index

The Disintegration of the Two-Party System
and the
Descent into Barbarism

the historicity of language and cognition

"Can't you just shoot them? Just shoot them
in the legs or something?"

In the beginning . . .

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

1. "Introduction" (Dor, Knight, and Lewis)

. . . 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.

2. "Vocal Deception, Laughter, and the linguistic significance of reverse dominance", pp. 307-9 (Knight and Lewis)

So decisively do women inhibit male aggression that the contest collapses into laughter and sexual play. The outcome is . . . ‘communism in motion’—a never-ending pendulum swinging between male dominance and its celebratory overturn, between brute force on the one hand, and, on the other, female collectivized attractiveness and corresponding power asserted through song, ribald laughter, and erotic play. . . . So how was sexual violence contained and transcended in the human case? . . . . Ritualized play pervades the very arena which, in other primate—chimpanzees, for example—leads recurrently to sexual violence.

. . . Brief Interlude . . .

from Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: the Evolution of Human Consciousness (W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 301-2

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.

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. . . . 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 Return of the Repressed

from Richard Lachmann, "Coda: American Patrimonialism: The Return of the Repressed” in Patrimonial Power in the Modern World, Julia Adams and Mounira M. Charrad, eds. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2011

Patrimonialism, until fairly recently, seemed an archaic social form, largely replaced by bureaucratic rationalism. That confident view of modernity, in the histories that Max Weber and his followers wrote, deserves to be challenged as patrimonial regimes reappear in states and firms throughout the world.

from Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (W. W. Norton & Company, 2001)

. . . 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. (p. 262)

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).

Fig. 0. (The bigger picture). The Evolutionary Context of the 2016 election: from the origins of language to the end of print literacy in the United States

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A map of early human migrations

from James R. Flynn, What is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect (Cambridge Univesity Press, 2009):

Our ancestors in 1900 were not mentally retarded. . . . We differ from them in that we can use abstractions and logic and the hypothetical to attack the formal problems that arise when science liberates thought from concrete situations. Since 1950 we have become more ingenious in going beyond previously learned rules to solve problems on the spot. pp. 10-11

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. p. 29

from Mercedes Cubero and Manuel L. de la Mata, "Activity Settings, Ways of Thinking and Discourse Modes: An Empirical Investigation of the Heterogeneity of Verbal Thinking," in Seth Chaiklin, The Theory and Practice of Cultural-Historical Psychology (Aarhus University Press, 2001), p. 220:

Bruner (1986, 1990) argues for a semiotic conception of thinking, in which each mode of thought is associated with two ways of thinking, or two ways of knowing: logical-scientific thinking and narrative.

Reading and Modernity

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.")

What is modernity?

This map was only constructed in the time of Trump, although the interviews that produced it were conducted in the mid-1970s. Thus, it is only recently that I realized that the Unity caucus was a fusion of bildungs-proletarians and plebeian upstarts, was the vanguard of modernity* in the factories of southeastern Michigan, and was organically related to the Keynesian elite in the New Deal state. The bildungsproletarian component of that fusion was made up mostly of communists and socialists (Lists of Bild.proles).

percent of workers in plants

plebeian upstarts: 7 to 10 percent

bildungs-proletarians: 0.06 to 0.16 percent

When placed in the contexts of Figure 0 and the periodization of the history of reading and writing provided by Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing, the extended mind of the Unity caucus becomes a cultural historical base camp from which observations can be made regarding both the historicity of language and cognition and the historicity of violence.

* What is modernity? Merlin Donald says it best: from from Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: the Evolution of Human Consciousness (W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 301-2

From FDR to Donald Trump: I

Consider the cognitive performativities evident in these minutes:

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

The members of the Local 2 Committee were:

Brother Hall from Spring & Wire
Brother McDonnell from Stamping
Brothers Sanders and McWilliams from Trim
Brother Smith from Frame (Ecorse plant)
Brother Manini, Vice President
Also present was Executive Board member Walter Reuther

Walter Reuther is the bildungsproletarian in the room. The members of the Murray Body committee were plebeian upstarts. Reuther, born into the Socialist civilization of the midwest, had been a student at Wayne State University. The ad hoc committee members were most likely high school graduates.

Now compare the discussion among these UAW cadre with the discursive performativity of Donald Trump as described in Rucker and Leonnig's account of Trump’s meeting in the Tank with the Joint Chiefs in A Very Stable Genius. ("the tank meeting had so thoroughly shocked the conscience of military leaders that they tried to keep it a secret")

in both cases we observe the unfolding of cognitive-discursive processes within well-defined rational-bureaucratic frameworks* where certain kinds of cognitive-discursive performative competencies were to be expected (normativity).

*Also, Fiona Hill's account of Trump's cognitive-discursive performativity in ‘This Was Trump Pulling a Putin’ (New York Times, April 11, 2022)

"He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate."

from "The President Who Doesn't Read," The Atlantic, January 5, 2018 (review of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury):

Ironically, it was the publication of a book this week that crystallized the reality of just how little Donald Trump reads. While . . . Trump’s indifference to the printed word has been apparent for some time, the depth and implications of Trump’s strong preference for oral communication over the written word demand closer examination. "He didn’t process information in any conventional sense," Wolff writes. "He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate."*

*"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." Donald, A Mind So Rare.

From FDR to Donald Trump: II

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - Campaign Address (speech file 930), October 1, 1936

Oelwein, Iowa - Western Campaign Trip - Informal remarks (speech file 935), October 9, 1936

Madison Square Garden, Campaign Speech, October 31, 1936

Audio
Transcript

Fireside Chat #13 - "Report to the Nation on National Affairs" (part 2) (speech file 1138B), June 24, 1938 View Online

The Liberalism of today's Dems is the antithesis of New Deal progressivism in two fundamental ways. First, the genetic ontology of progressivism is bildung and the will to power (civic republicanism); The genetic ontology of liberalism is nihilism (commercial republicanism: consumerism). Second, the nation is the primary ontology--not interests groups or victims. Third, planning is an integral part of progressive nationalism. Today's liberalism is referred to as the left, thus covering over the genetic-ontological transformation of the post-war years (see Hall et. al.)

But there is a fourth difference between the progressivism of "FDR" and today's liberalism.. The progressives should be thought in the context of the concept of bildung.* Bildung is about character and cognition on the one hand, but also about the relationship of individual development to visions of national development that involve the development, intellelctual/cognitive and cultural, of citizens. Without understanding this, it is impossible to understand the history of the UAW. And, also, without this understanding it is immpossible to have even the foggiest idea about the catasterophic disintegration of Mind in America.

