Invisible
University
aa1971@wayne.edu |
the Cartesian self (the geneative matrix of the public sphere)
before the state (QHD 1 and QHD 2) after the state (QHD 3, QHD 4, and QHD 5) Eye of the Times |
This site is an enquiry into the post-paleolithic development of the primate homo sapiens--of culturally, historically, and politically-based developmental differentiation and divergence that is qualitative as well as quantitative, and which, as Mary Midgley (The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene, p. 52) has noted, can be called "pseudo-speciation." This extraordinary variation is both cognitive and psychological, ontogenetic and phylogenetic, and context-dependent. In its approach to this variation this site is, among other things, the antithesis of the prevailing racisms, liberal as well as fascist. The axis around which this site revolves is The Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein: 5 Genetic Ontologies (QHD). It should be looked at now. This site is a rhizome: an assemblage of linked pages, and links to videos, texts, and data-bases. This site is embedded in cognitive-textual fields determined by two rules: the Cassirer inclusion rule, and the Margolies exclusion rule. QHDs 1-5 is such a cognitive-textual field. Figure 1 is only technically about cognitive variation. (For more on Figure 1 see the PISA Results: Evolutionary, Historical, Developmental, and Psychological Perspectives). While much has been made over the past dozen years of the abysmal showing of the United States, the results of the 2012 tests, while confirming the wretched relative position of the U.S. among the advanced industrial nations, provide a glimpse into our global "postmodern" future. The sharp decline in the scores of Finland and Sweden, and the significant decline of the scores of the Anglo-Saxon nations, suggests that the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are where two lines of development--sociotechnical advance and cognitive regression--clash. Capitalism--at least advanced capitalism--requires advanced minds. Narcissistic regression--the culture of consumption (see Hall et. al., Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture)--undermines the very possibility of advanced cognitive development. But Figure 1 is just the tip of Dasein's iceberg. Cognitive and bio-emotional issues can be addressed as seperate analytical fields, but only if these approaches are dialectically related in the construction of a comprehensive view of Dasein. In the context of QHD the development of the advanced cognitive powers that is the essence of the enlightenment trajectory (QHD-4) is subverted by the political mobilizations of both ressentiment (QHD-3) and primate relational modalities (QHD-1), and by the consequences of the nihilism (QHD-5) that is the essence of post-modern capitalism. Nihilism is above all about entropy. |
Figure 1.
PISA Math
Scores, 2003 - 2012: 25 Nations
NCES, Highlights PISA 2003, p. 14 NCES, Highlights PISA 2009, p. 18 NCES, Highlights PISA 2006, p. 12 OECD 2013 Key Findings, p.5 Southeast Asian nations are in light blue; Scandinavian nations + Switzerland in dark blue; Anglo-Saxon nations in orange; France, Germany, Belgium and Poland in green; Italy, Port- ugal and Spain in brown; the United States in red. These are the advanced capitalist nations (some have been omitted for the sake visual clarity). Also see Figures 2 and 3 in The GOP as the Stupid Party? An Inadequate Conceptualization |
⓵
QHD is
the antithesis of the Cartesian delusion so central to neo-liberal
ideology. The term Dasein is used to problematize homo sapiens as
a species unlike any other, whose "nature" it is to be subject to
cultural and historical development as a result of its own activity, to
be subject to the psychological consequences of such processes
(Nietzsche), and to be capable of embarking on projects whose objective
is self- and societal-transformation (Hegel's Bildung and Nietzsche's
Will to Power). [Dupre, Kagan]Cognitive development is one of these fundamental transformations, but it is not the only one. Nietzsche's last man is neo-liberalism's ideal and all too real human, and it is this brute fact of contemporary life that sets the limits for any praxis that could be called progressive and/or revolutionary in the twenty-first century. And ressentiment--another of Nietzsche's fundamental concepts that gets us to the heart of fascism--also denotes a fundamental transformation of Dasein. There is no point in reading any of this site's pages without keeping QHD in mind. A common justification for the way things are today to say that Marxism (by which one really means the Progressivism of the New Deal as well as Russian Stalinism) has failed, and it has failed because its utopian dream was no match for "human nature." ∞Marx, and the enlightenment ethos of which he was a part, was indeed wrong, and in more ways than one. 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. →
|
⓶
Ressentiment
is the dark energy against which the Enlightenment is powerless.
