Figure Zero

Figure 0. From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States

Fascism Today:
1. The Dissolution of Language and Cognition
Fascism readings

Early Human Migration (from World History Encyclopedia)

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)

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.

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.

Geoff Eley, in Nazism as Fascism,³ argues that the concept of "ideology" should be broadened (pp. 60-61; 83; and 207-8):

. . . not as the old style expository history of ideas, but as a careful and grounded analysis of of all the forms of Nazi praxis. (p. 83);

reinstate the importance of Nazi ideology, not just as the critical dissection of fascist ideas in the programmatic and philosophical senses, as interpretive readings of key texts, or as the analysis of the fascist outlook, but by studying the nature of the fascist appeal. . . . Rather, it formed a matrix of common dispositions, what Mussolin called a "common denominator," a set of "master tropes" ordered around violence, war, nation, the sacred, and the abject. (pp. 207-208)

This is consistent with the concept of cognitive-discursive performativity that is used in this site.

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)
3. Geoff Eley, Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology and the Ground of Consent
in Geremany, 1930-1945 (Routledge, 2013)

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 . . .

cognitive-discursive performativity/biocultural niche

Figure 0. From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States, places American fascism in its biocultual and evolutionary context. Figure 0 developed as a result of my encounter with The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014). This work is of singular importance, so much so that I have assembled three sets of excerpts: a compressed summary; brief excerpts; and extended excerpts (These three sets of excerpts make up the first part of Biocultural Niche: Language, Thinking, Education). Its key concept--biocultural niche--is fundamental to this site.

The historicity of language and cognition, their biocultural embeddedness, and their contemporary disintegration, is one of the fundamental questions posed by this site. This is the nihilism that Nietzsche anticipated.

The Social Origins of Language helps to situate this existential catastrophe of which "The Great Leader" is an index. The concept of biocultural niche enables us to see this catastrophe. It is the intention of this site to incorporate discussions of “intelligence”¹ within the broader framework of SOOL. Here intelligence means cognitive-discursive performativity (Ceci, On Intelligence, Harvard, 1996).

1. 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)

Here is a way to approach the problematic of fascism:
A close look at the January 6 arrestees

A close look at the January 6 arrestees reveals that, contrary to the Chicago Study¹ 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 classifications² 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 as grifters. (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). This brief essay ought to be read immediately. (See also Wilbur Cash on the proto-dorian convention)

The language of these arrestees can be seen here: Semiotic Regimes/telephone threats.

Here is a way to approach the problematic of fascism: Lang-Think-Ed (theoretical materials) combined with some arrestees and telephone threats (empirical materials)--that is, the simultaneous immersion in the empirical materials and the theoretical materials. Thus, one ought not attempt to "read" this site, but to use it in the spirit of transcendental empiricism. The reader ought not to proceed any further without studying these people sand their use of languagee

1. The University of Chicago, Division of the Social Sciences, the Chicago Project on Security and Threats: The Face of American Insurrection: Right-Wing Organizations Evolving into a Violent Mass Movement (Update of 2=5=21).
2. "From Navy Seal to Part of the Angry Crowd Outside the Capitol" (the New York Times, January 26, 2021)
3. North American Industry Classification System (U.S. Census Bureau)
Standard Occupational Classification System (Bureau of Labor Statistics

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:

New England
Southeast (north)
Southest (south)
Mideast
Great Lakes
Plains
Southwest
Rocky Mountain
Far West

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 Arrests from the January 6th Assault on Congress.

The idée fixe of this site is immersion in what is called "data". That which is called "data" is to be treated as a living thing, to be cultivated and developed continuously, and thereby constitute an action zone of transcendental empiricism. Such is Some Arrestees from the January 6th Assault on the Capitol, and Semiotic Regimes/telephone threats.

minutes of Murray Body
Packard Report
Speakers at Chrysler meeting

From FDR to Donald Trump: a cognitive-discursive assessment

Meeting in the Tank

UAW & Modernity: KE/New Deal (extended mind).

