Invisible University aa1971@wayne.edu
Why "Deleuze"?
History without philosophy is only a screen on which to project
the shibboleths of our time
the Encounter — Image of Thought — Planes of Immanence
. . . Deleuze's transcendental empiricism attempts to overcome the opposition between concepts and intuitions . . . that has characterized most of the history of philosophy and which arises from the assumption of a finite subject whose receptivity is conceived of as passive. Bryant (ix)
Hegel/Deleuze
If the name "Hegel" stands for a mode of thought, the name "Deleuze" can stand for a crisis for that mode of thought. In the era of neoliberalism, and in the wake of the collapse of the historical left (this includes the Keynesian Elite in the New Deal state), philosophy falls into a kind of anomie, turning ever inward, making elaborate lateral moves and suffering stylistic excess.
Yet in my fifty year effort to put "Hegel" into action, the results of which can be seen in the pages that make up this site, it was only at the end (2012-13) that I discovered that what I was doing is best described by the "Deleuzian" concepts of: transcendental empiricism, the encounter, plane of immanence, image of thought.
Figure 1 is about, or can be taken as, many things. But it is certainly about the cultural historical development of "intelligence," and the way that development has varied over the past century or two. Althought the scientific discourses on intelligence are of recent origin (both the racist-genetic reductionist and the Vygotskian developmentalist discourses emerge in the early 20th century), philosophy's concerns about "Mind" inevitably includes intelligence.
Yet if philosophy's chief concern is with Mind, it is strangely silent in the face of the dramatic transformations of actual cognitive and expressive modalities only now becoming intelligible (Flynn) and problematic (Hall). Flynn is about the emergence on a large scale of formal operational cognitive capabilities; Hall is about the way a mass consumer culture of regressive narcissism undermines the development of these capabilities. It is in this context that one should study Figure 1. PISA Math Scores, 2003 - 2009. Figure 1 is an effect of cultural-historical developmental processes, of which schooling itself is only one of several key inputs affecting the cognitive and cultural development of situated organisms (not Cartesian selves: an image of thought whose pervasive presence and perverse effects Deleuze warns us about). Figure 1 is about the history and fate of the Enlightenment. It is also about processes of production, not only of goods and services, but of human beings themselves. And thus (but only incidentally) figure 1 is about America as a failed state, a state unable to develop its "native" population into a workforce capable of formal operational cognitive competence.
Figure 1.
PISA Math
Scores, 2003 - 2009: 21 Nations +
U.S. New England + U.S. South + OECD average
PISA
2009 Results: What Students Know and Can Do – Student
Performance in Reading, Mathematics and Science (Volume I)
Why Math?
U.S. New England + U.S. South + OECD average
Performance in Reading, Mathematics and Science (Volume I)
Why Math?
A Post-modern Dark Age? 21st Century
Ontological Questions
Figure 1 is just
the tip of the
iceberg. Development is usually seen in a progressive
context:
the assumption that development is linear, that it is cognitive, and
that its ultimate goal is the Enlightenment trope of the rational
individual in a market economy. This is its ontology, and it
is
worse than naïve. Even so, this developmentalist
idea has only
taken hold on a national level in nations like Finland, where a
weakening social democratic pragmatism continues to inform policy.
In
the
United States developmentalism (Vygotsky et. al.) in the public sphere
is not only absent but demonized. Because Finland's cognitive
achievement figures significantly in current debates on educational
reform, the excerpts at the right are worth bearing in mind.
They
provide a reference point when considering the rhetoric of
corporate-dominated think tanks that now dominate American discussions
of educational reform. Amanda Ripley's The Smartest Kids in the World,
and how they got that way (Simon & Schuster, 2013)
is the latest of this genre (See my critique here.)
This book provides some extraordinarily useful material while
at
the same time functioning as an informercial for charter schools, right
wing think tanks, and Wall St. dominated reform organizations.
The developmentalist perspective is naïve not because it has failed--Finland is a stunning success story. It is naïve because two of the most powerful ontologies of modern society, ressentiment (racism and all its cognates) and regressive narcissism(the psychological side of mass consumption in the post-modern era), are at best recognized only tangentially, if at all. (Sahlberg and Illeris recognize the threat to development posed by the latter, but only tangentially.)
Cultural Historical Activity Theory (Bildung as educational theory--see Cole 2007), notwithstanding its success in the nation where it was most fully implemented (Finland), does not address the vulgarity, violence and greed of modern life. It does not address such phenomena as The Stupid Party; it has nothing to say about fascism as a generic phenomenon of modernity and as a central feature of American life. Nor does it have anything to say about the cognitive effects of our enormously powerful corporate networks devoted to the stimulation of desire and envy. Cultural Historical Activity Theory is Hegel with a smiley face, a utopian Progressivism. But development can go awry; regression can occur; archaic forces persist and become the raw materials of opportunistic political elites: shit happens, and the smile is wiped off Hegel's face. That's in part what Figure 1 is about . . . and what this site is about.
The developmentalist perspective is naïve not because it has failed--Finland is a stunning success story. It is naïve because two of the most powerful ontologies of modern society, ressentiment (racism and all its cognates) and regressive narcissism(the psychological side of mass consumption in the post-modern era), are at best recognized only tangentially, if at all. (Sahlberg and Illeris recognize the threat to development posed by the latter, but only tangentially.)