It bubbles and explodes in the 2009 anti-"Obamacare" town hall
meetings. Some see ressentiment as backlash--as episodic and
event-driven (ie, as reactions to ghetto rebellions, school busing,
student radicalism); they are wrong. There is a deep structure of
rage that is endemic to our more broadly conceived historical situation
(Nietzsche)--inchoate rage expressed in the theater of ressentiment
that politics provides. This is the heart of darkness at the
center of civilization--and the core psychodynamic logic that generates
the rhetorical performances at the heart of the Right.
The activity of 1) provincial, archaic and traditional elites (Persistence of the Old Regime), together with 2) newer firms in the west and south and 3) newly emergent crony capitalist formations (Enron, World Com), and now 4) a whole new set of predatory financial institutions plays a critical role in the politicization of ressentiment. In addition, the autonomy of the political apparatus of ressentiment, as evidenced by the Debt-Ceiling Crisis . . . where the fundaental rule of politics--difference--is overcome, and the GOP tea party caucus repreesnts an irruption into governamcne of the umediated forces of ressentiment (seee NY Times article) the activity of these old and new elites, in aiding and abetting the construction of the political structures of mass mobilization (Town Hall meetings, Fox News, etc.), is decisive in determining the political effectiveness of contemporary right wing movements, which otherwise might languish in a populist stew of ineffectual rage (see Red Scare). But they do not call into existence these ontologies of ressentiment, of the right, of anti-cosmopolitanism. They merely utilize and shape them. (See Right-wing Elites in the Postwar era.) The result is the Stupid Party. The question of ressentiment and fascism is raised in The GOP as the Stupid Party: An Inadequate Conceptualization, and Resentiment and the Mechanisms of Defense, where I apply psychoanalytic methods and concepts to understanding the persistence and resurgence of fascism, the dominant ethos of the GOP "base." Fascism is also the dominant ethos in Israel, Russia and the Ukraine, and is a powerful presence in Europe. In this regard two books by the psychologically astute journalist Max Blumenthal are essential: Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (Nation Books, 2013), and Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Republican Party (Nation Books, 2009). Needless to say, progressives of all stripes, who a century ago were an ascending force optimistic about the future, are now dumbfounded, perplexed and depressed in the face of a persisting barbarism now become almost banal (Fox News). ↙ |
⓷
Bobby Jindal, who used "stupid" to characterize the Republican Party on January 24, 2013, was referring to the sado-sexual rhetoric of, among others, Tod--"legitimate rape"--Akin, and Richard--"rape is God's will"--Mourdock. The opportunistic use of sado-sexual rhetoric is in itself is not necessarily stupid, even if its appeal is to the cognitively challenged. Nevertheless, the rhetorical performativity of the GOP is primitive (gestural and pre-operational), and serves to retard the cognitive development of those human populations subsumed under its semiotic domain. But the sadism of the GOP's appeal is part of a global historical phenomenon. Instead of enlightement reason we have a triumphant politics of ressentiment that includes, we can now see, the ultranationalism of the late 19th century, the fascism of the last century, and the "tea parties" of this century (Protestant, Islammic, and Jewish fundamentalisms). To be clear: the fusion of religious fundamentalism with sadism is a global phenomenon. → |
⓸ ⓷⓸⓶⓹ |
⓹
∞I sugggest here that there is a persistent existential catastrophe manifested in fascism, or better, to use Nietzsche's term, ressentiment. Usually something that is catastrophic is seen as a cataclysmic event rather than a persistent condition. But that all depends upon the level of analysis chosen. At the level of the organism homo sapiens historicus--post-paleolithic man--life is a series of catastrophes--eternal recurrence, repetition compulsion, mechanisms of defense . . . The perpetual work of adaptation to power, and the tremendous range of possibilities opened up by the increasing symbolic and institutional complexity of Dasein, give us our being in the