**Frederick C. Beiser, "The Concept of Bildung in Early German Romanticism," in Beiser, The Romantic Imperative (Harvard, 2003)
Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience since the Sesventeenth Century (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 301-4
Philippe-Joseph Salazar, "Reconnaissances of Marx", Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 48, No. 4, 2015
Nordic Paths to Modernity, Jóhann Páll Árnsason and Björn Wittrock, eds .(Bergham Books, 2012)

➞

History (White¹) and Psychology (Flynn²)

¹Richard White, The Republic for which it Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Guilded Agge, 1865-1896* (Oxford, 2017), pp.

²James R. Flynn, What is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect (Cambridge Univesity Press, 2009):

*This book is essential reading. I chose the excerpts because they provide a context for understanding the bildungsproletarians who were the leading force in the organization of auto workers in the 1930s. White describes two things of immediate relevance: 1. the cognitive-technical dimension of the vibrant industrial culture of "Yankees". This becomes part of the cognitive-developmental timeline. And 2. the creation of the Socialist civilization of the midwest, into which the bildungsproletrians whom I interviewed were born.

On Language and Philosophy

On Language:
First Row
➞

the primary semantic units are not 'words' but material-discursive practices through which (ontic and semantic) boundaries are constituted. This dynamic is agency.

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

Discourse is not a synonym for language. Discourse does not refer to lingusitic or signifying systems, grammars, speech acts, or conversations. To think of discourse as mere spoken or written words forming descriptive statements is to enact the mistake of representationalist thinking. Discourse is not what is said; it is that which constrains and enables that which can be said. Discursive practices define what counts as meaningful statements. Statements are not the mere utterances of the originating consciousness of a unified subject; rather, statements and subjects emerge from a field of possibilities. This field of possibilities is not static or singular but rather is a dynamic and contingent multiplicity. 146-7

. . . the primary ontological units are not 'things' but phenomena--dynamic topological / reconfigurings / entanglements / relationalities / (re)articulations of the world. And the primary semantic units are not 'words' but material-discursive practices through which (ontic and semantic) boundaries are constituted. This dynamic is agency.

from Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body (University of Illinois Press, 2005), p. 75

In Die fröliche Wissenschaft (1882) Nietzsche proposes that language enables us to “produce” things, to shape our conception of reality: “This has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realize that what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are . . . it is sufficient to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create, in the long run, new ‘things’” (GS 58).

For Nietzsche, language lets us grasp, order, and judge what we regard as reality, and it also gives us the means to reflect on this reality through the development of general terms and concepts, which let us realize similarities and relations among things and see contexts and construct coherent systems of belief about this reality. Our experience and knowledge of reality . . . is therefore embedded in a network of concepts delineating what we perceive as our environment.

← On Language and Philosophy →
↓
prelude to Trump: from the origins of language to the end of print literacy in the United States

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Thoughts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.

from Imanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787)

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). Thus the represesntations’white’, ‘grainy’, ‘saline’ are combined and ordered in the concept ‘salt, while the representations ‘colorless’, ‘liquid’, ‘tasteless’ (say) are not. In this way a concept is a rule allowing me to unite certain representations and to bring them under a higher representation, i.e. the concept. (pp. 22-3)

Cognition does not consist merely in the collecting of phenomena; rather we strive to forge conceptual links between them and to grasp the laws of nature that are valid for specific classes of objects as cases of yet more general laws, whereby we are guided by the ideal of a unified explanation of nature. (p. 38)

“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. I see, e.g., a spruce, a willow, and a linden. By first comparing these objects with one another I note that they are different from one another in regard to the trunk, the branches, the leaves, etc.; but next I reflect on that which they have in common among themselves, trunk, branches, and leaves themselves, and I abstract from the quantity, the figure, etc., of these; thus I acquire a concept of a tree.” (pp. 250

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)

On Language:
Second Row
➞

This emergent property of human culture has important implications.

from Philip G. Chase, The Emergence of Culture. The Evolution of a Uniquely Human Way of Life (Springer, 2006)* pp. 1-2

Human behavior and ape behavior, like that of all mammals, is guided in part by ideas, concepts, beliefs, etc. that are learned in a social context from other individuals of the same species. Among humans, however, some of these are not just learned socially but are also created socially, through the interactions of multiple individuals. . . . Culture cannot be understood at the level of the individual alone. Knowing the motivations and mental constructs of the individuals invlved may be necessary to understand cultural creations or cultural changes, but it is not sufficient. It is also necessary to analyze the interactions of those involved. In this sense, human culture is an emergent phenomenon in a way that nonhuman "culture" is not. As Mihata (1997:36) put it,

what we describe most often as culture is an emergent pattern existing on a separate level of organization and abstraction from the individuals, organizations, beliefs, practices or cultural objects that constitute it. Culture emerges from the simultaneous interaction of subunits creating meaning (individuals, organizations, etc.)

This emergent property of human culture has important implications. It makes the nature of human social life different in fundamental ways from that of all other species (in spite of the continuities that also exist). It makes it possible for groups of humans to coordinate their behavior in ways that are impossible for nonhumans. It changes the relationship of the individual to the social group. Because culture provides motivations for the behavior of the individual, it gives the group a means of controlling the individual that is absent among other primates. Among all living humans, culture provides a (uniquely human) mental or intellectual context for almost everything the individual thinks or does.

*Reviewed by Leonid Vishnyatsky, Institute for the History of Material Culture, Dvortsovaya nab. 18, St. Petersburg, 191186, RUSSIA

it is the fitting of action into some kind of systematic pattern that distinguishes the truly free agent from one who merely has the ability to respond to the whim of the moment

from John Dupré, "Causality and Human Nature in the Social Sciences," in Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (Oxford, 2012)

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)

If I simply act in pursuit of whatever passing whim is uppermost at the moment I exhibit no more causal power than any other animal. If I choose to build a bridge, write a book, or cook dinner, and subordinate my choice of actions to this decision, I exercise to a greater or lesser degree a distinctively human ability to shape the world. In the social realm, the ability to confrom to principle, above all moral principle, is the kind of regimentation of behaviour that constitutes a uniquely human achievement. (291)

. . . it is the fitting of action into some kind of systematic pattern that distinguishes the truly free agent from one who merely has the ability to respond to the whim of the moment; and . . . [what emerges is] the ontological picture of the human agent as an entity enabled to pursue complex goals or engage in patterns of action over time by the acquisition of a uniquely rich range of capabilities. (293)

I wish to emphasize particularly the ability of cultural evolution to transform the developmental niche. And here, at least in 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)