"Data" and "concepts" are two sides of the same coin.* KE in ND State; UAW

The big questions that this site addresses involve

1) The historicity of language and cognition, their biocultural embeddedness, and their contemporary disintegration, is one of the fundamental questions posed by this site. This is the nihilism that Nietzsche anticipated.

2) "Fascism" in the context of Figure 0: primate style dominance . . .

3. the concept of "class" is relegated to the dustbin of history, while a concept of agency leads naturally to a close scrutiny of elite formation and activity: networks of power.

*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)

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.
6 to 12	Concrete operational³	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.
12 to 19	Formal operational⁴	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.

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

Commentary on above + Figure 0 (1/2)

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.This is one dimension of our experience of the implosion of neo-liberal "society." The term "society" is bracketed because, in the conventional use of the term, an ontological stability is implied, whereas in reality this society is in the process of blowing its brains out, and that along four axes of ontological catastrophe.

•First, the disintegration of the cognitive performativities of modernity itself: the "human" side of "capital." (decognification, disindividuation; Trump's rhetorical performances seen from the standpoint of literacy and cognition as contingent not normative). This is a catastrophe of the first order.

•Second, the explosion of fascist performativities within the orbit of the GOP (Robert O. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism: "The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism."). (See Some Arrestees from the January 6th Assault on the Capitol.)

Commentary on above + Figure 0 (2/2)

•Third, the patrimonial assault on rational-bureaucratic institutions, an assault on the very idea of science-based professionalism and public service. Why does Trump get along so well with the alpha males of other patrimonial regimes, especially Putin? Not simply because he is one of them. The inner logic of such regimes--especially in the case of Trump--is the objective necessity to destroy the entire culture of science-based administration in agency after agency as an existential imperative. This is the significance of the shibboleth: "the deep state".

primate heritage and patrimonialism

•Fourth, the triumph of nihilism (or as it is known today, neoliberal subjectivity). This nihilism is manifest in the culture of the Democratic Party's appeal, which defines "self" not as citizen but as consumer and victim; and in the dissolution of language and cognition. The New Deal's civic republicanism is dead.

Nihilism's most pithy expression is the obsession with "identity." (Ehrenreich, Hall)

This triumph of nihilism takes shape as the socio-cultural engineering project of global corporate networks of unimaginable reach and power, generating an entropic process of disindividuation.(Hall) Mass consumption as a mode of absorption and transformation of the organism. The fiction of freedom, the subversion of individuation (bildung), the inner logic of addiction, the commodification of distress, the infantilization of public discourse (Two-Party System and its media) . . . in short, the dissipation of the species homo sapiens into a proliferation of effects.

DSM-5: Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) as the operating manual of the post-human ontology (and the drug industry and all that it entangles). Homo sapiens is now becoming a collection of hapless blobs of protoplasm gulping down vast quantities of salt, fat, and sugar; of psychoactive drugs both legal and otherwise; of ego-boosting and self-forming fashion statements; of life experiences (Viking River Cruises), all the while wallowing in media-provided concoctions of all kinds, from Downton Abbey and Housewives of Beverly Hills to the Jerry Springer Show and Duck Dynasty. This ever-expanding free-wheeling exercise of corporate power in the creation of the subjectivities of disindividuation (Alcorn) becomes an "issue" unlike any other that homo sapiens has ever faced before. This infinite differentiability of this uniquely bio-cultural historical species is what gives capitalism its "vitality." It is what Marxists, with their obsession with the crisis of capitalism and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, characteristically fail to grasp.

