Deleuze and Guatarri argue that the book . . . has been seen as an organic unit, which is both hermetically sealed, but also a reflection of the world.  In contrast, the rhizome is neither mimetic nor organic.  It only ever maps the real, since the act of mapping is a method of experimenting with the real: and it is always an open system, with multiple exits and entrances.  In short, the rhizome is an 'acentred' system; the map of a mode of thought which is always 'in the middle'. p 45

from 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 

We might well see these political street gangs as the forerunners of the sinister enforcers who formed an essential part of the ultranationalist fascist parties of the next century: Brownshirts, Blackshirts, and the like.  In other words, America's most successful party of ethnic nationalism [the Know-nothings 1854-58] included forerunners of the street violence of the twentieth century's parties of pathological nationalism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

from Michael André Bernstein, Bitter Carnival : ressentiment and the abject hero (Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 28

 . . . ressentiment is trapped forever in the slights of the past.  . . . .  What “empowers” someone afflicted by ressentiment is the intensely focused, but impotent hatred with which he feeds his sense of having been treated unfairly, and his hope of someday forcing others to suffer in his place.

from F. Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 6

talkin' shit: see FDR-Trump module and Semiotic Regimes.

A typical telephone threat: Lawmaker Debbie Dingell Shares Phone Threat Audio

“You fucking old, senile bitch, you’re as old and ugly as Biden,” the caller says. “You ought to get the fuck off the planet. You fucking foul bitch. I hope your family dies in front of you. I pray to God, if you’ve got any children, they die in your face.”

from "It’s Just Too Much: A Florida Town Grapples With a Shutdown After a Hurricane," New York Times, January 7, 2019.

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. (emphasis added)

The narcissism in question is not only Trump’s. More important is that of his followers, who idealise him as they once, in childhood, idealised themselves. Beyond that, the demagogue has a special appeal to wounded narcissism, to the feeling that one has failed to meet standards one has set for oneself.

 In Adorno’s words, ‘the superman has to resemble the follower and appear as his “enlargement”.’ The leader ‘completes’ the follower’s self-image. This helps explain the phenomenon of the ‘great little man’, the ‘Aw shucks’, ‘just folks’ demagogue like Huey Long. He ‘seems to be the enlargement of the subject’s own personality, a collective projection of himself, rather than an image of the father’ – a Trump, in other words, rather than a Washington or Roosevelt.

A close look at the January 6 arrestees reveals that, contrary to the respectable media, 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.  This is a challenge to the neat concept of class. 


from  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 40



• from Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (FSG, 2011), p. 128

These interviews 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:

Nicholas Kristof, "McDonald’s Workers in Denmark Pity Us," New York Times, May 8, 2020

Brain Plasticity and its Consequences

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

Something about our mentality changed in the past few millenia, something that made us able to construct such exotic things as symphonies, philosophies, oil refineries, nuclear weapons, and robots.  Do such achievements have implications for theories of consciousness?  Many would deny that they do.  They would claim that the parameters of mind were surely fixed long ago, when we emerged as a species, and that culture can add nothing to an equation written deeply into the human genome.

But that common belief does not stand up to scrutiny.  The human mind has been drastically changed by culture.  In modern culture, enculturation has become an even more formative influence on mental development than it was in the past.  This may be a direct reflection of brain plasticity, rather than genetic change, but that does not in any way diminish the importance of the change from a purely cognitive standpoint.  The human mind is so plastic in the way it carries out its cognitive business, individually and in groups, that the core configuration of skills that defines a mind actually varies significantly as a function of different kinds of culture.  This is especially true of the most conscious domains of mind, such as those involved in formal thinking and representation.

Let me be very clear about what I mean here.  I am not speaking of trivial cultural changes, such as variations in custom or language use.  These are by far the most common and have no proven cognitive impact.  The most important of these is literacy.  Literacy skills change the functional organization of the brain and deeply influence how individuals and communities of literate individuals perform cognitive work.  Mass literacy has triggered two kinds of major cogitive reorganizations, one in individuals and the other in groups.

