History
without philosophy is only a screen on which to project the shibboleths
of our time, which is what the respectable media do (Nietzsche).
Thinking requires constantly overcoming the crippling effects of the Cartesian myth--the
ontological presupposition of the Cartesian self and its associated
rhetorical elements of consciousness, belief, motive, ideology, and
interest. Failure to do so has the effect, a priori, of blocking
conceptualization of questions of ontology, agency, intentionality,
habitus, networks and context.
from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (462):
In place of "sociology," a theory of the forms of domination.
In place of "society," the culture complex . . .
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Figure 0. The Adventures of Dasein: From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States
Philosophy always arrives too late. . . . The Owl of Minerva takes flight
only as the dusk begins to fall: Rethinking "Modernity"
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Figure
0 provides a context for thinking about the history of reading and
writing. The latter provides a context for rethinking the New
Deal. Note the periodization provided by Lyons' A History of Reading and Writing: the Enlightenment to the New Deal, 1750 to the 1930s.
Figure 0 is the irreducible minimum if one is to understand the New
Deal, "Trump," and the historical path connecting them. This is because "Trump" forces us to face the question of our primate heritage and its corrolary,
patrimonialism), on the one hand, and the fragility of civilization, on
the other. The catastrophe now unfolding is nothing less than the disintegration of the biocultural niche of modernity
At issue: the cognitive
developmental modalities that span the entire history of the tribe
hominini, which contains the genus homo (the only extant variety of
which is homo sapiens) and the genus pan (this latter contains
chimpanzees and bonobos). Consider the excerpts from the work of
Donald, Wrangham and Wilson, Price and Feinman, Gomez, Tomasello,
Chase, Renfrew, Malafouris, Dunbar, Dupré and others in The Sapient
Paradox, regarding the ontologically indeterminate nature of homo
sapiens as cultural-historical primate.
Today
we--at least in the United States--are in the midst of an "event"
hitherto unthinkable: the decognification of major segments of the
American population: the dissolution of language
and
cognition; the undoing of modernity.
In this regard "Trump" is a symptom of this process
of decognification. While from the beginning of the Trumpean
ascendancy jounalists provided some
critical analyses of of Trump's use of language (The President Who Doesn't Read),
what is required is that we put the Cognitive-Discursive
Performativity of "Trump" (Phen. bundle) in the spotlight by deploying the
relevant theoretical frameworks for the analysis that this situation
requires.
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Reading and Modernity: 1750-1936
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Martyn Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing In the Western World (2010)
9. The Reading Fever, 1750-1830
("Everyone in Paris is reading . . . People read while riding in
carriages or taking walks . . . Women, children, journeymen
and apprentices read in shops. On Sundays people read while
seated at the front of their houses; lackeys read on their
back seats, coachmen up on their boxes, and soldiers keeping guard.")
10. The Age of the Mass Reading Public (“Between the 1830s and the
First World War . . . a mass reading public came into existence.”)
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11. New Readers and Reading Cultures ("The half century between the
1880s and the 1930s was the golden age of the book in the West.")
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the dissolution of language and cognition:
Trump's meeting in the Tank with the Joint Chiefs on July 20, 2017
Even
before the 2016 election evidence
abounded in the public arena of a widespread dissolution of language
and
cognition. Because the media performs this cognitive decline, the
decay
of the cognitive-discursive performativities of modernity is invisible
within the
cognitively decaying media sphere.
Trump's meeting with the Joint Chiefs in the Tank on July 20, 2017 provides us
with a spectacular example--a performative tour-de-force--of this
accelerating disintegration of discursive and cognitive
performativity. We have a detailed description of this meeting in
A Very Stable Genius, chapter 9, "Shocking the Conscience."(1) A close
reading of that chapter can be found here. The chapter in its entirety can be found here. The most striking aspects of the Tank meeting, as reported in A Very Stable Genius,
are the
primitive
cognitive-discursive performativity of the president, his brutish behavior
toward the Joint Chiefs, and the degree to which the Joint Chiefs were
flabergasted by this brutish stupidity. "He's a fucking moron,"
said Rex Tillerson.(2)
A comparison of Trump's and FDR's cognitive-discursive performativity can be found here: From FDR to Donald Trump: a cognitive-discursive assessment.
Figure 0 provides a framework for such a comparison. In addition,
one should really study the cognitive-discursive performances
constituting the Lincoln-Douglass Debates. We thus have at
our disposal the cognitive-discursive performances of three Presidents
from the three critical periods in American history: the Civil War, the
New Deal, and the Trumpean ascendancy. And we also have at our
disposal the theoretical resources that enable a rigorous analysis of
these performances (Language-Thinking-Education
).
At the right we have a graphical representation of the debate
rules. If you want to know how Trump handles the intellectual
demands of the presidency, you have your answer in Rucker and Leonnig's
description of the meeting in the tank.
1. Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing
of America (2020)
2. Slate, "Trump's Nuclear Meltdown" October 11, 2017)
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The Harris-Trump and Lincoln-Douglass debates Compared: Syntax and Attention-span
Harris-Trump (2024)
And that brings us
to the rules of tonight's debate: 90 minutes with two commercial
breaks. No topics or questions have been shared with the campaigns. The
candidates will have two minutes to answer questions. And this is the
clock. That's what they'll be seeing. Two minutes for rebuttals and one
minute for follow-ups, clarifications or responses
Lincoln-Douglass (1858)
The debates
consisted of a one hour opening speech, an hour and a half answer, and
a half hour rebuttal, with the two men alternating the privilege of
opening and closing. The contests drew immense crowds for the time, as
thousands gathered underneath the prairie sky to listen as two
political titans traded rhetorical thrusts and parries.
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ego-centrism (centration: child-care statement)
from "Woodward
book: Trump says he knew coronavirus was ‘deadly’ and worse
than the flu while intentionally misleading Americans, Washington Post 9-9-20
In a separate conversation recounted by Woodward, Mattis told Coats,
“The president has no moral compass,” to which the director of national
intelligence replied: “True. To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what
he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a
lie.”
from "Jim Mattis’s reading list offers a jarring contrast to Trump’s lack of intellectual curiosity," James Hohmann, Washington Post, 9- 4-19
"If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally
illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal
experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you,” Jim Mattis
writes in his new memoir, which came out yesterday. “Any commander who
claims he is ‘too busy to read’ is going to fill body bags with his
troops as he learns the hard way."
centration
Donald Trump Takes Shots At Nikki Haley For Civil War Remark
this stuff is covered by respectable media as a "debate" on the civil
war. The exchange between Niki Haley and Donald Trump was no
debate, but rather a symptom of a general cognitive degeneration in the
public space of the semiosphere.
word salad (1)
The civil war was so
fascinating, so horrible, so horrible, but so fascinating, it was, I
don't know, it was just different. I just find it, I'm so
attracted to seeing it, so many mistakes were made. see, there
was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with
you, I think could have been negotiated that, because I was reading
something and I said that this is something that could have been
negotiated, you know. there was just for all those people to die,
and they died viciously. That was a vicious vicious war.