world, fractured, dynamic, creative, stagnant, withdrawn, depressive, bold, fearful, anxious, ecstatic, explosive, gregarious, autistic, etc. Ernest Gellner has written a very intersting book--The Psychoanalytic Movement: The Cunning of Unreason--in which he dismisses psychoanalysis as a cult whose therapeutic promise is a false one. To which I respond, the failure of therapy (which is to greatly overstate the case, but I accept his premise for the sake of the point I am making) is hardly an indictment of a specific instantiation of the Second Copernican Revolution (page under construction). Attempts at therapy, whatever their outcome, leave us a record, among other things, of the persistent existential catastrophe that Nietzsche conceptualizes. Psychoanalysis, together with literature and cognitive-developmental psychology, constitute a counternarrative to the narrative of neoliberalism . . . . . . . It is in the theaters of ressentiment that include the politics of rage and identity that the organism's attempts to deal with this persistent catastrophe are on display. Look again at The Stupid Party: that's the concrete, everyday stuff that I'm talking about. And look at Ressentiment and the Mechanisms of Defense, which assembles state-of-the-art contemporary texts indicating that this persistent catastrophe can be traced at least as far back as the First Crusade. To summarize: sado-sexual rage dominates the discursive practice of the GOP's relationship to its base. This is the emotional side of right-wing politics, a bruitishness, a sado-sexual obsessiveness, that results in institutionalized violence . . . . a persistent existential catastrophe that Nietzsche diagnosed as ressentiment. Marx was wrong; Nietzsche was right. |
from Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 16: Let us add at once that . . . the
existence on earth of an animal soul turned against itself, taking
sides against itself, was something so new, profound, unheard of,
enigmatic, contradictory, and pregnant with a future that the aspect of
the earth was essentially altered. Indeed, divine spectators were
needed to justice to the spectacle that thus began and the end of which
is not yet in sight . . . . From now on, man . . . gives rise to
an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as if with him
somethin were anouncing and preparing itself, as if man were not a goal
but onl a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise.
from Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 22: Oh this insane, pathetic
beast--man! What ideas he has, what unnaturalness, what paroxysms
of nonsense, what bestiality of thought erupts . . .
All this is interesting, to excess, but also of a gloomy, black, unnerving sadness, so that one must forcibly forbid oneself to gaze too long into these abysses. Here is sickness, beyond any doubt, the most terrible sickness that has ever raged in man . . . . There is so much man that is hideous!--Too long, the earth has been a madhouse! from Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 14: Here the works of vengefulness
and rancor swarm; here the air stinks of secrets and concealment;
. . . and what mendaciousness is employed to disquise that this hatred
is hatred! What a display of grand words and postures, what an
art of "honest" calumny!
|
The
GOP as the Stupid Party--which focuses on what should be
seen as the praxiological, context-dependent cogntive inferiority of the
GOP's rhetorical performativity--shows
what happens if you take a fundamentally anti-racist approach to the
issue of cognitive inequality,
a word--inequality--which will henceforth be dispensed with since it is
both an
expression of Cartesian presuppositions and a reduction of questions of
power, structure and history to a child's moral sensibilities.
Political
correctness dictates the avoidance of such questions of variations in
cognitive performativity (see Engeström
and Miettinen), and there is a virtual taboo against speaking
of
Tea Party (that is, militantly white)
cognitive performativity in such terms. This is a field effect
(Bourdieu) of racism. Whether anti-communism as field effect
is
homologous with racism is still an open question. In both
cases demonization of the other and ideologically organized hatred are
instruments of power. They differ in
the nature of the object, however. In racism, the object is
the abject yet threatening other, envied for its primitive aliveness.