Cultural Historical Activity Theory (Bildung as educational theory--see Cole 2007), notwithstanding its success in the nation where it was most fully implemented (Finland), does not address the vulgarity, violence and greed of modern life. It does not address such phenomena as The Stupid Party; it has nothing to say about fascism as a generic phenomenon of modernity and as a central feature of American life. Nor does it have anything to say about the cognitive effects of our enormously powerful corporate networks devoted to the stimulation of desire and envy. Cultural Historical Activity Theory is Hegel with a smiley face, a utopian Progressivism. But development can go awry; regression can occur; archaic forces persist and become the raw materials of opportunistic political elites: shit happens, and the smile is wiped off Hegel's face. That's in part what Figure 1 is about . . . and what this site is about.
from Hartmut Giest, "The Formation Experiment in the Age of Hypermedia and Distance Learning," in The Transformation of Learning: Advances in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, edited by Bert van Oers, Wim Wardekker, Ed Elbers, and René van der Veer (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
. . . the
basic idea [of activity theory] is not "evolution,"
that is, the idea of adaptation to the environment, but "revolution,"
that is, change of the environment. The dialectical analysis
of
human history, as it was done, for example, by Hegel and particularly
by Marx, showed not only that humans adapt to the environment but also
that they change it in accordance with their demands . . .
Activity is not an active adaptation to the environment but the
transformation of the environment and--in interrelation with it--of
humans themselves. Although this
idea is not new,
it has only
begun to prove its explanatory potental. Among the first to
apply
this idea to psychology were Vygotsky and one of his closest students,
Leontiev. (pp. 103-105)
from Ulla Härkönen (University of Joensuu, Finland), "Current Theories Related to Early Childhood Education and Preschool as Frames of Reference for Sustainable Education," in Institute of Sustainable Education, conference, 2004
In
Finland, for thirty
years, theoretical frames for early childhood education and preschool
have been outlined through Bronfenbrenner's ecological approach,
Vygotsky's developmental theory, didactic theories and the
psychological theories of learning, among which the latest is the
constructivist theory of learning.
The importance of the theory of ecological development lies in the fact that personal development is seen in relation to different kinds and different levels of systems. This has introduced to the methodological principles of educational research a systems approach, according to which an object is studied as a system of its structural and functional relations.
Early childhood education and preschool have received strong theoretical stimuli from developmental psychology. This is true of Finland even today and evident also in this article. Developmental psychology theories are represented here by the often referred to theories of Bronfenbrenner and Vygotsky. They both focus their attention on human development and both have introduced a systems dimension to their ideas.
The importance of the theory of ecological development lies in the fact that personal development is seen in relation to different kinds and different levels of systems. This has introduced to the methodological principles of educational research a systems approach, according to which an object is studied as a system of its structural and functional relations.
Early childhood education and preschool have received strong theoretical stimuli from developmental psychology. This is true of Finland even today and evident also in this article. Developmental psychology theories are represented here by the often referred to theories of Bronfenbrenner and Vygotsky. They both focus their attention on human development and both have introduced a systems dimension to their ideas.
Shit Happens
The
US differs from other advanced nations in two fundamental
ways.
The first is seen in Figure 1: the failure to develop beyond
the
concrete operational level--the criterion of modernity established by Flynn.
The second is indicated by the excerpt from Lieven.
What
Lieven is describing is what Nietzsche conceptualized as Ressentiment, and
what I developed in Ressentiment
and the
Mechanisms of Defense.
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, Geneology of Morals)--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, boldly and shamelessly expressed in the 2011-12 GOP primary debates.
The activity of provincial, archaic and traditional elites (Mayer, Persistence of the Old Regime), together with newer firms in the west and south and newly emergent crony capitalist formations (Enron, World Com), and now a whole new set of predatory financial institutions plays a critical role in the politicization of ressentiment.
the activity of these old and new elites, in aiding and abetting the construction of the political structures of mass mobilization (Town Hall meetings), is decisive in determining the political effectiveness of anti-modern right wing movements, which otherwise might languish in a populist stew of ineffectual rage. (Carleton, Red Scare: Right-wing Hysteria, Fifties Fanaticism, and Their Legacy in Texas) But they do not call into existence these ontologies of ressentiment, of the right, of anti-modernism. They merely utilize and shape them. (See Right-wing Elites in the Postwar era.)
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, Geneology of Morals)--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, boldly and shamelessly expressed in the 2011-12 GOP primary debates.
The activity of provincial, archaic and traditional elites (Mayer, Persistence of the Old Regime), together with newer firms in the west and south and newly emergent crony capitalist formations (Enron, World Com), and now a whole new set of predatory financial institutions plays a critical role in the politicization of ressentiment.
the activity of these old and new elites, in aiding and abetting the construction of the political structures of mass mobilization (Town Hall meetings), is decisive in determining the political effectiveness of anti-modern right wing movements, which otherwise might languish in a populist stew of ineffectual rage. (Carleton, Red Scare: Right-wing Hysteria, Fifties Fanaticism, and Their Legacy in Texas) But they do not call into existence these ontologies of ressentiment, of the right, of anti-modernism. They merely utilize and shape them. (See Right-wing Elites in the Postwar era.)
from James R. Flynn, What is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect (Cambridge Univesity Press, 2009)
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. p. 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 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 administative tasks. p. 172-174
from Anatol Lieven, America
Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (Oxford
University Press, 2005)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 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 administative tasks. p. 172-174
America is the home
of by far the
most deep, widespread and conservative religious belief in the Western
world, including a section possessed by wild millenarian hopes, fears
and hatreds—and these two phenomena are intimately related. .