On the emotional side, the brutishness in language and behavior that are the chief characteristics of Trump's mass-oriented performances must be understood as manifestations of something of great ontological significance. The sado-sexual eigenvector of “Trump” performativities goes back to the Know-Nothing roots of the GOP (Gniepp) late 19th century anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic political rhetoric, the lynching for rape discourse, the southern strategy, and the infamous Willie Horton episode in George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign (Lacan-Atwater signifying chain). Trump's performance coming down the stairs ("They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.") and the plaint of one of his supporters ("He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting") should be placed in this broader context.

It is already clear that in the U.S. large numbers of unchurched as well as fundamentalist whites and blacks (and many working class Catholics) have been disgorged from the project of modernity, and now constitute, by twenty-first century standards, a barely literate mass, concentrated in central cities, inner suburbs, small towns, and rural areas, and removed in toto from the possibilities of cognitive development implied by the term "education." Their disgorgement from the project of modernity is evident in Some Arrestees from the January 6th Assault on the Capitol.

Fascism

Thermidor: May 1937

kkk

Detroit News, May 2, 1937 click here for full text

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

the KKK 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

the dissolution of language and cognition (4/4)

Racism: Don't Throw Out the Baby with the Bathwater

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.

from Hunt Hawkins, “Heart of Darkness and Racism,” in Heart of Darkness: Authoritative Texts, Paul B. Armstrong, ed. (Norton Critical Editions) pp. 373-4

Darwin himself concluded, in The Descent of Man: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world”. Alfred Russel Wallace ended his 1864 article by saying “the higher—the more intellectual and moral—must displace the lower and more degraded races”. Eduard von Hartmann in his 1869 Philosophy of the Unconscious, a book Conrad read, wrote that it wasn’t humane to prolong "the death struggles of savages who are on the verge of extinction. . . . The true philanthropist, if he has comprehended the natural law of anthropological evolution, cannot avoid desiring an acceleration of the last convulsion, and labor for that end.” And in 1894 in Social Evolution Benjamin Kidd observed, “The Anglo-Saxon has exterminated the less developed peoples with which he has come in competition.”

English visitors to Conrad in Kent recollected him as “not of our race”, “like a Polish Jew”, “the conventional stage Hebrew”, “simian”, “oriental mannerisms”, “very Oriental indeed”, “spectacularly a foreigner”, an Oriental face”, “semi-Mongolian”, and “like a monkey”.

Resources for thinking about the cognitive-discursive performativity of political actors can be found in the following links:

Ike Farewell . . .

what I am trying to get at here is unthinkable within existing cognitive-discursive fields of performativity. What is required is idicated by the graphic materials at the right.

What is also required is to take seriously the problematic of racism as distinct from its ideology of race. As appears in the excerpt below, at its high tide in late 19th century England posed its problematic explictly nd without embarassment: cognition and character, when taken seriously,

relevant theoretical frameworks

Fascism

group bound by affective ties (ethnie)

group created out of the workings of power in a global age of capital

thus, "africans," whose affective group was [tribal, village or other similar]
become "black

no motivated but process of becoming

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)

Brain articles
Bull. TS on Fascism

from Hunt Hawkins, “Heart of Darkness and Racism” in Heart of Darkness: Authoritative Texts--Backgrounds, and Contexts--Criticism, Paul B. Armstrong, ed. (Norton Critical Editions) pp. 373-4

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."

"The View Within Israel Turns Bleak" Megan K. Stack, NYT May 16, 2024

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.”

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.

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)

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

figure 1b. A Geography of Dasein
The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943:
Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind
Bildungsproletarians and Plebeian Upstarts

the UAW, 1933-1943: a working notebook

Fascism Today: A close look at the January 6 arrestees

cruelty/brain

AE3.2

the fascist problematic as phenomenological bundle (including scholarly texts, some arrestees, telephone threats, tweets)

Roper as model of getting beneath the mere surface of racism
conrad & franzen (the corrections)
role of elites in shaping, mobilizing, manipulating (Nat Turner)

phenomenological bundles of "fascism"

Robert O. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism

Geoff Eley, Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany 1930-1945 (Routledge, 2013)

