IndexMarch2018

Fascism and Patrimonialism

Why Trump Reigns as King Cyrus. The Christian right doesn’t like the president only for his judges. They like his style.
By Katherine Stewart, NYT Dec. 31, 2018

What are the cognitive prerequsites for understanding Trump?

• Fascism (Paxton)

• Patrimonialism (Collins-Weber)

• The Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain

• the Sapient Paradox (Renfrew)

• The Flynn effect

from Robert O.Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (Knopf, 2004)

It may be that the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism is American: the Ku Klux Klan. . . . The first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was arguably a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe. p. 49

United States: Eleven Regional Cultures

Map from Colin Woodard, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival
Regional Cultures of North America (Penguin, 2011)

Michael W. Miles, The Odyssey of the American Right (Oxford, 1980)

Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism

(Oxford, 2012)

Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (Yale, 2008)

the “lynching for rape” discourse:
the folk pornography of the Bible Belt

from Jacquelyn Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jesse Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching (Columbia, 1993), p. 150

The imagery of lynching—in literature, poetry, music, in the minds of men—was almost inescapably erotic. . . .

Rape and rumors of rape became a kind of acceptible folk pornography in the Bible Belt. As stories spread, the attacker became not just a black man but a ravenous brute, the victim a beautiful, frail, young virgin. The experience and condition of the women. . . were described in minute and progressively embellished detail: a public fantasy that implies a kind of group participation in the rape of the woman almost as cathartic as the subsequent lynching of the alleged attacker. . . .

The small percentage of lynchings that revolved around charges of sexual assault gripped the southern imagination far out of proportion to statistical reality. In such scenes, described in the popular press in strikingly conventionalized words and phrases, the themes of masculinity, rage, and sexual envy were woven into a ritual of death and desire.

Ashraf H.A. Rushdy, American Lynching (Yale, 2012)

see also the year 1898; the descent into barbarism (patrimonial) attempt to destroy rational-bureuacratic form of legitimations

"They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists."

Donald Trump says:

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

‘Rapist!’ she yelled at a Hispanic man. ‘She’s quoting the president,’ he thought.

" . . . a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable . . . " Nietzsche, Geneology of Morals, III. 14

. . . the themes of masculinity, rage, and sexual envy were woven into a ritual of death and desire.

. . . sometimes, the lynchers . . . cut off genitals of the lynched and divide them into bits to be distributed to participants as souvenirs, as . . . a coda to this composition of hate and guilt and sex and fear . . .

fascism is resentiment crossing the line from symbolic to physical assault and murder: pogroms, holocausts . . . but what about lynch mobs? These occur within a legal order in which they are legitimized and accepted.

from Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (1949. Norton ed. 1994)

. . . the lynched Negro becomes not an object that must die but a receptacle for every man’s damned-up hate, and a receptacle for every man’s forbidden feelings. Sex and hate, cohabiting in the darkness of minds too long, pour out their progeny of cruelty on anything that can serve as a symbol of an unnamed relationship that in his heart each man wants to befoul. That, sometimes, the lynchers do cut off genitals of the lynched and divide them into bits to be distributed to participants as souvenirs is no more than a coda to this composition of hate and guilt and sex and fear, created by our way of life. 162-3

In the name of sacred womanhood, of purity, of preserving the home, lecherous old men and young ones, reeeking with impurities, who had violated the home since they were sixteen yers old, whipped up lynchings, organized Klans, burned crosses, aroused the poor and ignorant to wild excitement by an obscene, perverse imagery describing the “menace” of Negro men hiding behind every cypress waiting to rape “our” women 145

1. A Concept of Fascism

Three paragraphs from Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004):

¶ 1. Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by 1) obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and 2) by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which 3) a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, 4) working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, 5) abandons democratic liberties and 6) pursues with redemptive violence and 7) without ethical or legal restraints 8) goals of internal cleansing and 9) external expansion. p. 218

¶ 2. The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism. p. 84

¶ 3. Today [2004] 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 this video]. 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

Fascism is a Concept,
not an epithet

from Eckart Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: a Systematic Reconstruction (Harvard, 2012)

. . . concepts have their basis in functions, by which Kant understands “the unity of the act of bringing various representations under one common representaton.” (A68). A concept is a rule for combining certain representations (and thus also a principle for excluding certain others). Thus the represesntations’white’, ‘grainy’, ‘saline’ are combined and ordered in the concept ‘salt, while the representations ‘colorless’, ‘liquid’, ‘tasteless’ (say) are not. In this way a concept is a rule allowing me to unite certain representations and to bring them under a higher representation, i.e. the concept. (pp. 22-3)

