The
End: 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. Civilization or barbarism.
The thinking behind Figure 0 is that
contemporary questions revolving around sex and violence (fascism/r*c*sm), on the one
hand, and cognition and organization, on the other, must be addressed
within the dual context of our primate inheritance and our developmental capacity as
the only symbolic species (Dupre) capable of self-transformation.
1. on the Cartesian synthetic a priori
from Levi R. Bryant,
Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the
Ontology of Immanence (Northwestern University Press, 2008)
.
. . . so long as philosophy assumes that thought has a natural affinity
with the true . . . a specific form of objectivity (natural common
sense), and bases itself on the model of recognition, thought cannot
help but become unconsciously trapped in its own implicit
presuppositions which are culturally, historically, and socially
contingent. . . . Deleuze thus begins with a critique of the
transcendental subject as a structure consisting of invariant
categories. (17)
. . . the error will arise in that Kant treats concepts and
intuitions as differing in kind, and thus being externally related,
rather than discerning the manner in which they only differ in degree.
(28)
from Robert B. Brandom,
"The Centrality of Sellars's Two-Ply Account of Observations to the
Arguments of 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind', in Robert B.
Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics
of Intentionality (Harvard University Press, 2002)
. . . according to Sellars's view, the difference between theoretical
objects and observable objects is methodologcal rather than
ontological. That is, theoretical and observable objects are not
different kinds of things. They differ only in how we come to
know about them." (362)
from Stephen Houlgate, "Hegel and Brandom on Norms, Concepts and Logical Categories", in Espen Hammer, ed., German Idealism: Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge, 2007)
Hegel
is a particular hero of Brandom's because he recognizes that concepts
are not 'fixed or static items' but the changing products of social and
historical practices. (p. 137)
from F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (VI:3)
The
“inner world” is full of phantoms…: the will is one of them. The will
no longer moves anything, hence does not explain anything either — it
merely accompanies events; it can also be absent. The so-called motive:
another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness — something
alongside the deed that is more likely to cover up the antecedents of
the deeds than to represent them…. What follows from this? There are no
mental [geistigen] causes at all.
|
Philosophy:
Hitler is to Trump as Tragedy is to Farce
"Thoughts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind."
"Philosophy always arrives too late . . . . The Owl of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk begins to fall."
"Hegel
remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages
appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as
tragedy, the second time as farce."
History without philosophy is only a screen on which to project the shibboleths of our time.
Hitler is to Trump as tragedy is to farce.
|
Graphemes . . . this
page uses figurative elements
This
page uses figurative elements, including graphs, tables,
charts,
and maps, to advance an analysis of the historical trajectory: the New
Deal to Donald Trump. These elements (all in the right column)
are related to the text-boxes in this column.
The
rule governing this page is to think in terms of these graphemes,
which form a set of synthetic a prioris.* In certain cases a
text is made to function as a grapheme. The Lacan-Atwater
Signifying Chain is one such a case. It takes us to the very heart of white supremacy as symbolic activivity and politics.
Another is the Freud-Jamieson Black Hole of Liberalism.
This takes us to the heart of liberalism's failure to grasp the Lacan
Atwater signifying chain, and thus its failure to understand the
fascism that now holds of the nation in its grip.
Figure
1 can also be taken as a synthetic a priori. It is simply
an organizational chart with specifics filled in. Look at the
Trump administration. (Do the work!) OrgChart as synthetic a
prior is deployed:
it presents the Trump administration as a whole. What do you get
when you fill it in? what patterns do you see? A
rogue’s gallery of scumbag capitalism(note). A patrimonial regime of predators.
This regime then plays the further role of
sado-sexual avengers--DHS seperating children from their parents in the
theater of cruelty generated by the deployment of the sado-sexual
eigenvector that is the essence of the GOP's rhetorical activity.
These graphemes are also elementary particles.* That is, they are the
building blocks of intelligibility within a hermeneutical modus
operandi. This may be what Deleuze means by transcendental
empiricism, which is consistent with Hegel's notion of the concrete
universal. Also Alexander Luria's The Making of Mind: Hermeneutical intelligibility vs. nomothetic explanation.