. [A]t the start of the twenty first century the United
States as
a whole is much closer to the developing world in terms of religious
belief than to the industrialized countries (although a majority of
believers in the United States are not fundamentalist Protestants but
Catholics and “mainline,” more liberal
Protestants).
p. 8
from Alan S. Blinder, Center for Economic Policy Studies, Department of Economics, Princeton University, "CEPS Working Paper No. 163," May 2008
At the risk of some (but not much) exaggeration, the nation’s K-12 education system never adapted to the Second Industrial Revolution. Yet we are now, I believe, in the early stages of a Third Industrial Revolution, often called the Information Age. p. 6
Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh:
the concrete universal
Ressentiment and the Mechanisms of Defense was the first page I constructed that could be described as a plane of immanence, one of Deleuze's fundamental concepts. But I did not at that time think of it as such. Rather, it was Hegel's concept of the concrete universal, which I first encountered in Findlay's Hegel: a Re-examination, that provided the sense of what could be done with the wealth of graphic images and political-cultural performances available over the Internet (Google image searches and Youtube videos). The web page cited above contains materials from history and philosophy mixed in with the shit of everyday life. What makes it a plane of immanence is that the psychoanalytic concept of the mechanisms of defense provides the generative grammar, so to speak, for the production of the specific expressions of ressentiment. Every different moment--the debate on gun control for example--can be seen as being generated by the mechanisms of defense. This is the unity in difference so central to Hegel-Deleuze. The Heiddegerian Medard Boss (Daseinanalysis and Psychoanalysis) opened my mind to how phenomenological analysis could be applied, for example, to the gun control debate. One had only to enter into the experiental horizon of the right-wing phantasy world, where the gun is a prop in the theater of revenge, a symbol of manhood (see Gibson), and thus linked to the whole culture of violence, revenge, and righteous slaughter (Katz, Seductions of Crime). While discussions of the 2nd Amendment can be interesting, they completely miss the cultural historical forces behind the American love affair with redemptive violence (Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism). Remember the 2008 GOP primary debates where torture--that is, sadism--was a key issue.
Sometimes the phantasy breaks through its politically coded, euphemistic representations. Thus, Senator Lindsay Graham on why we need assault weapons:
“In 1992
you had the riots
in Los Angeles,” Graham said. “I think it was the
King
event, but you could find yourself in this country in a lawless
environment through a natural disaster or a riot. … And the
story was about a place called Koreatown. There were marauding gangs
going through the area, burning stores, looting and robbing
…
and raping.”
And sometimes the phantasy is actually enacted. Witness the great white hunter George Zimmerman, and the uprising of white support for him in his hour of need. Not all whites, of course, but the severely and the really white.
And yet again, sometimes--or rather, almost always--the inner logic of the sado-sexual performativity at the heart of right-wing semiosis is missed by liberal intellectuals (Jamieson), as in the excerpt to the right. Indeed, the liberal media characteristically take the surface code--the "issues"--at face value, thus allowing the far right to set the parameters of discourse.
It is in this context that "fascism" must be reconsidered.
the mechanisms
of defense
in the
the other as constructed
by
construction of the other the mechanisms of defense  
|
|
from Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (Oxford Univeristy Press, 2008), p.p. 188-89. (Emphasis added.) Also see Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994, p. 78 n. 37
Limbaugh's attempts
at gender-based "humor" are of the locker room variety. As
the
California gubernatorial recall was heating up, Limbaugh informed his
followers that Leutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante--"whose name loosely
translates into Spanish for 'large breasts'--leads the Terminator by a
few points" (August 18, 2003). A photomontage on the Limbaugh
website shows a photograph of Schwartzenegger's head and shoulders from
his Pumping Iron days as a body builder. A naked woman has
been
transposed onto his shoulders. Over her breasts is a sign
reading
BUSTAMONTE. When Madonna endorsed General Wesley Clark,
Limbaugh
reported that she had "opened herself" to him. Why the
vulgarity
in this message does not alienate the churchgoing conservatives in his
audience is a question for which we have no ready answer.
|
"Fascism" as a Plane of Immanence
"Fascism"
is a
word that is bandied about--by those on the left as well as on the
right--as an epithet not a concept. It is also thought of as
something limited to the 1920s and 1930s; something that is of
historical interest only; or, conversely, an epithetical slam used to
smear political enemies. Robert
O. Paxton's The
Anatomy of Fascism (Alfred
A. Knopf, 2004) provides an antidote to this kind of simple-minded
approach.
" . . . the supreme act of philosophy is not to think the plane of immanence, but to show, in an image, that is is there." Beth Lord, "Deleuze and Kant," in the Cambridge Companion to Deleuze (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 99
The
legitimation of violence against a
demonized
internal enemy brings us close
to the heart of fascism.
