|
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
|
Table 0.2. Datasets
|
|
the New Deal and the UAW
From FDR to Donald Trump: a cognitive-discursive assessment
The KE in New Deal
The New Deal and Capitalism (old but keep)
see also
The UAW (raw)
Fascism
Fascism Reconsidered (Fascism Two) these texts were assembled before Eley & Stone)
Fascism Data (this overlaps with Some Arrestees)
Some Arrestees from the January 6th Assault on the Capitol
GOP as the Stupid Party: an inadequate
use
lengthy excerpts from Lowndes A MUST-RREAD
resentiment and the mech of def
(AE3.2: use). Crusades, Dostoevsky, etc.
theater of ressentiment (2008-2009: on the Giffords shooting)
The Imus
Brouhaha and that which is called
"Racism"
RMD2Musso
use
Elites in the Mobilization of Ressentiment
Semiotic Regimes
Semiotic Regimes: the Two-Party System
Semiotic%20regimes%20Nov%202019 Backup.html
Semiotic regimes Nov 2019.html
SemioticRegimes.html
SemioticRegimes2.html
Semiotic%20regimes2021.html
SemioticRegimes copy.html
index/semiotic regimes
Semiotic Regimes 2024
The President Who Doesn't Read
Stalinism excerpts (Lenin's awakening)
Ninnavaggi "Fascism" in Key Page
Heart of Darkness
needs editing
Excerpts Nov 25 2019 (from indexJULY1915) just notes; use some
CP Context (long, stuff on primatology)***
GOP history
GOP
GOPBase
Cognitive Development
The Sapient Paradox
the PISA Results: Evolutionary, Historical, Developmental, Psychological
Developmental Divergence
1-dev diverg
SemioticRegimes.html (intelligible, coherent)
American Exceptionalism: Education without Development
(an assessment of the cognitive performativity of the rhetoric of
reform. Comparison of the cognitive performativity evident in the
PISA reports with the rhetoric of educational reform in the United
States suggests that the educational reformers themelves suffer from
strategically disabling cognitive limitations.)
American Exceptionalism III
this is old. use, edit, select.
The President Who Doeesn't Read
Elites: Strategic and Otherwise
U.S. Political Economy by Sector, 1910 to 1939
Keynesian Elite in the New Deal State (old)
Keynesian Elite: Matrix (Personnel)
Keynesian elite as a plane of immanence (Deleuze)
see KE 2019July
the Clinton Foundation
|
|
the dissolution of language and cognition (1/4)
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.
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)
|
|
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."
|
|
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.
|
|
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.
|
|
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
|
|
|
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
|
|
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
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”.
|
|
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.”
|
|
A close look at
the January 6 arrestees
|
A close look at
the January 6 arrestees reveals that, contrary to the Chicago Study 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,"1 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.)
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.
1. "From Navy Seal to Part of the Angry Crowd Outside the Capitol," the New York Times (January 26, 2021)
2. 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:
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
.
|
|
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
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
from "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."
-----------------
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.
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Deep history?
From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States
Figure
0. From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in
the United States, places the phenomenological bundle "Trump" in its
biocultual and evolutionary context.
This site 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 and third decades 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. This bigger picture
is represented by Figure 0.
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. Its
key concept--biocultural niche--is fundamental to this site.1
the question of fascism
Fasism as we have come to know it occurs within the
institutional-cultural environment of modernity: urbanization,
industrialization, nationalism, mass literacy, global markets
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)
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Deep History? The Question of Fascism
1.
Figure 0 is the irreducible minimum if one is to understand the New
Deal,The Great Leader, and the historical path connecting
them. This is because The Great Leader 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.) The catastrophe now unfolding is nothing less than
the disintegration of the biocultural niche of modernity.3
This is the result of an evaluation of the cognitive-discurive performativity of the Great Leader.
A close look at
the January 6 arrestees reveals that, contrary to the respectable
media and the Chicago Study, 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 classifications3 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 (socio-econ: marginal) with the mentalite of grifters. (See Some Arrestees from the January 6th Assault on the Capitol.)
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 Deep history of Jan 6 necessitates Fig. 0 as context.
Scattered throughout this site will be references to stae-of-the art
scholarly literature: what are the phenomenological bundles associated
with the problematic of fascism? Bundle # 1: Some Arrestees from the January 6th Assault on the Capitol.
Bundle # 2: Sado-Sexual Eigenvector of GOP performtivity
Bundle 3: texts ; in place of "ideology" cognitive-discursive performativities
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
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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.
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the dissolution of language
and
cognition:
Trump's
Meeting with the Joint Chiefs in the Tank on July 20, 2017
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cognitive-discursive performativities: theoretical contexts
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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 |
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Decoding Trump-talk: the sadio-sexual eigenvector of GOP performativity: fascism?