The steeper gradients between rich and poor may produce surprising social effects unless we do something about the rich getting richer.

from William Calvin, A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2004). See Calvin's Webpage

It is just in the last 1 percent of that up-from-the-apes period that human creativity and technological capabilities have really blossomed. It's been called "The Mind's Big Bang." In our usual expansive sense of "mind," the history of the mind is surprisingly brief, certainly when compared with the long increase in brain size and the halting march of toolmaking. xiv

. . . there are emergent properties lurking in anything that produces a steep gradient. . . I can imagine softwiring emergents in the brain intensively engaging in structured stuff at earlier ages. The steeper gradients between rich and poor may produce surprising social effects unless we do something about the rich getting richer. 177-8

"Yet once our education has the techniques to incorporate what is being learned about brain plasticity and inborn individual differences, we are likely to produce many more adults of unusual abilities, able to juggle twice as many concepts at once, able to follow a longer chain of reasoning, able to shore up the lower floors of their mental house of cards to allow fragile new levels to be tried out, metaphors and beyond--the survival of the stable but on a higher level yet again." 183

"Such education, perhaps more than any of the imagined genetic changes, could make for a very different adult population. We would still look the same coming out of the womb, would still have the same genetics, but adults could be substantially different. A lot of the elements of human intelligence are things like that, while they also have a genetic basis, are malleable; we ought to be able to educate for superior performance."
184

"But at the high end, what might pump us up even higher? If our conscisness is a house of cards, perhaps there are techniques, equivalent to bending the cards, that will allow us to spend more time at the more abstract levels. Can we shore up our mental edifices to build much taller "buildings" or discover the right mental "steel?""

Emergents are hard to predict, and they are not all beneficial . . . " (pp. 177-78) (p. 186)

On Language:
Third Row
➞

the language(s) of the social sciences (Weber, Marx, Durkheim)

The Social Origins of Language (excerpts). I rely on the work of these researchers to situate the problem of the disintegration of language and cognition in its evolutionary context.*

I rely on the work of researchers in developmental psychology to provide analytical frameworks for evaluating cognitive-discursive performativity.**

On patrimonialism, I rely on Richard Lachman, Julia Adams and Randall Collins for a general orientation, and on Henry Hale, Samuel Greene and Graeme Robertson for deployment of the concept to the case of Putin's Russia.***

* Daniel Dor, Chris Knight, and Jerome Lewis, The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014)
** the PISA Results: Evolutionary, Historical, Developmental, and Psychological Perspectives and the Sapient Paradox,
*** Henry E. Hale, Patronal Politics: Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, 2015); Hale et. al., eds., Developments in Russian Politics 9 (Yale, 2019); Samuel A. Greene and Graeme B. Robertson, Putin vs. the People: the Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia (Yale, 2019)

Foucault, Freud, and Nietzsche

Ely Zaretsky, "The Mass Psychology of Trumpism" (London Review of Books, 18 September 2018). These 19 paragraphs should be read immediately.

Lehr, White Hot Hate: A True Story of Domestic Terrorism in America's Heartland

every GOP rhetorical gesture is generated by the grammar, and drawn from the lexicon, of the sado-sexual eigenvector that runs like a river of blood through the body politic.

sado-sexual eigenvector is ontologically prior to "racism", mysogyny, war-mongering. Eigenvector the primordial core of being, of Being. (inner) Logic of language games

Marshall Sahlins on Human Nature

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.

On Language:
Fourth Row
➞

Two Public Spheres

The concept of the public sphere as developed by Habermas and others referred originally to the print-based discurive environment of salons, coffee houses within which the discourse of republicanism was developed. This was a very limited public, not only at first

Today a print-based sphere lingers on, but insofar as we are talking about the kind of issues addressed--public issues of politics--the second public sphere is non-print media-based, and has an entirely different emotional and congitive orientation. The second pubic sphere is the arena in which politico-cor[oprate elites manipulate languae

. . . a post-print, oral culture? But not a culture rooted in locality, in face-to-face interactions--what used to be called "traditional" societies. Powerful institutions, both global and national, work up us humans as materials to be shape to their needs and interests.

the death spiral of the two-party system.

The two-party System: Semiotic Regimes I
Cognitive Performativities and Emotional Configurations

	LEFT*	RIGHT
Topology	depressive	paranoid-schizoid
Political style	progressive	proto-Dorian
Cognitive mode	concrete & pre-op	pre-op and gestural
Regime type	rational-bureaucratic	patrimonial

"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."

from from Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: the Evolution of Human Consciousness (W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 301-2

the Enlightenment as a cultural-historical developmental leap (the Symbolic Order of Progressivism)

¹Richard White, The Republic for which it Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Guilded Agge, 1865-1896* (Oxford, 2017), pp.

Edward Stevens Jr., The Grammar of the Machine: Technical Literacy and Early Industrial Expansion in the United States (Yale, 1995)

comment on Margaret Jacob's The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, 2014).

Jacob's emphasis on the socio-cultural networks, circles, meeting houses of these first "industrialists"; her emphasis on the role of books as emotionally charged world-opening objects--one sees here both Vygotsky's notion of zone of proximal development broadened and historicized, and Alcorn's understanding of the development of self that can result from an an engagement with a text. In this way Jacob expands our concept of the Enlightenment.

This requires a reconceptualization of what is called the Enlightenment--the Enlightenment as a cultural-historical developmental leap--an ontological leap, a cognitive revolution, a new Symbolic Order. The superorganisism of the enlightenment . . . from the 18th century to the New Deal (Schiller Hall, Detroit (and the UAW bildungs-proletarians). Scientific reasoning is not merely about knowledge. It is about functioning on the formal-operational level. In the adventure of it, the jouissance of developmental transgression and becoming, lies the secret of the bildungs-proletarians and plebian upstarts who gave us so many Nietzschean spectacles (the Toledo auto lite strike, the Midland Steel sitdown strike, the Flint sitdown strike, the 1943 Dodge Main strike . . . )

"The half century between the 1880s and the 1930s was the golden age of the book in the West."

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.")

(connective tissue)
reading was an activity that was central to self-fashioning

We take reading for granted today without realizing that reading about something in newspapers, books, and pamphlets is different from the mere capacity to sound out words. In my interviews with bildungsproletarians I found a milieu of the kind of print-based association we read about in the various works of scholars of the late 18th and early 19th century growth of a public sphere. The salons where enlightened aristocrats and middle class readers met to discuss politics, philosophy, and society should be considered as nodes in the discursive field of modernity.

