sado-sexual eigenvector is ontologically prior to "racism", mysogyny, war-mongering. SS Eigenvector the primordial core of being, of Being. (inner) Logic of language games of Fascism 3.0.
mass
shootings
Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heiddeger, Foucault, Deleuze
|
The graphic at the far right represents the manner in which thought can be structured in relation of the problematic posed by the three mass shootings indicated. data should be read as the set of life worlds N=212 of arrestees studied. texts is the subset of texts relevant to a reconsideration of the concept of fascism. This is the antithesis of idiotic approach to these events of the two-party discursive field, which is useful only as semiotics.* *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
|
Archive refers to the set of all texts, data sources, etc. In the pre-internet days, it included the contents of all libraries, court records, newspapers--everything that a researcher might look at. However, in the age of the internet the archive has been expanded to include all materials available over the internet, including videos, graphic materials, tweets, etc. I have assembled a subset of texts* addressing the question of fascism.* Mind refers to the cognitive-discursive fields extant among contemporary humans. Nomothetic discursive fields are useful in that they provide background materials (occupation, income, education), but are useless when it comes to understanding living humans. Hermeneutical discursive fields (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heiddeger, Foucault) are indespensible for such understanding. Data refers to the set of life worlds (hermeneutical materials) assembled. It is necessary to read and assimilate these materials, for they are meant to be used as a lens through which to view the three mass shootings selected for analysis. * On the method whereby texts are assembled, see Notebook (The Cassirer inclusion rule, and the the Margolies exclusion rule). ** One of these texts is Ely Zaretsky's "The Mass Psychology of Trumpism" (London Review of Books, 18 September 2018). These 19 paragraphs should be read immediately. Attention should be paid to the cognitive-discursive field that Zaretsky deploys: "There is an older body of psychological thought, however, that illuminates the kind of tight bond Trump has forged with a significant minority of Americans. Inspired by Freud, this thought arose following the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe . . . " |
thought can be structured in relation of the problematic posed
|
the striking thing about these three shooters 1. white on white 2. white on black 3. hispanic on hispanic is that they were extreme cases of the paranoid-schizoid position (which concept is a further development of Freud's mechanisms of defense) when these mechanisms/configurations*-what I refer to as the sado-sexual eigenvector of GOP performativity of aadolescent male rage exploited by specialists in rage: the grass roots leadership of the GOP.. * this I think is what Klein means by "positions": stable configurations of the defense mechanisms it is when these configurations become valorized in mass politics . . . |
“Before massacre, Uvalde gunman frequently threatened teen girls online”
| “Before massacre, Uvalde gunman frequently threatened teen girls online” (Washington Post, May 28, 2022)
Some* also suspected this was just how teen boys talked on the Internet
these days — a blend of rage and misogyny so predictable they could
barely tell each one apart. One girl, discussing moments when he had
been creepy and threatening, said that was just “how online is.”
Many of Ramos’ threats to assault women, the young women added, barely stood out from the undercurrent of sexism that pervades the Internet . . . *of the girls and young women who talked with Salvador Ramos online in the months before he allegedly killed 19 children in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. |
| from Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantiative Information, 2nd edition (Graphics Press, 2001) The
use of abstract, non-representational pictures to show numbers is a
surprisingly recent invention, perhaps because of the divesity of
skills required--the visual-artistic, empirical-statistical, and
mathematical. It was not until 1750-1800 that statistical
graphics--length and area to show quantity, time-series, scatterplots,
and multivariate displays--were invented, long after such triumphs of
mathematical ingenuity as logarithms, Cartesian coordinates, the
calculus, and the basics of probability theory. . . .
Modern data graphics can do much more than simply substitute for small statisstical tables. At their best, graphics are instruments for reosoning about quantitative information. Often the most effective way to describe, explore, and summarize a set of numbers--even a very large set--is to look at pictures of those numbers. |
this graph has a serious flaw: it does not adjust for population.
