order (1877 to 1929). It was external to Dasein. Small
potatoes in the context of Figure 0.
"Trump," in this context,
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Figure 1. The Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein: Five Genetic Ontologies
(Five Principles of the Production of Practices)
Genetic Ontology
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Sources
(Full page here)
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Primate
Dominance and Deference
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Mazur, deWaal, Wrangham . . .
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Paleolithic
Dynamic Egalitarianism
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Whiten, Descola, Chase, Price . . .
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Ressentiment & the Mechanisms of Defense
Despotic regime; Racism;
Nationalism; Fascism
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Nietzsche, Deleuze & Guattari, Clarke, Paxton, Knox . . .
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Bildung & the Will to Power (Jouissance)
Progressive Narcisism; Individuation;
Progressivism, Socialism, Communism
the UAW and the Keynesian Elite
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Hegel, Nietzsche, Vygotsky, Piaget, Alcorn . . .
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Nihilism & the Last Man
Regressive Narcissism and the
Culture of Consumption; Repressive
Desublimation; Disindividuation;
Neoliberalism
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Nietzsche, Hall, Ehrenberg, Stiegler, Illouz, Marcuse . . .
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The disintegration of language and cognition: 1. Trump's
Meeting with the Joint Chiefs in the Tank on July 20, 2017
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."* 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 performativity of president Trump, 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. (Slate, "Trump's Nuclear Meltdown", October 11, 2017.)
I thought I could find a few quotes from this chapter that would give a sense of the
unfolding biocultural catastrophe of which Trump is an index. I
was mistaken. The reader must read chapter 9, "Shocking the Conscience", in its entirety. Then read the Miles Taylor* excerpts below. Read carefully. Text and texture in Dasein: reading situations and processes,
sensibilities and subjectivities, and discursive and cognitive
performativities.
This article by Eli Zaretsky, " The Mass Psychology of Trumpism" ( London Review of Books, 18 September 2018), is the best thing I have seen so far on Trump, and it is only
about 18 paragraphs long. (If this link doesn't work, click here)
Now read FDR's speeches.
*an
appointee who served in the United States Department of Homeland
Security from 2017 to 2019, including as chief of staff of the DHS. He
was first recruited into the department by former DHS Secretary and
White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, serving as his senior advisor.
Richard Wolin, Hiedegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology (Yale, 2022)
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A Geography of Dasein
figure 2. The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943:
Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind
Bildungsproletarians and Plebeian Upstarts

the UAW, 1933-1943: a working notebook |
The disintegration of language and cognition:
Miles Taylor on Trump's discursive and cognitive performtivity:
Trump "was the most
incandescently stupid and evil man I've ever encountered."
in the New York Times of September 5, 2018: "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration":
The
root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with
him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that
guide his decision making.
From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies,
senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the
commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate
their operations from his whims.
Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in
repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked,
ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked
back.
“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from
one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently,
exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president
flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.
on Deadline Whitehouse, June 20, 2023, interviewed by Nichole Wallace:
But
it's just the tip of the iceberg. We all know that. Now, in
Trump's defense I'll say one good thing: which is that, he did bring
together a pretty strong cabinet. At the beginning, you know, you had
Scarborough and others saying they were reassured that people like Jim
Mattis were coming in. And I'll tell you, first hand, as soon
as those people got into the administration they all thought Donald
Trump was a fool. I mean, we talked about it after oval office
meetings, after situation room meetings, constantly. So much so
that I felt that . . . the people needed to know that. It
was five years ago that I published that anonymous op-ed to say,
listen, the president's own lieutenants think he's at best an idiot,
and at worst totally unfit for the office that he's in. It was
true then; it's true now. . . . Jim Mattis . . . said that he [Trump] was a threat to
the fabric of our republic, and my old boss, John Kelly, once said
Trump was so crazy, he told me he hoped Trump chained himself to the
resolute desk and they had to come in and quote carry him away . . .
. but I'll speak for myself and say genuinely, [Trump] was the most
incandescently stupid and evil man I've ever encountered in my entire
life.
Just in: CBS News, June 27, 2023, Trump heard in audio clip describing "highly confidential, secret" documents
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PISA Test Scores (Math): 2003 to 2015

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Bildung and Literacy:
On Reading as a Transformative Process
The half century between the 1880s and the 1930s was the golden age of the book in the West
Martyn Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing In the Western World (PalgraveMacmillan, 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.”)
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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Cognitive Modalities: a summary of sources
Psychometrics ("Q"): Flynn, Nisbett, Ceci; Hernstein and Murray
•IQ tests
•PISA
•MEAP
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Evolutionary: Donald, Mind: cognitive evolution Table 7.1 p. 260
•episodic (primate)
•mimetic (homo erectus, h. sapients)
•oral-mythic (h. sapiens sapiens)
•theoretic (required by modern capitalism*)
•post-theoretic (Foucault, Sellars, Deleuze)
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Developmental: Piaget et. al.
•pre-operational
•concrete operrational
•formal operational
•post-formal thought (Commons)
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Psychoanalytic: Freud-Klein: mechanisms of defense
•projection
•displacement
•reaction formation
•denial
•identification
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Cultural-historical: Vygotsky, Luria, Ong, Bruner, Flynn, Tomasello. The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014)
• zone of proximal development
• joint intentionality
• intersubjectivity
• niche construction
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Cognitive-linguistic Cardinality
(orders of magnitude/index of cognitive complexity)
the Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein in the context of Merlin Donald,
A Mind so Rare, Table 7.1, p. 260 (Apologies to George Cantor)
ℵiאindex of cognitive complexity (Ceci)
i = 4 Internet and the Extended Mind
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i = 3 Foucault (Kant Hegel Nietzsche)
|
i = 2 Formal operational
|
i = 1 Concrete operational |
i = 0 Oral-mythic/pre-operational |
i = -1 Mimetic/gestural (Homo erectus)
|
i = -2 Primate semiosis
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The Development of Children (Sixth Edition) by Cynthia Lightfoot, Michael Cole, and Sheila R. Cole
Development Through the Lifespan, Laura E. Berk
Jerome Kagan, The Human Spark: The Science of Human Development 2013
Piaget, Genetic Epistemology
Stephen J. Ceci, On Intelligence: A Bioecological Treatise on Intellectual Development (Harvard, 1996)
The term
intelligence is often used synonymously with "IQ", "g", or "general
intelligence", especially in some of the psychometric literature. .
. however, the ability to engage in cognitively complex behaviors
will be shown to be independent of IQ, g, or general intelligence . . .
cognitive complexity will be seen to be the more general of the two
notions and the one most theoretically important to keep in mind when
referring to intelligent behavior.22
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Cognitive-linguistic Cardinality (orders of magnitude/index of cognitive complexity)
the Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein in the context of Merlin Donald, A Mind so Rare, Table 7.1, p. 260 (Apologies to George Cantor)
אi index of cognitive complexity (Ceci)
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i=4 Internet and the Extended Mind
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i=3 Foucault (Kant Hegel Nietzsche)
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i=2 Formal operational
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i=1 Concrete operational
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i=0 Oral-mythic/pre-operational
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i=-1 Mimetic/gestural (homo erectus)
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i=-2 Primate semiosis
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The Development of Children (Sixth Edition) by Cynthia Lightfoot, Michael Cole, and Sheila R. Cole
Development Through the Lifespan, Laura E. Berk
Jerome Kagan, The Human Spark: The Science of Human Development 2013
Piaget, Genetic Epistemology
Stephen J. Ceci, On Intelligence: A Bioecological Treatise on Intellectual Development (Harvard, 1996)
The term
intelligence is often used synonymously with "IQ", "g", or "general
intelligence", especially in some of the psychometric literature. .
. however, the ability to engage in cognitively complex behaviors
will be shown to be independent of IQ, g, or general intelligence . . .
cognitive complexity will be seen to be the more general of the two
notions and the one most theoretically important to keep in mind when
referring to intelligent behavior.22
f
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The New Deal:
reading situations and processes,
sensibilities and subjectivities,
and discursive and cognitive
performativities
The bulleted (•) speeches are required reading. The context of their production is shown here.
The context of their reception can be imagined through a careful
reading of the Murray Body minutes, looking at and keeping in mind the photo of Richard Frankensteen addressing the
meeting of Murray Body workers, and a
reading of this excerpt:
from Henry Kraus, Heroes of the Unwritten Story: the UAW, 1934-1939, p. 204:
Roosevelt's
trip through Michigan was one continuous triumph. In the auto
centers, where we were trying so hard to reanimate the workers, those
same workers put on spontaneous demonstrations of overwhelming enthusiasm. In Lansing, thirty five thousand came out to hear FDR speak from the rear platform of his train. Flint, with its pathetic UAW membershhip of 136, put more than a hundred thousand people along his path. In Pontiac, where we had no members at all,
there was a "tremendous gathering," according to the Detroit News of
October 15, 1936. It described the cheering crowds in the hub
city as rivaling the Armistice Day throngs, those at Lindbergh's visit
after his transatlantic flight, or the World Series Jamboree of
1935. The News
estimated the number of people lining the streets from Hamtramck to
Detroit at five hundred thousand. Frank Winn and I, who followed
the president's motorcade in the press section, doubled that figure.