In anti-communism, the
object is envied for its modernity--its competence and power.
Anti-communism is nothing more than the politically orchestrated rabid
hatred of
progressivism and the New Deal, and of their feeble successor, post-modern
liberalism (see Vincent). The two figures to the right summarizes the results of an analysis of the cognitive-emotional performativity of the public sphere. My rough attempt to assemble the texts relevant to decoding the two-party discursive/performative domain can be found here and here. A very crude summation of the three fields at the right would be image, fact, and concept, with the caveat that conceptual thinking is the sin of the left within bourgeois (2), and is not represented in this figure. |
Fig.
2a. Cognitive
Regimes: Topography of the Two-party system
Bourgeois (1):
CNN/MSNBC
Bourgeois (2):
Universities/NPR
(modern
corporation)
(human capital, cultural capital)
Concrete Operational (and preop.) Concrete Operational Preoperational (and gestural) provincial capitals; racist political ecologies) (I don't remember the source of this graphic. I found it via a Google image search) |
Notice that in Cognitive Regimes 2a
specific cognitive modalities are associated with specific sectors of
capital. This is a simplification, but it gets the ball rolling (on
sectors of capital see KE). In 2b, Topologies of the Two-Party System, I take a further step. 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. The cognitive-semiotic structures are provided by standard developmental theory. Pre-operational and gestural cognitive modalities dominate the right rhetorical set. Concrete and pre-operational modalities dominate on the mass media left. The Mechanisms of Defense provide the structure on the set of all right-wing semiotic productions. In Clarke's text, this is the paranoid-schizoid position (after Melanie Klein): rage seeking a target; exclusion. The psychological structure on the set of all mass media left-wing semiotic productions is given by the depressive position (Melanie Klein again): concern for others; inclusion. Note that the discursive manifold of the public sphere does not include elite discursive activity, such as the internal correspondence of the Keynesian elite (see also Bull. T.S. online), or theoretically developed academic discourse. |
Fig. 2b.
Cognitive Regimes: Topologies
of the
Two-party System
LEFT
RIGHT
TOPOLOGY depressive* paranoid-schizoid* POLITICAL STYLE progressive proto-Dorian COG MODE formal + concrete pre-operational + gestural + psuedo-concrete |
*** Nihilism The second big question involves not violence, rage, and racism, but Nihilism (Nietzsche): Regressive Narcissism and the culture of consumption (Hall et. al.); repressive desublimation (Marcuse); and the last man (Nietzsche)--or, in a word, Entropy. It's story might be entitled The Incredibly Shrinking Self, or The Incredible Smallness of Being. This page--Nihilism--is as yet only a crude assemblage of texts and images. But Nihilism is a critical issue in the page that belongs to Figure 1: The PISA Results: Evolutionary, Historical, Developmental, and Psychological Perspectives |
|
This site is built out of a series of immanent, densely "empirical" investigations of historical processes in which power and its consequences, and cognitive/psychological development and its consequences, are at issue. So far this page has To illustrate: in my investigation of the organization of the UAW in Detroit and Flint my informants frequently opposed my use of the standard ontologies of class and culture, and insisted instead on the importance of key individuals and small groups of workers not readily subsumable under the standard concepts of labor history. Some of the interviewees also emphasized a developmental process generally absent from historical texts. As the excerpt beneath the photo of Dodge Main from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil suggests, an entirely different understanding of the events and processes that led to the creation of the UAW is required, an understanding that drive a stake into the heart of Marxist populism, while breathing new life into Leninist vanguardism . . . but only if the latter is fused with Nietzsche's will to power and the übermensch, and with Hegel's Bildung. |
Dodge Main on Detroit's
near east side, circa 1940
The
very same new conditions that will on average lead to the
leveling and mediocritization of man--to a useful,
industrious,
handy, multi-purpose herd animal--are likely in the highest degree to
give birth to exceptional human beings of the most dangerous and
attractive quality.