To become fully literate, the individual must acquire a host of neural demons that are completely absent from anyone who lacks literacy training.  This involves massive restructuring.  There is no equivalent in the preliterate mind to the circuits that hold the complex neural components of a reading vocabulary or the elaborate procedural habits of formal thinking.  These are unnatural.  They have to be hammered in by decades of intensive schooling, which changes the functional uses of certain brain circuits and rewire the functional architecture of thought.  This process can be very extensive. Consider the impact of twenty or more years of schooling on the brain of someone who has acquired full symbolic literacy in several different technical, mathematical, scientific, and musical fields.  These skills encumber neural resources on a vast scale and change how the person's mind carries out its work.

from Jeremy E. C. Genovese, "Piaget, Pedagogy, and Evolutionary Psychology" (Evolutionary Psychology, Volume 1, 2003)

"The Origins of the "Welfare State: The Keynesian Elite and the Second New Deal, 1910-1936", p. 3-4; 33

The Mind-Boggling Intrusiveness of Donald J. Trump
NYT 8-19

We are changing, of course, but that does not necessarily mean we are progressing.  Combined with all the forces that today exhort us to look into our own private lives, the “civilization of change” has stimulated a massive interest in psychic disorders.  It can be heard from all quarters, and it takes form in the many marketplaces that offer inner balance and tranquility.  Today, many of our socials tensions have been expressed in terms of implosion and depressive collapse [liberalism] or, in a similar way, its flip side: [fascism] explosions of violence, rage, the search for new sensations.  pp. 185-6

[liberalism] As addictive explosion reflects depressive implosion, so the drug-taker’s search for sensation reflects the depressed person’s lack of feeling.  Depression, that crossroads of pathology, serves as a canvas upon which to sketch out the changes in modern subjectivity, the displacement of the hard task of being healthy.  In a context in which choice is the norm and inner insecurity the price, these pathologies make up the dark side of contemporary private life.  Such is the equation of the sovereign individual: psychic freedom and individual initiative = identity insecurities and the incapacity to act.  p. 232

from Willem A. de Vries, Wilfrid Sellars (McGill-Queens University Press, 2005), p. 7

 

We proceed immanently, inductively, drawing from the dialogic unfoldings the necessary concepts.  Some of these--habitus, ressentiment, bildung, übermenschen--are well-known.  Nevertheless, they are not merely applied to the interviews but renewed in the context of reviewing the interviews.  These interviews are not mere digital files of transcripts, reminiscences of events of the 1930s spoken in the mid-1970s.  In reviewing them now [spring 2015] in the double context of all I have read and experienced since then and all that has happened in the world since then (the wreckage of socialism, the persistence of fascism, and the triumph of nihilism) they come alive, not as fixed objects, but as part of thinking now. 

These interviews 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) that dominate the manifold areas of human activity; and second, the irruption of forces of an entirely different kind, referred to variously as bildung and the will to power--aufheben, emergence, praxis, agency--these concepts are entangled in a common vitalist sensibility.  In this context the concept of the übermensch is widely applicable to the understanding of Bolshevism in Russia and the UAW in Michigan--and the Keynesian elite in the New Deal state.  Indeed, the more I read of Russian history* while simultaneously digitalizing and listening to my 1970s interviews (while having already internalized and made my own the discursive praxis of the Keynesian Elite), the more apparent it is to me that what is called bolshevism is a more generic (if short-lived) phenomenon of modern times.  Bear in mind Hobsbawm's concept of the short twentieth century (1914-1991) defined as a chain of events:      ➞
But if we characterize the singular feature of this era as the inner logic of the revolutionary process (rather than the outward chain of events): bildung and the will to power, then the 1890s, when the various Progressivisms emerged, is a likely beginning of the era, and the defeat of bildung as historical praxis, in the Soviet Union in the Great Purges of the 1930s (not the 1920s), and in the United States in the Great Purges of the late 1940s and early 1950s, is the terminus.

from Richard White, The Republic for which it Stands: the United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford, 2017), p. 776

praxiological ratios

Bildungsproletarians' encounters with the "world"

1.  encounters with "the grey masses"

4.  encounters with plebeian upstarts

a.  Bud Simons on Toledo flying squadron
b.  Edmund Kord on guys from front welding
c.  Edmund Kord on the youth "gangs" in the press
     rooms
d.  Bill Mazey and Joe Adams on the Italians
e.  Frank Fagan on the welders in his department/body-
    in-white