p. 84
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. p. 218
The United States itself has never been exempt from fascism. Indeed, antidemocratic and xenophobic movements have flourished in America since the Native American party of 1845 and the Know-Nothing Party ofthe 1850s. In the crisis-ridden 1930s, as in other democracies, derivative fascist movements were conspicuous in the United States. The Protestant evangelist Gerald B. Winrod's openly pro-Hitler Defenders of the Christian Faith with their Black Legion; William Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts (the initials "SS" were intentional) . . . . Much more dangerious are movements that employ authentically Amerian themes in ways that resemble fascism functionally. The Klan revived in the 1920s, took on virulent anti-Semitism, and spread to cities and the Middle West. In the 1930s, Father Charles E. Coughlin gathered a radio audience estimated at forty million around an anticommunist, anti-Wall Street, pro-soft money, and---after 1938--anti-Semitic message broadcast from his church in the ouskirts of Detroit. For a moment in early 1936 it looked as if his Union Party and its presidential candidate, North Dakota congressman William Lemke, might overwhelm Roosevelt. . . . p. 201
The "moment" captured on a Youtube video at the right, and linked the excerpt from
Paxton's Anatomy of
Fascism (which was published five years before the event it describes), is the plane of immanence Ressentiment & the Mechanisms of Defense made
palpable. It renders intelligible a whole range of shit that
happens and that will happen in the theatrical performances of the
right. It is eternal recurrence with a vengeance. (It also makes sense of Nietzsche's most damnably infuriating concept.) Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. p. 218
The United States itself has never been exempt from fascism. Indeed, antidemocratic and xenophobic movements have flourished in America since the Native American party of 1845 and the Know-Nothing Party ofthe 1850s. In the crisis-ridden 1930s, as in other democracies, derivative fascist movements were conspicuous in the United States. The Protestant evangelist Gerald B. Winrod's openly pro-Hitler Defenders of the Christian Faith with their Black Legion; William Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts (the initials "SS" were intentional) . . . . Much more dangerious are movements that employ authentically Amerian themes in ways that resemble fascism functionally. The Klan revived in the 1920s, took on virulent anti-Semitism, and spread to cities and the Middle West. In the 1930s, Father Charles E. Coughlin gathered a radio audience estimated at forty million around an anticommunist, anti-Wall Street, pro-soft money, and---after 1938--anti-Semitic message broadcast from his church in the ouskirts of Detroit. For a moment in early 1936 it looked as if his Union Party and its presidential candidate, North Dakota congressman William Lemke, might overwhelm Roosevelt. . . . p. 201
" . . . the supreme act of philosophy is not to think the plane of immanence, but to show, in an image, that is is there." Beth Lord, "Deleuze and Kant," in the Cambridge Companion to Deleuze (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 99
"I want my country back!"
("The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism . . . ")  Tap-Dances Around Obama Birth Certificate (July 20, 2009) |
Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism was published in 2004, yet it describes the anti-Obama Tea Party uproar of 2009--the Youtube video above is a good example--with uncanny prescience:
Today
a "politics
of
ressentment" rooted in authentic American piety and
nativism sometimes
leads to violence against some of the very same "internal enemies" once
targeted by the Nazis, such as homosexuals and defenders of abortion
rights. . . . The
languge and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of
course, have little to do with the original European models.
They
would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the
language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and
reassuring to many Italians and Germans, as Orwell suggested. . . .
No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes
(or
Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but
mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance [one minute and 45 seconds
into the video above right]. These symbols
contain no whiff
of
fascism
in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them
into obligatory litmus
tests for detecting the internal enemy. p.
202 (Emphasis
added)
Philosophy and our emerging
post-modern dark age
This page had introduced some concrete stuff: Figure 1; a portrait of the author as other; and a video of patriotism in action. It has also shown that Hegel-Deleuze can be brought to life, that philosophy can inform praxis--thought as well as action. If it doesn't, then, as I said above, it falls into a kind of anomie, turning ever inward, making elaborate lateral moves and suffering stylistic excess. Thus, I simply do not see the point of the kind of writing characteristic of philosophy today, even if I continue to read it. Philosophy lives only by going beyond itself, while history without philosophy is only a screen on which to project the shibboleths of our time--and by history I mean everything human. And I hope this page demonstrates that philosophy and history not only can but must be fused into a single praxis. Thus, Somers-Hall (at the right) speaks truly, even as he is imprisoned in the discipline of philosophy. And Bryant (at the right) gives us a clear statement of the mechanics of R&MD, of the making of a plane of immanence, even as he fails to encounter the shit that happens (sometimes called the world) and generate an actual plane of immanence. And to talk about the encounter without doing any encountering is, sad to say, a sign of the times.
This site is basketful of encounters. Some of these encounters lead to the production of planes of immanence: Bildung: Was Mozart a Communist; The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal State . . .
Other encounters produce strange effects. In reading biographies of prominent people who were entangled with "Communism" (Orson Welles, Robert Oppenheimer, Katherine Hepburn, Arthur Miller, Aaron Copeland) one encounters The Singularity. (what's that? Click here to find out.)
Others are just encounters, most recently, an encounter with Amanda Ripley's The Smartest Kids in the World, and how they got that way (Simon & Schuster, 2013); and an encounter with Daniel Stedman Jones' Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, 2012).
This entire site, however, is about our emerging post-modern dark age, and is written from within the historical trajectory a very much expanded concept of the Enightenment. Click here for comments on what that means; continue on to see where this gets us.
from
Henry
Somers-Hall, "Introduction," in
the Cambridge
Companion to Deleuze (Cambridge University Press, 2012),
p. 5
The
notion that concepts are created is therefore intimately connected with
the notion that philosophy begins with an encounter with that which is
outside of it . . . . In this sense we can say that while
there
is a definite discipline of philosophy (the discipline of creating
concepts), this discipline can only operate by reaching beyond itself,
in encounter with that which is not philosophy. p. 5
from Levi R. Bryant, Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence (Northwestern University Press, 2008)
A style
or essence
is what we might refer to as an identity of
difference, or an identity produced through difference. It is
not a type or a kind, but rather a rule of production, a genetic
factor. It is an identity that maintains itself through topological variations.