Abraham Lincoln, of course, if he negotiated it, you probably wouldn't
even know who Abraham Lincoln was. He would have been president,
but he would have been president, and he would have been, he wouldn't
have been the Abraham Lincoln would have been different, but that would
have been okay. It was a hell of a time. And you think of
it today, I would have absolutely stopped Putin. He would have
never gone in. And he didn't, you know, for four years.
There was never even a thought of it going in. And that was the
apple of his eye.
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The article from
the Huffington Post and the two videos below should be interpreted in
cognitive as well as
emotional terms.
Keep
Your Goddamn Government Hands Off My Medicare! Huffington Post,
June 27, 2010
Anti-Obama
Billboard: President? or Jihad?
November
23, 2009 MSNBC The ED Show (Video and transcript)
SCHULTZ:
.
. . what does jihad mean to you, Mr. Wolf?
WOLF: I think to me it means it's an extreme element of a struggle to
overcome somebody. It can be interpreted probably some different ways.
but to me it's-it's
certainly not one of us. It's something other than
what an American is, that I've been taught.
SCHULTZ: Jihad is religious war, is it not? The definition is religious
war. You must have put that word up there for something. Do you think
Barack Obama wants a religious war?
WOLF: I think it's definitely anti-Christian. Yes, I do.
Ground
Zero Mosque Rallies Sept. 11 CNN (at 1 minute in)
---->
L.
We believe in the same document. You just said you
believe in the Constitution.
R. I do believe in the Constitution
L. But you just said you don't.
R.
People were jumping out of the buildings; people were
disintegrating, all over the city
L. By terrorists. you can't
blame Muslims for the
work of the terrorists.
R. I'm not blaming Muslims. But
if they had the
respect that they claim they have . . .
L. Why should they have to appologize for
the actions of
radicals?
R. I would rather see no church than a
mosque right where
people are going to to . . .
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"keep your goddamn government hands off my medicare"
lack of hierarchical classification: Piaget's class inclusion problem
The
cry during the
town hall riots of 'don't touch my Medicare' indicated that these
individuals did not grasp that Medicare
is a government program--they could not subsume the
particular--Medicare--under the general--government program.
The
exclusive focus on the particular, combined with the
inability to deal with concepts, suggests something akin to the
pre-operational stage of cognitive development (ages 2-6).
concept or epithet?
Wolf's
comments on the Ed Show regarding his billboard (President or jihad?)
likewise indicate a similar cognitive limitation. For him
jihad
was not a concept
but an epithet.
The use of words, such as
socialism, fascism, communism, and jihad that in modern language use
denote concepts are likewise used instead as epithets.
rage trumps reason
The
Left-Right 'debate' (Ground Zero Mosque Rallies) at a ground zero
anti-Islam demonstration could easily be seen as a mere
difference of opinion on where the mosque should be located, with one
view based on the constitution, the other based on not offending the
sensitivities of racist motherfuckers whipped into a state of
hysterical rage by Fox News.
Yet this is also an example that cries out for a cognitive as well as a
psychoanalytic investigation. The tepid rationality
of the one (L) was met with the emotional outburst of the other (R)
that took a
particular
form: given the ontological priority of rage over ideation, the leap of
illogic is understandable: a target must be found, the rage against it
justified. Redemptive violence (Paxton) is the order of
the
day. |
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The Sado-Sexual Eigenvector of GOP Performativity (the eternal return of the same)
1a. Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale, 2004):
The
hatred and terror that drove people to such violence were shaped by
social tensions and religious beliefs, but the passions themselves
derived from deeply rooted fantasies, extravagent in their evocation of
demonic lovers and Satanic revels. These fantasies shared, for
the most part, a standard structure and a similar set of primary
themes. p. 7 See also Bryant
1b. Donald Trump: "They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats."
1c. Donald Trump: "I hate Taylor Swift."
1d. A typical telephone threat: Lawmaker Debbie Dingell Shares Phone Threat Audio
“You
fucking old, senile bitch, you’re as old and ugly as Biden,” the caller
says. “You ought to get the fuck off the planet. You fucking foul
bitch. I hope your family dies in front of you. I pray to God, if
you’ve got any children, they die in your face.”
1e. ‘I’m a black NAZI!’: NC GOP nominee for governor made dozens of disturbing comments on porn forum |
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The Sado-Sexual Eigenvector of GOP Performativity: 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 [the new
Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn'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 byproduct
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."[8][9]
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Bildung and the Will to Power
Bildung: the Unity Caucus (bildungssproletarians and plebeian upstarts)
Bildung: References
from S.A. Smith, Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge Univesity Press, 2008)
We
have seen that for 'conscous' workers in Russia and, to a lesser
extent, in China, reading was an activity that was central to
self-fashioning, constitutive of what it meant to be a cultured and
autonomous individual. By contrast, the relation of the newly
literate and semi-literate readers of the lower urban classes to new
forms of commercially produced mass literature, produced with an eye to
entertainment rather than education, was far less earnest. . . . p. 100
Indeed, without denying the real potental for tension between
individual autonomy and class-based collectivism, we may conclude that
genuine forms of collectivism and cooperative action are possible only
where class solidarity is grounded in autonomous individuals capable of
demanding the recognition due to them as thinking, feeling
persons. Without that, new forms of group coercion based on weak
individuality are likely to be the result . . . 110
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Table 0. The Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein: Five Genetic Ontologies
(Five Principles of the Production of Practices)
Genetic Ontology
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Sources
(Full page here)
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Primate
Dominance and Deference
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SOOL, Mazur, deWaal, Wrangham . . .
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Paleolithic
Dynamic Egalitarianism
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SOOL, Whiten, Descola, Chase, Price . . .
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Ressentiment & the Mechanisms of Defense
Despotic regime; Racism;
Nationalism; Fascism
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Nietzsche, Freud, Deleuze & Guattari, Clarke, Paxton, Eley, Stone, Knox . . .
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Bildung & the Will to Power (Jouissance)
Progressive Narcisism; Individuation;
Progressivism, Socialism, Communism
the UAW and the Keynesian Elite
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Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov, Hegel, Nietzsche, Vygotsky, Piaget, Berman, Alcorn . . .
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Nihilism & the Last Man
Regressive Narcissism and the
Culture of Consumption; Repressive
Desublimation; Disindividuation;
Neoliberalism
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Nietzsche, Hall, Ehrenberg, Stiegler, Illouz, Marcuse . . .