There were
250,000 gathered in City Hall Square to hear Roosevelt's speech, to
hear him lashing the auto manufacturers for thinking only of their own
profits while ignoring the dire problems of their workers. They
roared their approval but they also listened intently,
as I did, for I could not fault a single word of what Roosevelt
said. I had never before had so convincing a political
experience. But beyond that certitude was my realization that the
UAW's fate was linked with FDR's victory, my conviction that success ws
within our grasp.
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but they also listened intently: Novelist Saul Bellow recalled hearing a fireside chat . . .
from Wikipedia, "Fireside chats"
Novelist Saul Bellow
recalled hearing a fireside chat while walking in Chicago one summer
evening. "The blight hadn't yet carried off the elms, and under them,
drivers had pulled over, parking bumper to bumper, and turned on their
radios to hear Roosevelt. They had rolled down the windows and opened
the car doors. Everywhere the same voice, its odd Eastern accent, which
in anyone else would have irritated Midwesterners. You could follow
without missing a single word as you strolled by. You felt joined to
these unknown drivers, men and women smoking their cigarettes in
silence, not so much considering the President's words as affirming the
rightness of his tone and taking assurance from it."
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FDR Addresses the Nation, 1936-1938
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Master Speech File, 1898-1945
Campaign Address (speech file 930), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 1, 1936
Informal remarks (speech file 935), Oelwein, Iowa, October 9, 1936
Audio and Transcript of Campaign Speech, Chicago, October 14, 1936
• Audio and Transcript of Campaign Speech, Detroit, October 15, 1936
• Audio and Transcript of Campaign Speech, Madison Square Garden, October 31, 1936
Fireside Chat #13, "Report to the Nation on National Affairs", June 24, 1938 ("Copperhead") p.12)
Address of the President at Barnesville, Georgia August 11, 1938 (on the South in the bigger picture)
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the Secondary Leadership of Murray Body Discuss the
Competitive Situation in the Spring Industry, April 26, 1939
Minutes of the
Murray Body Committee Local 2 at Executive Board Meeting, April 26,
1939, Toledo Ohio, Addes Collection, Box 14.11, Reuther Archives. re. the competitive situation in the spring industry.
The members of the Local 2 Committee were:
Brother Hall from Spring &
Wire
Brother McDonnell from Stamping
Brothers Sanders and McWilliams
from Trim
Brother Smith from Frame (Ecorse plant)
Brother Manini,
Vice President
Also present was Executive Board member Walter Reuther
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The New Deal:
reading situations and processes,
sensibilities and subjectivities,
and discursive and cognitive
performativities
There is no audio for FDR's Detroit speech, but we have Henry Kraus's description of it. There is
an audio of the Madison Square Garden speech. Listen to the
audio while reading the transcript. Then read the transcript of
the Detroit speech and the Kraus excerpt above.
Then read the minutes of the Murray Body committee. This
secondary leadership was undoubtedly present when Richard Frankensteen
addressed the sit-down strikers. And it is also undoubtedly the
case that these workers were what I have called plebeian upstarts.
FDR's
speeches and the Murray Body minutes are discursive and cognitive
performances, as are Donald Trump's speeches and meetings. The inner logic of these performances I refer to as performativities. The cognitive inner logic--the performativity--of FDR’s speeches is formal operational. The cognitive inner
logic of Trump’s rhetorical performances is pre-operational and
gestural. The next two rows provide the scholarly context for
these statements.
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Richard Frankensteen addresses the workers of Murray Body Co. during their
1937 sit-down strike Detroit, Michigan. (Reuther Archive)
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Donald
Trump's cognitive-discursive performativities are pre-operational and
gestural. The discussants seen in the Murray Body minutes are
high functioning concrete operational. FDR's speeches are formal
operational
Kraus referred to the--they listened intently (compare wit Trump rallies
attention span
Mattis & Coats (indexPortal)
Kant
SOOL & Lachman
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The Republican Dasein
Schiller Hall in Detroit in the 1930s should be viewed as a radical salon,
a
node in the discursive field/biocultural niche of modernity
1. from S.A. Smith, Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
We
have seen that for 'conscous' workers in Russia and, to a lesser
extent, in China, reading was an activity that was central to
self-fashioning, constitutive of what it meant to be a cultured and
autonomous individual.
2. Schiller Hall in Detroit should be viewed as a radical salon, a
node in the discursive field of modernity, a meeting place of the
bildungsproletarians. At the right Ed Lock (proud grandson of a Civil War veteran) provides an
account
of
the intellectual life of the bildungs-proletarians who gathered in
Schiller
Hall. Saul Wellman (communist, Detroit and Flint), provides an
account of intellectual aspirations of new recruits to the
Party in Flint in the immediate post-war period. Joe Adams
(socialist, Dodge Main) provides an account of such modernist
sensibilities on Detroit's east side, and more generally among the
socialists he knew back in the day. Excerpts from the Wellman and Adams interviews can be found here.
3. comment on Margaret Jacob's The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, 2014:
Jacob's
emphasis on the socio-cultural networks, circles, meeting houses of
these first "industrialists"; her emphasis on the role of books as
emotionally charged world-opening objects--one sees here both
Vygotsky's notion of zone of proximal development broadened and
historicized, and Alcorn's understanding
of the development of self that can result from an an engagement with a
text. In this way Jacob expands our concept of the Enlightenment.
This requires a reconceptualization of what is called the
Enlightenment--the Enlightenment as a cultural-historical developmental
leap--an ontological leap, a cognitive revolution, a new Symbolic
Order. The superorganisism of the enlightenment . . . from the 18th
century to the New Deal. Scientific reasoning is not merely about
knowledge. It is about functioning on the formal-operational level.
In the adventure of it, the jouissance of developmental transgression
and becoming, lies the secret of the bildungs-proletarians and plebian
upstarts who gave us so many Nietzschean spectacles . . .
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4. from my interview with Ed Lock (CP, UAW Local 600)
I was very active in MESA --- Ford in USSR petered out in March of 1933, and I was laid
off. Several months later I found employment in a job shop as a
milling machine operator. I got signed up in the MESA, that was a
unionized plant. The job didn't last long.

In that period I would hang out at the MESA hall, Schiller Hall* on
Gratiot Ave. . . It was very much a Left hall. I became very
interested in union . . . I was very young, 20 yrs old. My father was
AFL, a ship carpenter, but I didn't assimilate much from him. But I
became very interested in the MESA, and one of the characteristics of
the time was that large
numbers of radicals of all descriptions IWW, Communist, Socialist . . .
would come to this hall, and we would sort of sit around and have big
bull discussions with the old timers from the IWW and the Communists
and whoever was there . . . We would all participate in these
discussions, each of them would bring their literature round . . . I
got involved so to speak, I was unemployed, but I would still go
because I found these meetings fascinating, and I would participate in
the distribution of leaflets.
I would go out with some of the leaders, and go with John Anderson or
John Mack, who was a leader at that time. I went to--not so often to
Fords--but I went to the Cadillac plant, Ternstedt, places like this,
and GM, and would distribute organizational . . . I got involved in the
Detroit Stoveworks strike . . . The MESA had undertaken the
organization there and had a bitter strike there. A matter of fact I
had guns put in my ribs in this strike threatening to kill us. But
this was part of my education in the trade union movement.
5.
Karl Emil Franzos, " Schiller in Barnow" (1876), in The German Jewish Dialogue: An Anthology of Literary Texts, 1749-1993, Ritchie Robertson, ed. (Oxford University Press, 1999)
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Bildungs-proletarians and Plebeian Upstarts: the extended mind of the Unity caucus
h
bildungsproletarians
and
plebeian upstarts
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praxiological ratios
a. plebeian upstarts
1. the Joe Adams ratio: 10.6% (Dodge Main) PF
2. the Charlie Yaeger ratio: 7.2% (Buick) Skeels
3. the Bud Simons ratio: 7.5% (Fisher Body 1) Skeels
4. the Cliff Williams ratio: 7.1% (Pontiac Motors) PF
b. bildungsproletarians: about one in thousand
Dodge Main: 2 ratios (21,894 members in Fall 1939)
n=34. (0.16%): Emergency Meeting of Chrysler Executive Boards and Shop Committees, October 8, 1939
n=13 (0.06%): Meeting of the Chrysler Executive Boards and shop committees, November 7, 1939
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Bildungsproletarians' encounters with the "world"
1. encounters with "the masses"
a. patrimonial formations: gangs and grifters
b. Masons and K of C
c. the middle (hometownsmen): Elder, Wainwright
d. Polish women (Herman Burt)
e. workhorse uncle toms
f. Hillbillies
2. encounters with "the middling sort"
a. Ben Wainwright interview
b. the Elder report
3. encounters with the skilled trades
a. Mazey on the skilled trades in Briggs
b. Fagan on the "Americans"
c. Kluck on skilled trades
d. Kord on the colonization of the tool room
4. encounters with plebeian upstarts
a. Bud Simons on Toledo flying squadron
b. Edmund Kord on guys from front welding
c. Edmund Kord on the youth "gangs" in the press
rooms
d. Bill Mazey and Joe Adams on the Italians
5. encounters with management
a. Earl Reynolds
b. Bud Simons and Frank Fagan
c. Murray Body spring committee
6. encounters with fascism*
a. Bud Simons experience in Saginaw
b. Victor Reuther experience in Anderson
c. Cliff Williams vs. Bert Harris
d. Packard
e. Maurice Sugar in the elevator
f. Lindahl on 1938 meeting (letter to Lewis)
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Networks of Power

Reformation "Roots"

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transcendental empiricism
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.