Cognition does not consist merely in the collecting of phenomena; rather we strive to forge conceptual links between them and to grasp the laws of nature that are valid for specific classes of objects as cases of yet more general laws, whereby we are guided by the ideal of a unified explanation of nature. (p. 38)

“To make concepts out of representations one must be able to compare, to reflect, and to abstract, for these three logical operations of the understanding are the essential and universal conditions for the generation of every concept whatsoever. I see, e.g., a spruce, a willow, and a linden. By first comparing these objects with one another I note that they are different from one another in regard to the trunk, the btanches, the leaves, etc.; but next I reflect on that which they have in common among themselves, trunk, branches, and leaves themselves, and I abstract from the quantity, the figure, etc., of these; thus I acquire a concept of a tree.” (pp. 250-51)

2. The above Concept of Fascism Deployed

Paragraph 2, "The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy" perfectly encapsulates the the "populist" performativity of Trump's rallies. (note)

Paragraph 1 can be broken down into nine elements, six of which (1, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8) characterize the Trump phenomenon. More interesting is to look at the three elements of Paxton's definition of fascism that seem least applicable: 2, 3 and 9.

2) cults of unity, energy and purity
3) a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants
9) external expansion

It is here that we see the plausibiity of the ratio: Hitler is to Trump as Tragedy is to Farce

Compare Paxton's Paragraph 3 with the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain (below right). Atwater has shown how the discursive and symbolic elements of the Southern Strategy were generated through the construction of a theatrical arena in which hatred is expressed and sadism performed. This sado-sexual performativity is the essence of the GOP's mass appeal. Well before Trump the evocation of evil and the channelling of rage against a scapegoat (various forms of the other) was the stock-in-trade of Republican politicians.

The rhetorical violence of Trump rallies, not ideology and policies, is what is fundamental. The Trump performances--the audience, the cultural-historical context, and Trump himself as a therapeutic object with which the audience member can identify--become intelligible when viewed through the prism of certain key concepts: Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment; psychoanalysis's concept of the mechanisms of defense; Wilbur Cash's concept of the proto-Dorian convention; the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain; and Robert Paxton's concept of transcendental violence.

On the right there are not issues, but postures, gestures, various encodings of the same sado-sexual reflex (the inner logic of racism). Rage enacted in a political-media theater of violence, sadism, and revenge. The cruelty of it all is the most important thing. The vicarious thrill, the “enthusiasm for inflicting pain, suffering, or humiliation”(OED): this is what is seen at Trump rallies. The GOP's performative cadre are specialists in herding hominids.

Here the works of vengefulness and rancor swarm; here the air stinks of secrets and concealment; . . . and what mendaciousness is employed to disguise that this hatred is hatred! What a display of grand words and postures, what an art of "honest" calumny! (Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 14)

Max Weber's ideal type
Piketty and Krugman on Patrimonialism

from Max Weber,

An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those onesidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct.

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

Randall Collins and Max Weber on Patrimonialism

Randall Collins, "Patrimonial Alliances and Failures of State Penetration: A Historical Dynamic of Crime, Corruption, Gangs, and Mafias,"The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 636, Patrimonial Power in the Modern World (July 2011), pp. 16-31

Classically, patrimonialism was organization based on private households, plus alliances among them. Patrimonialism wields political power in the form of personal loyalty and arbitrary discretion, tempered only by tradition. The archetype of this kind of personal power is the family, but a patrimonial household is not limited to kinship per se. What makes patrimonialism capable of wielding large-scale power is that some households expand beyond kinship and become extremely large by including a large number of servants, armed guards, retainers, hostages, and houseguests; the bigger the entourage of the head of such a house, the greater his power.

It is important to distinguish, as Weber (1922/1968) did, between patrimonialism and patriarchy. Rule by the father (literally) or male dominance generally - patriarchy - can take place in many different kinds of organization; it occurs even in bureaucracy, although bureaucracy historically has been the main ally and organizational weapon of resistance to patriarchy. Patrimonialism is something more.

Patrimonial power involves personal loyalty, but it is also fraught with conflicts, betrayals, and treason—Shakespearean plots are virtual textbooks of patrimonial politics. . . . patrimonialism and bureaucracy are not bare organizational forms but sites for constructing moral visions; proselytizers for expanding bureaucratic state penetration are moral entrepreneurs as well as expanders of organizational domains. The struggle between patrimonialism and bureaucracy takes the form of rival moralities, althoug one side rarely recognizes this about the organizational form they oppose.