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This site is a rhizome
This site is a rhizome. Its principle of production is
transcendental empiricism. It uses figurative elements,
including graphs, tables, charts, and maps, originally to advance
an analysis of the historical trajectory: the New Deal to Donald Trump,
but the events of the second decade of the 21st century, when viewed
through the lens provided by The Social Origins of Language, forced me
to see that there was a bigger picture.
The historicity
of language and cognition, their biocultural embeddedness, and their
contemporary disintegration, is one of the fundamental questions posed
by this site. Because the media performs this decline of cognitive-discursive
performativity,* the decay of reason is invisible within the cognitively
decaying public sphere. This
is the nihilism that Nietzsche anticipated. And this is the more
profound context in which to evaluate the cognitive-discursive
performativity of "Trump." Simultaneously, we must evaluate
the cognitive-discursive performativity of the "respectable" media in
its coverage of Trump. And, more generally, we must analyze the
cognitive-discursive performativity of the two-party system (see Semiotic Regimes: the Two-Party System).
Approaching
fascism immanently means assembling (in a process of continuous
augmentation) phenomenological bundles** relevant to the problematic of
"fascism."
* from F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (p. 51 Penguin):
To this extent media
discourse* is never to be taken literally: as such, it never contains
anything but nonsense. But as semiotics it remains of incaculable
value: it reveals, to the informed man, at least, the most precious
realities of cultures and inner worlds which did not know how to
"understand" themselves. Media discourse** is merely sign-language,
merely sympomology . . . * "moral judgement" in the original
** "morality" in the original
** from
from
Robert B.
Brandom, "The Centrality of Sellars's Two-Ply
Account of Observations to the Arguments of 'Empiricism and the
Philosophy of Mind', in Robert B. Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead:
Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality
(Harvard
University Press, 2002)
. . . according to Sellars's view, the difference between
theoretical
objects and observable objects is methodologcal rather than
ontological. That is, theoretical and observable objects are
not
different kinds of things. They differ only in how we come to
know about them."(362)
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Approaching
fascism immanently
Fascism: Raw Data Jan.6 Arrestees
1. Mob at Capitol.
this is a raw and incomplete PDF that was the basis for
discussions between PF and RB that led to a series of
reconceptualizations, methodological as well as substantive. The
failure of much of local journalism to provide basic facts re.
employment (occupation and industry) led me to cut short my efforts
to do all 212 individuals that I was working with. As it turned
out, this was sufficient material to think about, analyze, and draw
conclusions from.
2. Regional breakdowns.
This was the second step in arriving at the tables of arrestees from
selected states that became the basis for the comments on this page:
3. Analysis. As we reviewed states and other datasets, it became evident that the analysis out of the University of
Chicago (and mainstream media coverage in general) fails to comprehend the major features of the dataset: Some Arrestees from the January 6th Assault on the Capitol (merge with Fascism: Data).
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Fascism: a close look at
the January 6 arrestees
A close look at
the January 6 arrestees reveals that, contrary to the Chicago Study 1 and the New York Times, which claimed that "the
angry crowd at the Capitol . . . seemed to come
not from the fringes of American society but from white picket-fence
Main Street backgrounds,"2 what is found instead is a population in the process of
marginalization. The instability in their lives was manifested in
the difficulty of category formation. The standard occupational
and industry classifications 3 are inadequate, indeed
misleading. Gyms, bars, tatoo parlors, restaurants, salons, and
gun shops occur regularly in the entire dataset. To view the
individual owners of these establishments solely in terms of their role
as "shop owners" is misleading. What we are really dealing with
is social networks, not Cartesian selves. Very few if any of the
arrestees were connected to mainstream occupations and industries: none
in manufacturing, none in the building trades, none in the modern
corporate sector. They could be better characterized objectively as marginal, and subjectively as grifters.4 (See Some Arrestees from the January 6th Assault on the Capitol. Merge with Fascism: Data). This is the sociological mire out of which emerged the mob of Jan
6. A psychoanalytic discussion of the dialectic between Trump and
his supporters is provided by
Eli Zaretsky, "The Mass Psychology of Trumpism" (London Review of Books, 18 September 2018). (See also Wilbur Cash on the proto-dorian convention) "Globalization" provides the context;
The language of these arrestees can be seen here: Semiotic Regimes/telephone threats.
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January 6, 2021: Approaching
fascism immanently (Four Phenomenological Bundles)
1. the mob at the capitol
2. language (cognitive-discursive performativity)
3. the innermost soul of fascism: The Sado-Sexual
Eigenvector of GOP Performativity
4. state of the art scholarship
Excerpts from Eric D. Weitz, Weimar German: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, 2007/2018), chapter 9, "Revolution and Counterrevolution from the Right" (pp. 331-360).
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Fascism in Packard, circa 1942
Preferment
of Charges against Frank Buehrle by Kurt
Murdock,
President of PACKARD LOCAL U.A.W.-C.I.O. #190, held at the
local Headquarters at 6100 Mt. Elliott Avenue, in Detroit, Michigan.
April 3rd, 1942, at 7:30 P.M.
"Lynching" in Fisher Body press room, June 10, 1937, Pontiac
"Tar-dipping is Laid to Five" Detroit News 12-10-37
The Harry Elder Report, September 2, 1939 (Detroit Regional Office, NLRB, in Smith Committee Files, National Archives, Washington D.C.)
FDR vs. the Slave Power: MEMO July 10, 1935
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Fascism in Flint, 1937
Detroit News, May 2, 1937 click here for full text
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from Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism
(Alfred A. 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
From January 7, 1974 to August 21, 1975, Cliff Williams* and I had a
series discussions about the situation in the Auto plants in Pontiac
and Flint during the 1930s. Among other documents, he gave me the Detroit News clipping above. (For more see the The Cliff Williams page and Cliff Williams: NOTES)
Leftists of various stripes have viewed the Flint sitdown strike (Jan.
30, 1936-Feb. 11, 1937) as a dramatic victory for labor (see Occupy Detroit: A Look at 90 Years of Auto Strikes).
Yet immediately following the strike's settlement the fascist forces of
Homer Martin and Jay Lovestone** unseated the
elected leadership that had led the sitdown strike by administrative fiat.
As
can be seen in the excerpt at the right from the Charlie Yaeger
interview, at the time of the Cleveland convention in March of 1939 the
union in Buick included only 500 dues paying members out of a plant of
7,000. The situation was far worse in Fisher Body and
Chevrolet. And from the Art Case interview*** one gets a sense of
just how weak the union was in Fisher Body and Chevrolet during the
sitdown strike itself.