Fascism and Figure 0
Have
just completed analysis of Trump-rally-talk. The work was done on
the page FDR-Trump module. Further refinement is needed; this is
preliminary.
Three
elements: 1. sado-sexual epithet*; 2. allusions to issues and policy
(tarrif, immigration, etc.); and 3. a word salad**
The tank
meeting as synthetic a priori to be deployed in analysis of
Trump-rally-talk. Meeting shows Trump incapable of cog-disc
performativity appropriate to issue-policy discourse (call this the
Tillerson a priori). Thus, all references in such talk to
issues and policies must become the occasion for the recall and
deployment of the Tillerson a priori (A Very Stable Genius ch.
9. Indicative of the cog disc degeneration on the "left" is the
repsonse of "respectable" media (MSNBC) to the melange of word salad,
sado-sexual expletives, and words like "tarrif" that we know from the
Tilerson a priori to be without any intellectual content
whatsoever. Media assumes the presence of something called mind
in trump when there is only evidence of its absence.
Quantitatively,
most of Trump-rally-talk is word salad. The crowd of adolescents
(of all ages) in the audience are really waiting for the sado-sexual
zinger. Thee is a general lack of focus on the speaker's
words. Rally crowds could be described as milling about even when
seated, a herd of primates waiting for the sado-sexual zinger.
*
pejorative-name (sleepy Joe); Joe Biden strapped to pickup truck;
"Brandon"--this is all adolescent trash-talk notable for its cowardess and cognitive minimalism. Master-pet relationship (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)
**this is a word salad: "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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fascism reconsidered: the sado-sexual performativity of right wing media and rallies
The rhetorical violence of
Trump
rallies, not ideology and policies, is what is fundamental. The Trump
performances--the audience, the cultural-historical context, and Trump
himself as a therapeutic object with which the audience member can
identify--become
intelligible when viewed through the prism of certain key concepts:
Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment; psychoanalysis's concept of the
mechanisms of defense; Wilbur Cash's concept of the proto-Dorian
convention; the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain; and Robert Paxton's
concept of redemptive violence.
On the right there are not issues, but postures, gestures,*
various encodings of the same sado-sexual reflex (the inner logic of
racism). Rage** enacted in a political-media theater of violence,
sadism, and revenge ("I am your retribution" say Trump). The cruelty of it all is the most important thing. The
vicarious thrill, the “enthusiasm for inflicting pain, suffering,
or humiliation”(OED): this is what is seen at Trump rallies. The
GOP's performative cadre are specialists in herding raging hominids.
"Conspiriacy theories" like QAnon should be understood in the context provided by Lyndal Roper (Witch Craze). QAnon
is not a theory. It is a demonic accusation.
Cognitive-developmentally speaking, conspiracy "theories" can be viewed
as cartoon-like. Vivid and simple-minded to the extreme, they
appeal to the toddleresque mentalité of the milieu of American
fascism.
* "Mimetic
representations are evident in human children before they acquire
language competence. . . . They continue to be important in
adults, taking the form of highly variable social customs, athletic
skills, and group expressive patterns (such as mass demonstrations of
aggression or rejection)." Merlin Donald, "The mind considered
from a historical perspective: human cognitive phylogenesis and the
possibility of continuing cognitive evolution." In D. Johnson & C.
Ermeling Eds., The Future of the Cognitive Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 360-61. Also youth gangs and cimpanzees
** "Here the works of vengefulness and rancor swarm; here the
air stinks of secrets and concealment; . . . and what mendaciousness
is employed to disguise that this hatred is hatred! What a display of
grand words and postures, what an art of "honest" calumny!" (Nietzsche, The
Geneology of Morals, II)
from "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."
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| This site is a rhizome |
Its principle of production is transcendental empiricism |
This site is a rhizome. Its principle of production is transcendental empiricism.
This site is a rhizome. Its principle of production is transcendental empiricism.
1. from Inka Mülder-Bach, "Introduction" to Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty amd Distraction in Weimar Germany (Verso, 1998), p. 15.
. . . now theory
forfeits its hierarchically privileged position in relation to
empirical material. It infiltrates the surface, so to speak,
manifesting itself in the way the tessera of the 'mosaic' are cut and
in the interstices left between them. . . . this conceptual
language misses precisely what matters crucially to Kracauer: the
details of the situations, their complexity, the perspectives of their
agents (videos) . . .
His investigation, therefore, refrains from formulating its insight in
a conceptual language removed from its material. . . Knowledge of
the material's significance becomes the principle of its textual
representation, so that the representation itself articulates the
theory.