*synthetic a priori and elementary
particles may appear contradictory. Rather than explain this
aparent contradiction on an abstract level, the actual deployment of
these concepts is what this site is about. The utility of this
approach should then become clear. Elementary particles usually
refers to the building blocks of matter—the standard
positivist-materialist reduction. What possible meaning can the
term elementary particle have when used in the context of the human
sciences (Geisteswissenschaften)?
|
|
Figure 1. The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal state
intersubjectivity and shared intentionality

Source: "Membership List, May 1927," in the Morris L. Cooke Papers, box 66,
FDR Library; and United States Government Manual 1937
for more info on Fig.2 click on Keynesian Elite: Career Matrix;
also: the Papers of John M. Carmody
Joanna Bockman. Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism (Stanford University Press, 2011): three reviews
FF to FDR 11-21-34 re. Leffingwell (J.P. Morgan partner)
MEMO Corwin Edwards to Leon Henderson April 22, 1939
"The Origins of the "Welfare State": The Keynesian Elite and
the Second New Deal, 1910-1936" (manuscript, 1987)
|
Elites: Strategic and Otherwise |
The first three graphemes are about organization
❖ The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal state
❖ Sectors of Capital
❖ The UAW: Bildungsproletarians and Plebeian Upstarts*
They provide a necessary framework and point of departure for dealing with
the historical trajectory in question: from the New Deal to Donald Trump.
The next two graphemes are about cognitive and emotional processes. (click here)
❖ PISA math scores, 2003-2018 (cognitive)
❖ The Lacan Atwater Signifying Chain (emotional: sex and violence--> racism)
The
grapheme at the right--Semiotic Regimes--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. This is why the New Deal is not
represented in the grapheme to the right (Semiotic Regimes).
So-called "conspiracy theories", when apprehended in the context of
this grapheme, become intelligible as instances of the political
mobilization of the paranoid-schizoid position. (Clarke and Umberto
Eco)It is within this context that a concept of the sado-secual
egenvector of republican perofmtiity.
Recent criticisms of MSNBC and the New York Times (that they are "biased") . . .
. . . miss the point. It is not the mere fact of "bias": as we know from Immanuel Kant and the further ramifications of the second Copernican revolution inaugurated by the publiciation of the Critique of Pure Reason (Hegel, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Heiddeger, Wittgenstein, Foucault), the question of presuppositions and synthetic a prioris, to which the unitiated are cognitively blind, is fundamental.
*Peter Friedlander, The Emergence of a UAW Local: a Study in Class and Culture (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975)
Reginald E. Zelnick, ed., A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Sėmen Ivanovich Kanatchikov (Stanford, 1986)
Interview of Saul Wellman by Peter Friedlander (1975/6)
Interview of Henry Kraus (U of M oral history project)
|
|
Semiotic Regimes: Psychological Correlates

|
LEFT*
|
RIGHT
|
Topology
|
depressive
|
paranoid-schizoid
|
Political style
|
progressive
|
proto-Dorian
|
Cognitive mode
|
concrete & pre-op
|
pre-op and gestural
|
Regime type
|
rational-bureaucratic
|
patrimonial
|
Sources for this grapheme
conceptual elements
Elementary particles and associated comments, lists,
transcripts, remembrances of things past (civic republicanism 1933-1943: Bildung + חֻצְפָ); cognitive
regimes,
intersubjectivity and shared intentionality, proximal processes,
biocultural niche (Schiller Hall, Fox News, MSNBC), cognitive performativity*, paranoid-schizoid position and fascism
(the sado-sexual eigenvector of “Trump” performativities: ressentiment
and the mechanisms of defense), the
depressive position and liberalism (nihilism, nietzsche, and you), the
lynching for rape discourse, herding primates: semiotic regimes,
patrimonialism and the fundamental incompetence** of the Trump regime. Fascism.