* Yellow Truck and Bus, Pontiac
** sent to Detroit by David
Dubinsky of the ILGWU in March of 1936 (book)
*** Art Case interview (Oral History: p. 6, Reuther Archives):
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Philosophy always arrives too late. . . . The Owl of Minerva takes flight only as
the dusk begins to fall: Rethinking "Modernity"
|
Figure
0 provides a context for thinking about the history of reading and
writing. The latter provides a context for rethinking the New
Deal. Figure 0 also provides a context for conceptualizing the Harris-Trump debate of September 10, 2024.
Keywords for Trump: eternal return; return of the repressed; patrimonialism (the sado-sexual eigenvector of GOP performativity). Grifter. Buffoon.
Figure 0 is the irreducible minimum if one is to understand the New
Deal, "Trump," and the historical path connecting them. This is because "Trump" forces us to face the question of our primate heritage (and its corrolary,
patrimonialism), on the one hand, and the fragility of civilization, on
the other. The catastrophe now unfolding is nothing less than the disintegration of the biocultural niche of modernity.3
the Yishuv is dying: it's about more than health care and parenting. It is about development.modernity; cognitive
NYT 9-16 and 9-19 A Huge Cause of Parental Stress (The Point: Conversations and insights about the moment.)
The Commonwealth Fund, Mirror, Mirror 2024: A Portrait of the Failing U.S. Health System
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from from Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: the Evolution of Human Consciousness (W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 301-2
.
. .
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.
262
Something about our mentality changed in the past few millenia,
something that made us able to construct such exotic things as
symphonies, philosophies, oil refineries, nuclear weapons, and
robots. Do such achievements have implications for theories
of
consciousness? Many would deny that they do. They
would
claim that the parameters of mind were surely fixed long ago, when we
emerged as a species, and that culture can add nothing to an equation
written deeply into the human genome.
But that common belief does not stand up to
scrutiny. The
human mind has been drastically changed by culture. In modern
culture, enculturation has become an even more formative influence on
mental development than it was in the past. This may be a
direct
reflection of brain plasticity, rather than genetic change, but that
does not in any way diminish the importance of the change from a purely
cognitive standpoint. The human mind is so plastic in the way
it
carries out its cognitive business, individually and in groups, that the
core configuration of skills that defines a mind actually varies
significantly as a function of different kinds of culture.
This
is especially true of the most conscious domains of mind, such as those
involved in formal thinking and representation.
Let me be very clear about what I mean here. I am not speaking of
trivial cultural changes, such as variations in custom or language
use. These are by far the most common and have no proven
cognitive impact. The most important of these is literacy.
Literacy skills change the functional organization of the brain and
deeply influence how individuals and communities of literate
individuals perform cognitive work. Mass literacy has triggered
two kinds of major cogitive reorganizations, one in individuals and the
other in groups.
To become fully literate, the individual must acquire a host of neural
demons that are completely absent from anyone who lacks literacy
training. This involves massive restructuring. There is no
equivalent in the preliterate mind to the circuits that hold the
complex neural components of a reading vocabulary or the elaborate
procedural habits of formal thinking. These are unnatural.
They have to be hammered in by decades of intensive schooling, which
changes the functional uses of certain brain circuits and rewire the
functional architecture of thought. This process can be very
extensive. Consider the impact of twenty or more years of schooling on
the brain of someone who has acquired full symbolic literacy in several
different
technical, mathematical, scientific, and musical fields. These
skills encumber neural resources on a vast scale and change how the
person's mind carries out its work.
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Reading and Modernity: 1750-1936
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Martyn Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing In the Western World (2010)
9. The Reading Fever, 1750-1830
("Everyone in Paris is reading . . . People read while riding in
carriages or taking walks . . . Women, children, journeymen
and apprentices read in shops. On Sundays people read while
seated at the front of their houses; lackeys read on their
back seats, coachmen up on their boxes, and soldiers keeping guard.")
10. The Age of the Mass Reading Public (“Between the 1830s and the
First World War . . . a mass reading public came into existence.”)
|
11. New Readers and Reading Cultures ("The half century between the
1880s and the 1930s was the golden age of the book in the West.")
|
Successive layers in the evolution of human cognition and culture
Table 7.1 from Merlin Donald, A mind so Rare (Norton, 2001), p. 260
Stage
|
Species/Period
|
Novel Forms
|
Manifest Change
|
Governance
|
EPISODIC
|
Primate
|
Episodic event perceptions
|
Self-awareness and event sensitivity
|
Episodic and reactive
|
MIMETIC
(first transition)
|
Early homids, peaking in
H. erectus 2M-0.4 Mya
|
Action
metaphor
|
Skill, gesture, mime, and imitation
|
Mimetic style and archetypes
|
MYTHIC
(second transition)
|
Sapient humans, peaking in H. sapiens sapiens 0.5-present
|
Language, symbolic representation
|
Oral traditions, mimetic ritual,narrative thought
|
Mythic framework of governance
|
THEORETIC
(third transition)
|
Modern culture
|
External symbolic universe
|
Formalisms, large-scale theoretic artifiacts, massive external storage
|
Institutionalized paradigmatic thought and invention
|
|
Action Networks (Networks of Power) Instead of "Class"
Elites: KE & New Deal (Maza*) "Third Force"
Fig. 1a, The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal state, is an organizational chart of the Roosevelt
administration circa 1936. This particular social formation
(TS+FF) emerged out of the Eastern Rate Case of 1910, played a critical
role in the industrial side of the conduct of the First World War (when
FDR, Frankfurter, and the Taylor society linked up), and became, as
Figure 1a indicates, the socio-cultural infrastructure of the New Deal
state.
Fast forward . . . The crisis of the 1930s--the Great
Depression--was the central question of that period, addressed head-on
by FDR and the New Dealers in the Democratic Party. The crisis of
the twenty-first century--only poorly captured by the term
globalization--is addressed not at all by today's Democratic
Party. Perhaps this is because the Democratic Party, by the
1990s, had become--with NAFTA--the party of globalization. The
result of this failure to address the central question of our
time--globalization--is what made Donald Trump possible. JAN 6
The Democratic Party has become the party of globalization. We have to change that.
|
*
Maza describes the biocultural niche of modernity as networks of
power-discourse
central to what has become known as the French
Revolution.
|
Figure 1a. Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind:
The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal state
Source: "Membership List, May 1927," in the Morris L. Cooke Papers, box 66, FDR Library,
and The United States Government Manual 1937. Also: the Papers of John M. Carmody
The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal State: Career Matrix
Ordway Tead, "An Interpretative Forecast of the NRA: Is the Trend Toward Fascist or
Socialized Self-Government?" Bulletin of the Taylor Society, August 1933
For context see Elites: Strategic and Otherwise
"Liberal Businessmen" Ezekiel
|
Elites: Capital
Elites
are in part defined by the input-ouput matrices (really existing
markets, praxiological flows) of the major sectors of the American
political economy (Fig. 1). Such matrices are shorthand ways of
referring to inputs of money, raw materials, intermediate goods, and
services; and outputs of raw materials, intermediate goods, finished
goods, and services.