5.  encounters with management

6.  encounters with fascism

---

This is the best description of what I have been trying to formulate: the socio-cognitive cultural historical development of certain cognitive-performative elements that sharply distinguish the "semi-skilled" production and non-production workers from the peasant masses (Ong)

John [Anderson] was one of those who had an idea that his job should be a skilled trade
 . . . .
What you would also do is you would take . . . glaze a body, a putty-like lead coat . . . a lot of our guys have an imagination of what their jobs used to be.  When I describe my job, I can make is sound so fantastic and technically important when it wasn’t.  I use to test the paint, when we used the color varnish and when we were spraying, you had to mix your base paint with oleum, which was your thinner, and then they had to go through the ovens and dry, and based on the production needs you would thin down the paint so that the coat wouldn’t be too thick.  If they needed the bodies fast, so you had to put a thinner coat of paint on so that they would go through the oven and dry fast.  If you didn’t need the bodies you would thicken the paint down to specifications.  So I used to take the viscosity of the paint—sounds important as hell, the average workers don’t know what viscosity [is]; [it] sounds so technical. And hell all I used to do was keep a finger under the bottom of the viscosity pail (?) and fill it up and then take and put a level  on it to see that it was level and then remove the finger and with a stopwatch see how long it takes for the paint to flow out.  By that we would know how much of the paint would flow off the body when it was being poured on.  Then you would take the temperature of the ovens.  Sounds very important.  Hell, I was taught how to do that within an hour of the time I was hired.  Then they took three days 43:25  to show me how to make up the reports, to cheat, so that the Ford Motor Company, when it got its reports, the report would show that they had the right thickness of the paint that the specifications called for.  But the thickness of the paint was always based on how badly they needed the bodies.  If Ford needed the bodies they didn’t give a damn how much paint as long as you covered it.  So you see everybody made their job sound very important,  especially the leadership, the old militants like myself and John Anderson 44:00

This entire enterprise depends upon establishing benchmarks for cognitive-discursive performativity. 

FDR's campaign speeches addressed to his crowds construe an audience that is formal operationally competent.  We know nothing of the cog-disc competencies of the individuals who make up these crowds, although attention span, focus, and reaction times can be observed.  The rapid, synchronized responses of the Madison Square Garden crowd to FDR's punch lines (we know this because we have a recording),  can be contrasted with the crowd responses to Trump rallies 90 years later.  Trump's crowds await the punch line; but, unlike the FDR cog-disc. perf., there is no chain of reasoning leading up to the punch line.  Trump is actually talkin' shit.  There is no chain of reasoning at all.  The entirety of his rally speeches is a word salad with nigger, nigger¹ and fuck you² as the crowd pleasers.  But even his punch lines take long seconds to get a unsynchronized, sporadic resoonse--until audinece get the point (fucxk you nigger)

Minutes of the Murray Body Committee Local 2 at Executive Board Meeting, April 26, 1939, Toledo Ohio, Addes Collection, Box 14.11, Reuther Archives. re. the competitive situation in the spring industry.

On Thursday at the Economic Club of New York, former President Donald Trump was asked a question about whether he would commit to making child care more affordable. In a two-minute response, he offered a pile of nonsense. Here’s a brief snippet that honestly I didn’t even know how to punctuate properly:

We had Senator Marco Rubio and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think, when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that, because the child care is child care, couldn’t, you know, it’s something you have to have it in this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly and it’s not going to stop them doing business with us.

Apparently, what he’s saying here is that he would make child care more affordable by raising tariffs on imports, though he did not explain how that would work.

Evidence abounds in the public arena of a widespread dissolution of language and cognition. Because the media performs this cognitive decline, the decay of reason is invisible within the cognitively decaying media sphere. The historicity of language and cognition, and their contemporary disintegration, is one of the fundamental questions posed by this site.   This is the nihilism that Nietzsche anticipated.

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 performativity of president Trump, 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. (Slate, "Trump's Nuclear Meltdown", October 11, 2017.)

Taking into account the major perspectives on the development of language and cognition, and applying these results and methodologies to the cognitive-discursive performativities of "school", "politics", and the "media," we are led to a chilling conclusion:  we are now living through the disintegration of the cognitive-discursive performativities of modernity. 