And this, from Researchgate: What are patrimonialism and neo-patrimonialism?

3. the above concept of fascism encounters "Trump" (Aufheben)

Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind" (A 51/B 75) p. 193-4 in xxxx "This entirelynewtranslation ofthe CritiqueofPureReasonis the most accurate and informative English translation ever produced of this epochal philosophical text. Though its simple and direct style will make it suitable for all new readers of Kant, the translation displays an un precedented philosophical and textual sophistication that will enlighten Kant scholars as well."

lock her up and build the wall and zero-toleance and the Muslim ban are two of many elements generated by the fascist performative

inner logic of a performative complex: associated milieu

deep structure (n=1: RMD/genetic ontology) and performative modalities (fascism, racism, ultranationalism/nationalism, bullying. Rape.: these are the things wanting to be understood

LASC

the southern strategy
lynching

fascism as HM was a specific period in the unfolding of violence and politics.d

Human languages contain three broad categories

from Jerome Kagan, On Being Human: Why Mind Matters (Yale, 2016)

Humans are the only species that operates in two realities. The one we share with animals consists of representations of the salient features of objects, movements, places, smells, sound, tastes, and feelings. . . .

The second reality, unique to humans, consists of words, only some of which describe the reality that schemata represent. . . .

Human languages contain three broad categories. One set of words is uses to evaluate a person, object, event, intention or feeling as good, pleasant or appropriate, as opposed to bad, upleasant, or inappropriate. The second category consists of names for observable objects, events, or their physical features. Most of these words are linked to a schema. . . .

The third category contains names for abstract ideas, such as knowledge, truth, resiliency, justice, number, and time, that do not possess a particular set of physical features. pp. 1-3

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

Karen Barad:

. . . the primary ontological units are not 'things' but phenomena--dynamic topological / reconfigurings / entanglements / relationalities / (re)articulations of the world. And the primary semantic units are not 'words' but material-discursive practices through which (ontic and semantic) boundaries are constituted. This dynamic is agency.

the primary ontological units are not 'things'
the primary semantic units are not 'words'

from Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University, 2007)

a
a
a
a

the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain

from Wikipedia: (Lee Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy)

As a member of the Reagan administration in 1981, Atwater gave an anonymous interview to political scientist Alexander P. Lamis. Part of the interview was printed in Lamis's book The Two-Party South, then reprinted in Southern Politics in the 1990s with Atwater's name revealed. . . . Atwater talked about the Republican Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan's version of it:

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now you don't have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

The above Concept of Fascism Deployed

Paragraph 2, "The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy" perfectly encapsulates the the "populist" performativity of Trump's rallies. (note)

Paragraph 1 can be broken down into nine elements, six of which (1, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8) characterize the Trump phenomenon. More interesting is to look at the three elements of Paxton's definition of fascism that seem least applicable: 2, 3 and 9.

Compare Paxton's Paragraph 3 with the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain (below right). Atwater has shown how the discursive and symbolic elements of the Southern Strategy were generated through the construction of a theatrical arena in which hatred is expressed and sadism performed. This sado-sexual performativity is the essence of the GOP's mass appeal. Well before Trump the evocation of evil and the channelling of rage against a scapegoat (various forms of the other) was the stock-in-trade of Republican politicians.

The rhetorical violence of Trump rallies, not ideology and policies, is what is fundamental. The Trump performances--the audience, the cultural-historical context, and Trump himself as a therapeutic object with which the audience member can identify--become intelligible when viewed through the prism of certain key concepts: Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment; psychoanalysis's concept of the mechanisms of defense; Wilbur Cash's concept of the proto-Dorian convention; the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain; and Robert Paxton's concept of transcendental violence.

On the right there are not issues, but postures, gestures, various encodings of the same sado-sexual reflex (the inner logic of racism). Rage enacted in a political-media theater of violence, sadism, and revenge. The cruelty of it all is the most important thing. The vicarious thrill, the “enthusiasm for inflicting pain, suffering, or humiliation”(OED): this is what is seen at Trump rallies. The GOP's performative cadre are specialists in herding hominids.

language matters: from The Oxford English Dictionary

Bestiality, n.