* see Measures of Cognitive Performativity
The
gap between Obama and Trump is two orders of magnitude. Cognitive
performativity is context-dependent (as Ceci speculated twenty years
ago). Consider the dramatic differences in cognitive performativity
described by Nicholas Kristoff between the EU and the USA.
1. "Fauci Says Trump's Attention Span Is a 'Minus Number,' Only Cares About Getting Re-elected: Woodward Book" from Newsweek 9-9-20
The infectious diseases expert told others that Trump "is on a separate channel" and called his leadership "rudderless."
Then these comments from the Woodward/Trump article
2. "Woodward book: Trump says he knew coronavirus was ‘deadly’ and
worse than the flu while intentionally misleading Americans," Washington Post 9-9-20 LINK
In a separate
conversation recounted by Woodward, Mattis told Coats, “The president
has no moral compass,” to which the director of national intelligence
replied: “True. To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks.
He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”
PRE-OPERATIONAL!
** the
fundamental incompetence of the Trump regime is evident in the
coronavirus debacle. MSNBC talking heads say "Trump" should
behave in a rational-bureaucratic manner. But this is
fundamentally impossible.
Trump appointees are capable only of predation. The essence of
their relatonship to the science-based rational-bureuacratic structures
of modernity
|
|
|
|
The election of Donald Trump is a lagging indicator
of
the disintegration of cognitive performativities
To call trump stupid (or “a moron”) is to miss the point. Cognitive
performativity is a biocultural historical phenomenon, hardly
explicable within a discursive field shaped by the Cartesian synthetic
a priori. Indeed, The election of Donald Trump is a lagging indicator
of the disintegration of cognitive performativities. Preceding his
election was the decline of mathematical competence indexed by Figure
3a and b. which indicate that a catastrophic decline in cognitive performativity preceded and made
possible the fascist-patrimonial victory of November 2016. (see
Prelude to Trump: the end of literacy in the United States). The
coronavirus debacle that is Trump is a product of and an accelerant of
that decline.
Cognitive development is not a normative, inevitable process
(Wolf). It is an effect of history and politics, as well as
evolution, and can suffer reversal or collapse. It is
this collapse that is manifest in the stunningly incompetent
performance of the Trump administration's response to the existential
threat posed by Covid 19.
On
a certain level of analysis Trump is little different from your
average mover and shsaker, wheeler and dealer, of modern republican
scumbag captalism. A world of good ole boys governed by the logic
of patrimonialism, good ole boys who never really learned what science
and mathematics was all about, ns sdemnstate this cognitive incapacity
whenever they discuss policy re Covid (Govs of Texas, Florida,
Georgia).***
cognitive processes: the disintegration of cognitive performativity
unfolds within distictive biocultural niches that correspond well to
the discrsive-performtive patternsof the two party system (semioitic
regoimes).
cog perform distinguished from emotional-symbolic
* see Measures of Cognitive Performativity
The
gap between Obama and Trump is two orders of magnitude. Cognitive
performativity is context-dependent (as Ceci speculated twenty years
ago). Consider the drmatic differnces in cognitive perofrmtivity
described by Nicholas Kristoff between the EU and the USA.
** the
fundamental incompetence of the Trump regime is evident in the
coronavirus debacle. MSNBC talking heads say "Trump" should
behave in a rational-bureaucratic manner. But this is
fundamentally impossible.
Trump appointees are capable only of predation. The essence of
their relatonship to the science-based rational-bureuacratic structures
of modernity
***from Passi Sahlberg,
I
was once with a delegation of concerned mathematics teachers and
mathematicians who were meeting with their state governor and his
advisors in the United States to hand over their appeal to improve
mathematics learning outcomes in junior high school. Their main
rationale was that mathematics performance, especially among boys, had
decreased and attitudes toward learning mathematics were rather
negative among all youngsters. What this delegation was asking from the
decision makers was to add an hour of mathematics to weekly schedules
for all students. The governor listening to the delegation replied:
“Why do you think asking children to do more of those things that they
don’t like and won’t learn well anyway would do any good for their
learning outcomes?” He closed the conversation by suggesting that
perhaps pupils should have less exposure to mathematics and more to
something that they really like and were interested in doing in school.
|
|
Figure 2. U.S. Political Economy by Sector, 1910 to 1939
input-output matrices: capital formations and the two-party system

|
Here are the sources for the psychological-emotional conceptualization of the Two-Party System: Semiotic Regimes:
Simon Clarke, Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism (Palgrave Macmillan; 2003)
Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009)
Eli Zarestsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (Vintage, 2005)
Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightement: the French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Note on use of the term "Left."