What is happening now is beyond the cognitive scope of current thought, which is economistic in character and Cartesian in its metaphysical presuppositions.  Figure 0.  From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States, provides a framework for conceptualizing what is currently inconceivable.  Short of something similar in scope and depth to the Reformation, our fate is sealed.  We are living through " . . . a perfect storm of cognitive degradation . . . "²

"The worry is that we, as a society, will become innumerate, not just illiterate. A.I. appears to be exacerbating an alarming trend in which our basic education is failing our young citizens. And that crisis is aimed at the most basic elements of that education: reading, writing and arithmetic."

from Imanuel Kant,  Critique of Pure Reason (A 51/B 75) p. 107 (Hackett Publishing Co., 1996):


from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (462):

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

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

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


from John Dupré, The Metaphysics of Biology (Cambridge, 2021)


from Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupré eds. (Oxford, 2018)

What organisms do is quite unlike what other natural entities do.  Organisms constitute a distinct ontological category.  They are a special kind of processual thing; they are agents. . . .  Methodological vitalism is the view that evolution should be studied from the perspective of the distinctive role that agents play in enacting evolution.

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

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

from Daniel Dor, Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis, The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014), p.4

  . . . 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.

Franz de Waal, Our Inner Ape (Riverhead, 2005) (p. 135)

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.

from Fyodor Dostoevski, Notes from Underground, p. 96-7

 Now let’s see how things are with people who are capable of revenge and, in general, of taking care of themselves.  When the desire for revenge takes possession of them, they are drained for a time of every other feeling but this desire for revenge. . . . .  Now let’s look at this mouse in action.  Let’s assume it has been humiliated (it is constantly being humiliated) and that it wishes to avenge itself.  It’s possible too that there’s even more spite accumulated in it than in l’homme de la nature et de la verite.  The nauseating, despicable, petty desire to repay the offender in kind may squeak more disgustingly in the mouse than in the natural man who, because of his innate stupidity, considers revenge as merely justice . . . .  In its repulsive, evil-smelling nest, the downtrodden, ridiculed mouse plunges immediately into a cold, poisonous, and—most important—never-ending hatred.  For forty years, it will remember the humiliation in all its ignominious details . . . 

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



from Marshall Sahlins, Hierarchy, Equality, and the Sublimation of Anarchy: The Western Illusion of human nature.  The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at The University of Michigan, November 4, 2005

Human culture, it needs be considered, is much older than human nature: culture has been in existence for two million years or more, ten or fifteen times longer than the modern human species, homo sapiens.  Respectable biological opinion has come around to seeing the human brain as a social organ, evolving in the Pleistocene under the “pressure” of maintaining a relatively extended, complex, and solidary set of social relationships. This is to say that culture, which is the condition of the possibility of this successful social organization, thereby conditioned the possibilities of the human organism, body and soul. The “pressure” was to become a cultural animal, or, more precisely, to culturalize our animality.  For two million years, we have evolved biologically under cultural selection.  Not that we are or were “blank slates,” lacking any inherent biological imperatives, only that what was uniquely selected for in the genus homo was the ability to realize these imperatives in the untold different ways that archaeology, history, and anthropology have demonstrated.  Biology became a determined determinant, inasmuch as its necessities were mediated and organized symbolically.

What is most pertinent to the relations between physis and nomos is not (for example) that all cultures have sex but that all sex has culture. sexual drives are variously expressed and repressed according to local determinations of appropriate partners, occasions, times, places, and bodily practices. We sublimate our generic sexuality in all kinds of ways—including its transcendence in favor of the higher values of celibacy, which also proves that in symbolic regimes there are more compelling ways of achieving immortality than the inscrutable mystique of the “selfish gene.”

As it is for sex, so for other inherent needs, drives, or dispositions: nutritional, aggressive, egoistic, sociable, compassionate—whatever they are, they come under symbolic definition and thus cultural order.  In the occurrence, aggression or domination may take the behavioral form of, say, the new Yorker’s response to “Have a nice day”—“don’t tell me what to do!”   We war on the playing fields of Eton, give battle with swear words and insults, dominate with gifts that cannot be reciprocated, or write scathing book reviews of academic adversaries. Eskimos say gifts make slaves, as whips make dogs. But to think that, or to think our proverbial opposite, that gifts make friends—a saying that like the Eskimos’ goes against the grain of the prevailing economy—requires that we are born with “watery souls,” waiting to manifest our humanity for better or worse in the meaningful experiences of a particular way of life.