1. The nature or qualities of a beast; want of intelligence, irrationality, stupidity, brutality.

2. a. Indulgence in the instincts of a beast; brutal lust; concr. a disgusting vice, a beastly practice.

Sadism, n.

Enthusiasm for inflicting pain, suffering, or humiliation on others; spec. a psychological disorder characterized by sexual fantasies, urges, or behaviour involving the subjection of another person to pain, humiliation, bondage, etc.

Cruelty, n.

1. The quality of being cruel; disposition to inflict suffering; delight in or indifference to the pain or misery of others; mercilessness, hard-heartedness: esp. as exhibited in action. Also, with pl., an instance of this, a cruel deed.

An ICE Raid Leaves an Iowa Town Divided Along Faith Lines

The detention of 32 workers at a concrete plant opened fissures among the town’s churches and secular leaders, and brought an abstract national issue painfully close to home. (NYT 7-3-18)

This story is fundamentally misleading. Evangelical white supremacist churches stood alone against an all-American line-up of every other religious body in the town. This is but one example of the cognitive limitations of media discourse. At every turn of events, the deep reality of White Supremacy is white-washed by the media.

The above concept of Fascism critiqued, or:
what is fascism, what is racism?

inner logic of a performative complex: associated milieu

The Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain

from Wikipedia: (Lee Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy)

The three excerpts at the right provide a broad contextualization of our current problems of violence, aggression, rage, hatred, and how these emotions have become the sustencne of the presetn Republican Party. The objectives of the leadership, however, are the fullest expression of greed one could wish for.

A more compeliing cntextualiztion is to take the presnt situation and view it in the light of the sapient paradox.

disciplining bodies and purging them of their desires

the existence on earth of an animal soul turned against itself . . . is the very basis of the Western world

from Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 16:

from Mika Haritos-Fatouros, “Cruelty: A dispositional or a situational behavior in man?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29, p.230

The basic question remains, however: How far are aggression, violence, and cruelty in humans today the result of predisposition factors, or biological or archetypal processes, and how far are they the result of cognitive/emotional processes evoked by situational factors? p. 230

from Timothy R. Pauketat, An Archaeology of the Cosmos: Rethinking Agency and Religion in Ancient America (Routledge, 2012), p. 30

Indeed, this is the very basis of the Western world, with religions that profess beliefs while simultaneiously disciplining bodies and purging them of their desires.

Genetic Ontology	Sources (Full page here)
Primate Dominance and Deference	Mazur, deWaal, Wrangham . . .
Paleolithic Dynamic Egalitarianism	Whiten, Descola, Chase, Price . . .
Ressentiment & the Mechanisms of Defense: (the dark energy of politics) Patrimonialism; Despotic regime; Racism; Nationalism; Fascism	Nietzsche, Deleuze & Guattari, Clarke, Paxton, Knox . . .
Bildung & the Will to Power (Jouissance) Progressive Narcissism; Individuation; Progressivism, Socialism, Communism the UAW and the Keynesian Elite	Hegel, Nietzsche, Vygotsky, Piaget, Kohut, Alcorn . . . Lacan . . .
Nihilism & the Last Man Regressive Narcissism and the Culture of Consumption; Repressive Desublimation; Disindividuation; Neoliberalism	Nietzsche, Hall, Ehrenberg, Stiegler, Illouz, Marcuse . . . Didion . . .

the Two-Party System: Semiotic Regimes

	LEFT	RIGHT
Topology	depressive	paranoid-schizoid
Political Style	progressive	proto-Dorian
Cognitive Mode	concrete & formal op	pre-op and gestural
Regime type	rational-bureaucratic	r-b and patrimonial

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)

Jamieson and Cappella don't get it: the "vulgarity" they so coyly refer to is the sado-sexual performativity of the GOP right

A striking illustration of the cognitive limitations of liberals is that they fail to note the obvious--that is, they fail to conceptualize the generic character of this stream of sado-sexual performances. The excerpt at the right from Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment, makes this clear. Jamieson and Cappella just don't get it: The vulgarity and sadism of Limbaugh's rhetoric is the main event in this theater of ressentiment. The sado-sexual fixations that are the essense of right-wing signifying chains may dress themselves up as issues (such as abortion or Obamacare or the Wall), as if they were subject to rational debate and beholden to empirical checks. But these "issues" are merely the occasion for the expression of emotionally appealing sexual inuendo and sadism, and "facts" are merely props in the theater of ressentiment. One of the indications of the intellectual bankruptcy of liberal and progressive discourse is that it is fundamentally incapable of grasping this elemental fact.