Friederich
Nietzsche, Beyond Good
and Evil, 242
|
There
is more to Figure
1
than meets they eye. The whole of primate history generates
figure 1. According to Merlin Donald (right), the immediate
performative potential of human beings is both a living archeological
site and Viewed, for the sake of argument, within a progressive framework, the "highest" levels of cognitive development--scientific reason and formal operational cognitive competence-- But both primate and ressentiment modalities are also reflected in Fig 1. Figure 1 is explicitly about cognitive development as an historical process, implicitly about the Enlightenment as a cultural-historical, cognitive-developmental inflection point in human history. Figure 1 is also at issue in The GOP as the Stupid Party? An Inadequate Conceptualization. The sharp decline in the scores of Finland and Sweden, and the significant decline of the scores of the Anglo-Saxon nations, suggests that the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are where two lines of development--sociotechnical advance and cognitive regression--clash. Capitalism--at least advanced capitalism--requires advanced minds. Narcissistic regression--the culture of consumption (see Hall et. al., Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture)--undermines the very possibility of advanced cognitive development. Of course this is a speculation based on mere data and theory, and no match for the desperate clutching at straws of the cognitive primitives who tout educational reform, which in practice means cultural violence against both teachers and students led by hedge funds (see the the Board of Success Academy in New York) and the right-wing noise machine. (see example 1 and example 2.) |
Merlin
Donald, "The mind considered from a historical perspective: human
cognitive phylogenesis and the possibility of continuing cognitive
evolution." In D. Johnson & C. Ermeling (Eds.) The Future of the Cognitive Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 360-61 mimetic representations are
evident in human children before they acquire language competence. . .
. They continue to be important in adults, taking the form of
highly variable social customs, athletic skills, and group expressive
patterns (such as mass demonstrations of aggression or rejection).
Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (Norton, 2001): . . . modern culture
contains within it a trace of each of our previous stages of cognitive
evolution. It still rests on the same old primate brain capacity
for episodic or event knowledge. But it has three additional,
uniquely human layers: a mimetic layer, an oral-linguistic layer, and
an external-symbolic layer. The minds of individuals reflect
these three ways of representing reality. (p. 262)
But
this progressive view is only half the psycho-cognitive picture.
The progressive view could retain plausibility through the New
Deal and beyond, perhaps into the 1970s. But by the second decade
of the twenty-first century there has been too much barbarism,
stupidity, and contraction of self to a pulsating blob of desires
floating in a corporate-dominated semiotic stew--too much for the naive
and by now archaic progressivism of our immediate predecessors.
It is Nietzsche who has given us the more appropriate conceptual
and metaphoric framework for understanding what it is : the Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein.Barbarism, stupidity, and contraction of self: ressentiment, decognification, and nihilism. These also enter into the equation, so to speak, that results in Figure 1. "The superorganism account of human sociality: How and when human groups are like beehives" by Selin Kesebir University of Virginia September 26, 2011 Personality and Social Psychology Review. 2012 Aug;16(3):233-61. doi: 10.1177/1088868311430834. Epub 2011 Dec 27. |
*See
Jonathan Marks' review
of New
York Times science journalist Nicholas
Wade's neo-racist A Troublesome Inheritance:
Genes, Race and Human History (Penguin
Press, 2014). Also see Revisiting