Weitz

Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (Knopf, 2004)
Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, 2007)
R.G. Bosworth,ed., The Oxford Handbook of Fascism (Oxford, 2009)
Geoff Eley, Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology and the Ground of Consent
in Geremany, 1930-1945 (Routledge, 2013)
Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (Verso, 2016)
Dan Stone, Goodbye to All That: the Story of Europe Since 1945 (Oxford, 2014)
Stone, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (2023)

The Deep History of Fascism

the question of fascism

It is in the dual context of Fig 0 and Some Arrestees and Semiotic Regimes that the question of fascism should be rethought, while keeping in mind and frequently consulting (Paxton; Geoff Eley, Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930-1945 (Routledge, 2013); David King, The Trial of Adolf Hitler: The Beer Hall Putsch and the Rise of Nazi Germany (Norton, 2017) turns out to be an uncanny description of Trump's people. Lehr, White Hot Hate: A True Story of Domestic Terrorism in America's Heartland (

My approach is to begin in the middle of of the "data", while keeping in mind . . .
Eley's concluding statement: ]

By the 1990s, little remained of either the practices or the principles, let alone the material structures and institutional relations previously organizing the political common sense. The Social contract associated with the New Deal and the Great Society was gone. . . . This new dialectic of international conflict and societal crisis may well enable a politics that resembles fascism to coalesce.(pp. 215-216)

Violence and the Fuhrer principle; a boadened concept of ideology in which it is not ideas and the reaction to them of cartesian selves

2. Fascism is, fundamentally, about our primate heritage and patrimonialism. Both the violence and the Fuhrer principle are the first order "principles" of fascism. The particular historical forms this takes depend upon circumstances. Thus, racism’s evolve, and vary in intensity and scope, as do expressions of violence. Lynchings, pogroms, holocausts and tweets are therefore second-order phenomena. Even the impact of globalization on the populations concentrated in the central cities, inner suburbs, small towns, and the rural heartland in the United States, which is critical to understanding the success of the Great Leader, is a second-order phenomenon (Fascism/racism may be two concepts crying out for aufheben. (Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race))
MARX: 18th Brumaire, Seigel, Jones

Fasism as we have come to know it occurs within the institutional-cultural environment of modernity: urbanization, industrialization, nationalism, mass literacy, global markets. It is about violence in its primrdial form, as well as violence as derivative: ressentiment and the mechanisms of defense. and it is about "ideology", a concept whose scope has been broadened to include a wide range of cognitive discursive performativities.

I have assembled excerpts from key texts dealing with fascism. The question of our primate heritage (and its corollary, patrimonialism) is brought in under the sign of Aufhebung4, both preserving and expanding upon the concept of fascism found in the current literature.

the phenomenological bundle "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. (See excerpts from Dor et. al. and de Waal at the lower right.)

1. To bring us up to date: Sinha, C. (2021). Artefacts, symbols, and the socio-cultural dynamics of niche construction, in The Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution (Oxford, 2021)
Shilton, D; Bre ski, M; Dor, D; Jablonka, E (February 14, 2020). "Human Social Evolution: Self-Domestication or Self-Control?". Frontiers in Psychology. 11: 134.
Human Lifeworlds: The Cognitive Semiotics of Cultural Evolution (2016)

"In this longue durée perspective . . . "

Robert C. Gordon, “Race,” in R. J. B. Bosworth, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Fascism
(Oxford, 2009), p. 315

Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale, 2004):

from "It’s Just Too Much: A Florida Town Grapples With a Shutdown After a Hurricane," New York Times, 1-7-19.

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.