America’s Gun Problem
More guns in the U.S. mean more deaths. 5-26-22. NYT
| The page fascism: data assembles online media accounts of those arrested for their participation in the
events of January 6, 2020. Attempts were made to ascertain
occupational status and history, education, and income. Limitations in the
reporting of local media made this extremely difficult. And these
limitations themselves became a discovery, an insight into the decay of the cognitive-discursive fields of the two-party system. |
fascism: data:
a lens through which to view the three mass shootings:
Findings
| What we found was 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 classifications* 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 of the arrestees were connected to mainstrean occupations and industries: none in manufacturing, none in the building trades, none in the modern corporate sector. The bottom line: out of the collapse of the economic basis for socialization into adulthood within the psycho-cultural framework provided by white supremacy, there results a prolongation of adolescent sadism (Goldberg and Weitz). Thus, about one third of the arrestees were employed in the performative domain of "legitimate" violence: military, police, security guards. Another third were low-wage service workers in very small establishments. Above all, many of the arrestees come across as grifters. Indeed, the entire Trump administration could be characterized as a swarm of grifters.** The GOP as a whole is a party dominated by grifters (although it still has within it honorable conservatives). * North American Industry Classification System (U.S. Census Bureau) Standard Occupational Classification System (Bureau of Labor Statistics) **Herman Melville's The Confidence Man (1857). Karen Halttunen, Confidence men and painted women: a study of middle-class culture in America, 1830-1870 (Yale, 1982) |
| A University of Chicago study found that 40
percent [of the arrestees] are business owners or hold white-collar jobs. Unlike the
stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the
Capitol riot have a lot to lose. They work as CEOs, shop owners,
doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants. Strikingly, court
documents indicate that only 9 percent are unemployed.
And from the New York Times (January 26, 2021): One
striking aspect of the angry crowd at the Capitol was how many of its
members seemed to come not from the fringes of American society but
from white picket-fence Main Street backgrounds — firefighters and real
estate agents, a marketing executive and a Town Council member.
This characterization is profoundly wrong. It fails to comprehend the reality of a population in the process of marginalization. In Fascism: Data, we sorted the arrestees by state and organization. Among the states and organizations we looked at, the Oathkeeepers were the most "middle class." They are a general manager at a car dealership, a self-employed carpenter, a window washer, a tatoo parlor owner, the owner of a marginal day-car facility, and a former police officer. The outlier in this table--and that by a long-shot--is Stewart Rhodes, Yale Law School, clerk for an Arizona Supreme Court Justice, and a staffer for Ron Paul. In fact, any concept implying middle-class stability cannot be used to describe this dataset. What one really sees here is one of the more monstrous effects of what is misleadingly called globalization. The transformations of postmodern capitalism are not only spatial. They are technological (automation), occupational (gig workers on the one hand, exqusitely refined high-income-oriented services and commodity-fetishes on the other) . . . and cultural-psychological (nihilism) (Ehrenberg] What would happen, we began to wonder in the 1980s, to the displaced masses thus produced. We have our answer: they would become the cannon-fodder of fascism American style*. And the two-party system is the death spiral of a once great nation. Speaking now as a 21st century New Dealer, today's liberal democratic party is 1. an agent of globalization without the necessary planning that was a hallmark of the New Deal; 2. a collaborator with the GOP in its support of no child left behind (and thus, the destruction of public education in workering class America; and a cheerleader for nihilism . . . * and the subject of of books like Deaths of Despair. What School Shooters Have in Common: Data-driven pathways for preventing gun violence, By Jillian Peterson & James Densley (Education Week, October 08, 2019) |
a
lens through which to view the three mass
shootings, or, why look at the context of the shooters' actions and not
simply at the shooters in isolation from the contexts out of which
their actions emerge?
| Zaretsky critiques the Cartesian presuppositional matrix of most
of the effort that has gone into analysing Trump, who is often
described as suffering from ‘narcissistic personality disorder’.
Not only are such diagnoses, made from a distance, implausible; they
also fail to address a more important question: the nature of Trump’s appeal.