Before continuing, the reader should scroll through the four empiricities below:
This site is organized
around the empiricities, and is steeped in the post-Kantian
revolution in thought. Excerpts from key works in that revolution,
from the Critique of Pure Reason to contemporary thinkers like Förster, Žižek, and Emden, are to be found in the Philosophical Notebook and in Philohistory page.
Figure 0, From the Origins of Language to the End of Print
Literacy in the United States,
provides a narrative framework. Below this figure are three
excerpts from state-of-the-art scholarly works that contextualize the
problematic of "Trump".
Daniel Dor, Chris Knight, and Jerome Lewis, The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014) is of singular importance if one is to understand the nature of the biocultural
catastrophe in which we are now engulfed. Here I provide long excerpts. A shorter summary and brief excerpts can be found here.
The concept of biocultural niche is especially useful for understanding
the semiotic regimes of the two-party system, and the processes of
cognitive development and cogntive disintegration.
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the deep history of "Trump"
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.
Richard Lachmann, "Coda: American Patrimonialism: The Return of the Repressed” in Patrimonial Power in the Modern World, Julia Adams and Mounira M. Charrad, eds. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2011:
Patrimonialism,
until fairly recently, seemed an archaic social form, largely replaced
by bureaucratic rationalism. That confident view of modernity, in the
histories that Max Weber and his followers wrote, deserves to be
challenged as patrimonial regimes reappear in states and firms
throughout the world.
Understanding the Global Patrimonial Wave, July 2021 Perspectives on Politics 20(1):1-13
. . . the major trend in regime change over the past decade has been
not simply a move away from democratic institutions to authoritarianism
but, more precisely, a wave of patrimonialism spreading through
autocratic and democratic regions alike.
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The
link between the "empirical" materials in the right-hand column and the
"theoretical" materials in this column is tenuous when viewed row by
row. The
empiricities (the links at the right) structure this page--that is, I first assembled
these empiricities and only then began to consider what "theoretical"
materials should be adjacent to them. The "theoretical" materials
are
of two kinds: excerpts from state-of-the-art scholarly texts; and my
own comments. It is recommended that the reader first scroll down
and become acquainted with the graphic materials and data sets in the
right hand column. Then return to this place and resume
reading. This site is really a working notebook. "It only ever maps the real, since the act of mapping is
a method of experimenting with the real: and it is always an open
system, with multiple exits and entrances."
from John Marks, Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity (Pluto Press, 1998)
Deleuze and Guatarri argue that the book . . . has been seen as an organic
unit, which is both hermetically sealed, but also a reflection of the
world. In contrast, the rhizome is neither mimetic nor
organic. It only ever maps the real, since the act of mapping is
a method of experimenting with the real: and it is always an open
system, with multiple exits and entrances. In short, the rhizome
is an 'acentred' system; the map of a mode of thought which is always
'in the middle'. p 45
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concepts
and their empiricities
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On the Enlightenment
I wrote the paragraph below before Trump, and before the publication of The Social Origins of Language.
Not only
did the Enlightenment not acquire a proletarian or popular embodiment
(the "class with radical chains"). The ‘people’, even in its
"working class" moment, became the mass base for right wing,
nationalist, racist, xenophobic cognitive modalities, political
cultures, and socio-culturally contextualized character formations.
(Blanning, Paxton, Clarke, Sugrue) These modalities of
ressentiment are ontologically prior to the political forces that
utilize, absorb, and manipulate them (see Right-wing Elites in the
Postwar era; Red Scare, UAW links). That is why answers to such
questions as What’s the Matter With Kansas? cannot be given in political terms or through political analysis.
On the Enlightenment, from Lionel B. Steiman, Paths to Genocide: Antisemitism in Western History (Macmillan Press, 1998), p. 93-95
The
Enlightenment did not deny the existence of all manner of evils but
denied that these were a consequence of human nature. It held that
people are by nature reasonable and capable of good but had been
corrupted by their institutions and environment. Its rationalism
assumed the universal existence of human reason and applied the
criterion of social utility to all institutions, policies, and
actions. Transform or abolish corrupt institutions, improve the human
environment, and human behavior would likewise improve. Human beings
were by nature rational and therefore capable of creating a rational
and humane socal order.
I wrote the paragraph below in 2023 as a comment on the paragraph above (Steiman):
This
was the intellectual ethos of Progressivism, whose radical wing
included the socialists and communists. It is this ethos which now
lies in ruins. One does not simply pick up the pieces and hope for a
better day. One can no longer yearn for that "class with radical
chains," that phantom of the 19th and 20th centuries. Indeed, a
stunning reversal has occured, most evident in the United States, where
the deterioration of discursive and cognitive performativity is now the
hallmark of our times. Is it possible that literacy is dying even as
we speak? You bet! And right before our eyes. Watch MSNBC and see
for yourself. We miss this bigger picture if we focus only on trump.
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The Republican Dasein
Schiller Hall in Detroit in the 1930s should be viewed as a radical salon,
a
node in the discursive field/biocultural niche of modernity
1. from S.A. Smith, Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
We
have seen that for 'conscous' workers in Russia and, to a lesser
extent, in China, reading was an activity that was central to
self-fashioning, constitutive of what it meant to be a cultured and
autonomous individual.
2. Schiller Hall in Detroit should be viewed as a radical salon, a
node in the discursive field of modernity, a meeting place of the
bildungsproletarians. At the right Ed Lock (proud grandson of a Civil War veteran) provides an
account
of
the intellectual life of the bildungs-proletarians who gathered in
Schiller
Hall. Saul Wellman (communist, Detroit and Flint), provides an
account of intellectual aspirations of new recruits to the
Party in Flint in the immediate post-war period. Joe Adams
(socialist, Dodge Main) provides an account of such modernist
sensibilities on Detroit's east side, and more generally among the
socialists he knew back in the day. Excerpts from the Wellman and Adams interviews can be found here.
3. comment on Margaret Jacob's The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, 2014:
Jacob's
emphasis on the socio-cultural networks, circles, meeting houses of
these first "industrialists"; her emphasis on the role of books as
emotionally charged world-opening objects--one sees here both
Vygotsky's notion of zone of proximal development broadened and
historicized, and Alcorn's understanding
of the development of self that can result from an an engagement with a
text. In this way Jacob expands our concept of the Enlightenment.
This requires a reconceptualization of what is called the
Enlightenment--the Enlightenment as a cultural-historical developmental
leap--an ontological leap, a cognitive revolution, a new Symbolic
Order. The superorganisism of the enlightenment . . . from the 18th
century to the New Deal. Scientific reasoning is not merely about
knowledge. It is about functioning on the formal-operational level.
In the adventure of it, the jouissance of developmental transgression
and becoming, lies the secret of the bildungs-proletarians and plebian
upstarts who gave us so many Nietzschean spectacles . . .
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4. from my interview with Ed Lock (CP, UAW Local 600)
I was very active in MESA --- Ford in USSR petered out in March of 1933, and I was laid
off. Several months later I found employment in a job shop as a
milling machine operator. I got signed up in the MESA, that was a
unionized plant. The job didn't last long.

In that period I would hang out at the MESA hall, Schiller Hall* on
Gratiot Ave. . . It was very much a Left hall. I became very
interested in union . . . I was very young, 20 yrs old. My father was
AFL, a ship carpenter, but I didn't assimilate much from him. But I
became very interested in the MESA, and one of the characteristics of
the time was that large
numbers of radicals of all descriptions IWW, Communist, Socialist . . .
would come to this hall, and we would sort of sit around and have big
bull discussions with the old timers from the IWW and the Communists
and whoever was there . . . We would all participate in these
discussions, each of them would bring their literature round . . . I
got involved so to speak, I was unemployed, but I would still go
because I found these meetings fascinating, and I would participate in
the distribution of leaflets.
I would go out with some of the leaders, and go with John Anderson or
John Mack, who was a leader at that time. I went to--not so often to
Fords--but I went to the Cadillac plant, Ternstedt, places like this,
and GM, and would distribute organizational . . . I got involved in the
Detroit Stoveworks strike . . . The MESA had undertaken the
organization there and had a bitter strike there. A matter of fact I
had guns put in my ribs in this strike threatening to kill us. But
this was part of my education in the trade union movement.