Progressivism and Liberalism are opposites, not twins. The genetic ontology of Progressivism is Bildung and the Will to Power; The genetic ontology of Liberalism is Nihilism.
Today's liberalism is referred as the left, covering over the
genetic-ontological transformation of the post-war years (see Hall et.
al.) The New Deal is not represented in the above figure and table, The Two-Party System: Semiotic Regimes. Donald Trump is a result of this genetic-ontological transformation. |
|
Prelude to Trump: the end of literacy in the United States
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.
|
|
conceptual elements
Elementary particles and associated comments, lists,
transcripts, remembrances of things past (civic republicanism 1933-1943: Bildung + חֻצְפָ); cognitive
regimes,
intersubjectivity and shared intentionality, proximal processes,
biocultural niche (Schiller Hall, Fox News, MSNBC), cognitive performativity*, paranoid-schizoid position and fascism
(the sado-sexual eigenvector of “Trump” performativities: ressentiment
and the mechanisms of defense), the
depressive position and liberalism (nihilism, nietzsche, and you), the
lynching for rape discourse, herding primates: semiotic regimes,
patrimonialism and the fundamental incompetence** of the Trump regime. fascism.
|
Fascism and Patrimonialism
fascism
|
racism
|
patrimonialism
|
white supremacy
|
racism
|
white supremacy
|
fascism
|
patrimonialism
|
patrimonialism
|
fascism
|
white supremacy
|
racism
|
white suspremacy
|
patrimonialism
|
racism
|
fascism
|
|
|
the mid-nineteenth century turn: socialism vs. populism
ultra-nationalism vs. Social Democracy
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Harvard, 2016), "Bonaparte and Bonapartism," pp. 334-344.
Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body
(U. of Illinois, 2005); Nietzsche's Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2014)
Philippe-Joseph Salazar, "Reconnaissances of Marx", Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 48, No. 4, 2015
Jerrold Seigel, Modernity and Bourgeois Life: Society, Politics, and
Culture in England, France and Germany since 1750 (Cambridge, 2012)
|
|
Figure 3.
The UAW (Unity Caucus): Bildungsproletarians and Plebeian Upstarts,
1933-1943: Detroit and the lower great lakes.
|
Orality vs. Literacy: the Great Divide
from James R. Flynn, What is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect (Cambridge Univesity Press, 2009)
Our ancestors in 1900 were
not mentally retarded. Their intelligence ws anchored in everyday
reality. We differ from them in that we can use abstractions and
logic and the hypothetical to attack the formal problems that arise
when science liberates thought from concrete situations. Since
1950 we have become more ingenious in going beyond previously
learned rules to solve problems on the spot. pp. 10-11
The scientific ethos, with its vocabulary, taxonomies, and detachment
of logic and the hypothetical from concrete referents, has begun to
permeate the minds of post-industrial peoples. This has paved the
way for mass education on the university level and the emergence of an
intellectual cadre without whom our present civilization would be
inconceivable. 29
Science altered our lives and then liberated our minds from the
concrete. This history has not been written because, as children
of our own time, we do not perceive the gulf that separates us from our
distant [circa 1900] ancestors: the difference between their world and
the world seen through scientific spectacles. . . . As use of
logic and the hypothetical moved beyond the concrete, people developed
new habits of mind. They became practiced at solving problems
with abstract or visual content and more innovative at administrative
tasks." 172-174
|
Midland Steel/UAW 410: work-flow and extended mind

|
|
Michigan Steel Tube/UAW 238/

|
Images of Cognitive Complexity and the fundamental divide

fascism
|
racism
|
patrimonialism
|
white supremacy
|
racism
|
white supremacy
|
fascism
|
patrimonialism
|
patrimonialism
|
fascism
|
white supremacy
|
racism
|
white suspremacy
|
patrimonialism
|
racism
|
fascism
|
|
the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain
racism, white supremacy, and fascism in the USA today
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."