"Why the vulgarity in this message does not alienate the churchgoing conservatives in his audiences is a question for which we have no ready answer."

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.)

Limbaugh's attempts at gender-based "humor" are of the locker room variety. As the California gubernatorial recall was heating up, Limbaugh informed his folowers that Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante--"whose name loosely translates into Spanish for 'large breasts'--leads the Terminator by a few pionts" (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 audiences is a question for which we have no ready answer.

Third Orientation
Critique of Media Discourse
"'Animals!' the crowd cheered, echoing the remarks Trump made earlier this month"

Trump doubles down on MS-13 'animals' comment: 'They're not human beings', The Tennessean May 29, 2018) [Gomez, Donald, Wrangham, McMahon

from the Oxford Dictionary of Biology

Hominid. Any member of the primate family Hominidae, which includes humans and their fossil ancestors in the tribe Hominini. The hominid family is now regarded as also including the other extant great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutan—formerly constituting the family Pongidae) and extinct groups, such as Australopithecus and Dryopithecus .

from Juan Carlos Gomez, Apes, Monkees, Children and the Growth of Mind (Harvard, 2004)

from Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (Norton, 2001)

. . . modern culture contains within it a trace of each of our previous stages of cognitive evolution. It still rests on the same old primate brain capacity for episodic or event knowledge. But it has three additional, uniquely human layers: a mimetic layer, an oral-linguistic layer, and an external-symbolic layer. The minds of individuals reflect these three ways of representing reality. (p. 262)

from Merlin Donald, "The mind considered from a historical perspective: human cognitive phylogenesis and the possibility of continuing cognitive evolution." In D. Johnson & C. Ermeling (Eds.) The Future of the Cognitive Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 360-61

Mimetic representations are evident in human children before they acquire language competence. . . . They continue to be important in adults, taking the form of highly variable social customs, athletic skills, and group expressive patterns (such as mass demonstrations of aggression or rejection).

" . . . the existence on earth of an animal soul turned against itself . . . "

from Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 16:

Let us add at once that . . . the existence on earth of an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, was something so new, profound, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and pregnant with a future that the aspect of the earth was essentially altered. Indeed, divine spectators were needed to justice to the spectacle that thus began and the end of which is not yet in sight . . . . From now on, man . . . gives rise to an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as if with him somethin were anouncing and preparing itself, as if man were not a goal but onl a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise.

from Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 22:

Oh this insane, pathetic beast--man! What ideas he has, what unnaturalness, what paroxysms of nonsense, what bestiality of thought erupts . . .

All this is interesting, to excess, but also of a gloomy, black, unnerving sadness, so that one must forcibly forbid oneself to gaze too long into these abysses. Here is sickness, beyond any doubt, the most terrible sickness that has ever raged in man . . . . There is so much man that is hideous!--Too long, the earth has been a madhouse!

from Timothy R. Pauketat, An Archaeology of the Cosmos: Rethinking Agency and Religion in Ancient America (Routledge, 2012), p. 30

Indeed, this is the very basis of the Western world, with religions that profess beliefs while simultaneiously disciplining bodies and purging them of their desires.

Joseph Conrad on the GOP

from Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers. It was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage. There was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe. . . . They were conqurerors, and for that you want only brute force--nothing to boast of, when you have it.

performativity within the two-party discursive field: rhetorical maneuvers; schstick

critique of media discourse

Topography of the Two-party system
(discursive fields)

U.S. Political Economy
by Sector, 1910-1948

Mark S. Mizruchi, The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite (Harvard, 2013)

Mizruchi sees the 1970s as crucial in the development of a new kind of business conservatism.

Herding Hominids:
Semiotic Regimes
(discursive logics)

Senate, 2018. Alabama
Doug Jones Roy Moore

College grad

Women
Men

Non-College grad

Women
Men

45%
35%

25%
19%

52%
62%

73%
79%

The Sapient Paradox and Figure 1

Lacan and the problem of the imaginary

Cliff Williams and Simon Jarvis's Wordworth's Philosophic Song (Cambridge, 2007)—Bildung

the Pathos of Donald Trump

HOMINIDS

the question of language

***Watch Trump rallies closely. The audience is usually unfocused, almost bored in the haze of broken English spoken by Trump. Bored, restless, talking among themselves, cognitively not there, but waiting for the punch line, the expletive, the primitive, hate-filled denunciation: license has been given (Kallis). Then they wake up, some more slowly than others, as they catch on, and howl their delight, only to subside into a state of not being. This the pundits refer to as "energy." This is, ontologically speaking, some really primitive stuff. This is why media discourse on the real-world economic grievances of white men simultaneously get it and miss it completely. They are finally being forced to address what has been a trend obvious for decades, but not discussed in the media until the breakdown of elite control of public discourse in the primary campaigns of 2016. What they miss is the deep structure of this rage; the cognitive primitiveness of its expression; the centuries long history of ressentiment as the inner logic of ultra-nationalism and fascism and racism