Schiller Hall in Detroit should be viewed as just such a radical salon, a node in the discursive field of modernity, a meeting place of the bildungsproletarians. Ed Lock (at the right), proud grandson of a Civil War veteran, communist, Ford, provides an account of the intellectual life of the bildungsproletarians who gathered in Schiller Hall. Saul Wellman (communist, Detroit and Flint), provides an account of intellectual aspirations of new recruits to the Party in Flint in the immediate post-war period. Joe Adams (socialist, Dodge Main) provides an account of such modernist sensibilities on Detroit's east side, and more generally among the socialists he knew back in the day. (click here)

Reading was not only about something; it was also about becoming something, about self-fashioning:

"We have seen," writes S.A. Smith, "that for 'conscous' workers in Russia and, to a lesser extent, in China, reading was an activity that was central to self-fashioning, constitutive of what it meant to be a cultured and autonomous individual."

This is thus much more than mere reading in the sense that the term is understood in today's nearly illiterate society.

comment on Margaret Jacob's The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, 2014).

Schiller Hall: a working class salon in Detroit

from my interview with Ed Lock (CP, UAW Local 600)

I was very active in MESA --- Ford in USSR petered out in March of 1933, and I was laid off. Several months later I found employment in a job shop as a milling machine operator. I got signed up in the MESA, that was a unionized plant. The job didn't last long.

In that period I would hang out at the MESA hall, Schiller Hall* on Gratiot Ave. . . It was very much a Left hall. I became very interested in union . . . I was very young, 20 yrs old. My father was AFL, a ship carpenter, but I didn't assimilate much from him. But I became very interested in the MESA, and one of the characteristics of the time was that large

numbers of radicals of all descriptions IWW, Communist, Socialist . . . would come to this hall, and we would sort of sit around and have big bull discussions with the old timers from the IWW and the Communists and whoever was there . . . We would all participate in these discussions, each of them would bring their literature round . . . I got involved so to speak, I was unemployed, but I would still go because I found these meetings fascinating, and I would participate in the distribution of leaflets.

I would go out with some of the leaders, and go with John Anderson or John Mack, who was a leader at that time. I went to--not so often to Fords--but I went to the Cadillac plant, Ternstedt, places like this, and GM, and would distribute organizational . . . I got involved in the Detroit Stoveworks strike . . . The MESA had undertaken the organization there and had a bitter strike there. A matter of fact I had guns put in my ribs in this strike threatening to kill us. But this was part of my education in the trade union movement.

*Schiller Hall in Detroit should be viewed as a radical salon, a node in the discursive field of modernity, a meeting place of the bildungsproletarians. Here Ed Lock (proud grandson of a Civil War veteran, communist, Ford) provides an account of the intellectual life of the bildungsproletarians who gathered in Schiller Hall. Saul Wellman (communist, Detroit and Flint), provides an account of intellectual aspirations of new recruits to the Party in Flint in the immediate post-war period. Joe Adams (socialist, Dodge Main) provides an account of such modernist sensibilities on Detroit's east side, and more generally among the socialists he knew back in the day. (click here)

Bildung

from S.A. Smith, Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge Univesity Press, 2008)

We have seen that for 'conscous' workers in Russia and, to a lesser extent, in China, reading was an activity that was central to self-fashioning, constitutive of what it meant to be a cultured and autonomous individual. By contrast, the relation of the newly literate and semi-literate readers of the lower urban classes to new forms of commercially produced mass literature, produced with an eye to entertainment rather than education, was far less earnest. . . . p. 100

Indeed, without denying the real potental for tension between individual autonomy and class-based collectivism, we may conclude that genuine forms of collectivism and cooperative action are possible only where class solidarity is grounded in autonomous individuals capable of demanding the recognition due to them as thinking, feeling persons. Without that, new forms of group coercion based on weak individuality are likely to be the result . . . 110

*Frederick C. Beiser, "The Concept of Bildung in Early German Romanticism," in Beiser, The Romantic Imperative (Harvard, 2003)
Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience since the Sesventeenth Century (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 301-4
Philippe-Joseph Salazar, "Reconnaissances of Marx", Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 48, No. 4, 2015
Nordic Paths to Modernity, Jóhann Páll Árnsason and Björn Wittrock, eds .(Bergham Books, 2012)

cognitive-discursive field, cognitive discursive web, and cognitive-discursive performativity

I have been using cognitive-discursive field, cognitive discursive web, and cognitive-discursive performativity with the understanding that these are provisional terms. It now appears that I may have known what I was doing.

cognitive-discursive performativity is the most straightforward. It builds upon the work of Piaget and Vygotsky, of Luria and Ong, of Wittgenstein and of course, of the authors of The Social Origins of Language. It also takes to heart Stephen Ceci's observation*

The possibility that there exists a more restless relationship between intelligence and context, in which thinking changes both its nature and its course as one moves from one situation to another, is enough to cause shudders in some research quarters. It represents a move toward a psychology of situations . . . xvi

The term intelligence is often used synonymously with "IQ", "g", or "general intelligence", especially in some of the psychometric literature. . . however, the ability to engage in cognitively complex behaviors will be shown to be independent of IQ, g, or general intelligence . . . cognitive complexity will be seen to be the more general of the two notions and the one most theoretically important to keep in mind when referring to intelligent behavior. p. 22

cognitive discursive web refers to actual networks of people who interact and discuss ideas and events in the context of a cognitive-discursive field. Whereas cognitive discursive web refers to actual people in actual contact with one another, cognitive-discursive field is more elusive.** Vivian Gornick’s memoirs (Fierce Attachments and Odd Woman and the City) provides us with vivid accounts of what such a field was and how it worked. Gornick, in her teen years, became aware of the great world of possibility, of self-fashioning, a dialectical dance of encounter, immersion, and growth, a world that was nowhere and everywher. This is the world of modern civilization.

*from Stephen J. Ceci, On Intelligence: A Bioecological Treatise on Intellectual Development, expanded edition (Harvard University Press, 1996)
**web refers to actual people in actual contact with one another, cognitive-discursive field is more elusive
cognitive field is what Vivian Gornick

Wyndham Mortimer to Chas, Mar. 22. 1938 (Reuther Library, Kraus Collection, Boxes 11 and 13)

Dear Chas:
Just read your letter and am very glad to hear from you once again. You sure gave us a line on Anderson, and that is exactly what we need. It is my opinion, that he is being brought in for a purpose, and as long as these damned Lovestonites have anything to do with it, you may rest assured the purpose is not a good one. The “Unity” boys are sure making big inroads into the “Martinsteen” camp, and it is my opinion if the convention were held today he couldn't muster a corporals guard to support him.