Commodities in International Trade includes much of the transportation
and services infrastructure primarily dependent on such trade and thus
belongs to the imput-output matrix of the latter: shipping, railroad,
insurance, legal and other services. (W. Averill Harriman Wiki
article). Elliot A. Rosen, Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Brains
Trust: from Depression to New Deal (Columbia University Press, 1977),
although not conceptualizing it as such, gives a compelling description
of Commodities in International Trade in action around the candidacies
of Al Smith and Newton Baker. Also see Irving Katz, August
Belmont; a political biography (Columbia University Press, 1968).
The Securities bloc was the object of analysis by Louis D. Brandeis in
his book Other People's Money. Brandeis used the results of the
Pujo Committee's Investigation of Financial and Monetary Conditions in
the United States (see Pujo Committee Interlocking Directorates
1912). A defining moment in the conflict between the emerging
mass consumption sector and the Securities bloc was the Eastern Rate
Case of 1910, out of which emerged the Taylor Society. (see
unfinished tables HERE.)
|
|
U.S. Political Economy by Sector, 1910 to 1939
input-output matrices: capital formations and the two-party system
Elites: Strategic and Otherwise
KE2019
The New Deal and Capitalism (notes)
Elites in the Mobilization of Ressentiment
|
Capital: the Mass Distribution Sector
In
Fig. at right I look at the major sector in the Taylor Society. I
have proceeded immanently, taking the 1927 member list of the Taylor
Society and arranging the firms according to their place in the flow of
money and goods. These are actually quite large firms in relation
to their specific field of economic activity; they are technologically
progressive; and are intellectually among the vanguard of
capitalists. To refer to them as small and provincial is flatly
wrong. Even to refer to them as competitive, while not flat-out
wrong, is misleading. Steve Fraser's study of Sidney Hillman
describes the joint union-management efforts to stabilize the market by
taking labor out of competition.
provincial "small" business are the "base" of the GOP. Another "base" is the mob at the capitol.
|
|
Taylor
Society, 1927: Mass
Distribution, input-output flows
|
Elites: Political: UAW-Unity Caucus
What
made this whole site
possible is the literary and cognitive capabilities of the
bildungs-proletarians and plebeian upstarts whom I interviewed
Figure 1b, The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943: Intersubjectivity, Shared
Intentionality, and the Extended Mind (Bildungsproletarians and
Plebeian Upstarts), is a map of sources. While I interviewed
veterans of the organizational struggle from the Conner Avenue area on
the far east side of Detroit (Briggs, Budd Wheel, Hudson, and Chrysler), and workers from Fleetwood, Ternstedt,
and Ford on the west side of the city, the most intensive work was done
with veterans of the organizational struggle on the near east side:
Michigan Steel Tube, Chrysler Highland Park, Murray Body, Dodge Main,
Midland Steel, Detroit Steel Products, Packard, and Plymouth, and with
veterans of the organizational struggle in Flint (Fisher 1, Chevrolet, and Buick) and Pontiac (Pontiac Motors, Yellow Cab).
What
made this whole site
possible is the literary and cognitive capabilities of the
bildungs-proletarians and plebeian upstarts whom I interviewed. These
bildungs-proletarians inhabited the biocultural niche of modernity. In
this regard they had more in common with the New Deal vanguard of
Figure 1a than they had with the “masses” of their fellow workers in
the plants. For this reason it was
possible to co-construct a discursive web incorporating all the
interviews that, in another context, could be referred to as the
extended mind of the Unity caucus.
I had no idea at the time (the
mid-1970s) that these interviews would prove to be critical to a
reconceptualization of modernity as a mode of cognitive-discursive
performativity that includes the concepts of biocultural niche and bildung.
|
|
figure 1b.
A Geography of Dasein
The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943:
Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind
Bildungsproletarians and Plebeian Upstarts
 y
the UAW, 1933-1943: a working notebook
|
the dissolution of language and cognition
from Philip Roth unbound: interview transcript ( Daily Beast, October 30, 2009)
Tina
Brown: You said in an interview that you don’t think novels are going
to be read 25 years from now. Were you being provocative or do you
believe that to be true?
Philip
Roth: I was being optimistic about 25 years really. No, I think it’s
going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them, but
it’ll be a small group of people—maybe more people than now read Latin
poetry, but somewhere in that range. . . . To read a novel
requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the
reading. . . I think that that kind of concentration, and focus,
and attentiveness, is hard to come by. It’s hard to find huge numbers
of people, or large numbers of people or significant numbers of people
who have those qualities.
from Maryanne Wolf, Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (Harper Collins, 2018), p. 179
The seriousness of the current
reality means that at the present rate, the majority of eighth-grade
children could be classified as functionally illiterate in a few years' time.
|
|
|
the
most important work contained in these pages concerns the biocultural
niche of modernity, yet this is the most difficult problematic to
formulate--impossible, if one is imprisoned in the Cartesian-Marxist a
priori. The biocultural niche of modernity
What Happened to My Party?
Joel Kotkin
https://americanmind.org/salvo/what-happed-to-my-party
The Senator Warning Democrats of a Crisis Unfolding Beneath Their Noses
NYT
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/19/opinion/chris-murphy-democrats.html
Figure 0 is
also required if we are to understand the "Christian" values of American fascism today: cruelty, envy, rage, greed, and vengeance.(2)
1. from F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (p. 51 Penguin) [ * "moral judgement" in the original; ** "Morality" in the original]
To this extent media
discourse* is never to be taken literally: as such, it never contains
anything but nonsense. But as semiotics it remains of incaculable
value: it reveals, to the informed man, at least, the most precious
realities of cultures and inner worlds which did not know how to
"understand" themselves. Media discourse** is merely sign-language,
merely sympomology . . .
2. Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale, 2004):
The
hatred and terror that drove people to such violence were shaped by
social tensions and religious beliefs, but the passions themselves
derived from deeply rooted fantasies, extravagent in their evocation of
demonic lovers and Satanic revels. These fantasies shared, for
the most part, a standard structure and a similar set of primary
themes. p. 7
2. "It’s Just Too Much: A Florida Town Grapples With a Shutdown After a Hurricane," New York Times, 1-7-19.
I
voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” an employee of the
Federal prison in the Florida Panhandle said. “I thought he was going
to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting."