Constituting something close to a third of the electorate, his
followers form an intensely loyal and, psychologically, tight-knit
band. They are impervious to liberal or progressive criticisms of Trump
or his policies. On the contrary, their loyalty thrives on anti-Trump arguments, and digs in deeper.
Read especially the three telephone threats to Congresspersons; realize how representative these are of the general character of the bursts of epithets characteristic of the arrestees' verbal and online activity; and discover the same thing in White Hot Hate. These bursts of epithetic discourse form a pattern. They are manifestations of the sado-sexual eigenvector of GOP performativity. The bursts of epithetical discourse of the three shooters are similar in structure and content. But this content is, in concentrated form, the Republican Party's rhetorical essence. These events can only be seen as a triumph of the GOP's political praxis going back to the Southern Strategy. Do not be deceived by the GOP's leaders' crocodile tears for the victims of these shootings. The shootings are just another occasion for the GOP to play the gun-card. And one should note the sadistic performative esense* of the shift to the shibboleth of "mental health" in response to liberal cries for gun "safety" legislation. "Mental health" functions in the same way as "arm the teachers." Just look at the image below, and the two quotes on either side of it. The gun is the sacred icon of the GOP; mass murder the sacred ideal, the path to redemption, the antithesis of the Sermon on the Mount. One should read Matthew chapters 5, 6 and 7 as a critique of the violence, lust, greed, and dishonesty that, for example, dominates the GOP leadershhip and cadre. And not only the GOP. But it is the GOP that claims the mantle of Jesus, the GOP that substitutes the AR 15 and the AK 47 for the Cross. And John 8:7: "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." The public stance of the GOP is nothing other than throwing stones (in private, greed and fraud is the rule; throwing stones is the means to this end). This secular message of Jesus is more relevant today than it was two thousand years ago. Read the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of Marx in this context. * see excerpt from Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections at the right. |
. . . fiction is nearer truth. . . . A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian . . .
| from Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (FSG, 2011)
It was true that Alfred believed the only thing wrong with the death
penalty was that it wasn’t used often enough; true as well that the men
whose gassing or electrocution he’d called for, over dinner in Chip’s
childhood, were usually black men from the slums on St. Jude’s north
side. (“Oh, Al,” Enid would say, because dinner was “the family meal,”
and she couldn’t understand why they had to spend it talking about gas
chambers and slaughter in the streets.) p. 128 from Joseph Conrad's "Henry James: an Appreciation" (1905)Fiction
is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than
that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms
and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on
documents, and the reading of print and handwriting--on second-hand
impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth. . . . A historian may
be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the
keeper, the expounder, of human experience.
|
Trump is "not hurting the people he needs to be hurting"
from It’s Just Too Much’: "A Florida Town Grapples With a Shutdown After a Hurricane, New York Times, 1-7-19.
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.
The cult of sado-sexual "masculine" violence is the fundamental principle of Modern "authoritarian" performativities
Trump-Putin-et. al.
A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The Second Amendment, as discussed:
A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
on the origins of the second amendment
from The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution, by Michael J. Klarman (Oxford, 2016):
When Antifederalist
congressmen proposed structural amendments that Madison deemed
potentially harmful, he sometimes converted them into individual-rights
guarantees that he considered innocuous. Thus, while
Antifederalists sought an amendment limiting Congress's power to raise
standing armies in time of peace, Madison offered instead a guarantee
of the right 'to keep and bear arms' in connection with militia
service. p. 578
It is a striking index of the
cognitive insufficiency (to put it nicely),
near-illiteracy, and the mendacity of our times, that the text
itself is never actually discussed in the public sphere. Why
not? (see Semiotic Regimes: the two-party discursive field.)
We no longer read. We are a post-print, oral culture, possessed only of the technical capacity to sound out words. But we don't actually read. The entire public discussion of the Second Amendment bears witness to this fact.
. . . 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.
*Tom McCarthy, Satin Island (Knopf, 2015)
We no longer read. We are a post-print, oral culture, possessed only of the technical capacity to sound out words. But we don't actually read. The entire public discussion of the Second Amendment bears witness to this fact.