Evidence abounds in the public arena of a widespread dissolution of language and cognition. Because the media performs this cognitive decline, the decay of reason is invisible within the cognitively decaying media sphere. The historicity of language and cognition, and their contemporary disintegration, is one of the fundamental questions posed by this site.   This is the nihilism that Nietzsche anticipated.

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."*  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 performativity of president Trump, 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. (Slate, "Trump's Nuclear Meltdown", October 11, 2017.)

Now read these articles, especially the Comments attached to "American Children's Reading Skills Reach New Lows." see Children's reading Skills, comments.  This selection of comments is a phenomenological bundle.

A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley (NYT October 26, 2018)

The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books the Atlantic, October 1, 2024.

"American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows" NYT jan 29, 2025

‘Don’t ask what AI can do for us, ask what it is doing to us’: are ChatGPT and co harming human intelligence? the Guardian, April 19, 2025

"Producing Something This Stupid Is the Achievement of a Lifetime"
NYT April 10, 2025

A.I. Killed the Math Brain NYT. June 2, 2025

Why Factories Are Having Trouble Filling Nearly 400,000 Open Jobs (NYT 6-23-25)

Michael O’Connell, "David Foster Wallace, A.I. and the future of the humanities" (America: the Jesuit Review, 6-27-25)

Trump Doesn't Read. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, June 4, 2025

Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good (NYT  July 28, 2025)

Thinking a Lot About Too Little Thinking (NYT Aug. 10, 2025)

Taking into account the major perspectives on the development of language and cognition, and applying these results and methodologies to the cognitive-discursive performativities of "school", "politics", and the "media," we are led to a chilling conclusion:  we are now living through the disintegration of the cognitive-discursive performativities of modernity. 

What is happening now is beyond the cognitive scope of current thought, which is economistic in character and Cartesian in its metaphysical presuppositions.  Figure 0.  From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States, provides a framework for conceptualizing what is currently inconceivable.  Short of something similar in scope and depth to the Reformation, our fate is sealed.  We are living through " . . . a perfect storm of cognitive degradation . . . "1 

"The worry is that we, as a society, will become innumerate, not just illiterate. A.I. appears to be exacerbating an alarming trend in which our basic education is failing our young citizens. And that crisis is aimed at the most basic elements of that education: reading, writing and arithmetic."²

GailG, Rockville, MD

I’m a school librarian at a suburban school.  Most of our kids are middle class but we do have students from low income families as well.  Not only do most kids eschew reading by fifth grade (the Kindergartners are still eager!) but when they do read they are mostly reading graphic novels, which are comics.  We limit them to two of these at a time but they still choose not to check out novels.  In class most of them cannot restate in their own words the content of a short paragraph.  Before vacation when I query them about what they are excited about the vast majority say, “play lots of video games “.  From the trenches, there is no question in my mind that screen time has had a huge negative impact on their reading comprehension.  Trying to convince them to read is an uphill battle when parents are not limiting screen time.  Usually educators get blamed for low reading scores but parents are the ones who need to spend time at home making sure their kids are putting into practice the skills that are being taught at school.

Jeanie Macdonald

As a high school teacher, its clear that years of being stuck like glue to their phones has degraded children's ability to focus on any reading longer than a sentence. When I give them six pages to read for homework, they act like their world is falling apart! It's nonsense. They simply have to be made to read more, and read longer books. Books!

Annika. MA

There are so many contributing factors from screen time to videos to parents to school funding to political interference from school boards and PTAs to social conditions in the community to the child's interest themselves. It is pointless to try to find one sole cause or thing to blame when you have to look at the child's educational progress holistically and within context of the experiences of the broader school community. But, I think that attention span is increasingly becoming an issue that needs to be addressed. About 15 years ago, an acquaintance was teaching college level filmography part-time. He stopped teaching  though because he was frustrated that the student would neither watch or create films that were longer than 3-5 minutes. And these were college age Millennials. More recently the NY Times reported how college professors are receiving students who do not know how to read a full book from start to finish in high school. That they had only been given excerpts from books to study passages. I don't know how to address improving attention, maybe aides in the classroom to help focus students and increase their time on task.

