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 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 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.

The story of how I came to get this clipping in the course of interviewing Cliff Williams in Pontiac from the end of 1974 to late 1975 is here.

It is the intention of this site to incorporate discussions of “intelligence”* within the broader framework of  The Social Origins of Language.  Here intelligence means cognitive-discursive performativity (Ceci, On Intelligence, Harvard, 1996).

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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

Even before the 2016 election evidence abounded in the public arena of a widespread dissolution of language and cognition.  Because the media performs this cognitive decline, the decay of the cognitive-discursive performativities of modernity is invisible within the cognitively decaying media sphere.  Trump's meeting with the Joint Chiefs in the Tank on July 20, 2017 provides us with a spectacular example--a performative tour-de-force--of this accelerating disintegration of discursive and cognitive performativity.  We have a detailed description of this meeting in A Very Stable Genius, chapter 9, "Shocking the Conscience."¹ A close reading of that chapter can be found here.  The chapter in its entirety can be found here.  The most striking aspects of the Tank meeting, as reported in A Very Stable Genius, are the primitive cognitive-discursive performativity of the president, his brutish behavior toward the Joint Chiefs, and the degree to which the Joint Chiefs were flabergasted by this brutish stupidity.  "He's a fucking moron", said Rex Tillerson.²

A comparison of Trump's and FDR's cognitive-discursive performativity can be found here: From FDR to Donald Trump: a cognitive-discursive assessment.  Figure 0 provides a framework for such a comparison.  Excerpts from works providing the theoretical context for this effort can be found in Biocultural Niche: Language, Thinking, Education.

  . . . in the case of many nonhuman primates, dominance asserted through violence or threat is the internal principle of social organization . . . [Among humans] . . . primate-style dominance is periodically overthrown and then restored, only to be overthrown and restored again and again.

Tendencies toward group identification, xenophobia, and lethal combat--all of which do occur in nature--have combined with our highly developed planning capacities to "elevate" human violence to its inhuman level.  The study of animal behavior may not be much help when it comes to things like genocide, but if we move away from nation-states, looking instead at human behavior in small-scale societies, the differences are not that great anymore.

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

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

2.  from Albert Bandura, “A murky portrait of human cruelty,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29, p. 225

At the macrosocial level, Nell greatly exaggerates the prevalence of human cruelty.  There exist wide intercultural differences representing both warring and pacific societies with large intracultural variations and even rapid transformation of warring societies into peaceful ones.

In the context of Figure 0 it is possible to assess the human condition anew.  Violence, sex, power, rage, ressentiment, hatred--how mjuch of this is our primate heritage, howmuch a result of what we have done to ourelves?


Some phenomena are subsumed under the term fascism: the Jan 6 2021 assault on the Capitol.  Other phenomena are excluded from consideration though, such as:

Figures 1a and 1b are based on work I did in the mid-1970s.

Fig. 1a, The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal state is an organizational chart of the Roosevelt administration circa 1936.  The particular social formation (TS+FF) emerged out of the Eastern Rate Case of 1910, played a critical role in the industrial side of the conduct of the First World War (when FDR, Frankfurter, and the Taylor society linked up), and became, as Figure 1a indicates, the socio-cultural infrastructure of the New Deal state.

Figure 1b, The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943: Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind, is a map of sources.  While I interviewed veterans of the organizational struggle from the Conner Avenue area on the far east side of Detroit (Briggs, Budd Wheel, Hudson, and Chrysler), and workers from Fleetwood, Ternstedt, and Ford on the west side of the city, the most intensive work was done with veterans of the organizational struggle on the near east side: Michigan Steel Tube, Chrysler Highland Park, Murray Body, Dodge Main, Midland Steel, Detroit Steel Products, Packard, and Plymouth, and with veterans of the organizational struggle in Flint (Fisher 1, Chevrolet, and Buick) and Pontiac (Pontiac Motors, Yellow Cab).

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)

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)

In place of "sociology," a theory of the forms of domination.¹

In place of "society," the culture complex . . . ²
t

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.

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."  

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.”

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