Philip Roth

cognitive-discursive performativities: theoretical contexts

The footnotes to Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development should be read in conjunction with the account give of the meeting in the tank (“Shocking the Conscience"). The generative matrix of Trumptalk is preoperational (note 1). The Mattis quote (notes 2 and 3) needs unpacking. Mattis’ comment on reading implies books relevant to the tasks of elite policy-making (e.g., these excerpts from works on Putin). These books require a reader possessed of formal operational competence. (Boris Johnson (exponential growth); Auto bailout supply chain, general systems theory)

I refer the reader to Orton and Genovese regarding the continuing viability of Piaget's description of cognitive-discursive performativities at different level of development (see Jeremy Bruner on Piaget and Vygotsky). Following Ceci, I emphasize a pragmatic-hermeneutical account of actual cognitive-discursive behavior over the positivist notion of general inteligence, or “g.” I also, with Ceci, I emphasize the context dependency of cognitive-discursive performativities.

The question of cognitive-discursive performativities arose out of my investigations into the organization of Autoworkers in southeastern Michigan some fifty years ago.

Successive layers in the evolution of human cognition and culture,

Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development, and

Bronfenbrenner's Bioecological Model¹

are taken from my assemblage of sources in the page titled Language-Thinking-Education (Biocultural niche).

Familiarity with these materials is essential. The page From FDR to Donald Trump: a cognitive-discursive assessment, should be read in the context provided by Language-Thinking-Education.

1. Tong P, An IS. Review of studies applying Bronfenbrenner's bioecological theory in international and intercultural education research. Front Psychol. 2024 Jan 8;14:1233925. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1233925. PMID: 38259539; PMCID: PMC10801006.
Bronfenbrenner U, Ceci SJ. Nature-nurture reconceptualized in developmental perspective: a bioecological model. Psychol Rev. 1994 Oct;101(4):568-86. doi: 10.1037/0033-295x.101.4.568. PMID: 7984707.
Educational Policy and Country Outcomes in International Cognitive Competence Studies Author(s): Heiner Rindermann and Stephen J. Ceci. Source: Perspectives on Psychological Science , November 2009, Vol. 4, No. 6 (November 2009), pp. 551-577s

This site is a rhizome

Its principle of production is transcendental empiricism

Biocultural Niche

some arrestees/telephone threats/Eddington case/the sado-sexual eigenvector of GOP cognitive-discursive performativity/Trumptalk/minutes of murray body spring committee meeting/minutes of special Chrysler meeting(1939)/FDR speeches/1850s racism (Lincoln book, ch. 10)/UAW interviews as database/KE in ND state/.
jjjb

Bildung (Schiller vs. Engels)

March 19, 2024

Language-Thinking-Education, Bildung: References, and Proximal Processes should be studied together

how liberal media bolsters Trump

The interview with Saul Wellman illustrates key features of Bronfenbrenner's bioecological model. As well, it provides a concrete illustration of that which the concept of bildung subsumes. ( ) Read the excerpts fro Bykova and Gjesdalb

What the wellman interview (and the Gornick references) show is the working of bildung as imagined in the cognitive-discursive field of modernity. The field within which the individual develops is understood in the sense illustrated by wellman inter.: expansionn of horizons, development of powers. The "external" world encourages tht.

Schiller in Barnow
Janice Sunderland
Roy Moore victims videos
Alcorn

What we have now is bildung in reverse: the encompassing values (and the impact that has on motivation) embodied in the
Little did they realize that the whole process could be perverted. The dialectical whole of the tea prty, prud boys, Jan 6, fox news, gop, trump, charter aschools, hedge fund education--can destroy a nation as well as develop the indidivual.

Modernist Sensibilities in Flint circa 1945-48

from my interview with Saul Wellman, Michigan State Chairman of the Communist Party in the post-war 1940s.

Saul Wellman: Flint is what I consider to be the asshole of the world; it's the roughest place to be. Now we recruited dozens of people to the Party in Flint, and they came out of indigenous folk. And those are the best ones. But we couldn't keep them in Flint very long, once they joined the Party. Because once they came to the Party a whole new world opened up. New cultural concepts, new people, new ideas. And they were like a sponge, you know. And Flint couldn't give it to them. The only thing that Flint could give you was whorehouses and bowling alleys, you see. So they would sneak down here to Detroit on weekends--Saturday and Sunday--where they might see a Russian film or they might . . . hear their first opera in their lives or a symphony or talk to people that they never met with in their lives.