Leneen

I was a high school librarian in a top ranked public school. There was NO reading culture. If you read you were considered strange. Students couldn’t understand complex texts. At all. There were no efforts made by administration to develop and support readers. Even English teachers had given up. A very sad state of affairs.

Linda K

A former co-worker pursued her ME to teach history at Southern CT SU. Stated plainly, her writing and reading skills were marginal at best. I surreptitiously edited and/or re-wrote every document she created for over two years. How can a barely literate person graduate with a master’s and then successfully teach children to be well spoken, well read and well written? Something is wrong with our broken education system and it’s not a new phenomenon in this post-covid period. It’s multi-generational and several decades in the making.

alpenglow

As a second grade teacher, I am not surprised by these results. In the 23 years that I have taught, I have watched student misbehavior increase dramatically, and attention spans have similarly decreased. Students used to be excited to learn, but now the vast majority just.... aren't. I don't know why, and I don't know how to fix it, but I do know that my job has gotten dramatically worse and unrewarding to the point that I am likely going to leave the profession at the end of this school year.

Mr Mallard

Initially kids need phonics. However, I think the widespread notion that schools "stopped teaching phonics" for decades is overblown.

The main problem isn't phonics, it's volume. Kids just don't read enough.
If you want kids to read, they have to actually read. Not just do phonics drills. Not just word work. They have to read, a lot, for hours every day, for years and years.

907guy

ITSS -  It's the screens stupid. Kids are being re-programmed to only read short blurbs on their phones. texts, chats, short videos on Tik-Tok, kids have lost their attention span and ability to focus.

I'm a teacher and if I assign reading kids freak out. I send out emails and they say they didn't read them because they were too long (less than one page). I was observed by a supervisor and I had my class read out loud and assigned reading for an upcoming quiz. I was later told that kids 14 yo don't read, so don't bother assigning it. I said the opposite, that kids don't read because it isn't assigned and enforced. It's an uphill battle when school administrators appear to have given in to the short attention span syndrome that kids have adopted.

The range and boundaries of plasticity are not fixed, however, and in some cases plasticity itself can be plastic.  This is especially clear in the case of complex behaviors.  For example, the cultural technologies of reading and writing seem to have extended human memory, enabled abstract chains of reasoning, and guided new ways of scanning visual items, thus making human[s] even more cognitively plastic. 23

The scientific ethos, with its vocabulary, taxonomies, and detachment of logic and the hypothetical from concrete referents, has begun to permeate the minds of post-industrial peoples.  This has paved the way for mass education on the university level and the emergence of an intellectual cadre without whom our present civilization would be inconceivable. 29

Science altered our lives and then liberated our minds from the concrete. .  .  .  As use of logic and the hypothetical moved beyond the concrete, people developed new habits of mind.  They became practiced at solving problems with abstract or visual content and more innovative at administrative tasks." 172-174

Literacy skills change the functional organization of the brain and deeply influence how individuals and communities of literate individuals perform cognitive work.  Mass literacy has triggered two kinds of major cogitive reorganizations, one in individuals and the other in groups.

To become fully literate, the individual must acquire a host of neural demons that are completely absent from anyone who lacks literacy training.  This involves massive restructuring.  There is no equivalent in the preliterate mind to the circuits that hold the complex neural components of a reading vocabulary or the elaborate procedural habits of formal thinking.  These are unnatural.  They have to be hammered in by decades of intensive schooling, which changes the functional uses of certain brain circuits and rewire the functional architecture of thought.  This process can be very extensive. Consider the impact of twenty or more years of schooling on the brain of someone who has acquired full symbolic literacy in several different technical, mathematical, scientific, and musical fields.  These skills encumber neural resources on a vast scale and change how the person's mind carries out its work.

the New Deal: action networks and networks of power (a critique of marxism)

(a critique of marxism)

The language of these arrestees can be seen here:


The theoretical resources re. cognitive-discursive performativity:


These resources deployed:

(Einstein's Generation, Maza)
Ken Richardson, Understanding Intelligence (Cambridge, 2022)


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)

" . . . a perfect storm of cognitive degradation . . . "

performative benchmarks: FDR; minutes spring division of Murray Body; Chrysler Exec Bd. and Shop Committees


Bronfenbrenner's bio-ecological model of human development should be understood as a representation of the workings of the biocultural niche of modernity.  Piaget-Luria-Ong provide us with the means to analyze and evaluate actual cognitive-discursive performances.  (Dupre on variations within the smallest environments (family): this is the caveat of fundamental importance.)  Within the cognitive space of this model there are several niches.