It was the pictures of Palestinians swimming and sunning at a Gaza
beach that rubbed Yehuda Shlezinger, an Israeli journalist, the wrong
way. Stylish in round red glasses and a faint scruff of beard, Mr.
Shlezinger unloaded his revulsion at the “disturbing” pictures while
appearing on Israel’s Channel 12.
“These people there deserve death, a hard death, an agonizing death,
and instead we see them enjoying on the beach and having fun,”
complained Mr. Shlezinger, the religious affairs correspondent for the
widely circulated right-wing Israel Hayom
newspaper. “We should have seen a lot more revenge there,” Mr.
Shlezinger unrepentantly added. “A lot more rivers of Gazans’ blood.”
|
|
The Enigma of Trump
from Steve Fraser, Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life (HarperCollins, 2006)
Why did people tolerate these displays of
"unmitigated selfishness" and raise monuments to those "peculiarly
American virtues" such as "audacity, push, unscrupulousness, and brazen
disregard of others' rights. . . . . That even during an era of legendary
rapaciousness Wall Street figures could elicit feelings of awe and
reverence, that they could become exemplars of national achievement and
prowess, is an enigma. (p. 72) see Zaretsky
A distinctive vocabulary inscribed these men in urban-industrial
legend. Contemporaries, even critical ones, always described them
as "bold," and "magnificent of view," full of "verve," capable of
absorbing a hard blow without flinching, as "audacious," "keen," and
possessed of that sangfroid that could stand up to the worst possible
news. Often treated as American primitives, observers marked and
often celebrated their lack of education and refinement; they were
profane and uncouth but endowed with native frankness, self-confidence,
and blunt force personality. The language of masculine virility
and plebeian brashness also signaled their inspiring escape from
unprepossessising origins. (p. 95)
|
|
|
Networks of Power (instead of class)
Figures 1a and 1b are based on work I did in the mid-1970s.
Fig. 1a, Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind:
The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal state, is an organizational chart of the Roosevelt
administration circa 1936. The particular social formation
(TS+FF) emerged out of the Eastern Rate Case of 1910, played a critical
role in the industrial side of the conduct of the First World War (when
FDR, Frankfurter, and the Taylor society linked up), and became, as
Figure 1a indicates, the socio-cultural infrastructure of the New Deal
state.
The link above should be understood as a phenomenological bundle.
Approaching the New Deal immanently means occupying the space of the
New Deal's cognitive-discursive performativity as
participant-observer. That is why the page Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind:
The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal state consists almost entirely of documents geneated within and addressed to others within
|
|
|
Action Networks (instead of class): 1/2
|
Figure 1b, The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943: Intersubjectivity, Shared
Intentionality, and the Extended Mind, is a map of sources. While I interviewed
veterans of the organizational struggle from the Conner Avenue area on
the far east side of Detroit (Briggs, Budd Wheel, Hudson, and Chrysler), and workers from Fleetwood, Ternstedt,
and Ford on the west side of the city, the most intensive work was done
with veterans of the organizational struggle on the near east side:
Michigan Steel Tube, Chrysler Highland Park, Murray Body, Dodge Main,
Midland Steel, Detroit Steel Products, Packard, and Plymouth, and with
veterans of the organizational struggle in Flint (Fisher 1, Chevrolet, and Buick) and Pontiac (Pontiac Motors, Yellow Cab).
This site began fifty years ago as a project which at the time I called
an exercise in phenomenological marxism, and resulted in the
publication of my book The Emergence of a UAW Local, 1936-1939: a Study in Class and Culture
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975). Edmund Kord, who was the
key organizer in this plant, was one of the bildungs-proletarians who
was part of the Reuther circle at Wayne State University in the
1930s. In the early 1970s we had many discussions and exchanged
many letters.
|
|
|
|
|
Action Networks (instead of class): 2/2
|
Then, In the mid-1970s I had further discussions with the
bildungsproletarians and plebeian upstarts who led the efforts to
unionize the auto industry in the 1930s. Figure 1b. The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943,
emerged out of these discussions with veterans of the formative years
of the UAW. This map was only constructed in the time of Trump,
although the interviews that produced it were conducted in the
mid-1970s. Thus, it is only recently that I realized that the Unity
caucus was a fusion of bildungs-proletarians and plebeian upstarts,
was the vanguard of modernity in the factories of southeastern
Michigan, and was organically related to the Keynesian elite in the New
Deal state.
The bildungs-proletarians component of that fusion was made up mostly
of communists and socialists. It was these bildungs-proletarians
around whom formed the action networks of plebeian upstarts who created
the modern UAW in the late 1930s.
What made this whole site possible is the literary and cognitive
capabilities of the bildungs-proletarians and plebeian upstarts whom I
interviewed. These bildungs-proletarians inhabited the biocultural
niche of modernity. In this regard they had more in common with the
New Deal vanguard of Figure 1a than they had with the “masses” of their
fellow workers in the plants. For this reason it was possible to
co-construct a discursive web incorporating all the interviews that, in
another context, could be referred to as the extended mind of the Unity
caucus.
All of us historians who interviewed these workers back in the nineteen
seventies and eighties were not only struck by their powers of mind,
but also by what can only be described as their strength of character.
They were the embodiment of civic republicanism.
I had no idea at the time (the mid-1970s) that these interviews would
prove to be critical to a reconceptualization of modernity as a mode of
linguistic and cognitive performativity that includes a concept of
biocultural niche and bildung.
|
|
3. Joe Bidinger, Pete Olshove, and Chester Podgorsky in
front of one of the large presses that produced
the siderails for the
frame. In this interview Joe Bidinger describes the step-by-step movement of metal
from raw input to finished output.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Cliff Williams Page
|
Fascism at the Rouge, circa 1941
from Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit:
Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (Basic Books, 1995), p. 82
|
Reading and Modernity: 1750-1936
|
Martyn Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing In the Western World (2010)
9. The Reading Fever, 1750-1830
("Everyone in Paris is reading . . . People read while riding in
carriages or taking walks . . . Women, children, journeymen
and apprentices read in shops. On Sundays people read while
seated at the front of their houses; lackeys read on their
back seats, coachmen up on their boxes, and soldiers keeping guard.")
10. The Age of the Mass Reading Public (“Between the 1830s and the
First World War . . . a mass reading public came into existence.”)
|
11. New Readers and Reading Cultures ("The half century between the
1880s and the 1930s was the golden age of the book in the West.")
|
To read
a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to
the reading.
I think that that kind of concentration, and focus,
and attentiveness, is hard to come by.
from Maryanne Wolf, Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (Harper Collins, 2018), p. 179
The seriousness of the current
reality means that at the present rate, the majority of eighth-grade
children could be classified as functionally illiterate in a few years' time.
from Philip Roth unbound: interview transcript (Daily Beast, October 30, 2009)
Tina
Brown: You said in an interview that you don’t think novels are going
to be read 25 years from now. Were you being provocative or do you
believe that to be true?