Mappings

Beyond sadism (the beating heart of the GOP), and related to it, are the cognitive consequences of a politics of bestiality. It is not merely that Donald Trump Talks Like a Third-Grader (Politico, August 13, 1915).

Language on the threshold of gesture and reflex. Regression to infantile narcissism via processes of identification, to a politics of patrimonialism.

In stead, liberals legitimize white supremamcy and racism by taking at face value the con, an constructing a fictive, ausrd cogitive position-----

" . . . a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable . . . "

Nietzsche, "How things will become ever more artistic in Europe", The Gay Science § 256

Roland, FDR, FF, Brand, Cooke

President Trump’s Big-Money Establishment, NYT Jan 24, 2017

the state
the study area
the extended mind

a summary of findings as prolegomena

Heart of Darkness: Conrad's White man

"Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers. It was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage. There was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe." (Signet, p. 250; Norton Critical Edition, p. 30

from Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio R. Damasio, “We Feel, Therefore We Learn: The Relevance of Affective and Social Neuroscience to Education,” in Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015)

. . . learning is dynamic, social, and context dependent because emotions are, and emotions form a critical piece of how, what, when, and why people think, remember, and learn. Intro, p. 17

In general, cognition and emotion are regarded as two interrelated aspects of human functioning. p. 36

This rhetorical performance of the right is not only cognitively primitive. It should be obvious that

On the right there are not issues, but postures, gestures, various encodings of the same sado-sexual reflex (the inner logic of racism, its genetic ontology*). Rage enacted in a political-media theater of violence, hatreed, sadism, and revenge. (NIETZ): this is the essence of what is called "Conservative" today. And not only rage, but political pornography. Consider the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain, and bring Clarke in at this time. Sex and violence make up the entirety of the inner logic, the generative matrix, of populist Republicanism. These sado-sexual fixations may dress themselves up as issues, as if they were subject to rational debate and beholden to empirical checks (remember Willie Horton?). Language on the threshold of gesture and reflex. Regression to infantile narcissism via processes of identification, to a politics of patrimonialism.

But what is new with the Trump campaign--and decisively so--is that a "demagogue" has literally hijacked the base of the Republican Party (LiberalismConservatism). The genetic ontology of ressentiment produces a subject. But that subject--the Trump enthusiasts one sees at rallies and in interviews and focus groups--has been embedded in the cultural-historical field of white supremacy (see The Imus Brouhaha and that which is called "Racism"). The containment of surplus agression, rage and hatred--which GOP politics has hitherto been able to shunt aside after having ridden this rage to victory (--has depended on two things.

First, an economy of white affirmative action guaranteeing great masses of "white" folk sole access to those sectors of employment embedded in local government (police, fire, govt administration, utilities, transportation, building services, construction, and skilled trades in manufacturing). And second, a semioitic regime of ego-reinforcing symbols (positive and negative identifications). When you add the election of Barak Obama to the economic consequences of the regime of neoliberal globalization (which includes declining wages as well as job losses) you add insult to injury, and one gets a psycho-cultural crackup of world-historic proportions. This is what Trump exploits.

sources and notes

NCES, Highlights PISA 2003, p. 14 NCES, Highlights PISA 2009, p. 18
NCES, Highlights PISA 2006, p. 12 NCES, PISA 2012, Math v
NCES, PISA 2015, Math

Korea and Japan are in light blue; Asia: Asian cities and city-states (C & C-S) are in light orange (see below for a breakout of the components of this category); Scandinavian nations + Switzerland are in dark blue; Anglo-Saxon nations in orange; France, Germany, Belgium and Poland in green; Italy, Portugal and Spain in red; the United States in yellow.

Of the European nations omitted from this graph, Croatia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and Cyprus scored below the United States in math. Ahead of the United States but not shown are Estonia, Slovenia, Ireland, Austria, Russian Federation, Czech Republic, Iceland, Luxembourg, Latvia, Malta, Lithuania, Hungary, and the Slovak Republic.