It is in this context that one should apprehend Trump's meeting in the tank.

Jessica L. Navarro and Jonathan R. H. Tudge, "Technologizing Bronfenbrenner: Neo-ecological Theory," (Current Psychology (2023) 42:19338–19354)

Bronfenbrenner’s theory, being fully developed by the turn of the cen-
tury (Rosa & Tudge, 2013), did not consider the impact of
developing in the digital age.

---

"Bored of the rings: Methodological and analytic approaches to operationalizing Bronfenbrenner's PPCT model in research practice",

Jessica L. Navarro, Christina Stephens, Blenda C. Rodrigues, Indya A. Walker, Olivia Cook, Leah O'Toole, Noírín Hayes, Jonathan R. H. Tudge
 Journal of Family Theory & Review
First published: 13 June 2022 https://doi.org/10.1111/jftr.12459Citations: 6

Authors claim Bronf.  emmpasized contexts over proximal processes

see Proximal Processes

The contemporary scientific study of human development is characterized by a committment to the understanding of the dynamic relationships between the developing individual and the integrated, multilevel ecology of human development.  This approach to development is marked by a theoretical focus on temporally (historically) embedded person-context relational process; by the embracing of models of dynamic change across the ecological system; and by relational, change-sensitive methods predicated on the idea that individuals influence the people and institutions of their ecology as much as they are influenced by them. (ix)

Especially in its early phases, but also throughout the life course, human development takes place through processes of progressively more complex reciprocal between an active, evolving biopsychosocial human organism and the persons, objects and symbols in its immediate external environment. (xviii)

Within the bioecological theory, develoment is defined as the phenomenon of continuity and change in the biopsychological characteristics of human beings both as individuals and as groups.  The phenomenon extends over the life course across successive generations and through historical time both past and present. (3)

Brain Plasticity and its Consequences

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

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

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

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

Brain Plasticity and its Consequences

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

Something about our mentality changed in the past few millenia, something that made us able to construct such exotic things as symphonies, philosophies, oil refineries, nuclear weapons, and robots.  Do such achievements have implications for theories of consciousness?  Many would deny that they do.  They would claim that the parameters of mind were surely fixed long ago, when we emerged as a species, and that culture can add nothing to an equation written deeply into the human genome.

But that common belief does not stand up to scrutiny.  The human mind has been drastically changed by culture.  In modern culture, enculturation has become an even more formative influence on mental development than it was in the past.  This may be a direct reflection of brain plasticity, rather than genetic change, but that does not in any way diminish the importance of the change from a purely cognitive standpoint.  The human mind is so plastic in the way it carries out its cognitive business, individually and in groups, that the core configuration of skills that defines a mind actually varies significantly as a function of different kinds of culture.  This is especially true of the most conscious domains of mind, such as those involved in formal thinking and representation.

Let me be very clear about what I mean here.  I am not speaking of trivial cultural changes, such as variations in custom or language use.  These are by far the most common and have no proven cognitive impact.  The most important of these is literacy.  Literacy skills change the functional organization of the brain and deeply influence how individuals and communities of literate individuals perform cognitive work.  Mass literacy has triggered two kinds of major cogitive reorganizations, one in individuals and the other in groups.

To become fully literate, the individual must acquire a host of neural demons that are completely absent from anyone who lacks literacy training.  This involves massive restructuring.  There is no equivalent in the preliterate mind to the circuits that hold the complex neural components of a reading vocabulary or the elaborate procedural habits of formal thinking.  These are unnatural.  They have to be hammered in by decades of intensive schooling, which changes the functional uses of certain brain circuits and rewire the functional architecture of thought.  This process can be very extensive. Consider the impact of twenty or more years of schooling on the brain of someone who has acquired full symbolic literacy in several different technical, mathematical, scientific, and musical fields.  These skills encumber neural resources on a vast scale and change how the person's mind carries out its work.