5.
Karl Emil Franzos, " Schiller in Barnow" (1876), in The German Jewish Dialogue: An Anthology of Literary Texts, 1749-1993, Ritchie Robertson, ed. (Oxford University Press, 1999)
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x
x
x
x
x
x
x
What is a Catastrophe of the First Order?
Donald Trump and the Adventures of Dasein
Slavoj Žižek, "only a catastrophe can save us." (Elevate Festival 2023)
Slavoj Žižek, "What Lies Ahead" (Jacobin, January 17, 2023)
Joseph Carew, Ontological Catastrophe: Zizek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism (Open Humanities Press, 2014)
1. The question of ontological catastrophe is hardly speculative. This graph of PISA Math Scores,
2003-2015, gives us a hint of what an ontological catastrophe looks like.
2. Trump's
Meeting with the Joint Chiefs in the Tank on July 20, 2017 provides us
with a window into the actual unfolding of an ontological catastrophe. We have a detailed description of this meeting in A Very Stable Genius, chapter 9, "Shocking the Conscience."* 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 performativity of president Trump, 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. (Slate, "Trump's Nuclear Meltdown", October 11, 2017.)
3. The map at the right, Auto Supplier Plant Density, was produced by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
in 2005--before the financial meltdown of 2008. If one wanted to
map the economic catastrophe wrought by the regimes of financialization
and globalization since the early 1970s, this map will do as well as
any.
4. And of course the Great
Depression was certainly a catastrophe; and in the popular mind the
catastrophe that gave rise to the New Deal. (A genealogical approach to the New Deal demonstrates how wrong this is.)
But the Great
Depression was a catastrophe only of the second
order: it
did not destroy Dasein--it did not destroy the biocultural niche of modernity; it merely ruined the lives of millions people
and brought into question the post-Reconstruction (1877 to 1929) political-economic order. It was external to Dasein. Small potatoes in the context of Figure 0.
Something much bigger is happening now, something beyond the cognitive scope of current thought, which is economistic in character and Cartesian in its metaphysical presuppositions. Figure 0. From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States, provides a framework for conceptualizing a
catastrophe of the first order. The graph (above) of PISA Math Scores,
2003-2015, gives us a hint of what a catastrophe of the first order
looks like. The excerpts below right show what a catastrophe of
the first order looks like when refracted through the lens formed by a
group of texts (n=4). A catastrophe of the first order is internal to Dasein.
A catastrophe of the first order is above all about language as conceived of by the contributors to The Social Origins of Language.
Our current catastrophe of the first order is the disintegration of the biocultural niche of modernity
within the political boundaries of the United States (and maybe
elsewhere). "Trump" is a manifestation of this disintegration.
——————————————————————————————————————————
* Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America (Penguin Press, 2020)
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Dasein: A Synopsis of this Site
(Dasein without the Heideggerian bullshit)
Language on the threshold of gesture and reflex
Regression to infantile narcissism via processes of identification
The war against reason and the politics of patrimonialism:
why Trump loves Putin
The sado-sexual eigenvector of GOP performativity
Donald Trump and the abyss of decognification
Cognitive performativity is a biocultural historical phenomenon,
not explicable within a discursive field shaped by the
Cartesian synthetic a priori
The election of Donald Trump as a lagging indicator of the disintegration
of cognitive performativities.
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Concentration
of U.S. Parts Plants
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Key Texts. Read Now
The
bulleted (•) texts below should be read immediately. This will make
the summary of findings in the next row more intelligible.
The Zaretsky
article is the best thing I have seen so far on Trump, and it is only
about 18 paragraphs long. Eric Weitz on
the Nazis and the context of their emergence should be read in
conjunction with Zaretsky. Regarding Trump as grifter, Fraser poses a depressing but inescapable question: the enigma of how these con artists and grifters become folk heroes. Fraser and Zaretsky should be read contrapuntally. The Social Origins of Language is Dasein without the bullshit. I follow Sahlins on the relationship between "culture" and "biology".
•Daniel Dor, Chris Knight, and Jerome Lewis, The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014): long excerpts. A shorter summary and brief excerpts can be found here. Read the summary and short excerpts now. Sinha and Shilton et. al. bring us up to date.
•Marshall Sahlins, "Hierarchy, Equality, and the Sublimation of Anarchy: The Western Illusion of human nature." The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at The University of Michigan, November 4, 2005
•Eli Zaretsky, "The Mass Psychology of Trumpism" (London Review of Books, 18 September 2018).
•Eric D. Weitz, Weimar German: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, 2007/2018), chapter 9, "Revolution and Counterrevolution from the Right" (pp. 331-360), Excerpts
•Steve Fraser, Every Man A Speculator: A history of Wall Street in American Life (HarperCollins, 2005), pp. 72-73 and 94-96.
Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Inheritance Systems and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (Cambridge, 2020)
Sinha, C. (2021). Artefacts, symbols, and the socio-cultural dynamics of niche construction, in The Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution (Oxford, 2021).
Shilton, D; Breski, M; Dor, D; Jablonka, E (February 14, 2020). "Human Social Evolution: Self-Domestication or Self-Control?". Frontiers in Psychology. 11: 134.
Jane Schneider and Peter Schneider, "Mafia, Antimafia, and the Plural Cultures of Sicily." Current Anthropology, Vol. 46, No. 4 (August/October 2005), pp. 501-520
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More Adventures of Dasein:
what a catastrophe of the first order looks like
(refracted through the lens formed by selected texts)
Nicholas Kristof, "McDonald’s Workers in Denmark Pity Us," New York Times, May 8, 2020
Think
of it this way. Workers at McDonald’s outlets all over the world tend
to be at the lower end of the labor force, say the 20th percentile. But
Danish workers at the 20th percentile are high school graduates who are
literate and numerate.
In contrast, after half a century of underinvestment in the United
States, many 20th-percentile American workers haven’t graduated from
high school, can’t read well, aren’t very numerate, struggle with drugs
or alcohol, or have impairments that reduce productivity.
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.
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 Edward Frenkel And Hung-Hsi Wu, "Republicans Should Love 'Common Core'. National standards can revive the way we teach math and science," Wall Street Journal, 5-6-13
Mathematical education in the U.S. is in deep crisis. The World
Economic Forum ranks the quality of math and science education in the
U.S. a dismal 48th. This is one of the reasons the 2010 report "Rising
Above the Gathering Storm" by the National Academies warned that
America's ability to compete effectively with other nations is fading.
. . . [The report refers to] the current lock-step march to the bottom of international
student performance in math and science.
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What is Missing in Zizek and Varoufakis:
The relationship between catastrophes of the first and second order.
The historicity of language and cognition--their biocultural
embeddedness, and their contemporary disintegration--is one of the
fundamental questions posed by this site.
Evidence
abounds in the public arena of a widespread dissolution of language and
cognition--a catastrophe of the first order. Because the media performs this cognitive decline, the decay
of reason is invisible within the cognitively decaying media sphere.
The historicity of language and cognition, their biocultural
embeddedness, and their contemporary disintegration, is one of the
fundamental questions posed by this site.
We are now engulfed in is the implosion of neo-liberal "society." The
term "society" is bracketed because, in the conventional use of the
term, an ontological stability is implied, whereas in reality this
society is in the process of blowing its brains out, and that along
four axes of ontological catastrophe.
•First, the disintegration of the cognitive performativities of
modernity itself: the "human" side of "capital." (decognification,
disindividuation; Trump's rhetorical performances seen from the
standpoint of literacy and cognition as contingent not normative). This is a catastrophe of the first order.
•Second, the explosion of fascist performativities within the orbit of
the GOP (Robert O. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism: "The legitimation of
violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the
heart of fascism."). This is a catastrophe of the second order. The post-war development of West Germany is evidence that the biocultural niche of modernity can survive fascism.
Fascism in the United States, however, feeds off the disintegration of
the biocultural niche of modernity and also accelerates it.
•Third, the patrimonial assault on rational-bureaucratic institutions,
an assault on the very idea of science-based professionalism and public
service. Why does Trump get along so well with the alpha
males of other patrimonial regimes, especially Putin? Not simply
because he is one of them. The inner logic of such regimes--especially in the
case of Trump--is the objective necessity to destroy the entire culture
of science-based administration in agency after agency as an
existential imperative. This is the significance of the
demonic shibboleth: "the deep state". This is a catastrophe of the second order that feeds off the disintegration of the biocultural niche of modernity and also accelerates it.
•Fourth, the triumph of nihilism (or as it is known today, neoliberal
subjectivity). This nihilism is manifest in the victim culture of the
Democratic Party's appeal, which defines "self" not as citizen but as
consumer and victim. The New Deal's civic republicanism is dead. According to Nietzsche, this is a catastrophe of the first order.
