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, action networks and networks of power, and context.

This site began as an attempt to advance an analysis of the historical trajectory: the New Deal to Donald Trump, but the events of the second decade of the 21st century, when viewed through the lens provided by The Social Origins of Language, forced me to see that there was a bigger picture.  This bigger picture is represented by Figure 0. From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States.

"Trump" forces us to face the question of our primate heritage (and its corrolary, patrimonialism), on the one hand, and the fragility of print-based civilization, on the other. 

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 associated with the biocultural niche of modernity.  As catastrophes go, this one--the disintegration of the biocultural niche of modernity--is a whole order of magnitude greater than the catastrophe known as the Great Depression of 1929-1941.  What is happening now is beyond the cognitive scope of current popular and much scholarly thought, which is economistic in character and Cartesian in its metaphysical presuppositions. 

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.

Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age ( (McGill-Queens University Press, 2010)

Simon Clarke, Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)

Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: a Social and cultural history of psychoanalysis (Vintage, 2004)

. . . learning is dynamic, social, and context dependent because emotions are, and emotions form a critical piece of how, what, when, and why people think, remember, and learn. (p. 17)

In general, cognition and emotion are regarded as two interrelated aspects of human functioning.   (p. 36)

It assembles phenomenological bundles (the phenomenological bundle named fascism, for example) and identifies elementary particles (McMahon and Ehrenberg on the deep structure of the two-party system; Lacan-Atwater signifying chain;).

from Inka Mülder-Bach, "Introduction" to Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty amd Distraction in Weimar Germany (Verso, 1998), p. 15.

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

The commission tried the cocked-gun approach in a circular letter mailed out to all Massachusetts railroads in 1871.  Adams' purpose was to promote rate reductions, by way of both enticements and threat.  The letter . . . outlined the reduced costs brought by technological innovation ("The locomotive which formerly cost $30,000 now costs but $12,000"), the unusual opportunity now at hand ("Massachusetts is at this time susceptible of a very great and sudden industrial development"), and the payoff to the railroads themselves ("It is a pefectly well-established fact in railroad economy, that where a community is industrially in an elastic condition . . . a reduction of railroad charges within certain limits does not necessarilly involve any loss of net profits").

The content of the rate recommendations revealed Adams' preoccupation with aggregate economic growth.  He emphasized, for example, a form of what economists later called the multiplier effect:

Excerpt from Louis D. Brandeis, Vol. 8, pp. 4818-4820
David O. Ives, chairman of the traffic committee of the seaboard organizations
Lawrence 
Miller

And so Merriam entered the race.  His campaign manager was Harold L. Ickes, who quickly won promises of substantial financial support from industrialist Charles R. Crane [the Crane Co.: industrial and residential plumbing supplies] ad Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears Roebuck and Company.  A number of other wealthy businessmen pledged money.

Sears, Roebuck
Marshall Field & Co.
Mandel Brothers
B. Kuppenheimer
Montgomery Ward
Siegel, Cooper & Co.
G.W. Shelton & Co.

Hart,  Shafner, & Marx
Rosenwald & Weil, Inc.
The Hub (Henry C. Lytton & Sons)
Charles A. Stevens & Brothers
Percival B. Palmer & Co.
Warren Featherbone

Millinery, Gloves, Hats, Hosiery
Bush Hat Co.
Chicagao Mercantile Co.
Joseph N. Eisendrath Co.
Parrotte, Beals & Co.
C.D. Osborn Co.

Wilder & Co.
Guthman, Carpenter, & Telling Co.
Smith-Wallace Shoe Co.
The Rice and Hutchins Chicago Co.
Selz, Schwap & Co.
R.P. Smith & Sons & Co.

Southern Cotton Oil Co. (Wesson Oil)
Booth Fisheries
National Biscuit Co.
Nordyke and Marmon Co.
   (flour and cerial   
   milling machinery)
Beech-Nut Packing
Sprague, Warner & Co.
   (flavoring extracts,  
   preserves, beverages)

Steel-Wedeles Co.
   (importing, jobbing &
   mfg. of grocieries and
   kindred)
W.M. Hoyt Co.
Frankln MacVeagh & Co.
Oerlich & Laux, Inc.
Charles B. Ford & Co.
   (butter, eggs,
   poultry--brokers and
   wholesalers)
W.T. Rawleigh Co.
   (veterinary and pultry
   preparations)
E.B. Millar & Co. (tea,
   coffie--importing and
   mfg)
Libby, McNeil, & Libby
Decatur Brewing Co.
Thomson & Taylor Co.
   (coffee, spices--mfg
   for jobbers)
Reid, Murdoch & Co.
   (coffee, pickles,
   peanut butter)
Rueckheim Bros. &
   Eckstein (candy,
   crackerjacks)
United Cerial Mills
   (Washington Crisps,
   Egg-O-See, Toasted
   Corn Flakes)

James S. Kirk
Frigid Fluid Co.
The Fairbanks, N.K. Co.
Darling & Co.
Globe Rending
Pacific Coast Borax Co.
Fitzpatrick Bros. Soap

Humel & Downing Co.
Sanfod Mfg. Co.
The Paper Mills' Co.
J.W. Butler Paper Co.

And so Merriam entered the race.  His campaign manager was Harold L. Ickes, who quickly won promises of substantial financial support from industrialist Charles R. Crane [the Crane Co.: industrial and residential plumbing supplies] ad Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears Roebuck and Company.  A number of other wealthy businessmen pledged money.

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

human societies form around four distinct power sources – ideological, economic, military and political – which have a relative degree of autonomy from each other.

   The caesura in Marx's work was not the result of an epistemological revolution in 1845, but of his disappointment with the failure of the workers' revolution three years later.  The break was marked by repression of the knowledge that artisinal workers opposed to the spread of large industry had formulated the idea of workers' emancipation.  Marx (and Engels) came instead to place their hopes for a new revolutionary order in the factory proletariat to come, which would be molded by the discipline of large industry.  With this development, the proletariat left the real of social experience to become a normative category consecrated by a certain Marxist "science." (pp. xxi-xxii)

From now on there will be more favorable preconditions for more comprehensive forms of dominion, whose like has never yet existed. And even this is not the most important thing; the possibility has been established for the production of international racial unions whose task will be to rear a master race, the future "masters of the earth"; a new, tremendous aristocracy, based on the severest self-legislation, in which the will of philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants will be made to endure for millennia -- a higher kind of man who, thanks to their superiority in will, knowledge, riches, and influence, employ democratic Europe as their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth, so as to work as artists upon "man" himself.  Enough: the time is coming when politics will have a different meaning.

Memorandum FDR to FF, The White House, March 2, 1936

(b)  I wish you and Lasswell would try to work up a list of those smaller, independent business men -- say fifteen or twenty -- whom I could invite to Washington.  I know of no way of getting up such a list. . . . .

(d)  I hope to have a talk with Lincoln Filene.  I saw him the other day for a miinute but only with a group.  Please ask him if he can come down a little later on.

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  cognitive-performative elements that sharply distinguish the "Class A" "semi-skilled" production and non-production workers from the "Class C" "semi-skilled" production workers.

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

from F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (p. 51 Penguin)

from Werner Stark,  Sociology of Religion: A Study of Christendom (Fordham University Press, 1966-72) vol. 1, p. 188

As democratic convictions became settled . . . 'the people' emerged increasingly as the true sovereign, and the conception gained ground that 'the people' is sane and sound, and its voice, at least to some extent, is sacred.

and from Nietzsche, Will to Power, § 863

“The values of the weak prevail because the strong have taken them over as devices of leadership.”

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

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

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


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

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.

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)

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."