It is for this reason that we speak of morphological essences
or diagrams of becoming. 68
Although Deleuze himelf never makes reference to the notion of topological essences, the theme can be seen to run throughout his work. . . . Insofar as a topological identity is produced between the variations a structure can undergo, Deleuze is also able to maintain the being of concrete universals which are no longer opposed to particulars. 70-71
Although Deleuze himelf never makes reference to the notion of topological essences, the theme can be seen to run throughout his work. . . . Insofar as a topological identity is produced between the variations a structure can undergo, Deleuze is also able to maintain the being of concrete universals which are no longer opposed to particulars. 70-71
"Something
in the world forces us to think. This something is an object
not of recognition but of a fundametal encounter." (Deleuze, DR 139-40)
in Bryant, p. 92
Transcendental empiricism is an empiricism insofar as it must rely on the force of an encounter [emph.added] to engender thought. Here it is not the object of the encounter that is important. The aim is not to represent the object, or to draw a sensation from the object. Rather, the object of the encounter is the occasion of thought, but not that which is to be thought. p. 92--3
It would therefore be wrong to suppose that the encounter is an encounter with a positive reality or a something. What is important in the encounter is not the object or concrete experience, but the problem. p. 102
Transcendental empiricism is an empiricism insofar as it must rely on the force of an encounter [emph.added] to engender thought. Here it is not the object of the encounter that is important. The aim is not to represent the object, or to draw a sensation from the object. Rather, the object of the encounter is the occasion of thought, but not that which is to be thought. p. 92--3
It would therefore be wrong to suppose that the encounter is an encounter with a positive reality or a something. What is important in the encounter is not the object or concrete experience, but the problem. p. 102
our emerging
post-modern dark age: part the first
Marx, and the enlightenment ethos of which he was a part, was wrong 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, 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.
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, magnificently in your face and on display in the 2011-12 GOP primary debates.
The activity of provincial, archaic and traditional elites (Persistence of the Old Regime), together with newer firms in the west and south and newly emergent crony capitalist formations (Enron, World Com), and now a whole new set of predatory financial institutions plays a critical role in the politicization of ressentiment.
the activity of these old and new elites, in aiding and abetting the construction of the political structures of mass mobilization (Town Hall meetings), is decisive in determining the political effectiveness of anti-modern right wing movements, which otherwise might languish in a populist stew of ineffectual rage. (Red Scare) But they do not call into existence these ontologies of ressentiment, of the right, of anti-modernism. They merely utilize and shape them. (See Right-wing Elites in the Postwar era.) The result is the Stupid Party.
Figure 3.
Public
Acceptance of
Evolution, 2006: from "Why doesn't
Figure 2. percent who doubt America believe in evolution" by
Obama's Citizenship Jeff Hecht, Science: August 20, 2006
Evolution, 2006: from "Why doesn't
Figure 2. percent who doubt America believe in evolution" by
Obama's Citizenship Jeff Hecht, Science: August 20, 2006
Republican
and Southern,"
July 31, 2009
The Research 2000 findings were pulled
together from a survey of 2,400 adults.
Poll question: Do you believe that Barack
Obama was born in the United States of
America or not?
Choices: Yes No Not sure
No + Not Sure = variable graphed
The Research 2000 findings were pulled
together from a survey of 2,400 adults.
Poll question: Do you believe that Barack
Obama was born in the United States of
America or not?
Choices: Yes No Not sure
No + Not Sure = variable graphed
The Stupid Party
our emerging
post-modern dark age: part the second
from Steve Hall, Simon Winlow and Craig Ancrum. Criminal Identities and Consumer
Culture: crime, exclusion and the new culture of narcissism
(Willan Publishing, 2008)Thus we must suspect
that
consumerism somehow interferes with the maturation process, preventing
the individual's interest from being drawn towards objects and
signs--especially those which are ethically, politically or
scientifically charged and thus attractive only to the mature
individual--that lie outside the consumer sphere. . . . Once
fully unleashed, as it was in the 1960s, consumer culture simply
betrayed, brushed aside and demolished the weak forces of the
liberal-left, whose rather apologetic appeals to social justice and
meritocracy and half-hearted support for the democratic socialist
political movement that was attempting to properly replace the old
order could not compete with consumer culture's immensely seductive
imagery and economic dynamism . . . (173)
The alternative is the narcissist's joyride driven by the fetishistic command to circle permanently around objects associated with others who seem to offer vague recognition of the self and represent a concrete form of competence in the immediate environment. (185-6)
The alternative is the narcissist's joyride driven by the fetishistic command to circle permanently around objects associated with others who seem to offer vague recognition of the self and represent a concrete form of competence in the immediate environment. (185-6)
from Gene M. Heyman, Addiction: A Disorder of Choice (Harvard Univesity Press, 2009)
Critics of
consumerism have often
blamed social institutions or "society." The analysis
presented
here does not deny that social forces play an important role in
promoting excessive consumption levels. What it adds is the
point
that there would be excessive consumption levels even if advertising
did not exist. As long as choices are made from the local
perspective, and this is usually the perspective tht people take, the
favored good will be consumed excessively. Advertisers and
merchants encourage this tendency, and conversely, ascetic movements
counter this tendency. (p. 35)
from Gary Greenberg review of Addiction: A Disorder of Choice, in New Scientist, July 25, 2009
Heyman shows how the
failure to sacrifice short-term gains (getting high) for long-term
gains (sobriety-aided productivity) is endemic to a consumer culture.
The
Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food (New York
Times, February 20, 2013)Joanna Moncrieff, The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment (palgrave macmillan, 2009)
A little learning is a dangerous thing (Pope)
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again.
In Birkhoff and Mac Lane I have indeed read only pp. 124-26, and that shallow draught did indeed intoxicate my mind (I refuse the reductionist substitution of brain). These two pages render compactly intelligible the workings of RMD: the shit that emerges--gun discourse etc--comprise the elements; but the elements are rlated to each oter thrugh the mechanismsn of defense: that is, the inner structure, the geneative logic of resentiment as phenomena is the mechanisms of defense.
But how does this explain the stupid party; how does it explain figure one? How does it explain the failure of advanced capitalism in America? How does this expain both the communist party and anti-comunism? How, how, how?