On the emotional side, the brutishness in language and behavior that
are the chief characteristics of Trump's mass-oriented performances
must be understood as manifestations of something of great ontological
significance. The sado-sexual eigenvector of “Trump” performativities
goes back to the Know-Nothing roots of the GOP (Gniepp), later 19th
century anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic political rhetoric, the
lynching for rape discourse, the southern strategy, and the infamous
Willie Horton episode in George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign. Trump's
performance coming down the stairs ("They’re bringing drugs. They’re
bringing crime. They’re rapists.") and the plaint of one of his
supporters ("He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting")
should be placed in this broader context.
It is already clear that in the U.S. large numbers of unchurched as
well as fundamentalist whites and blacks (and many working class
Catholics) have been disgorged from the project of modernity, and now
constitute, by twenty-first century standards, a barely literate mass,
concentrated in central cities, inner suburbs, small towns, and rural
areas, and removed in toto from the possibilities of cognitive
development implied by the term "education." Their disgorgement from the project of modernity is a catastrophe of the second order. The consequences of that disgorgement, as we can now see, is a catastrophe of the first order. This disgorgement from the project of modernity is evident in Some Arrestees from the January 6th Assault on the Capitol.
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Analyzing Power Relations: Six Frameworks
Max Weber
Deleuze & Guattari
Vincent/McMahon
Piaget/Vygotsky
Michael Mann
This site
| Three regimes (charismatic, patrimonial, rational-bureaucratic)
Three regimes (primitive, despotic, capitalist)
Left vs. Right: (topologies of the two-party system)
Cognitive modalities (topologies of the two-party system)
Four networks of power
Five genetic ontologies (topologies of the two-party system)
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What we call societies are only loose aggregates
of diverse, overlapping, intersecting power networks.
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
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Today, many of our socials tensions have been
expressed in terms of implosion and
depressive collapse or, in a
similar way, its flip side: explosions of violence,
rage, the search
for new sensations.
Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age (McGill-Queens University Press, 2010)
We are changing, of course,
but that does not necessarily mean we are progressing. Combined
with all the forces that today exhort us to look into our own private
lives, the “civilization of change” has stimulated a massive interest
in psychic disorders. It can be heard from all quarters, and it
takes form in the many marketplaces that offer inner balance and
tranquility. Today, many of our socials tensions have been
expressed in terms of implosion and depressive collapse or, in a
similar way, its flip side: explosions of violence, rage, the search
for new sensations. pp. 185-6
As addictive explosion reflects depressive implosion, so the
drug-taker’s search for sensation reflects the depressed person’s lack
of feeling. Depression, that crossroads of pathology, serves as a
canvas upon which to sketch out the changes in modern subjectivity, the
displacement of the hard task of being healthy. In a context in
which choice is the norm and inner insecurity the price, these
pathologies make up the dark side of contemporary private life.
Such is the equation of the sovereign individual: psychic freedom and
individual initiative = identity insecurities and the incapacity to
act. p. 232
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This
site uses figurative elements, including graphs, tables,
charts,
and maps
This site began fifty years ago as a project which at the time I called
an exercise in phenomenological marxism, and resulted in the
publication of my book The Emergence of a UAW Local, 1936-1939: a Study in Class and Culture
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975). Edmund
Kord, who was the key organizer in this plant, was one of the bildungs-proletarians* who was part of the
Reuther circle at Wayne State University in the 1930s. (see the Bildung page).
The plant layout at the lower right (figure 2) was drawn by Kord in the course of our discussions.
Figure 1. The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943, emerged out of my discussions with a number of veterans of the
formative years of the UAW (59 of whom are listed here).
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
faction fight between the Unity caucus and the (fascist) forces of Homer Martin,
was actually a specific manifestation of the fundamental battle lines
that emerged following the French Revolution, summarized by Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: the French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford, 2001)
The bildungs-proletarian 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. When placed in the contexts of Figure 0 and the periodization of the History of Reading and Writing
provided by Lyons, the extended mind of the Unity caucus becomes a
cultural historical base camp from which observations can be made
regarding the historicity of language and cognition.
What made this whole site possible is the literary and cognitive
capabilities of the bildungsproletarians and plebeian upstarts whom I interviewed.
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 lingusitic and cognitive performativity, nor
that they would provide a framework necessary if not sufficient for
understanding all that we subsume under the term "trump".
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 very model of republican citizenship, the embodiment of civic republicanism.
it
was these bildungsproletarians who embodied the biocultural niche of
modernity within the factories of southeastern Michigan. 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. Since I participated in
all of these interviews, that extended mind is still active. It is from the standpoint of the still living extended mind of the Unity caucus that "we" now
address the question: What happened to the New Deal?
*Bildungs-proletarians. Highly literate workers who participated in the public sphere, embedded
especially in the biocultural niche of Progressivism. See Kraus interview on Wyndham Mortimer. Read Mortimer's letter to Chas
on the factional situation in the UAW in the spring of 1938 for an
example of what Kraus is talking about. (Also interviews of
Adams, Lock, Wellman, Williams)
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figure 1. The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943:
Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind
Bildungsproletarians and Plebeian Upstarts

the UAW, 1933-1943: a working notebook
figure 2. Layout of Michigan Steel Tube (UAW Local 238), circa 1937

|
Thermidor: What Happened to the New Deal?
Donald Trump and the Adventures of Dasein
The Cliff Williams page
From January 7, 1974 to August 21, 1974, 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 at the right.
Leftists of various stripes have viewed the Flint sitdown strike 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
around Homer Martin and Jay Lovestone (sent to Detroit by David
Dubinsky of the ILGWU) unseated by administrative means the first
elected leadership that had led the sitdown strike of local 156. The disintegration of the
local can be followed in the Bob Travis reports to the Executive
Board of the UAW, first in April and the second in September,
1937.From the summer of 1937 to the Cleveland Convention of March 1939
the UAW was riven by a civil war. No mere faction fight, this
battle was actually a continuation of the civil war of 1861-65.
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.
*Yellow Truck and Bus, Pontiac
|
|
Thermidor: May 1937
Detroit News, May 2, 1937

Detroit News, May 2, 1937 click here for full text
the state of the union: Buick, March 1939
from Charles Yaeger (Oral History: p. 12, Reuther Archives)
Finally the CIO group, the Addes and Reuther forces in the union at
that time, called a special convention with the blessing of the parent
CIO in Cleveland, and there we organized what became the UAW-CIO.
We attended the Cleveland Convention [March 27, 1939], and it was
there that the union was born after all this factional problem. Then,
of course, we had to go back and reorganize the plants because as much
as the International was torn asunder the locals were, too. We took
over the local union with(in) our unit of the old amalgamated [Local
156], which became [local] 594. We took it over with about 7,000
people working in the plant and 503 or 504 members. This was all the
membership we had. We did not have the union.
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|
x
x
x
bildung and literacy: On Reading as a Transformative Process
state-of-the-art scholarly text
The half century between the 1880s and the 1930s was the golden age of the book in the West
Martyn Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing In the Western World (PalgraveMacmillan, 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.”)
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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yy
state-of-the-art scholarly texts
g
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x
x
x
x
x
x
x
Bildungs-proletarians and Plebeian Upstarts: the extended mind of the Unity caucus h
bildungsproletarians
and
plebeian upstarts
think Chartists
|
praxiological ratios
a. plebeian upstarts
1. the Joe Adams ratio: 10.6% (Dodge Main) PF
2. the Charlie Yaeger ratio: 7.2% (Buick) Skeels
3. the Bud Simons ratio: 7.5% (Fisher Body 1) Skeels
4. the Cliff Williams ratio: 7.1% (Pontiac Motors) PF
b. bildungsproletarians: about one in thousand
Dodge Main: 2 ratios (21,894 members in Fall 1939)
n=34. (0.16%): Emergency Meeting of Chrysler Executive Boards and Shop Committees, October 8, 1939
n=13 (0.06%): Meeting of the Chrysler Executive Boards and shop committees, November 7, 1939
|
Bildungsproletarians' encounters with the "world"
1. encounters with "the masses"
a. patrimonial formations: gangs and grifters
b. Masons and K of C
c. the middle (hometownsmen): Elder, Wainwright
d. Polish women (Herman Burt)
e. workhorse uncle toms
f. Hillbillies
2. encounters with "the middling sort"
a. Ben Wainwright interview
b. the Elder report
3. encounters with the skilled trades
a. Mazey on the skilled trades in Briggs
b. Fagan on the "Americans"
c. Kluck on skilled trades
d. Kord on the colonization of the tool room
4. encounters with plebeian upstarts
a. Bud Simons on Toledo flying squadron
b. Edmund Kord on guys from front welding
c. Edmund Kord on the youth "gangs" in the press
rooms
d. Bill Mazey and Joe Adams on the Italians
5. encounters with management
a. Earl Reynolds
b. Bud Simons and Frank Fagan
c. Murray Body spring committee
6. encounters with fascism*
a. Bud Simons experience in Saginaw
b. Victor Reuther experience in Anderson
c. Cliff Williams vs. Bert Harris
d. Packard
e. Maurice Sugar in the elevator
f. Lindahl on 1938 meeting (letter to Lewis)
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Networks of Power

Reformation "Roots"

|

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Dasein: Bildung, Ressentiment, and Nihilism
|
Figure 0. From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States
larger image much larger image
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Bildung and Dasein: a Critique of Heidegger's Cartesianism
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Authenticity
Heidegger's conception of
human Dasein echoes Kierkegaard’s description of a “self”. On
Heidegger’s account, Dasein is not a type of object among others in the
totality of what is on hand in the universe. Instead, human being is a
“relation of being”, a relation that obtains between what one is at any moment (the immediacy of the concrete present as it has evolved) and what one can and will be as the temporally extended unfolding or happening of life into an open realm of possibilities.