PF: to me that's one of the most significant processes of people becoming radicals, is this . . .

SW: but you lose them in their area . . .

PF: right. You lose them, but I think something is going on there that I think radicals have not understood about their own movement . . .

SW: right . . .

PF: something about the urge toward self improvement . . .

SW: right . . .

and cultural advancement . . .

SW: right, right . . .

PF: and not to remain an unskilled worker in the asshole of the world . . .

SW: right, right. But there are two things going on at the same time. The movement is losing something when a native indigenous force leaves his community. On the other hand the reality of joining a movement of this type is that the guy who is in the indigenous area looks around and says this is idiocy, I can't survive here.

Paul Silver on cognitive-discursive performativity re. question of "semi-skilled"

Israel Intro
Israel Ch. 1

Two Questions:

Cog (Trump as cog-disc performativity)

Fascism: Eley and Stone: Jan. 6: N=212

the cartesian presup. matrix: no room for understanding "fascism"
Envy Theory:

Hate (hate, fear, and anxiety)
hatred, anger, rage
aggression (contrasts with envy) QUOTE
cruelty
sadistic aggression
insatiable hunger for new good objects
ehen offensive aggression is accopanied by malicious intent, fueled by envy
envy and greed
-------

from Kristin Gjesdal, "Bildung," in The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2015)

Bildung and culture are two sides of the same coin, or, to put it otherwise, Bildung is culture in the active, progressive sense of cultivation. (698)

The discourse on Bildung reflects a new understanding of the human being. The individual is not determined by inherited identity and privileges, but viewed in the light of his or her on-going capacity for self-formation, as this does itself borrow from and contribute to the community of which he or she is a part. (702)

from Marina F. Bykova, "Hegel's Philosophy of Bildung," in The Palgrave Hegel Handbook (palgrave macmillan, 2020)

Hegel portrays Bildung as an on-going dialectical (contradiction-ridden) process, a series of achievements that contribute to the individual’s self-making. Yet this process of self-formation is not a purely individual undertaking; it is a social enterprise that takes place in the historical and social world (the world of spirit) through various interactions with other individuals. . . . It is this complex process of the formation of the universal subjects of thought, will, and action historically and socially developed within the cultural forms of the manifest (world) spirit that Hegel describes as “path of Bildung.” (426)

The modern, Enlightenment-based idea of education defines its main aim as providing support for individual development toward maturity. From this perspective, education is a finite process. Furthermore, education focuses on the individual, considering his growth toward maturity as primarily an individual cognitive process, without taking into account this individual’s social interactions and practical engagement with the historical-cultural world. Yet Bildung for Hegel is the formative self-development of spirit (in both its “forms—as individual human and and world spirit) regarded as a social and historical process. Cognitive advancement is only one of the dimensions of Bildung, but this, too, is treated as a historical-social phenomenon. (430)

see next page; epoch of emerging modernity (432)

re identity: negation p. 437; also 441
intersubjectivity p. 439 Salon; liberation 442 re. Theory Z student

the two-party system's greatest achievement

Re. the graphic to the right (American Exceptionalism) see especially Calvin ("The steeper gradients between rich and poor may produce surprising social effects unless we do something about the rich getting richer") and Dupre ("I wish to emphasize particularly the ability of cultural evolution to transform the developmental niche.").

Israel: the Missing Link in my ursprungen

Israel: the Missing Link in my ursprungen

Israel: the Missing Link in my ursprungen

American Exceptionalism

Source. "How Other Nations Pay for Childcare. The U.S. is an Outlier" (New York Times, October 6, 2021)