The United States does better on reading and science, but math it taken by many as the more important indicator.

The possibility that, at a reduced scale, the mind of an ape can be upgraded by giving him, on the one hand, a regime of socally controlled attention and interactive experiences with humans, and on the other, a new, more explicit form of representing the world, would confer dramatic support to the Vygotskian notion that higher cognition can be created through cultural processes of development that change the nature of cognitive ontogeny.

ADD Donald on layers of the mind

Hitler speech Trump speech

These texts map onto the Left-Right binary

Gomez, Donald, Wrangham, McMahon

Rabids and Thoughtfuls

These sado-sexual fixations may dress themselves up as issues, as if they were subject to rational debate and beholden to empirical checks.

Language on the threshold of gesture and reflex. Language on the threshold of gesture and reflex. Regression to infantile narcissism via processes of identification, to a politics of patrimonialism.

from Juan Carlos Gomez, Apes, Monkees, Children and the Growth of Mind (Harvard University Press, 2004)

But is there any evidence that nonhuman primates may experience something akin to a cultural shaping of their minds in the way Vygotsky implied for human children? . . . . More recently, Tomasello (1999) has emphasized the "socialization of attention" and cognition in general as the explanation for higher achievements (by human standards) of human-reared apes. Although the two approaches emphasize very different factors, in fact from a Vygotskian perspective they are complimentary. Vygotsky's view was that adult mediation was optimally achieved through the use of signs and symbols, especially speech and language. In his view, higher cognitive processes--the processes that differentiate humans from other apes--could only be created through this sociocultural mediation. The possibility that, at a reduced scale, the mind of an ape can be upgraded by giving him, on the one hand, a regime of socally controlled attention and interactive experiences with humans, and on the other, a new, more explicit form of representing the world, would confer dramatic support to the Vygotskian notion that higher cognition can be created through cultural processes of development that change the nature of cognitive ontogeny. (pp. 262-3)

Semiotic Regimes

This pages presents two sets of left-right rhetorical positioning.

The pro- and anti-war demonstrators' signs and the table rabids vs. thoughtfuls are moments in the unfolding the two-party discursive field. In the competing demonstrations the pro-war signs involved demonization, rage, and expulsion/purification; the anti-war signs involved issue statements.. The rage directed against the other is a principle axis--the eigenvector--of the right. A large percentage of right-wing expressions are of this character.

The Stupid Party

from Selections from Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882/1887)

What will not be built any more henceforth, and cannot be built any more, is—a society in the old sense of that word; to build that, everything is lacking, above all the material. All of us are no longer material for a society; this is a truth for which the time has come. It is a matter of indifference to me that at present the most myopic, perhaps most honest, but at any rate noisiest human type that we have today, our good socialists, believe, hope, dream, and above all shout and write almost the opposite. Even now one reads their slogan for the future "free society" on all tables and walls. Free society? Yes, yes! But surely you know, gentlemen, what is required for building that? Wooden iron! The well-known wooden iron." And it must not even be wooden.

from Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Is it a coincidence that Trump uses the language of white supremacy? (WAPO 4-20-18)

speaking of elites

Behav Brain Sci. 2006 Jun;29(3):211-24; discussion 224-57.
Nell V1, "Cruelty's rewards: the gratifications of perpetrators and spectators."

Abstract

Cruelty is the deliberate infliction of physical or psychological pain on other living creatures, sometimes indifferently, but often with delight. Though cruelty is an overwhelming presence in the world, there is no neurobiological or psychological explanation for its ubiquity and reward value. This target article attempts to provide such explanations by describing three stages in the development of cruelty. Stage 1 is the development of the predatory adaptation from the Palaeozoic to the ethology of predation in canids, felids, and primates. Stage 2, through palaeontological and anthropological evidence, traces the emergence of the hunting adaptation in the Pliocene, its development in early hominids, and its emotional loading in surviving forager societies. This adaptation provides an explanation for the powerful emotions - high arousal and strong affect - evoked by the pain-blood-death complex. Stage 3 is the emergence of cruelty about 1.5 million years ago as a hominid behavioural repertoire that promoted fitness through the maintenance of personal and social power. The resulting cultural elaborations of cruelty in war, in sacrificial rites, and as entertainment are examined to show the historical and cross-cultural stability of the uses of cruelty for punishment, amusement, and social control. Effective violence prevention must begin with perpetrators, not victims. If the upstream approaches to violence prevention advocated by the public-health model are to be effective, psychologists must be able to provide violence prevention workers with a fine-grained understanding of perpetrator gratifications. This is a distasteful task that will compel researchers to interact with torturers and abusers, and to acknowledge that their gratifications are rooted in a common human past. It is nonetheless an essential step in developing effective strategies for the primary prevention of violence.