Chris Sinha's critique of Cartesianism: Chris Sinha, "Niche construction and semiosis: biocultural and social dynamics", in Social Origins of Language
It is increasingly
recognized, in theories of distributed cognition, that human cognitive
processes extend ‘beyond the skin’, involving intersubjectively shared
mental states and cultural-cognitive technologies. This presents
a conceptual problem not only for psychology, with its traditional
individualist assumptions, but also for biology, which assumes by
default that the organism as a behavioral and morphological individual
is identical to the organism as bearer of genetic material. 44-5
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h
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Midland Steel, UAW Local 410
The AFL Faction: the Non-Production Craft and Service Sector
name
| nationality
| religion
| year of birth
| classification | department |
|
|
|
|
|
| Oran Snyder
| German
| Catholic
|
| repair weld
| assembly
| Glen Snyder
| German
| Catholic
|
| repair weld
| assembly
| Anton Boll
| German/Kashub?
| Catholic
|
| die maker
| tool room
| Frrank Carr
| Irish
| Catholic
|
| crib clerk
| tool room
| Joseph Bergeron
| French-Canadian
| Catholic
|
| tool welder
| tool room
|
|
|
|
|
|
| F. Bieske
| German
| Catholic
|
| plumber
| maintenance
| Fred Kraus
| German
| Catholic
|
| pipefitter
| maintenance | F. Mathews
| Irish
| Catholic
|
| millwright
| maintenance
| A. Dumais
| French-Canadian
| Catholic
|
| electrician
| maintenace
| Carl Brendel
| German
| Catholic
|
| plumber
| maintenace |
|
|
|
|
|
| J. Killala
| Irish
| Catholic
| 1899
| crane operator
| transportation
| William Babcock
| German
| Catholic
|
| crane operator | transportation | Junius Pruitt
| Black
|
|
| tractor driver
| transportation |
|
|
|
|
|
| Pete Olshove
| Kashub
| Catholic
| 1898
| hyd. press die set
| press room
| Agnes Baaranski
| Kashub
| Catholic
| 1900
| press operator
| press room
| Marie Budna
| Czech
| Catholic
|
| press operator
| press room
|
|
|
|
|
|
| H. L. Harris
| Black
|
| 1891
| Hannifin op.
| assembly
| A. M. Smith
| Irish
| Catholic
| 1910
| arc welder
| assembly
|
u
|
The
link
h
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Midland Steel, UAW Local 410
The CIO Milieu: Bildungsproletarians and Plebeian Upstarts
name
| nationality
| religion
| year of birth
| classification | department |
|
|
|
|
|
| North European
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Thomas Dyer
| Ky. Mason
|
|
| die maker
| tool room
| Sam Brear
| Scot//Czech |
|
| machine hand
| tool room
| A. Barton
| Indiana WASP
|
|
| diie maker
| tool room
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Ben Wainwright
| Pa. English
|
|
| arc welder
| assembly
| Bud English
| WASP RR Okla
|
| 1906
| arc welder
| assembly
| Norm Green
| French-Canadian
| Catholic
| 1912
| arc welder
| assembly
| Bud Berkey
| Pa. WASP
|
| 1904
| arc welder
| assembly
| John Fisher
| Scotch
|
| 1897
| spot welder
| assembly
|
|
|
|
|
|
| G. Watson
|
|
|
| press operator
| press room
| Mac Mackelvey
| Scot
|
|
| press operator
| press room
| A. Fritche
| German
|
| 1899
| large press op.
| press room
|
|
|
|
|
|
| THE LEFT
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Bill Sumak
| Russian
|
| 1897
| press operator
| press room
| George Borovich
| Serb
|
| 1913
| press operator
| press room
| Fred Cini
| Maltese
|
| 1905
| press operator
| press room
| James Dinkle
| Germ/Kashub
|
| 1910
| press operator
| press room
|
|
|
|
|
|
| John Kazmierski
| Polish
|
| 1912 | Proj. welder | assembly
| Peter Borovich
| Serbian
|
| 1914 | arc welder
| assembly
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Peter Kotenko
| Russian
|
| 1915
| labor
| transportation
|
|
|
|
|
|
| THE SECOND GENERATION
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| John Kazmierski
| Polish
|
| 1915
| arc welder | assembly | Ed Grabowski
| Polish
|
| 1915
| arc welder | assembly | Ted Maciag
| Polish
|
| 1915
| arc welder | assembly | Frank Kusz
| Polish
|
| 1896
| arc welder | assembly | Chester Podorski
| Polish
|
| 1917
| Hannifin op
| assembly
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Oscar Oden
| Black
|
| 1909
| assembler
| assembly
| Henry Warfield
| Black
|
| 1896
| assembler
| assembly
| Nelson Merrill
| Black
|
| 1909
| assembler
| assembly
| Henry Patterson
| Black
|
| 1902
| assembler
| assembly
| Edgar Hicks
| Black
|
| 1891
| hannifin op
| assembly
|
|
|
|
|
|
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h
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Pontiac, Michigan
Aug 3, 1938
Mr. John L. Lewis
Washington D.C.
This
evening in a private hall rented for the purpose of having George Addes
and Ed Hall state their positions in the turmoil in International Union
u.a.w.a. a concerted effort was made by Martin adherents to break ???
meeting. Stop. This in violation of rights guarnteed undfer
U. S. Constitution. Stop. Glad to report effort was
unsuccessful. Members who called meeting have been told they will
be summarily expelled from u.a.w.a. Stop. Seems Martin forces are
determined members shall not know boith sides of controversy.
Your intervention appears necessary.
Chas. L. Barnes
Kathleen Henson
Cliff Williams
L. H. Kay
R. A. Marriott
C. B. Archer
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|
Interviews (Skeels, Friedlander, Leighton): Lower Great Lakes Industrial Region
Detroit-east side
|
|
interviewees
|
|
|
|
Murray Body
|
UAW Local 2
|
Pody, Fagan, Jones
|
Dodge Main
|
UAW Local 3
|
Frankensteen, Watson, Ross, Harris, Adams, Ptazynski, Reynolds, Zaremba
|
Plymouth
|
UAW Local 51
|
NLRB, Sweet, bus.hist.,
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Packard
|
UAW Local 190
|
McDaniel, Kujawski, Matthews, Poplewski,Lindahl
|
Michigan Steel Tube
|
UAW Local 238 |
Klue
|
Detroit Steel Products
|
UAW Local 351
|
Silver
|
Midland Steel
|
UAW Local 410
|
N=24
|
Chrysler Highland Park
|
UAW Local 490
|
Jenkins
|
|
|
|
Detroit-Connor Ave
|
|
interviewees
|
Chrysler-Jefferson
|
UAW Local 7
|
Zeller, Carey
|
Hudson
|
UAW Local 154
|
Anderson, Moore, Pody
|
Briggs
|
UAW Local 212
|
Bill Mazey, Ernie Mazey, Morris, Vega
|
Budd Wheel
|
UAW 306
|
Bauer
|
|
|
|
Detroit-west side and Dearborn
|
|
interviewees |
Ford
|
UAW Local 600
|
Lock, Llewelyn, Tappes
|
Fleetwood
|
UAW Local 15
|
Anderson
|
Ternstedt
|
UAW Local 174
|
|
|
UAW Local 157
|
|
|
|
|
Flint
|
|
|
Fisher Body 1
|
|
Genski, Simons
|
Chevrolet
|
|
Jones
|
Buick
|
|
Bully, Case
|
A.C. Spark Plug
|
|
|
|
|
|
Pontiac |
|
|
GM Truck & Bus
|
|
Williams et. al. |
Fisher Body |
|
Williams et. al. |
Pontiac Motors |
|
Williams et. al. |
|
|
|
Toledo
|
|
|
Auto-Lite
|
|
|
Chevrolet
|
|
Ditzel, Roland
|
Willys-Overland
|
|
Addes
|
Spicer Mfg.
|
|
|
City Auto Stamping
|
|
|
Logan Gear Co
|
|
|
Bingham Stamping and Tool
|
|
|
|
|
|
South Bend
|
|
|
Bendix
|
|
|
Studebaker
|
|
Rightly
|
|
|
|
Milwaukee
|
|
|
Allis-Chalmers
|
|
BOOK
|
Seaman Body
|
|
speth
|
|
|
|
Cleveland
|
|
|
Fisher Body
|
|
|
White Motor
|
|
Mortimer
|
|
state-of-the-art scholarly texts
excerpts from The Social Origins of Language v
state-of-the-art scholarly text
The human mind has been
drastically changed by culture
from from Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: the Evolution of Human Consciousness (W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 301-2 (emphasis added)
The human mind has been
drastically changed by culture. In modern culture, enculturation
has become an even more formative influence on mental development than
it was in the past. This may be a direct reflection of brain
plasticity, rather than genetic change, but that does not in any way
diminish the importance of the change from a purely cognitive
standpoint. The human mind is so plastic in the way it carries
out its cognitive business, individually and in groups, that the core
configuration of skills that defines a mind actually varies
significantly as a function of different kinds of culture. This
is especially true of the most conscious domains of mind, such as those
involved in formal thinking and representation.