Immanence as a methodology is to be distinguished from the concept of a plane of immanence. RMD fulfills all the requirements of a plane of immanince (Birkhoff and Mac Lane, A Survey of Modern Algebra, 4th ed., . See also Semiotic Regime. An immanent methodology paranoid schizoid and depressive positions: their utility in seeing the emergents
but I am not ure wht to do with KE2013. What I am sure of is the efficacy of immanence as methodology. Assuming you have clicked on KE and seen the graphics, you can see that what I did was very simple. I started within the thing itself: the us govt manual for 1937, the key adminstators identified with the seoncd new deal admin agencies; and then from within this social gropu worked backwards to construct a carer matrix. A typical one is shown here: ____________________ .
Beginning from within the thing itself--this is no ding an sich! The "thing" referred to has none of the ontologcal characteristics of thinginess (we underestimate the philosophical significance of Stephen Colbert).
The Dissapation of
Mind and the Singularity
It is already clear that in the U.S. fundamentalist whites and blacks (and many working class Catholics--hence my reference above to America as a failed state in relation to its "native" population) have been disgorged from the project of modernity, and now constitute a barely literate mass, concentrated in the central cities, inner suburbs, small towns, and the rural heartland, and removed in toto from the possiblities of cognitive development implied by the term "education." As the old America--Christian America--dies a sociocultural death (see links to left to New York Times articles), it is being replaced by newer populations capable, for now, of cognitive development (see Intel Finalists and Asian workers now dominate Silicon Valley tech jobs, San Jose Mercury News, 11-30-12)
Because the media performs this cognitive decline, the decay of reason is invisible within the cognitively decaying public sphere. One can observe the rhetorical performances of talking heads through the prism of e.g. English Grammar for Dummies (Wiley, 2010) and spot the decay of the logical structure of language in: subject-verb agreement when the subject is modified by a prepositional phrase; uncertainty in the use of prepositions (the speaker knows a preposition belongs in a sentence but just doesn't know which one to use); the use of phrases such as very unique, very major and others whose meaning precludes such quantitative modifiers; use of terms such as over-exaggerated and over-hyped (redundancies indicative of semantic dissolution); misuse of fewer and less . . . and so on into the night of cognitive dissipation.
This rotting away of the mind can also be measured and evaluated by deploying the resources of developmental psychology and psychoanalysis. The objective is not to infer something ontological (remember, we are dealing with situated organisms, not Cartesian selves), but rather to analyze cognitive performativity. Releveant empirico-theoretical resources are assembled in Developmental Divergence and Ressentiment and the Mechanisms of Defense. The latter is a plane of immanence; the former is a collection of empirico-theoretical resources, but lacks the inner coherence characteristic of a plane of immanence. (But Bildung: Was Mozart a Communist, is a coherent plane of immanence, as is The Keynesan Elite in the New Deal State, 1910 to 1937.)
Appalachian Hope and Heartbreak
‘That’s as Bad as It Gets’, by John Branch July 25, 2013 NYT
‘Beyond the Tree Line’, by John Branch July 25, 2013 NYT
Charles Murray's sequel to The Bell Curve (Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010)
Asian workers now dominate Silicon Valley tech jobs (San Jose Mercury News, 11-30-12)
from Asians: Too Smart for Their Own Good? (New York Times, 12-19-12).
Some white parents
have
reportedly shied away from selective public schools that have become
“too Asian,” fearing that their children will be
outmatched. Many whites who can afford it flock to private schools that
promote “progressive” educational philosophies,
don’t
“teach to the test” and offer programs in art and
music
(but not “Asian instruments,” like piano and
violin).
This statement has a double meaning. The obvious one is that parents fear Asian students' cognitive superiority, but these parents also are rejecting the obsession with tests that is the hallmark of No Child Left Behind, the signal achievement of the GOP (see The Stupid Party). These upper middle class parents may sense that they too, despite their high incomes and their whiteness, are being treated as if they were . . . N*****s.
Figure 1 can be taken as marking an inflection point in human history, where intelligence itself (and thus technology) is undermined by the further development what we call capitalism. This is very clear in the case of the United States.
Narcissistic regression (the psychology of mass consumerism), Bildung (progressive narcissism: Alcorn--the singularity), and Ressentiment are three of the four forces--genetic ontologies--that drive praxis. The fourth and oldest--our biology, our primate inheritance--persists and is available to hegemonic elites as a pool of primate affect evident everywhere in popular politics, organizational behavior (Mazur), and everyday life. (Wrangham, de Waal, Mazur) The Enlightement vision, from the eighteenth century to Progressivism and the New Deal to the post-war Finnish state (Figure 1 at the top) now appears to be a naive hope that lived for a century or two. If the United States is taken as the most advanced expression of predatory market capitalism, then the bottom line of Figure 1 must be seen as this form of capitalism's greatest if unintended effect. Another form of capitalism--developmental state capitalism--is evident in not only Finland, but also Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea. On developmental state capitalism see The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal State, 1910 to 1937.
Mazur
de Waal (1+)
Developmental
divergence: 35 mya to present
The inability of American society to generate the advanced minds critical to the development of advanced capitalism is masked by the enormous inflow of skilled and educated Third World middle classes into the U. S. labor force, including those born here of immigrant parents. (See, e.g., lists of Intel Science Talent Search Finalists for 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012.) In developmental diveregence I show how the concept of Zone(s) of Proximal Development, rather than the concepts of race and ethnicity, helps not only to explain "Asian" dominance, but also deconstructs the "white" minority subset into ZPDs. For an early albeit implicit demonstration of the effectiveness of the concept of ZPD, see Zena Smith Blau, Black children/white children: competence, socialization, and social structure (Free Press, 1981). In this context the widespread use of the rhetorical elements of"race" is an effect of racism, a reflection of the cognitive primitivism and pathology of organisms and cultures, but not a valid scientific concept.