Frankensteen is playing a very clever game, and is more than cordial to us. He not only does not “Red Bait” but, actually made quite an acceptable speech to the I.W.O.* in which he said “Of course we have Communists in our organization, if they work in the shop their place is in the union, along side every other worker.” He just plugs along and tries to keep out of the fight that is going on, meanwhile letting Martin take all the heat. We held a caucus here in Detroit on Saturday and had two hundred delegates present from about sixty local unions most of them former Martin supporters, and man oh man were they burned up with this new G.M. agreement.

We get resolutions every day calling for a special convention and some of them even say “For the purpose of removing President Martin.”

Fraternally yours.

Wyndham Mortimer
2958 Second Blvd.

*The International Workers Order

s
s
s
s
on cogntive and cultural "awakening" in Flint in the
immediate post-war years

from my interview with Saul Wellman, Michigan State Chairman of the Communist Party at the time:

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.

I want be very specific and very limited in the use of this term (civilization). I am not referring to what is usually meant, which generally excludes any notion biocultural development; and even when it implicitly enters onto the terrain of the concept of biocultural development, only does so accidentally. Our modern, science-based technologically sophisticated society generally does not understand the cognitive-developmental foundations on which it is built, and of course has no comprehension of the cognitive-developmental catastrophe now unfolding in the United States. This is why I repeat this excerpt from Donald's A Mind So Rare

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. . . . 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.

This world, that was everywhere and nowhere, was the world that red-diaper babies were born into, for they were born into the cognitive-discursive field of modernity. Wyman and Dor in The Social Origins of Language deal with these matters of intersubjectivity and interiority, of imagination and aspiration.

The publication of Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879) was a major event in the cognitive-discursive field of modernity: it made waves, it stimulated discussion, it entered the archive. It was a moment in the unfolding of the biocultural niche of modernity. It focused minds.

Paul Kalanithi's memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, is a brilliant account of his encounter with the great world of possibility, of self-fashioning, the dialectical dance of encounter, immersion, and growth, a world that was nowhere and everywhere, theoretically accessible to all, but actually only to those few whose experience, often through mediators (Kalanthis' mother, RB's uncle, ) simetimes through an accidental encounter . . . this world of "letters", of science, of imagination.

I can clarify this by disucssing a hypthetical: if you wanted to destroy a great nation, a scientific and educational world leader, really destroy it to the core, what would you do?➚➹

continued ➚

When I had finished constructing this map-- Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind: the UAW (Unity

Caucus): Bildungsproletarians and Plebeian Upstarts--I tried it out as a synthetic a priori, using it as a lens through which to read the Kraus interview:

Reading the Kraus interview through the lens of figure 1

Right off the bat, Kraus emphasizes Wyndham Mortimer's literary ability. And throughout, the Kraus interview is a commentary on the relationship between Mortimer as bildungsproletarian and the group of plebeian upstarts. The book I wrote in the mid 1970s (Emergence of a UAW Local) is in part an account of the relationship between Edmund Kord (Socialist, student at Wayne State) and the plebeian upstarts in the plant.

The letter from Wyndham Mortimer to Chas of March 22, 1838 (above), well-illustrates Henry Kraus's point regarding Mortimer's writing

ability. It is also one of the most revealing documents regarding the faction fight then at its most intense. Auto workers who were immigrants and the children of immigrants from the fringes of the Russian empire--Finland, Latvia, Serbia--and also Hungary and Romania, were very much a part of the cultural revolution linked to the Russian revolution. The IWO was a part of that cultural revolution. The IWO's support in the faction fight in the UAW was a vital element contributing to the success of the Unity caucus. You should read Mortimer's letter carefully

Modernist Sensibilities on Detroit's East Side, circa 1930s

Joe Adams (Dodge Main Local 3, socialist) interview conducted around 1975-76

My background on unionism. Mostly it was like on my dad with the newspaper socialism. He believed in socialism. He used to sit there and talk. I had seven brothers, and hell, the old man used to sit down. He was a pretty intelligent guy, like the Reuther boys we used to listen to the old man.”

Religion was a bunch of bullshit. As a statesman Reuther got to be where he went to some church and just went there once in a while just to make it look good, but shit when he died he [they] let nobody near him—any of them—godddamn rabbis or preists or ministers, he felt the same way about all of them there like [Roy] and him, up your bunhole, just burn it and get the hell over with it. That’s the way I feel about it.

There are a nucleus of people in any organization that make all organizations function. I don’t care what you say. You can have a million members and there can be fifty of them that makes the UAW function, which is what happened there for the last thirty five years. The Reuthers, the Woodcocks, myself. You know when a guy like me brings in 250,000 members into this goddamn union he has to have a semblance of some intelligence. he just can’t go out and say ‘I’m an organizer’. In Patterson NJ there was 32,000 people in Wright Aeronautical, and I got 23,000 votes out of them people for the UAW.

PF. In 43 44 did you support the No Strike Pledge?

Adams. Everybody did. [UAW conventions]

Adams. In '44 I was put in the Army. We had a no strike pledge, and the company could do any goddamned -- and a lot of times they was runnin roughshod, they was overstepping their bounds. 'Cause I was a steward at that time, and at that time remember the day steward was boss over 3 shifts. That was the setup we had here, like a plant committeeman over an area. And the agreements we had verbally--and a verbal agreement, to me, is worth more than this goddamned stuff you put in a paper.* And the company would say no, we didn't say this, we didnt say that, in front of the FBI guy. They would deny every godamned thing and they would just change the goddamned work schedule. Work 'em out of seniority. They tried everything goddamned thing when they had a no strike pledge in.

PF. Were there any strikes at Dodge?

Adams. Yes. I was kicked in the Army [unclear probably during] strike.

PF. Did you lead one of those strikes?

Adams. Yeah. I was steward . .

PF. You didn't follow the no-strike pledge?

Adams. Well, I'll tell ya. Let me say this. If they fire a couple of your workers, and you're a chief steward--in them days, if you don't back them guys you're a goddamned shit___ [heel?]

PF. . . .

Adams. Frankesnteen was a vice president at that time and he had us at Cass Tech, and Frankensteen couldn't get us back to work. I had three kids at that time and when you had three kids you didn't have to go into the service. They put me in. Work or fight . . . that's all. . . . .

"7,500 Strike, Shut Three Chrysler Plants," Detroit News, May 20, 1943

comment 1

The brutishness in language and behavior that are the chief characteristics of Trump's (and the GOP's) mass-oriented performances must be understood as manifestations of something of great ontological and evolutionary significance. The sado-sexual eigenvector of these performativities (widely recognized but not understood) goes back to the Know-Nothing roots of the GOP (Gniepp), later 19th century anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic political rhetoric, the lynching for rape discourse, the southern strategy, and the infamous Willie Horton episode in George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign.