Let me be very clear about what I mean here. I am not speaking of
trivial cultural changes, such as variations in custom or language
use. These are by far the most common and have no proven
cognitive impact. The most important of these is literacy.
Literacy skills change the functional organization of the brain and
deeply influence how individuals and communities of literate
individuals perform cognitive work. Mass literacy has triggered
two kinds of major cogitive reorganizations, one in individuals and the
other in groups.
To become fully literate, the individual must acquire a host of neural
demons that are completely absent from anyone who lacks literacy
training. This involves massive restructuring. There is no
equivalent in the preliterate mind to the circuits that hold the
complex neural components of a reading vocabulary or the elaborate
procedural habits of formal thinking. These are unnatural.
They have to be hammered in by decades of intensive schooling, which
changes the functional uses of certain brain circuits and rewire the
functional architecture of thought. This process can be very
extensive. Consider the impact of twenty or more years of schooling on
the brain of someone who has acquired full symbolic literacy in several
different
technical, mathematical, scientific, and musical fields. These
skills encumber neural resources on a vast scale and change how the
person's mind carries out its work.
from Lionel Bailly, Lacan: a Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld, 2009)
The human child needs no training, or even teaching: human beings acquire
language by simply 'crossing the bar' in the relationship between
signifier and signified; and once the bar is crossed, the human psyche
is in the entrance hall of the Symbolic realm, with all its vast
possibilities. (46)
The associations
between signifiers and their high mobility allow for the immeasurable
complexity of human psychological functioning, both conscious and
unconscious. (47)
The signified
concepts are already present in the child’s mind, and it is the
exercise of these concepts, via the vocalization, that produces
pleasure in the game. In this case, jouissance
is derived from the functioning of the psychological apparatus . . .
. This process of symbolization is the means by which drives may
be enjoyed in a sublimated form: ‘Sublimation is nonetheless
satisfaction of the drives, without repression.’ [Sahlins] (120)
There is just as
much, if not greater jouissance in the functioning of the mind than in
the functioning of any other bodily part. The ability to cross
the bar of metaphor, to operate in the symbolic realm—to conceptualize,
to analyze, and to rationalise—are all libidinal functions, which
entail enjoyment of the mere functioning of the intellect. (124)
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g
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Textures of Politics
Murray Body Committee Local 2 discusses the competitive situation in the spring industry, 1939
Minutes of the
Murray Body Committee Local 2 at Executive Board Meeting, April 26,
1939, Toledo Ohio, Addes Collection, Box 14.11, Reuther Archives.
The members of the Local 2 Committee were:
Brother Hall from Spring &
Wire
Brother McDonnell from Stamping
Brothers Sanders and McWilliams
from Trim
Brother Smith from Frame (Ecorse plant)
Brother Manini,
Vice President
Also present was Executive Board member Walter Reuther
|
FDR Addresses the Nation, 1936-1938
Campaign Address (speech file 930), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 1, 1936
Informal remarks (speech file 935), Oelwein, Iowa, October 9, 1936
Audio and Transcript of Campaign Speech, Chicago, October 14, 1936
Audio and Transcript of Campaign Speech, Madison Square Garden, October 31, 1936
Fireside Chat #13, "Report to the Nation on National Affairs", June 24, 1938
Barnesville, Georgia August 11, 1938 (Leuchtenberg/"Copperhead")
|
Novelist Saul Bellow recalled hearing a fireside chat . . .
from Wikipedia, "Fireside chats"
Novelist Saul Bellow
recalled hearing a fireside chat while walking in Chicago one summer
evening. "The blight hadn't yet carried off the elms, and under them,
drivers had pulled over, parking bumper to bumper, and turned on their
radios to hear Roosevelt. They had rolled down the windows and opened
the car doors. Everywhere the same voice, its odd Eastern accent, which
in anyone else would have irritated Midwesterners. You could follow
without missing a single word as you strolled by. You felt joined to
these unknown drivers, men and women smoking their cigarettes in
silence, not so much considering the President's words as affirming the
rightness of his tone and taking assurance from it."
|
Modernist Sensibilities in Flint circa 1945-48
from my interview with Saul Wellman, Michigan State Chairman of the Communist Party in the post-war 1940s.
Saul Wellman:
Flint is what I consider to be the asshole of the world; it's the
roughest place to be. Now we recruited dozens of people to the Party
in Flint, and they came out of indigenous folk. And those are the best
ones. But we couldn't keep them in Flint very long, once they joined
the Party. Because once they came to the Party a whole new world
opened up. New cultural concepts, new people, new ideas. And they
were like a sponge, you know. And Flint couldn't give it to them. The
only thing that Flint could give you was whorehouses and bowling
alleys, you see. So they would sneak down here to Detroit on
weekends--Saturday and Sunday--where they might see a Russian film or
they might . . . hear their first opera in their lives or a symphony
or talk to people that they never met with in their lives.
PF: to me that's one of the most significant processes of people becoming radicals, is this . . .
SW: but you lose them in their area . . .
PF: right. You lose
them, but I think something is going on there that I think radicals
have not understood about their own movement . . .
SW: right . . .
PF: something about the urge toward self improvement . . .
SW: right . . .
and cultural advancement . . .
SW: right, right . . .
PF: and not to remain an unskilled worker in the asshole of the world . . .
SW: right, right. But
there are two things going on at the same time. The movement is losing
something when a native indigenous force leaves his community. On the
other hand the reality of joining a movement of this type is that the
guy who is in the indigenous area looks around and says this is idiocy,
I can't survive here.
|
The Southern Strategy: 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 you don'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
by-product 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."
|
Trump's Meeting with the Joint Chiefs in the Tank, July 20, 2017
A close reading of chapter 9, "Shocking the Conscience," 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 performativity of president Trump, 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. (Slate, "Trump's Nuclear Meltdown", October 11, 2017.)
|
"He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting"
from "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.
|
|
➔
|
Semiotic Regimes: the Two-Party System
|
The
figure to the right combines cognitive and emotional processes.
Deployment of a concept of semiotic regimes enables making sense of
media productions as a moral theater of ressentiment and complaint.
So-called "conspiracy theories", when apprehended in the context of
this figure, become intelligible as instances of the political
mobilization of the paranoid-schizoid position. It is within this
context that a concept of the sado-sexual eigenvector of GOP
perfomativity emerges. (Clarke and Zaretsky; Nietzsche & Marx on the Cartesian myth (the myth of the "Individual")
|
state-of-the-art scholarly texts
from Friederich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (p. 51, Penguin)
To this extent media
discourse* is never to be taken literally: as such, it never contains
anything but nonsense. But as semiotics it remains of incaculable
value: it reveals, to the informed man, at least, the most precious
realities of cultures and inner worlds which did not know how to
"understand" themselves. Media discourse** is merely sign-language,
merely sympomology.
from Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age ( (McGill-Queens University Press, 2010)
We are changing, of course,
but that does not necessarily mean we are progressing. Combined
with all the forces that today exhort us to look into our own private
lives, the “civilization of change” has stimulated a massive interest
in psychic disorders. It can be heard from all quarters, and it
takes form in the many marketplaces that offer inner balance and
tranquility. Today, many of our socials tensions have been
expressed in terms of implosion and depressive collapse or, in a
similar way, its flip side: explosions of violence, rage, the search
for new sensations. pp. 185-6
As addictive explosion reflects depressive implosion, so the
drug-taker’s search for sensation reflects the depressed person’s lack
of feeling. Depression, that crossroads of pathology, serves as a
canvas upon which to sketch out the changes in modern subjectivity, the
displacement of the hard task of being healthy. In a context in
which choice is the norm and inner insecurity the price, these
pathologies make up the dark side of contemporary private life.
Such is the equation of the sovereign individual: psychic freedom and
individual initiative = identity insecurities and the incapacity to
act. p. 232
* "moral judgement" in the original
** "morality" in the original
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The two-party System: Semiotic Regimes I
Cognitive Performativities and Emotional Configurations

|
LEFT*
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RIGHT
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Topology
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depressive
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paranoid-schizoid
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Political style
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progressive
|
proto-Dorian
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Cognitive mode
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concrete & pre-op
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pre-op and gestural
|
Regime type
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rational-bureaucratic
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patrimonial
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t
ihhhi
Analysis of comments sent to the Connecticut Post, August 31, 2006 regarding
the Jonathan Edwards murder case

|
The
original impetus for this analysis emerged from a reading of
the comments published in The Connecticut Post of August 31, 2006 re.
the Jonathon Edington murder case (Rabids/Thoughtfuls).