|
|
KEUAW (MAP 1975-2010)-ABSOLUTE
Deep structure of
ressentiment and the precarious cultural-historical achievements of
“civilization”: defining barbarism (while being mindful of James C.
Scott’s discussion of the “barbarians” in Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale, 2017)).
The collapse of a civilization in the context of advanced capitalism;
regression to primate; collapse of cognitive performativity across the board by one
order of magnitude* in post-Fordist USA
|
|
Detroit News, May 2, 1937

click here for full text
|
|
the KKK in Packard, circa 1942

In the matter of . . .
Preferment
of Charges against Frank Buehrle by Kurt
Murdock, President of PACKARD LOCAL U.A.W.-C.I.O. #190, held at the
local Headquarters of the Locall at 6100 Mt. Elliott Avenue, in the
City of Detroit, Michigan. April 3rd, 1942, at 7:30 P.M.
|
the Green New Deal
1. FF-FDR
2. LDB-TS: ERC
3. WWI/WIB
|
Figure 3a. PISA Math Scores, 2003 to 2018:
21
Developed Nations & 4 East Asian City-States (SHMC)
note
1. . . . several limitations in the data used in
non-response-bias analyses submitted by Hong Kong (China) and the
United States. see"inexplicable anomalies"
|
|
Figure 3b. PISA Math Scores, 2003 to 2018:
18 Anglo-European Nations

see"inexplicable anomalies"
Problems with the U. S. Data:
Political (2006) and "Technical" (2018) |
|
the decline of cognitive performativity . . .
Prelude to Trump: the end of literacy in the United States
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.
|
|
articles:
Flynn (cognitive): "Does your family make you smarter? Ask the IQ expert," Jun 21, 2016 Irish Times
Zaretsky (emotional)
Damasio (cog-emotional)
Cruelty
|
Felix Frankfurter Papers (Library of Congress, manuscript division)
for more info on Fig.2 click on Keynesian Elite: Career Matrix;
also see the Papers of John M. Carmody
Joanna Bockman. Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism (Stanford University Press, 2011): three reviews
MEMO Ben Cohen to Leon Henderson, June 12, 1939
MEMO Corwin Edwards to Leon Henderson April 12, 1939
FF to FDR 11-21-34 re. Leffingwell
|
|
Rhizome
from John Marks, Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity (Pluto Press, 1998), p 45
The rhizome is a figure borrowed from biology, opposed to the principle
of foundation and origin which is embedded in the figure of the
tree. The model of the tree is hierarchical and centralized,
wheas the rhizome is proliferating and serial, functioning by means of
the principle of connection and heterogeneity.
Deleuze and Guatarri argue that the book has been linked traditionally
to the model of the tree, in 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'.
|
cognitive-linguistic
cardinality
a
framework for evaluating American
Exceptionalism in the context of:
Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare, Table
7.1, p.
260
(Appologies to Georg Cantor)
cognitive-linguistic
cardinality אi
index of cognitive complexity (אi)
i
= 4 Internet and the
Extended Mind
i
= 3 Foucault (Kant Hegel Nietzsche)
i =
2 Formal
operational
i
= 1 Concrete operational
i
= 0 Oral
Mythic/pre-operational
i
=
-1 Gestural (homo erectus)
i = -2
primate semiosis
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the essence of our situation: how to interpret Trump-talk

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MSNBC's
error: takes scorpion-talk at face value, thereby obliterating the
possiblity of understanding. the ontological error of Cartesians:
they assume a normative, universal human type (the Cartesian myth of the Enlightenment) capable at times of
decent behavior. Insoafar as we the poeple know Trump, he has
never behaved in a decent way. What we should always expect is what he actually does
MSNBC's error: a frequent lament on MSNBC: "I don't understand why Trump is doing this.
what trump is doing. what rhetorical performances are associated with the doing?
trummp is perofrming the sadao-sexual eigenvector of white supremacy/fscism.
the use of language reveals not huypocracy (you saay you dont hate
children?) something akin the the sadistic tauntingof police officers
performing the racist motherfucker routine
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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.