Brutish means crudely vulgar and aggressively (but not self-consciously) stupid. But, while the vulgarity of the 45th President of the United States has been conceptualized in the public sphere (conceptualized but also euphemised), his truly stunning stupidity has not been conceptualized, although sometimes snickered at by media pesonalities.

Among the books I have read on 45 it is only Michael Wolff's Trump Trilogy* that addresses the cognitive-discursive catastrophe that is so evident yet completely unconceptualized in the public sphere. The above row of two excerpts and one comment provides a context for Wolff's books. In addition, one should read Rucker and Leonnig's account of Trump’s meeting in the Tank with the Joint Chiefs in A Very Stable Genius.

*Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (2018); Siege: Trump Under Fire (2019); Landslide: the Final Days of the Trump White House (2021)

Bronfenbrenner's Bioecological Model

Sex
and Violence

Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany

Lyndal Roper on Q-Anon: 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

*Abortion, Trump rallies, telephone threats, guns, death, torture, school board assaults. Inflicting pain on the other is an expression of the sado-sexual eigenvector of right-wing politics, and thus sadism is the core value of the values voters. So-called "conspiracy theories" become intelligible as instances of the political mobilization of the paranoid-schizoid position (Simon Clarke, Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism). Cognitive-developmentally speaking, conspiracy "theories" can also be viewed as cartoon-like. Vivid and simple-minded to the extreme, they appeal to the toddleresque mentalité of the milieu of American fascism (DATA)

*Ted Cruz worries Disney will show "Mickey and Pluto going at it" and Twitter has questions (salon)
"Why are conservatives so worried about sex and genitalia all the time?" Twitter users wonder

x
d
d

from Ann Goldberg, “Women and Men: 1760-1960,” in Helmut Walser Smith, The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford, 2011)

Victor Nell, "Cruelty’s rewards: The gratifications of perpetrators and spectators," Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29, 211–257

Jacquelyn Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jesse Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching (Columbia, 1993)

Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (1949. Norton ed. 1994)

Maureen Dowd, "Starr Chamber: The Sequel. President Trump reaches deep into the perv barrel for his defense team," NYT, Jan 18, 2020.
--------------------
from Levi R. Bryant, Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence (Northwestern University Press, 2008)

A style or essence is what we might refer to as an identity of difference, or an identity produced through difference. It is not a type or a kind, but rather a rule of production, a genetic factor. It is an identity that maintains itself through topological variations. It is for this reason that we speak of morphological essences or diagrams of becoming. 68

Although Deleuze himelf never makes reference to the notion of topological essences, the theme can be seen to run throughout his work. . . . Insofar as a topological identity is produced between the variations a structure can undergo, Deleuze is also able to maintain the being of concrete universals which are no longer opposed to particulars. 70-71

the Sado-
Sexual
Eigen-
vector of
GOP
Perform-
ativity

Comment on 1 through 4

Media personalities operating with the two-party discursive field report the sexual obsessiveness of GOP rhetorical performativity in each particular instance, but sees no connection between separate instances. Yet this sexual obsessiveness is the prevailing theme of such rhetorical performativity, while sadism is the emotional content. The grilling of Judge Jackson by Cruz, Graham et. al. on the theme of child pornography was an outstanding example of this. Over and over again, it recurs, eternally (Nietzsche).

The two-party discursive field excludes the very processes described by Foster (t the right). For example, "Trumpism" is a word used often in the two-party discursive field. By tacking "ism" to the noun "Trump" a speaker implies that a concept has been born. Fascism is a concept; Trumpism is a psuedo-concept. Its uses reveals in an instant* the cogntive minimalism of the two-party discursive field.

The expression "culture war" is pervasive in media discourse. It is similar to the term "extremism:" both reveal the inner drive of liberal media discourse: euphemization. One side of the culture war involves deployment of the sado-sexual eigenvector of GOP performativity.**

*Arnold Schoenberg on Anton Weber: " . . . to express a novel in a single gesture . . .

**Inflicting pain on the other is an expression of the sado-sexual eigenvector of right-wing politics, and thus sadism is the core value of the values voters. So-called "conspiracy theories" become intelligible as instances of the political mobilization of the paranoid-schizoid position (Simon Clarke, Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism). Cognitive-developmentally speaking, conspiracy "theories" can also be viewed as cartoon-like. Vivid and simple-minded to the extreme, they appeal to the toddleresque mentalité of the milieu of American fascism (DATA)

Abortion, Trump rallies, telephone threats, guns, death, torture, school board assault, etc.

4) The Sado-sexual Eigenvector of GOP Performativity

from Imanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787)

Thoughts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.

from Eckart Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: a Systematic Reconstruction (Harvard, 2012)

The Imus Brouhaha and that which is called "Racism" April 4, 2007

The GOP as the Stupid Party?
GOP Sexual Obsessions on display re. child porn (Senate Confirmation Hearings on Judge Jackson)

Updating the Concept of Fascism

the Southern Strategy:
the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain

from Wikipedia: (Lee Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy)

As a member of the Reagan administration in 1981, Atwater gave an anonymous interview to political scientist Alexander P. Lamis. Part of the interview was printed in Lamis's book The Two-Party South, then reprinted in Southern Politics in the 1990s with Atwater's name revealed. . . . Atwater talked about the Republican Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan's version of it:

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."

● ● ●

the Meaning of Trump:
primate-style dominance is periodically overthrown
and then restored

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

from Eva Jablonka, Simona Ginsburg, and Daniel Dor, "The co-evolution of language and emotions," Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, Vol. 367, No. 1599 (5 August 2012), pp. 2152-2159

one of the contributing factors making human cooperation and aggression unique is the language-based control of emotions. However, the ability to control emotions can lead not only to inhibitory effects but also to excitatory ones: language can be mobilized for generating aggression. Furthermore, because words and phrases construct and stabilize human mental emotional categories, language makes it much easier to manipulate emotions for both aggressive and cooperative ends. In humans, cooperation and aggression are therefore, at least partially, symbol-bound and symbol-controlled, and, in this respect, are qualitatively different from cooperation and aggression in other animals.

from T. D. Price and G. M. Feinman, Chapter 1, “Social Inequality and the Evolution of Human Social Organization”, in Pathways to Power: New Perspectives on the Emergence of Social Inequality (Springer, 2010)

In a very real sense, human society over the last 100,000 years or more may have been characterized by a fundamental tension between relations based on dominance, hierarchy, and kin altruism (part of our primate heritage) and new capacities for social cognition, cultural learning, alliance building, and cooperation, whether the latter behaviors were learned or part of recently acquired innate tendencies (Boehm 2000, Stone 2008: 79, Tomasello et al. 2005).