Philip
Roth: I was being optimistic about 25 years really. No, I think it’s
going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them, but
it’ll be a small group of people—maybe more people than now read Latin
poetry, but somewhere in that range. . . . To read a novel
requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the
reading. . . I think that that kind of concentration, and focus,
and attentiveness, is hard to come by. It’s hard to find huge numbers
of people, or large numbers of people or significant numbers of people
who have those qualities.
|
|
Critical Theory?
History without philosophy is only a screen on which to project the shibboleths of our time.
Thinking must first emancipate itself from the Cartesian myth--the
ontological presupposition of
the Cartesian self and its associated
rhetorical elements of consciousness, belief, motive, ideology
and
interest. Failure to do so has the effect, a priori, of blocking
conceptualization of questions of
ontology, agency, intentionality,
habitus, networks and contexts.
|
from Imanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (A 51/B 75) p. 107 (Hackett Publishing Co., 1996):
Thoughts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.
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).
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.
from Levi R. Bryant, Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence (Northwestern University Press, 2008)
. . . . so long as philosophy assumes that thought has a natural
affinity with the true . . . a specific form of objectivity (natural
common sense), and bases itself on the model of recognition, thought
cannot help but become unconsciously trapped in its own implicit
presuppositions which are culturally, historically, and socially
contingent. . . . Deleuze thus begins with a critique of the
transcendental subject as a structure consisting of invariant
categories. (17)
from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (462)
In place of "sociology," a theory of the forms of domination.1
In place of "society," the culture complex . . . 2
t
from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (Preface)
What
I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come
differerently: the advent of nihilism.3
1. networks of power; elites: strategic and otherwise
2. biocultural niche, cognitive-discursive performativities
3. see Nihilism
|
|
the dissolution of language and cognition
(Trump's meeting with the Joint Chiefs in the Tank on July 20, 2017)
|
Table 0.1. The Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein: Five Genetic Ontologies
(Five Principles of the Production of Practices)
Genetic Ontology
|
Sources
(Full page here)
|
Primate
Dominance and Deference
|
SOOL, Mazur, deWaal, Wrangham . . .
|
Paleolithic
Dynamic Egalitarianism
|
SOOL, Whiten, Descola, Chase, Price . . .
|
Ressentiment & the Mechanisms of Defense
Despotic regime; Racism;
Nationalism; Fascism
|
Nietzsche, Deleuze & Guattari, Clarke, Paxton, Knox . . .
|
Bildung & the Will to Power (Jouissance)
Progressive Narcisism; Individuation;
Progressivism, Socialism, Communism
the UAW and the Keynesian Elite
|
Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov, Hegel, Nietzsche, Vygotsky, Piaget, Berman, Alcorn . . .
|
Nihilism & the Last Man
Regressive Narcissism and the
Culture of Consumption; Repressive
Desublimation; Disindividuation;
Neoliberalism
|
Nietzsche, Hall, Ehrenberg, Stiegler, Illouz, Marcuse . . .
|
|
|
|
Here is a way to approach the problematic of fascism:
|
|
the dissolution of language and cognition (2/4)
At issue: the cognitive
developmental modalities that span the entire history of the tribe
hominini, which contains the genus homo (the only extant variety of
which is homo sapiens) and the genus pan (this latter contains
chimpanzees and bonobos). Consider the excerpts from the work of
Donald, Wrangham and Wilson, Price and Feinman, Gomez, Tomasello,
Chase, Renfrew, Malafouris, Dunbar, Dupré and others in The Sapient
Paradox, regarding the ontologically indeterminate nature of homo
sapiens as cultural-historical primate.
Donald observes that contemporary homo sapiens' semiotic behavior
"contains within it a trace of each of our previous stages of cognitive
evolution." Wrangham and Wilson state that "patterns of collective
violence found among humans include similarities to those seen among
chimpanzees." Gomez writes of "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 socially 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."
Malafouris and Renfrew, in How Things Shape the Mind, write that "the
human mind exists as a historically situated actuality—that is, an
emergent product of complex ecological relationships and flexible
incorporative forms of material engagement." And Dupre: "It is . . .
clear that recognition of the variety of factors involved in
development makes possible a diversity of individual outcomes within
even quite narrowly defined populations."
|
|
Successive layers in the evolution of human cognition and culture
Table 7.1 from Merlin Donald, A mind so Rare (Norton, 2001), p. 260
Stage
|
Species/Period
|
Novel Forms
|
Manifest Change
|
Governance
|
EPISODIC
|
Primate
|
Episodic event perceptions
|
Self-awareness and event sensitivity
|
Episodic and reactive
|
MIMETIC
(first transition)
|
Early homids, peaking in
H. erectus 2M-0.4 Mya
|
Action
metaphor
|
Skill, gesture, mime, and imitation
|
Mimetic style and archetypes
|
MYTHIC
(second transition)
|
Sapient humans, peaking in H. sapiens sapiens 0.5-present
|
Language, symbolic representation
|
Oral traditions, mimetic ritual,narrative thought
|
Mythic framework of governance
|
THEORETIC
(third transition)
|
Modern culture
|
External symbolic universe
|
Formalisms, large-scale theoretic artifiacts, massive external storage
|
Institutionalized paradigmatic thought and invention
|
|
the dissolution of language and cognition (3/4)
|
Of special significance are the comments of Gomez and Dupre:
Gomez:
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 socially 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.
Dupre:
It
is . . . clear that recognition of the variety of factors involved in
development makes possible a diversity of individual outcomes within
even quite narrowly defined populations. (285) . . . the human mind . .
. involves a new level of capacity to transform the world beyond the
organism. (291)
I
wish to emphasize particularly the ability of cultural evolution to
transform the developmental niche. And here, at least in [some] contemporary
developed countries, it seems clear that humans have learned in quite
recent times to construct a remarkably novel environment for the
development of their young. . . . [T]hese prodigious changes to the
human environment, concretizations of our rapidly evolving culture,
profoundly affect the developmental resources available to growing
humans. For that reason their introduction should be seen as
representing major evolutionary change. (284)
Today
we--at least in the United States--are in the midst of an "event"
hitherto unthinkable: the decognification of major segments of the
American population: the dissolution of language
and
cognition: the undoing of modernity.