2. from "Nietzsche's Antisociology: Subjectified Culture and the End of History", Robert J. Antonio.American Journal of Sociology Vol. 101, No. 1 (Jul., 1995)
Nietzsche's . . . real target is Socratic culture's exceptionally
abstract languages, rampant conceptual reifications, and impoverished
aesthetic sensibilities. . . . . Adoration of concepts, theory, and reason makes the abstract
signifier the ultimate object of knowledge. Purely formal concepts are
treated as the "highest," "real," and "true" things, while sense
experience is relegated to the degraded status of "appearance."
Platonic ideas, Christian soul, Kantian things-in-themselves, and
Newtonian atoms and time are all foundational reifications that
"dehistoricize" the corporeal world and erect illusions of firm
"grounds" for those who cannot face life without God and tradition or
bear the weight of its conflictive choices and its "great dice game"
(Nietzsche 1974 [GS], pp. 287-90; 1968b [WP], p. 549; 1968b, pp. 35-37).
. . . . fanatical new prejudices, religions, and politics
appear alongside the most sterile intellectual formalisms. Mass
culture's hastily formulated languages blur all difference and
ambiguity (e.g., parties "transform their principles into great
alfresco stupidities"). The proliferation of abstract signifiers,
arising from diverse locations and detached from any sense of stable
referents, contribute to increasingly mechanical, diffuse, and mindless
regimentation. In this fashion, Nietzsche severed the links that modern
theorists saw between rational- ization and enhanced communication,
social integration, and legitimate authority (Nietzsche 1983
[Untimely], p. 215; 1986 [Human, All Too Human], pp. 161-62; 1966, pp.
216-17; 1968b, pp. 357-58, 380-81).
This site 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 and third decades 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. This bigger picture
is represented by Figure 0.
From the Origins of Language to the End of
Print Literacy in the United States.
Figure 1a. The
Keynesian Elite in the New Deal state: Intersubjectivity, Shared
Intentionality, and the Extended Mind, and
Figure 1b. A Geography of
Dasein. The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943: Intersubjectivity,
Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind (Bildungs-proletarians and
Plebeian Upstarts),
enable a systematic reappraisal of that which is called the New
Deal. Without this reappraisal, it is impossible to understand the historical
trajectory: the New Deal to Donald Trump, The Great Leader refers to the phenomenological bundles that are intrinsic to the
object—The Great Leader—under investigation, not to the person named ****** *****. For example, the
Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain, and Some Arrestees from the January 6th Assault on the Capitol.
Figures 1a and 1b
represent the phenomenological bundles of the New Deal state and the
UAW, respectively. The significance of this characterization is
discussed below and elsewhere.
CAUTION: thinking must 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.
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1. Knowledge of the material's significance
becomes the principle of its textual
representation, so that the
representation itself articulates the theory
2. Adoration of concepts, theory, and reason makes the abstract
signifier the ultimate object of
knowledge. Purely formal concepts are
treated as the "highest," "real," and "true" things, while
sense
experience is relegated to the degraded status of "appearance."
Philosophy
the new deal era
From the New Deal to Donald Trump: cognitive-discursive performativity
sado-sexual eigenvector of gop performativity
"Fascism"
Fascism: texts
/bildung
The President Who Doesn't Read
Nihilism & "Globalization"
Cognitive-Discursive Performativity
BILDUNG
U.S. Political Economy by Sector, 1910 to 1939
Keynesian elite as a plane of immanence (Deleuze)
the Clinton Foundation
Elites in the Mobilization of Ressentiment
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.").
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American Exceptionalism
Source. "How Other Nations Pay for Childcare. The U.S. is an Outlier" (New York Times, October 6, 2021)
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A Synopsis of this Site
Language on the threshold of gesture and reflex
Regression to infantile narcissism via processes of identification
The war against reason and the politics of patrimonialism:
why Trump loves Putin
The sado-sexual eigenvector of GOP performativity
Donald Trump and the abyss of decognification
Cognitive performativity is a biocultural historical phenomenon,
not explicable within a discursive field shaped by the
Cartesian synthetic a priori
The election of Donald Trump is a lagging indicator of the disintegration
of cognitive performativities
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four axes of
ontological catastrophe
We
are now engulfed in 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 not as
idiosyncratic but as representative: Literacy
and cognition as historically contingent not normative.)
•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").
•Third, the patrimonial assault on rational-bureaucratic institutions,
an assault on the very idea of science-based professionalism and public
service.
•Fourth, the triumph of nihilism (or as it is known today, neoliberal subjectivity).
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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) The fact that I can deal with it 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.