Trump in Context

from from Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: the Evolution of Human Consciousness (W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 301-2 (emphasis added)

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.

Socialization in Reverse?

from Juan Carlos Gomez, Apes, Monkees, Children and the Growth of Mind (Harvard University Press, 2004)

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 development that change the nature of cognitive ontogeny. (pp. 262-3)

three Trump-related cognitive-discursive assessments

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 "The President Who Doesn't Read," The Atlantic, January 5, 2018 (review of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury):

from "Anonymous, A Warning" (Washington Post, November 7, 2019):

I am not qualified to diagnose the president’s mental acuity,” the author writes. “All I can tell you is that normal people who spend any time with Donald Trump are uncomfortable by what they witness. He stumbles, slurs, gets confused, is easily irritated, and has trouble synthesizing information, not occasionally but with regularity. Those who would claim otherwise are lying to themselves or to the country.

Thermidor: the end of the New Deal, 1936-1939

This panel addresses the problem posed by FDR's apparent ineptitude of his court-packing efforts of early 1937. The chart below is from macrotrends . . .

*Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War; Jeff Shesol, Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court; and Susan Dunn, Roosevelt's Purge: How FDR Fought to Change the Democratic Party.

from Industrial Production--100 Year Historical Chart

➔

from from Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: the Evolution of Human Consciousness (W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 301-2

x
xx
Cognitive Decline

A great advantage of the new technology making this site possible is that one can do better than merely bearing certain things in mind. One can copy and paste, so that instead of bearing the above excerpt in mind one can repeat it. Space becomes cheap, and links can leap about in the archive of mind. Even if you don't reread the excerpt from A Mind So Rare, its physical appearance above can serve to recall it's contents and importance.

The excerpts and graphs at the right should be seen in the context of the above excerpt.

One thing

The PISA Results: Evolutionary, Historical, Developmental, and Psychological Perspectives assembles excerpts from the scholarly literature that help contextualize the data represented at the right.

Note, however, that in that page the data only goes up to 2015. You should look at the link above now, if only to see more clearly the overall pattern. For an American New Deal Nationalist such as myself, it's a grim picture.

In the graphs at the right that go up to 2018, things appear to have improved, even though we are still at the bottom among what used to be called the advanced industrial nations.

But wait! There's fraud and chicanery almost certainly involved in the reporting of the American data (see "inexplicable anomalies"). Just what data were omitted? Here's a project for an enterprising student to undertake. Meanwhile, it is prudent to assume that honest reporting would have produced a graph where the downward trajectory of the U.S. results would have been more pronounced.

All of the materials in The PISA Results: Evolutionary, Historical, Developmental, and Psychological Perspective were assembled before The Social Origins of Language was published.

four assessments

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

Think of it this way. Workers at McDonald’s outlets all over the world tend to be at the lower end of the labor force, say the 20th percentile. But Danish workers at the 20th percentile are high school graduates who are literate and numerate.

In contrast, after half a century of underinvestment in the United States, many 20th-percentile American workers haven’t graduated from high school, can’t read well, aren’t very numerate, struggle with drugs or alcohol, or have impairments that reduce productivity.

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.

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 Edward Frenkel And Hung-Hsi Wu, "Republicans Should Love 'Common Core'. National standards can revive the way we teach math and science," Wall Street Journal, 5-6-13

Mathematical education in the U.S. is in deep crisis. The World Economic Forum ranks the quality of math and science education in the U.S. a dismal 48th. This is one of the reasons the 2010 report "Rising Above the Gathering Storm" by the National Academies warned that America's ability to compete effectively with other nations is fading. . . . [The report refers to] the current lock-step march to the bottom of international student performance in math and science.

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f
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fPISA Math Scores, 2003 to 2018: 21 Developed Nations
and 4 East Asian City-States (SHMC)

PISA Math Scores, 2003 to 2018:18 Anglo-European Nations

see"inexplicable anomalies"
Problems with the U. S. Data:
Political (2006) and "Technical" (2018)

Source. "How Other Nations Pay for Childcare. The U.S. is an Outlier" (New York Times, October 6, 2021)

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hh
semiotic regimes: the two-party
discursive field

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A. Here are the sources for the psychological-emotional conceptualization of the Two-Party System: Semiotic Regimes:

Simon Clarke, Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism (Palgrave Macmillan; 2003), pp. 134-41

Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009)

Eli Zarestsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (Vintage, 2005)

Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightement: the French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001)

B. and for the cognitive developmental conceptualization of the Two-Party System: Semiotic Regimes:

The Development of Children (Sixth Edition) by Cynthia Lightfoot, Michael Cole, and Sheila R. Cole (2009)

Laura E. Berk, Development Through the Lifespan, (1998)

Piaget, Genetic Epistemology

Stephen J. Ceci, On Intelligence: A Bioecological Treatise on Intellectual Development (Harvard, 1996)

Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (Routledge, 2002)

A. R. Luria, Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations (Harvard, 1976)

Deep Structure of the Two-party System: Emotional Configurations

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

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

The two-party System: Semiotic Regimes I
Cognitive Performativities and Emotional Configurations

	LEFT*	RIGHT
Topology	depressive	paranoid-schizoid
Political style	progressive	proto-Dorian
Cognitive mode	concrete & pre-op	pre-op and gestural
Regime type	rational-bureaucratic	patrimonial

useful idiots

--an application of the method: Dr. Oz and Nutritional Supplements: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

what is the relationship beween Oz and his audience. (what it is to be part of an audience: Generosity (Richard Powers, 2009)

Workbooks (Imus, Semiotic Regimes

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

To this extent media discourse* is never to be taken literally: as such, it never contains anything but nonsense. But as semiotics it remains of incaculable value: it reveals, to the informed man, at least, the most precious realities of cultures and inner worlds which did not know how to "understand" themselves. Media discourse** is merely sign-language, merely sympomology . . .

* "moral judgement" in the original

** "Morality" in the original

the Deep Structure of the Two-Party System: political configurations

from Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightement: the French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 48-52

What were the elements of this emergent right wing vision? The fundamental importance of religion in maintaining political order, a preoccupation with the perils of intellectual and social license, the valorization of the family and history, the critique of abstract rights, the dangers of dividing sovereignty, and the need for a strategic alliance between throne and altar . . . Even more fundamental was a Manichean readiness to divide the word in two: bewtween good and evil, right and wrong, Right and Left.