Race in a Genomic Age (Rutgers, 2008). Even
better, see
Marks' blog (anthropomics),
as well as Jennifer Raff 's blog
to keep up to date. ** Elsewhere I deconstruct white into the severely, really, merely, and nearly white. *** Power as concrete empirical networks of power--see Keynesian Elite. **** Capitalism is a term that should be retired in favor of an empirically and theoretically more flexible and historical analysis of actually existing networks of power. How We Became Human A Challenge to Psychoanalysis |
authors
regimes, networks,
ontologies |
On psychoanalysis and the semiotics of the two-party system (see Vincent) |
|
The
above excerpts from Dupré are consistent with
Nietzsche's concept of the Will
to Power and
Hegel's concept of Bildung--the
fourth genetic ontology
of Dasein (see Bildung:
Was Mozart a Communist?). Nietzsche was an in-your-face kind of guy, and his extravagant, confrontational, and arrogant rhetorical style, his hostility to "democracy", his contempt for the emerging form of life of mass society, and his appropriation by the Nazis (through his racist sister), and even worse, the strangely selective reading and misconstrual of Nietzsche's overall work by, for example, Mary Migdley and Roger Griffith (in order to make Nietzsche an aristocratic nationalist-racist they ignore his concept of ressentiment and his contempt for nationalism and anti-Semitism)--nevertheless, he describes with exquisite chutzpah the events and processes that one sees when one views the action--the organizational battles that led to the formation of the UAW--from the inside, immanently. This judgement emerges from within the dialogic field (hence the concept of immanence--see Bourdieu) produced by my interviews of dozens of Übermenschen from Flint, Detroit's near east side (Dodge Main and vicinity, including my book on UAW Local 238/229--see Detroit's East Side, 1933‒1944), Detroit's far east side (the Conner Avenue area--Packard, Hudson, Briggs, and Chrysler), and the Ford Rouge plant. This judgement is confirmed by Nelson Lichtenstein's biography of Walter Reuther, which among other things is a detailed account of the events and processes of organizing on Detroit's west side. Sidney Fine's account of the Flint Sitdown Strike is also extraordinarily detailed. Both of these books confirm Nietzsche's statement even if their authors might cringe at the thought. BABSON |
The excerpt below from John
Dupré, "Causality and Human Nature in the Social Sciences,"
in Processes of Life: Essays in the
Philosophy of Biology (Oxford,
2012), is one of the best summaries available of what could be called
the Progressive view of human psycho-cognitive development: it can serve as an
introduction to Figure 1.
It
is . . . clear that
recognition of the variety of factors involved in development makes
possible a diversity of individual outcomes within even quite narrowly
defined populations. (285)
. . . the human mind . . . involves a new level of capacity to transform the world beyond the organism. (291) If I simply act in pursuit of whatever passing whim is uppermost at the moment I exhibit no more causal power than any other animal. If I choose to build a bridge, write a book, or cook dinner, and subordinate my choice of actions to this decision, I exercise to a greater or lesser degree a distinctively human ability to shape the world. In the social realm, the ability to confrom to principle, above all moral principle, is the kind of regimentation of behaviour that constitutes a uniquely human achievement. (291) .
. . it is the fitting of action into some kind of systematic pattern
that distinguishes the truly free agent from one who merely has the
ability to respond to the whim of the moment; and . . . [what
emerges is] the ontological picture of the human agent as an entity
enabled to pursue complex goals or engage in patterns of action over
time by the acquisition of a uniquely rich range of capabilities. (293)
For more along these lines, see The PISA Results:
Evolutionary, Historical, Developmental, and Psychological Perspectives.