The current convergence, in the United States, of economic decline, attacks on teachers and on the public sector as a whole, but especially narcissistic regression and the evangelical crusade against formal-operational thought (the impact of which is made clear by application of the ZPD concept), might reasonably be expected to deepen this inter- and intra-national developmental divergence. Cognitive decline--the decay of structure and discipline in cognitive performativity--is well underway, and has been for decades. The releveant empirico-theoretical resources are assembled in Developmental Divergence, Bildung: Was Mozart a Communist, and The Keynesan Elite in the New Deal State, 1910 to 1937.
All the non-human hominoids are generally thought of as highly intelligent, and scientific study has broadly confirmed that they perform outstandingly well on a wide range of cognitive tests – though there is relatively little data on gibbon cognition. The early studies by Wolfgang Köhler demonstrated exceptional problem-solving abilities in chimpanzees, which Köhler attributed to insight. The use of tools has been repeatedly demonstrated; more recently, the manufacture of tools has been documented, both in the wild and in laboratory tests. Imitation is much more easily demonstrated in "great apes" than in other primate species. Almost all the studies in animal language acquisition have been done with "great apes", and though there is continuing dispute as to whether they demonstrate real language abilities, there is no doubt that they involve significant feats of learning. Chimpanzees in different parts of Africa have developed tools that are used in food acquisition, demonstrating a form of animal culture.
Ressentiment is civilization's evil twin. It accompanies the rise of the state, and persists with greater force and effect into the twenty first century than anyone--except Nietzsche--thought possible. Ressentiment is the deep structure of the real, a fundamental element in the making of the West.
Ressentiment emerged as an adaptive response to the discipline imposed by power in the first civilizations (Schmookler). According to Nietzsche, ressentiment is more than simply a form of adaptation of an otherwise intact organism to power. Ressentiment is the chief characteristic of “natures that, denied the true reaction, that of deeds, compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge.” (Bernstein, Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero (Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 102) It is a fundamental reconfiguring of the organism, an alteration of Being, a transformation of Becoming. It is something new, contrary to the existence of hunter-gatherers. It is a particular type of Being that is the characteristic element of the age of civilization and the state.
This adaptive response is empirically and clinically developed in psychoanalysis's concept of the mechanisms of defense.
As democratic convictions became settled . . . 'the people' emerged increasingly as the true sovereign, and the conception gained ground that 'the people' is sane and sound, and its voice, at least to some extent, is sacred.
and from Nietzsche, Will to Power, § 863
“The values of the weak prevail because the strong have taken them over as devices of leadership.”
This entire site has as one of its primary purposes the deconstruction of "The People."
from Gene M. Heyman, Addiction: A Disorder of Choice (Harvard Univesity Press, 2009)
Critics of
consumerism have often
blamed social institutions or "society." The analysis
presented
here does not deny that social forces play an important role in
promoting excessive consumption levels. What it adds is the
point
that there would be excessive consumption levels even if advertising
did not exist. As long as choices are made from the local
perspective, and this is usually the perspective tht people take, the
favored good will be consumed excessively. Advertisers and
merchants encourage this tendency, and conversely, ascetic movements
counter this tendency. (p. 35)
from Gary Greenberg review of Addiction: A Disorder of Choice, in New Scientist, July 25, 2009
Heyman shows how the
failure to sacrifice short-term gains (getting high) for long-term
gains (sobriety-aided productivity) is endemic to a consumer culture.
The
Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food (New York
Times, February 20, 2013)Joanna Moncrieff, The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment (palgrave macmillan, 2009)
Jerom Kagan, The Human Spark: The Science of Human Development (Basic Books, 2013)
‘That’s as Bad as It Gets’
‘Beyond the Tree Line’
Charles Murray's sequel to The Bell Curve (Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010)
Risky Rise of the Good-Grade Pill, by NYT, by Alan Schwarz, NYT (June 9
In Their Own Words: ‘Study Drugs’ by Alan Schwarz, NYT (June 9, updated June 13, 2012)
At Stuyvesant, Allegations of Widespread Cheating,
By ANNE BARNARD and ERIC P. NEWCOMER
Published: June 26, 2012, NYT
February 5, 2010, 4:25 PM NYT
At Top City Schools, Lack of Diversity Persists
By JENNIFER MEDINA
Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (Vintage, 2004)
Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture: crime, exclusion and the new culture of narcissism. Steve Hal, Simon Winlow and Craig Ancrum (Willan Publishing, 2008)
Primates have
advanced cognitive
abilities: some make tools and use them to acquire food and for social
displays;[90][91] some have sophisticated hunting strategies requiring
cooperation, influence and rank;[92] they are status conscious,
manipulative and capable of deception;[93] they can recognise kin and
conspecifics;[94][95] and they can learn to use symbols and understand
aspects of human language including some relational syntax and concepts
of number and numerical sequence.[96][97][98] Research in primate
cognition explores problem solving, memory, social interaction, a
theory of mind, and numerical, spatial, and abstract concepts.[99]
Comparative studies show a trend towards higher intelligence going from
prosimians to New World monkeys to Old World monkeys, and significantly
higher average cognitive abilities in the great apes.[100][101]
Gomez; Wrangham cog dev and persistence of ancien regime
I interviewed about 40 workers and two managers (works mgr and vp frame div). Emerging from these interviews was a sense that the variations in remembering the events, structures, and processes of the history of the Local by the dozens of interviewees were a source of insight into the deep structure of the local's history. Conflicting memories, differing perspectives, differing cognitive modalities became the object of thought. That which positivists view as a failure to arrive at objective Truth--irreducible differance--became the royal road to deeper insights. This also a good example of an immanent practice (immanence is one of Deleuze's favorite words).
