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 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.

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.

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

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