Yet to say that the anti-philosophe discourse fulfilled an ideological function is not to assert that it offered a fully developed political platform. Rather it provided a "symbolic template" through which to construe a perplexing and rapidly changing world, a number of "authoritative concepts" and "suasive images" by which they could be grasped.

By invoking this mythic golden past . . . anti-philosophes revealed signs of a romantic, qasi-utopian yearning for wholeness and social unity that would characterize a strain in far Right thinking for years to come.

Reactive, reductive, Manichean, this thinking is less noteworthy, perhaps, for its particulars than for its general form. It was precisely this tendency to view society as a battleground between opposing camps that stands as a hallmark of the bipolar, Right-Left model of politics so fundamental to subsequent European history. . . . Dividing the world between good and evil, between the pious and the profane, anti-philosphes saw their struggle as a cosmic war in which the winners would take all.

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Progressivism and Liberalism are opposites, not twins

The Two-Party System: Semiotic Regimes II
Elites and their Masses
see Elites: Strategic and Otherwise

MSNBC/CNN New York Times and

Washington Post

NIHILISM (Liberalism) BILDUNG (Progressivism)

Commercial republicanism    Civic republicanism
concrete-operational and          formal-operational and
pre-operational                         concrete operational

Fox News

RESSENTIMENT

Fascism

pre-operational and gestural

rentier sectors; provincial capitals; patrimonial
and predatory businesses and racist political ecologies

from Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (Oxford Univeristy Press, 2008), p.p. 188-89. (Emphasis added.)

Limbaugh's attempts at gender-based "humor" are of the locker room variety. As the California gubernatorial recall was heating up, Limbaugh informed his folowers that Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante--"whose name loosely translates into Spanish for 'large breasts'--leads the Terminator by a few pionts" (August 18, 2003). A photomontage on the Limbaugh website shows a photograph of Schwartzenegger's head and shoulders from his Pumping Iron days as a body builder. A naked woman has been transposed onto his shoulders. Over her breasts is a sign reading BUSTAMONTE. When Madonna endorsed General Wesley Clark, Limbaugh reported that she had "opened herself" to him. Why the vulgarity in this message does not alienate the churchgoing conservatives in his audiences is a question for which we have no ready answer.

from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 14

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!

d
The Southern Strategy: the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain

from Wikipedia: (Lee Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy)

UNDER CONSTRUCTION/A WORKING SPACE

cognitive-discursive performativity
cognitive-discursive networks, webs and fields:
cognitive-discursive performativity
milieu

Indo-european civilization as cog-disc field (Copernicus, Newton, Kant . . . : names associated with "the circuits that hold the complex neural components of a reading vocabulary or the elaborate procedural habits of formal thinking"

"western" civilization as cog-disc field (the Crusades, the Inquisitiion, the Holocaust, Trump-Putin)

network is a set of communicating individuals
web is cognitive-discursive performativities spatialized
field is everywhere and nowhere: webs and fields: the "spirit of the age"

Stephen J. Ceci, On Intelligence: A Bioecological Treatise on Intellectual Development, expanded edition (Harvard University Press, 1996)

The possibility that there exists a more restless relationship between intelligence and context, in which thinking changes both its nature and its course as one moves from one situation to another, is enough to cause shudders in some research quarters. It represents a move toward a psychology of situations . . . xvi

"The term intelligence is often used synonymously with "IQ", "g", or "general intelligence", especially in some of the psychometric literature. . . however, the ability to engage in cognitively complex behaviors will be shown to be independent of IQ, g, or general intelligence . . . cognitive complexity will be seen to be the more general of the two notions and the one most theoretically important to keep in mind when referring to intelligent behavior." 22

. . . it would appear that no theory is capable of handling the diversity of findings reviewed earlier, unless it consists of the three prongs of biology, environment, and motivation. An important feature of the bio-ecological framework has been to suggest mechanisms by which these three factors combine to produce contextually tied performances . . . " 192

There are two primary cognitive-discursive webs: the rational-scientific, upon which modern capitalism is built; and the moral-emotional semiotic webs within which e eerryday life unfolds (Ong, Luria, Bruner, Flynn).

But when the developmental process that creates the numeracy and the literacy (high-school) that civilization depends upon, and upon which the capacity for further cognitive development (college) depends; and when the moral and ethical fabric that makes society possible is being shredded before our eyes, these two primary discursive webs do not within themselves have the means to understand or cope with the violence and greed rampant in the land. And they are a priori unable to understand the disintegration of cognitive-discursive performativity within the United States today.

cognitive discursive web refers to actual networks of people who interact and discuss ideas and events in the context of a cognitive-discursive field. Whereas cognitive discursive web refers to actual people in actual contact with one another, cognitive-discursive field is more elusive. Vivian Gornick’s memoirs (Fierce Attachments and Odd Woman and the City) provides us with vivid accounts of what that was and how it worked. Gornick, in her teen years, became aware of the great world of possibility, of self-fashioning, a dialectical dance of encounter, immersion, and growth, a world that was nowhere and everywhere. This is the world of modern civilization.

CP "circles" (networks, webs, and fields: interviews with George Charney, Mae _____; and Monk, Oppenheimer).

Add: concept of "grifter":
references: Every Man a Speculator; Bud Simons interview; Elder report; Dover school bd. evolution casey (Judge John E. Jones III on the mendacity,

ADD jan 6 hearings

from Maureen Dowd, "Starr Chamber: The Sequel. President Trump reaches deep into the perv barrel for his defense team," NYT, Jan 18, 2020.

The Starr chamber was a shameful period of American history, with the prissy Puritan independent counsel hounding and virtually jailing Monica Lewinsky and producing hundreds of pages of panting, bodice-ripping prose that read more like bad erotica than a federal report, rife with lurid passages about breasts, stains and genitalia. Like the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale and other Pharisaic Holy Rollers before him, the prosecutor who read the Bible and sang hymns when he jogged became fixated on sex in an unhealthy, warped way.

Starr, who once clutched his pearls over Bill Clinton’s sexual high jinks, is now going to bat for President “Access Hollywood.” After playing an avenging Javert about foreplay in the Oval, Starr will now do his utmost to prove that a real abuse of power undermining Congress and American foreign policy is piffle.

In 2007, he defended Jeffrey Epstein. By 2016, Starr was being ousted as president of Baptist Baylor University for failing to protect women and looking the other way when football players were accused and sometimes convicted of sexual assaults.