I noticed the deep similarities between this set of comments and the
pro- and anti-war demonstrators' signs in a CNN newscast, 4:00 to 6:00
PM, 9-15-07.
Figures 1 is what resulted from this line of thought.
In
the figure above right I characterized the differences between the two
parties as topological the topology (where there is a structure on a
set of elements)
and the topography (which is simply descriptive) of the two-party
system.
By topologies I mean the
following: take the set of all statements made in a well-defined
bounded discursive space (the two-party space).
First, the rhetorical elements form two disjoint sets.
Second, there is a
structure on each data set: a left structure and a right structure.
Each data set has both a psychoanalytic and a cognitive dimension.
These psychological-semiotic structures are provided by Simon Clarke, Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). The Clarke text is deployed as
interpretive grid. Without this psychoanalytic framework it is
impossible to understand the rhetorical performances of right-wing
political actors--and the responses of their right-wing audiences.
Note also how the work of Clarke, Zaretsky, Ehrenberg
The cognitive-semiotic
structures are provided by standard developmental theory (page,
bibliography). Pre-operational and gestural cognitive modalities
dominate the right rhetorical set. More abstract (formal
operational) and factual (concrete operational) dominate on the
left. Indeed, the fundamental character of the left is its
committment to science, explicitly, and bildung, implicityly. |
|
Rabid
Put me down for 100.00$ for this guys defence. He was kind. In Texas
they would have never found the body. I tored of all the nambepambe
judges letting these monster room free. I tell my kids not to worry
about whats on TV, worry about you neighbor! I don;t want to tramatize
them but damn the world has just changed for the worst. Nothing new,
its alwas been there, with media we haer more of it. You'd thing a good
judge would use it to their advantage and really knock these type of
creep down and lock them up and trow away the key. email me Jon, and
Thanks Allen
Allen Winn | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 12:09 pm | #
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This father is hero. Hopefully, those of us who feel the same will
continue to lobby the law makers to pass laws making any indecent
contact with a child AND dealing in any way with kiddie-porn, a felony,
carrying HEAVY jail sentences. The fact that this dad is an attorney
and knows the watered-down, perp-favored laws, says volumes. He meted
out justice, swiftly and fairly. God bless you, Mr. Edington!
c | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 12:07 pm | # |
About time someone takes the law in their own hands, So what did the
FFLD PD do when they had the compliant about the perv standing naked in
the window, FFLD PD get off your ASS and start working instead of
worrying about traffic voilation..... |
I hope i am a jurer for this trial, FREE FREE FREE
chris gallo | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 12:06 pm | #
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I've always thought I would do the same if any person harmed my son.
Thank you Mr. Edington from fathers everywhere. I wish this happened
everyday. Perverts would think twice.
Anton | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 11:51 am | # |
This man should be lift on the shoulders of every father in this
country and given three cheers. What he did to his neighbor is nothing
compared to what that little girl will have to live with. We should all
rally to let our voices be heard and help this man out. He is no danger
to anyone except the man who harmed his daughter and that is very well
taken care of.
Chris | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 11:44 am | # |
Wow I was expecting to chime in with the exact comments expressed here.
Earlier when the death was reported I said it was probably going to be
over something silly since nothing was reported about the reason.
videophotog | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 11:35 am | # |
This guy should be given the key to the city. The only thing the guy
did wrong was that he should have just gotten rid of the body so the
tax paying people of conn. wouldn't have to pick up the bill for the
trial. This is the way it should be done until the laws on sexual
predation are corrected.
Joel | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 11:07 am | # |
I have heard many a father say that is exactly what they would do to
any sick man who would dare....The tragedy is not that he killed a sick
man the tragedy is what was done to that little girl and what their
family will have to endure in the future.
Diane | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 11:06 am | # |
I hope he gets off and doesn't serve one day in jail because he got rid of a low life useless person a pediphile pig!
B | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 9:34 am | # |
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|
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Thoughtful
I heard the child was 2. Most 2 yearolds barely talk and most not
capable of making up a story. How did the child tell the mother about
this incident?
lisa | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 1:31 pm | # |
So many are making comments without knowing the facts. What really did
happen?? Think about both families and how they are both feeling. In
the USA we are supposed be to innocent until proven guilty. And does
being convicted of driving under the influence make this an automatic
assumption of guilt. Learn the facts before you judge............
Susan | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 1:07 pm | # |
I find it extremely disturbing that a man can be tried, convicted and
executed without one shred of evidence, in the court of public madness
and extremism.
Has our paranoia become so intesified that we are reasy to commit cold blooded murder merely on speculation and rumor?
The article stated: MacNamara said James did not have a criminal record
and was not under "any investigation alleging inappropriate activity
regarding children."
On May 1, 2001, James pleaded guilty in Superior Court to driving under
the influence of alcohol or drugs and was sentenced to six months,
suspended after two days, followed by 18 months probation. He was also
fined $500.
If people think the above charges warrant the death penalty by
stabbing, then the real danger to society are the majority of the
posters here.
TL Myers | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 12:59 pm | # |
Im glad your all so quick to judge. Do you know the facts? To me
something as important as molestation of a child should not been done
by a phone call. Where was the parents when this 2 year old child was
left alone? That just seems strange to me. people need to question that.
anonymous | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 12:37 pm | # |
I am an empty nest father of two, a daughter and a son. I too would
have the urge to hunt down and exterminate anyone who hurt either of my
children or my wife. Crimes against children are the very worst and are
why these types of people have to be protected from other lawbreakers.
Nevertheless, it seems strange to me that he would take the action he
did based on a phone call and not speaking with his daughter himself. I
would have got myself to my daughter's side first to talk to and
comfort her and my wife. There were already hard feelings with this
neighbor and the phone conversation after a long day at work was the
spark. This man is no hero to me regardless of the evidence that may
come.
Charlie | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 12:19 pm | # |
I am a bit dismayed at the comments here. If this guy did molest the
little girl then I have no problem with the father walking away.
However, every comment so far has convicted this man of molestation on
the word of a 2 year old, and the phone call of a wife. Did the 2 year
old just come out and say this to her mother? Did her mother bring this
revelation out of the child? We don't know, yet you are ready to
convict a man that you do not even know. The police have not confirmed
anything. How can anyone condone killing of another person based on
rumor, and at this point that is all that it is.
Joe Duh | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 12:15 pm | # |
Being the mother of a murdered daughter, you might think I would
approve of this but I dont..We have due process whether or not we think
t he process is just or not..This man is innocent until proven
guilty..A two year old child has to be questioned carefully..We cannot
as a society take the law into our own hands..Change the laws
pertaining to molestation, and violent crimes..Pay attention ,contact
legislators because it could be you or someone you love one day..Put
these people away, but do it in a legal manner.
gail addenbrooke | Email | Homepage | 08.31.06 - 12:10 pm | # |
XXX
X
X
X
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modernity as a mode of lingusitic and cognitive performativity
|
|
from Friederich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, (I 2).
All
philosophers have the common failing of starting out from man as he is
now and thinking they can reach their goal through an analysis of
him. They involuntarily think of 'man' as an aeterna veritas, as
something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure
mesure of things. Everything the philosopher has declared about
man is, however, no more than a testimony as to the man of a very
limited period of time. Lack of historical sense is the family failing
of all philosophers
from Friederich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (p. 51, Penguin)
To this extent media
discourse* is never to be taken literally: as such, it never contains
anything but nonsense. But as semiotics it remains of incaculable
value: it reveals, to the informed man, at least, the most precious
realities of cultures and inner worlds which did not know how to
"understand" themselves. Media discourse** is merely sign-language,
merely sympomology.
from Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age ( (McGill-Queens University Press, 2010)
We are changing, of course,
but that does not necessarily mean we are progressing. Combined
with all the forces that today exhort us to look into our own private
lives, the “civilization of change” has stimulated a massive interest
in psychic disorders. It can be heard from all quarters, and it
takes form in the many marketplaces that offer inner balance and
tranquility. Today, many of our socials tensions have been
expressed in terms of implosion and depressive collapse*** or, in a
similar way, its flip side: explosions of violence, rage, the search
for new sensations.**** pp. 185-6
As addictive explosion reflects depressive implosion, so the
drug-taker’s search for sensation reflects the depressed person’s lack
of feeling. Depression, that crossroads of pathology, serves as a
canvas upon which to sketch out the changes in modern subjectivity, the
displacement of the hard task of being healthy. In a context in
which choice is the norm and inner insecurity the price, these
pathologies make up the dark side of contemporary private life.
Such is the equation of the sovereign individual: psychic freedom and
individual initiative = identity insecurities and the incapacity to
act. p. 232
* "moral judgement" in the original
** "morality" in the original
*** liberalism/nihilism
**** fascism (see Roper and Walzer)
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the big picture: 1mya to 2023
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Geographies, Timelines, and Bibliographies
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