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Why Are Right-Wing Conspiracies so Obsessed With Pedophilia? xxxx
this is not consp theory. It's the parnaoid-schizoid position orchestrated
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Sources for Semiotic Regimes: Psychological Correlates
Here are the sources for the psychological-emotional conceptualization of the Two-Party System: Semiotic Regimes:
Simon Clarke, Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism (Palgrave Macmillan; 2003)
Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009)
Eli Zarestsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (Vintage, 2005)
Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightement: the French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001)
and for the cognitive developmental conceptualization of the Two-Party System: Semiotic Regimes:
The Development of Children (Sixth Edition) by Cynthia Lightfoot, Michael Cole, and Sheila R. Cole (2009)
Development Through the Lifespan, Laura E. Berk (1998)
Piaget, Genetic Epistemology
Stephen J. Ceci, On Intelligence: A Bioecological Treatise on Intellectual Development (Harvard, 1996)
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (Routledge, 2002)
A. R. Luria, Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations (Harvard, 1976)
from Ceci:
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
*Progressivism
and liberalism are opposites, not twins. The genetic ontology of
progressivism is bildung and the will to power; The genetic ontology of
liberalism is nihilism. Today's liberalism is referred to as the
left, thus covering over the genetic-ontological transformation of the
post-war years (see Hall et. al.) The New Deal is not represented
in the above figure and table, The Two-Party System: Semiotic
Regimes. Donald Trump is an effect of this genetic-ontological
transformation of progressivism into nihilism. More on this later.
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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." (see Wolf below) This is what we see at
Trump rallies. As the old America dies a sociocultural death, it
is being replaced by newer populations capable, for now, of cognitive
development. The "White" portion of old America is Trump
territory.
The election of Donald Trump reflects and also will accelerate this
degradation of cognitive performativity in American society. 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.
Modernity (suffering from itself--i.e., the nihilism implicit in
commercial republicanism: Food article; Figures 3a and 3b), cannot
resist fascism.
and so cannot compete with the fascist
performativities of today's GOP. Nihilism vs. Ressentiment. (More
later)
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Essential
to understanding this situation (wreckage, persistence, triumph): a
concept of pseudo-speciation. The "people" must be deconstructed;
certain shiboleths (democracy, freedom, equality, justice) retired or
at least desacrilized; and above all, the ontological presupposition of
the Cartesian self and its associated rhetorical elements of
consciousness, belief, motive, ideology and interest must be
"bracketed", its fangs pulled, its spell broken. This is the
central strategy of the works listed above under Vygotsky redux
("escaping from our Cartesian prison requires more than a change in our
academic language games." How Things Shape the Mind). Only
then does reason stand a chance.
Be aware of the crippling effect of the Cartesian presuppositional
matrix on the usefulness of texts. This has the effect, a priori,
of blocking conceptualization of questions of ontology, agency,
intentionality, habitus, networks and contexts.
***Hence the concept of pseudo-speciation. Homo sapiens is 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 and of
other complications and developments, and whose behavior contains but
cannot be reduced to the "biological." Brain plsticity's consequences for the future of its species once appeared rosy
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The
“inner world” is full of phantoms…: the will is one of them. The will
no longer moves anything, hence does not explain anything either — it
merely accompanies events; it can also be absent. The so-called motive:
another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness — something
alongside the deed that is more likely to cover up the antecedents of
the deeds than to represent them….
What follows from this? There are no mental [geistigen] causes at all. (TI VI:3)
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