Cliff Williams on mob behavior
One of Deleuze's
themes--the image of thought (apparently he is referring to
Foucault: A Postmodern Kantian or Parodic Nietzschean?
Foucault: A Postmodern Kantian or Parodic Nietzschean?
Daniel W Smith
Philosophy Today;
2000; 44
Transcendental Empiricism
Henry
Somers-Hall, "Introduction," in
the Cambridge
Companion to Deleuze (Cambridge University Press, 2012),
p. 5
Given the view of the enviroment as an extension of the mind and as an entangled part of the inseparable whole organism-and-environment, the behaviour of an organism can be properly understood only in a specific context. The context becomes part of the problem-solving activity, and it is not just the space within which problem solving takes place. This is the contextualist or situated approach to cognition. According to this aproach, a concept is no longer a static object in the mind, but an 'object' in the extended mind/brain/environment system. Since what transpires in this system is a loop of mutual actions, it is more proper to view concepts as processes that occur over relatively short tme spans and that involve an interplay between the properties of the organism and the proerties of the context.
If concepts are processes assembled on the basis of organismic and environmental components that form an interactive loop, the concept is necessarily characterized by a certain variation. Thus, each time a concept is being assembled when the cognizer engages in a problem solving activity within a specific context, the performance of the relevant task is by its nature variable and dependent upon the specific context. Since time is an intrinsic variable in dynamic phenomena, the context can never be the same, even if the same task is repeated over and over again within the same controlled experimental conditions; repetition by itself makes a difference. The variability and fluctuation in measurements are not due to extraeous factors that are irrelevant to the task; they are inherent chracteristics of the phenomenon. pp. 3-4
Cognitive developmental change:
theories, models and measurement By Andreas
Demetriou, Athanassios Raftopoulos (Cambridge University Press,
2004)
Writing on transcendental empiricism reveals the dead-end of philosophy, insofar as it begins within the discursive field of philosophy, thus contradicting the premise of transcendental empiricism. Within this site we begin instead with encounters*--for example, with Figure 1, PISA Math Scores, 2003-2012, or with Ressentiment and the Mechanisms of Defense, which assembles internet-accessible videos, graphics and texts expressive of right-wing political performativity in the USA.
*"Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundametal encounter." (Deleuze, DR 139-40) in Bryant, p. 92
Transcendental empiricism is an empiricism insofar as it must rely on the force of an encounter [emph.added] to engender thought. Here it is not the object of the encounter that is important. The aim is not to represent the object, or to draw a sensation from the object. Rather, the object of the encounter is the occasion of thought, but not that which is to be thought. p. 92--3
It would therefore be wrong to suppose that the encounter is an encounter with a positive reality or a something. What is important in the encounter is not the object or concrete experience, but the problem. [emph added] p. 102
from
the Oxford English Dictionary: (use of the word) Concentrate.
1794. R. J. Sulivan View of Nature V. 395
The
lineaments thus become collected, or rather concentrated in our
imaginations, and acquire force from concentration.
vs. dissipate
vs. dissipate
Why Math?
The two excerpts
at the right
emphasize the the critical place of mathematical thinking in the
development of our cognitive powers. Although such powers had
already developed among isolated elites in ancient times, basic
mathematical literacy, as part of the three Rs, is a recent
development, and the education of the "masses" (usually statistically
large minorities and majorities) in algebra, triginometry, and calculus
emerges only in the late twentieth century.
bias to the abstract (math score minus reading score)
One
can create a
new measure of cognitive performativity by analyzing the spread between
reading, science, and math for each nation. Singapore, Hong Kong, Macao
and Shanghai show a large positive
divergence between reading and math. The United States showed the
largest negative divergence beween reading and math.
All this is new. Although it sems unlikely that the United States will emerge from this new kind of dark age, it is unclear whether this is a global rather than local feature of a post-modern world--that is, whether the U.S. is merely the first expression of an immanent tendency in post-modern societies.
bias to the abstract (math score minus reading score)
One
can create a
new measure of cognitive performativity by analyzing the spread between
reading, science, and math for each nation. Singapore, Hong Kong, Macao
and Shanghai show a large positive
divergence between reading and math. The United States showed the
largest negative divergence beween reading and math. All this is new. Although it sems unlikely that the United States will emerge from this new kind of dark age, it is unclear whether this is a global rather than local feature of a post-modern world--that is, whether the U.S. is merely the first expression of an immanent tendency in post-modern societies.
We
give
special attention to math performance because math appears to be the
subject in which accomplishment in secondary school is particularly
significant for both an individual’s and a
country’s
economic well-being. Existing research, though not conclusive,
indicates that math skills better predict future earnings and other
economic outcomes than other skills learned in high school. The
American Diploma Project estimates that “in 62 percent of
American jobs over the next 10 years, entry-level workers will need to
be proficient in algebra, geometry, data interpretation, probability
and statistics.”
from Amanda
Ripley, The Smartest
Kids in the World, and how they got that way, Simon
& Schuster (2013), pp. 70-72.
Math is a language
of logic.
It is a disciplined, organized way of thinking.
There is a
right anwer; there are rules tht must be followed. More than
any
other subject, math is rigor distilled. Mastering the languge of logic
helps to embed higher-order habits in kids' minds. The
ability to
reason . . . to detect patterns and to make informed guesses.