These interviews, taken as a dialectical whole, are a set of dialogic unfoldings that form a lens
through which to examine the ontologies and events, the transformations
and reactions, that are subsumed under the term unionization. The
factories, meeting halls, and neighborhoods of southeastern Michigan
are laboratories in which to investigate the play of forces: first, the
deep structures, the genetic ontologies (the principles of the
production of practices--Bourdieu) that dominate the manifold areas of human
activity; and second, the irruption of forces of an entirely different
kind (Bordieu), referred to variously as agency, bildung, and the will
to power.
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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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
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We attended the Cleveland Convention [March 27, 1939], and it was
there that the union was born
Figure 1a is a graphic representation of the networks of power known as the Keynesian elite in the New Deal state .
Figure
1b is the geography of power among the autoworkers of southeastern
Michigan. The figure at the right ("The UAW 1933-1943: Networks of
Power") is the organizational chart of what one might call "workers
power."
from Charles Yaeger (Oral History: p. 12, Reuther Archives)
Finally the CIO group, the Addes and Reuther forces in the union at
that time, called a special convention with the blessing of the parent
CIO in Cleveland, and there we organized what became the UAW-CIO.
We attended the Cleveland Convention [March 27, 1939], and it was
there that the union was born after all this factional problem. Then,
of course, we had to go back and reorganize the plants because as much
as the International was torn asunder the locals were, too. We took
over the local union with(in) our unit of the old amalgamated [Local
156], which became [local] 594. We took it over with about 7,000
people working in the plant and 503 or 504 members. This was all the
membership we had. We did not have the union.
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What we call societies are only loose aggregates
of diverse,
overlapping, intersecting power networks.
from Michael Mann, The Sources of
Social Power. Volume II: The rise of classes and national states
(Cambridge University Press, 1993)
It is a basic tenet of my work that societies are not systems. There
is no ultimately determining structure to human existence--at least
none that social actors or sociological observers, situated in its
midst, can discern. What we call societies are only loose aggregates
of diverse, overlapping, intersecting power networks. p. 506
America has not so much been exceptional as it has gradually come to
represent one extreme on a continuum of class relations. America has
never differed qualitatively from other national cases. Differences
have been of degree, not kind. . . . Explanations asserting an
original and enduring American exceptionalism . . . have only a very
limited truth. p. 638
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Enlightenment Phantasies1:
Modernity as a Mode of Cognitive-Discursive Performativity (5)
I wrote the paragraph below before Trump, and before the publication of The Social Origins of Language.
Not only did the
Enlightenment not acquire a proletarian or popular embodiment (the
"class with radical chains"). The ‘people’, even in its "working
class" moment, became the mass base for right wing, nationalist,
racist, xenophobic cognitive modalities, political cultures, and
socio-culturally contextualized character formations. (Blanning,
Paxton, Clarke, Sugrue) These modalities of ressentiment are
ontologically prior to the political forces that utilize, absorb, and
manipulate them (see Right-wing Elites in the Postwar era; Red Scare,
UAW links). That is why answers to such questions as What’s the
Matter With Kansas? cannot be given in political terms or through
political analysis.
On the
Enlightenment, from Lionel B. Steiman, Paths to Genocide: Antisemitism
in Western History (Macmillan Press, 1998), p. 93-95
The Enlightenment
did not deny the existence of all manner of evils but denied that these
were a consequence of human nature. It held that people are by
nature reasonable and capable of good but had been corrupted by their
institutions and environment. Its rationalism assumed the
universal existence of human reason and applied the criterion of social
utility to all institutions, policies, and actions. Transform or
abolish corrupt institutions, improve the human environment, and human
behavior would likewise improve. Human beings were by nature
rational and therefore capable of creating a rational and humane socal
order.
I wrote the paragraph below in 2023 as a comment on the paragraph above (Steiman):
This was the
intellectual ethos of Progressivism, whose radical wing included the
socialists and communists. It is this ethos which now lies in
ruins. One does not simply pick up the pieces and hope for a
better day. One can no longer yearn for that "class with radical
chains," that phantom of the 19th and 20th centuries. Indeed, a
stunning reversal has occured, most evident in the United States, where
the deterioration of discursive and cognitive performativity is now the
hallmark of our times. Is it possible that literacy is dying even
as we speak? We miss this bigger picture if
we focus only on Trump.
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1. Harold Mah, Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750-1914 (Cornell, 2003)
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A. the biocultural niche of modernity as historically embedded networks of power-discourse (Hegel;Bykova)
B. FASCISM
THE SADO-SEXUAL EIGENVECTOR OF GOP PERFORMATIVITY (semiotic regimes)
Some Arrestees
lengthy excerpts from Lowndes A MUST-RREAD
GOP as the Stupid Party: an inadequate use
resentiment and the mech of def use
theater of ressentiment (on the Giffords shooting)
The Imus Brouhaha and that which is called "Racism"
Heart of Darkness needs editing
RMD2Musso use
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