I wish to emphasize particularly the ability of cultural evolution to transform the developmental niche. And here, at least in contemporary developed countries, it seems clear that humans have learned in quite recent times to construct a remarkably novel environment for the development of their young. . . . [T]hese prodigious changes to the human environment, concretizations of our rapidly evolving culture, profoundly affect the developmental resources available to growing humans. For that reason their introduction should be seen as representing major evolutionary change. (284) |
The
fourth genetic ontology of Dasein--Nietzsche's concept of the Will to
Power and Hegel's concept of Bildung--is also
critically important in
understanding the Keynesian elite, the left-wing of the Roosevelt
Administration (see The Keynesian
Elite, 1910-1939,
and Bildung:
Was Mozart a Communist?). from Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (University of Chicago, 1992) [Bourdieu develops]
"a
sociological method consisting essentially in a manner of posing
problems, in a parsimonious set of conceptual tools and procedures for
constructing objects and for transfering knowledge gleaned in one area
of inquiry into another. 'However important, the specific
object
of [this or that] research counts less . . . than the method which was
applied to it and which could be applied to an infinity of different
objects'"
Will to Power and Bildung--these concepts are drawn into the gravitational field of these two immanent domains: from within the dialogic field of the UAW interviews; and from within the diologic field of the Keynesian elite--the papers of MLC and the letters of LDB; the articles and discussion published in the Bull. of the T.S. Will to Power and Bildung (WP) are also immanent in relation to the textual field of scholarship on Bolshevism. Smith and Chrysler. Again, WPB is central to educational practice in Finland (Finnish Lessons), and to the work of Lev Vygotsky. |
Taylor
Society I: Keynesian
Elite in the New
Deal State Source: "Membership List, May 1927," in the Morris L. Cooke Papers, box 66, FDR Library and United States Government Manual 1937 |
Fascism: Ressentiment and the
Mechanisms of Defense
To understand the central praxiological element in late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century Progressivism--from Louis D. Brandeis to V. I. Lenin, and from the metalworkers of Detroit to the metalworkers of Petersburg--Bildung and the Will to Power, the fourth genetic ontology of Dasein--is critical. To understand the modern right wing, also dating from the late nineteenth century but contining not only into the presnt but ito the future, we must turn to the third genetic ontology of Dasein: Fascism: Ressentiment and the Mechanisms of Defense The axis around which this site revolves is The Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein: 5 Genetic Ontologies (QHD-5) This site is a moment in the unfolding of the Second Copernican Revolution, and probably its swan song as well. |
The
axis around which this site revolves is The Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein: 5 Genetic Ontologies (QHD-5) The link above is the antithesis of the Cartesian delusion so central to neo-liberal ideology. Take a look at QHD-5 now, then continue. The term Dasein is used to problematize homo sapiens as a species unlike any other, whose "nature" it is to be subject to cultural and historical development as a result of its own activity, to be subject to the psychological consequences of such processes (Nietzsche), and to be capable of embarking on projects whose objective is self- and societal-transformation (Hegel's Bildung and Nietzsche's Will to Power). Cognitive development is one of these fundamental transformations (see Figure 1 below), but it is not the only one. Nietzsche's last man is neo-liberalism's ideal and all too real human, and it is this brute fact of contemporary life that sets the agenda for any praxis that could be called progressive and/or revolutionary in the twenty-first century. And ressentiment--another of Nietzsche's fundamental concepts that gets us to the heart of fascism--also denotes a fundamental transformation of Dasein. There is no point in reading any of this site's pages without keeping the above link in mind. This site is a moment in the unfolding of the Second Copernican Revolution, and probably its swan song as well. Thus, this site is an enquiry into the post-paleolithic development of the primate homo sapiens--of culturally, historically, and politically-based developmental differentiation and divergence that is qualitative as well as quantitative, and which, as Mary Midgley (The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene, p. 52) has noted, can be called "pseudo-speciation." This extraordinary variation is both cogntive and psychological, ontogenetic and phylogenetic, and context-dependent. (see Dupre, Causality and Human Nature in the Social Sciences.) |
Fascism: Ressentiment and the Mechanisms of Defense The Keynesian Elite, 1910-1939 Minutes. Murray Body Committee Local 2 at Executive Board Meeting, April 26, 1939, Toledo Ohio (Addes Collection, Box 14.11, Reuther Archives Detroit) re. competitive situation in the spring and wire industry Detroit's East Side, 1933‒1944 Developmental Divergence Philosophy and History (Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism) |
1.
the misuse of Nietzsche (Migdley, Griffith) 2. Nietzsche and the UAW; Nietzsche and the New Deal; Nietzsche and bolshevism (who were Nietzsche's "blond beasts", in 3. Nietzsche and racism, fascism 4. Nietzsche and consumer culture (regresive narcissism) Also see the interview of Jerome Kagan: Psychology Is In Crisis, and Kagan's The Human Spark: the Science of Human Development (Basic Books, 2013)]* |