In this regard "Trump" is a symptom of this process
of decognification. While from the beginning of the Trumpean
ascendancy jounalists provided some astute
critical analyses of of Trump's use of language ( The President Who Doesn't Read),
no one has yet, to my knowledge, put the Cognitive-Discursive
Performativity of "Trump" (Phen. bundle) in the spotlight by deploying the
relevant theoretical frameworks for the analysis that this situation
requires. The graphic materials at the right are taken from my assemblage of texts Language-Thinking-Education
(Biocultural niche). When Coates says, in response to Mattis,
that "To him [Trump], a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He
doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie” he is
describing someone who remains stuck in the preoperational
developmental stage, ages two to six.
Trump has an extremey short attention span, and, as noted by Mattis, "If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally
illiterate, and you will be incompetent."
➘
|
|
Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development
from The Development of Children by Cynthia Lightfoot, Michael Cole, and Sheila R. Cole (Sixth Edition, 2009)
Age
| Stage
|
Description
|
Birth to 2
|
Sensorimotor
|
Infants' achievements consist largely of coordinating their sensory perceptions and simple motor behaviors.
As they move through the six substages of this period, infants come to
recognize the existence of a world outside themselves and begin to
interact with it in deliberate ways.
|
2 to 6
|
Preoperational2
|
Young children can represent reality to themselves through the use of symbols,
including mental images, words, and gestures. Still,
children often fail to distinguish their point of view from that of
others, become easily captured by surface appearances, and are often
confused about causal relations.
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6 to 12
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Concrete operational3
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As
they enter middle childhood, children become capable of mental
operations, internalized actions that fit into a logical system.
Operational thinking allows children to mentally combine, separate,
order and transform objects and actions. Such operations are
considered concrete because they are carried out in the presence of the
objects and events being thought about.
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12 to 19
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Formal operational4
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In adolescence,
the developing person acquires the ability to think systematically
about all logical relationswithin a problem. Adolescents display
keen interest in abstract ideas and in the process of thinking
itself.
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Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development: notes
1. from The Development of Children by Cynthia Lightfoot, Michael Cole, and Sheila R. Cole (Sixth Edition, 2009)
2. from "Woodward
book: Trump says he knew coronavirus was ‘deadly’ and worse
than the flu while intentionally misleading Americans, Washington Post 9-9-20
In a separate conversation recounted by Woodward, Mattis told Coats,
“The president has no moral compass,” to which the director of national
intelligence replied: “True. To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what
he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a
lie.”
3 and 4.
Kraus (on planning and organization vs. spontaneity); and Murray
Body spring division minutes (concrete operational vs. formal operational
thinking); Paul Silver on cognitive gap between unskilled and semi-skilled
4. from "Jim Mattis’s reading list offers a jarring contrast to Trump’s lack of intellectual curiosity," James Hohmann, Washington Post, 9- 4-19
“If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally
illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal
experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you,” Jim Mattis
writes in his new memoir, which came out yesterday. “Any commander who
claims he is ‘too busy to read’ is going to fill body bags with his
troops as he learns the hard way.”
Joe Dunford, chmn J chfs, covers up the facts (july 20, 2017), schmoozes Andrea Mitchell -- re. Warren Commission Report
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Fascism: "He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting."
Robert C. Gordon, “Race,” in R. J. B. Bosworth, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Fascism
(Oxford, 2009), p. 315
In this longue durée
perspective, the problems of moving from the specifics of race within
single fascist regimes to a ‘fascist common denominator’ may fade in
comparison with the possibility that racism lies at the core of the
modern nation and modernity itself.
Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale, 2004):
The
hatred and terror that drove people to such violence were shaped by
social tensions and religious beliefs, but the passions themselves
derived from deeply rooted fantasies, extravagent in their evocation of
demonic lovers and Satanic revels. These fantasies shared, for
the most part, a standard structure and a similar set of primary
themes. p. 7
"It’s Just Too Much: A Florida Town Grapples With a Shutdown After a Hurricane," New York Times, 1-7-19.
I
voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” an employee of the
Federal prison in the Florida Panhandle said. “I thought he was going
to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting."
It was the pictures of Palestinians swimming and sunning at a Gaza
beach that rubbed Yehuda Shlezinger, an Israeli journalist, the wrong
way. Stylish in round red glasses and a faint scruff of beard, Mr.
Shlezinger unloaded his revulsion at the “disturbing” pictures while
appearing on Israel’s Channel 12.
“These people there deserve death, a hard death, an agonizing death,
and instead we see them enjoying on the beach and having fun,”
complained Mr. Shlezinger, the religious affairs correspondent for the
widely circulated right-wing Israel Hayom
newspaper. “We should have seen a lot more revenge there,” Mr.
Shlezinger unrepentantly added. “A lot more rivers of Gazans’ blood.”
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Modernity as a Mode of Cognitive-Discursive Performativity (4)
This article (click here for full text) provided by Cliff Williams (Pontiac, GM
Truck and Bus, UAW local 159) is
an eye-opener. It pulls the rug out from under the Enlightenment
phantasies that saw in the Flint sit-down strike the fulfillment of the
social democratic hopes of yesteryear. I will deal with this
throughout this site. (see fascism in GM, Ford, and Packard) That I can deal with it at all is due to
the fact that my interviewees (who were mostly bildungs-proletarians)
were embedded in the biocultural niche of modernity. These
bildungs-proletararians were intensely rather that merely
literate. They were quintessentially modern.
What made this whole site possible was the literary and cognitive capabilities of the bildungs-proletarian whom I interviewed.
In addition, some of these interviews forced me to
include the more nebulous concept of jouissance, which I now (March 2024) see as the psychological side of bildung. (See especially Alcorn in the page Bildung: References.) When discussing such concepts of experience as bildung and jouissance--that is, when discussing sensibilities--see John L. Brooke's "There is a North": fugitive slaves, political crisis, and cultural transformation in the coming of the Civil War (U. of Mass. 2019).
It was these bildungs-proletarians around whom formed the action
networks of plebeian upstarts (the Unity Caucus) who created the modern
UAW in the 1930s. From the standpoint of praxis both
the Unity Caucus and the Keynesian elite should be conceived of as
vanguard formations within the biocultural field of Progressivism. Hence the juxtaposition of Figures 1 and 2.
What made this whole site possible is the literary and cognitive capabilities of the bildungsproletarian whom I interviewed.
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Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture by Krimsky, Sloan and Hammonds (Columbia, 2011). See review by Rob DeSalle in The Quarterly Review of Biology,
Vol. 87, No. 2 (June 2012), p. 160. Also: Traces of History:
Elementary Structures of Race, by Patrick Wolfe (Verso, 2016 )
Michael E. Staub, The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and
Intelligence between Brown and The Bell Curve (The University of North
Carolina Press, 2018)
Ken Richardson, Genes, Brains, and Human Potential: The Science and Ideology of Intelligence (Columbia, 2017)
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