Hatred
Rapacity
Envy

from Frank Ninivaggi, Envy Theory: Perspectives on the Psychology of Envy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010)

Why Math?

from "Teaching Math to the Talented" (Education Next, Winter 2011, Vol. 11, NO. 1

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.

from Pasi Sahlberg, xxxxxxx

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.

George W. Bush Tries to Suppress
Publication of 2006 results

from a BBC interview with Andreas Schleicher, the Division Head and coordinator of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA): "How Pisa became the world's most important exam", BBC.com, 26 November 2013

Among the starkest revelations has been the decline of the US school system. This former education superpower has been caught up and left behind by many other countries, particularly in Asia.

This was distasteful medicine and Mr Schleicher says that the US administration was deeply unhappy with the 2006 results and was trying to apply pressure on the OECD.

The US politician who intervened to defend the importance of publishing the results was Ted Kennedy, says Mr Schleicher. Kennedy, who had chaired the senate committee on education, had become very supportive of the Pisa project.

"It was Senator Kennedy who saved my life at the OECD," he says.

racism is a global property

from Joseph Margolis, The Unravelling of Scientism: American Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century (Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 15

. . . the great question of history's constitutive role in the formation and transformation of our cognizing powers is now largely ignored . . .

from Stanley I. Greenspan with Beryl Lieff Benderly, The growth of the mind and the endangered origins of intelligence (Addison-Wesley, 1997), p. 167

. . . modern social institutions and much of the technology that supports them have come to threaten the conditions that nurture intelligence . . .

Pieter Claesz, Still life with burning candle, 1627

from Max Weber,

"An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those onesidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct..."

from Episteme (Wikipedia)

Foucault's epistemes are something like the 'epistemological unconscious' of an era; the configuration of knowledge in a particular episteme is based on a set of fundamental assumptions that are so basic to that episteme so as to be invisible to people operating within it.
--------
deep structure (n=1: RMD/genetic ontology) and performative modalities (fascism, racism, ultranationalism/nationalism, bullying. Rape.: these are the things wanting to be understood

LASC

the southern strategy
lynching

fascism as HM was a specific period in the unfolding of violence and politics.d

Weber
Kant
Paxton
Nietzsche
Smith

Paragraph 3 was written beforethe rise of the Tea Party following the election of Barack Obama. The Tea Party as a cultural-historical phenomenon is best illuminated through deployment of two sets of texts: the literature on fascism (note), on the one hand, and the literature on American history and politics, on the other (note).

"escaping from our Cartesian prison"

from Lambros Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind (MIT Press, 2013)

Escaping from our Cartesian prison requires more than a change in our academic language games.

from Friederich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (Penguin, 1968)

"The so-called 'motive': another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, an accompaniment to an act, which conceals rather than exposes the antecedentia of the act." {re Imus and that which is called racism} p. 49

from Ian Hacking (Collège de France), review of Jan Goldstein, The post-revolutionary self: politics and psyche in France, 1750-1850 (Harvard, 2008)

Today's discussions of 'consciousness' and 'the self' too often suppose that items such as these . . . are timeless elements of the human condition. Goldstein's work shows how strongly they have been formed by forgotten events in our past.

from Episteme (Wikipedia)

Foucault's epistemes are something like the 'epistemological unconscious' of an era; the configuration of knowledge in a particular episteme is based on a set of fundamental assumptions that are so basic to that episteme so as to be invisible to people operating within it.

Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx : conversations with Duccio Trombadori, translated by R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (Semiotext(e), 1991)

It was a matter of calling the theme of the subject into question once again, that great, fundamental postulate which French philosophy, from Descartes until our own time, had never abandoned. Setting out with psychoanalysis, Lacan discovered, or brought out into the open, the fact that the theory of the unconscious is incompatible with a theory of the subject (in the Cartesian sense of the term as well as the phenomenological one). . . Indeed, Lacan concluded that is was precisely the philosophy of the subject which had to be abandoned on account of this incompatibility, and that the point of departure should be an analysis of the mechanisms of the unconscious. p. 56-7

from Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University, 2007)