. . . 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.
*Tom McCarthy, Satin Island (Knopf, 2015)
x
x
the Sado-sexual Eigenvector of GOP Performativity
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 |
Essence of the
GOP
1) He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.
"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."*
* from It’s Just Too Much’: "A Florida Town Grapples With a Shutdown After a Hurricane, New York Times, 1-7-19.
* Robert O. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism
"Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers. It was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage. There was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them . . . "
* Joseph Conrad on the GOP, from Heart of Darkness, p. 40
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.
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)
Thoughts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.
. . . 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
The GOP as the Stupid Party?
GOP Sexual Obsessions on display re. child porn (Senate Confirmation Hearings on Judge Jackson)
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
The GOP as the Stupid Party?
GOP Sexual Obsessions on display re. child porn (Senate Confirmation Hearings on Judge Jackson)
Comment:
the explosion of fascist performativities within the orbit of the GOP
the explosion of fascist performativities within the orbit of the GOP
the explosion of fascist performativities within the orbit of the GOP: Robert O. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism: "The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism.". The brutishness in language and behavior that are the chief characteristics of Trump's mass-oriented performances must be understood as manifestations of something of great ontological and evolutionary significance. The sado-sexual eigenvector of “Trump” performativities 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. Trump's performance coming down the stairs
"They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime.
They’re rapists.")
They’re rapists.")
and the plaint of one of his supporters:
"He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting"
should be placed in this broader context. Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment (the inner logic of GOP sado-sexual rhetorical performativity). The paranoid-schizoid position (Klein). Fascism and racism. Fascism and patrimonialism.
| two commentaries on Victor Nell, "Cruelty’s rewards: The gratifications of perpetrators and spectators," Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29, 211–257 1.
from Mika Haritos-Fatouros, “Cruelty: A dispositional or a situational
behavior in man?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29, p.230 The basic question remains, however: How far are aggression, violence, and cruelty in humans today the result of predisposition factors, or biological or archetypal processes, and how far are they the result of cognitive/emotional processes evoked by situational factors? 2. from Albert Bandura, “A murky portrait of human cruelty,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29, p. 225 At the macrosocial level, Nell greatly exaggerates the prevalence of human cruelty. There exist wide intercultural differences representing both warring and pacific societies with large intracultural variations and even rapid transformation of warring societies into peaceful ones. from Daniel Dor, Chris Knight, and Jerome Lewis, The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014), p.4
. . . in the case of many nonhuman primates, dominance asserted through
violence or threat is the internal principle of social organization . .
. [Among humans] . . . primate-style dominance is periodically
overthrown and then restored, only to be overthrown and restored again
and again.
|
s
s
s
a cult of masculine hardness and violence
| from Ann Goldberg, “Women and Men: 1760-1960,” in Helmut Walser Smith,
The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford, 2011)
The alleged undermining of the patriarchal family—the ruse of the
‘double earners’ (married women performing paid labor outside the
home), and sexually liberated New Women—became a powerful symbol of the
breakdown of the social fabric in the chaotic years of the Weimar
Republic, subject to intense poltical debate, social policy
interventions, and efforts to resurrect the traditional gender order.
The Nazis played directly on these gender anxieties as they built their
movement in the Weimar years. Together with Jews and leftists,
feminists and New Women became symbols in Nazi propaganda of the
decadence and weakness of liberal democracy and modern urban life.
Railing against the ‘soulless’ and ‘egotistical’ modern woman, National
Socialists called for their return to the home and for the restoration
of the patriarchal family—for, as the slogan went, ‘emancipation from
emancipation’.
At the same time, the Nazis built upon the militarized masculinity and culture of comradship that had evolved in WWI, glorifying the ideal of a brotherhood of self-sacrificing soldier-comrades, and turning it into an extreme cult of violence, hardness, and duty to the racial Volk. A study of the writings of the Freicorps—right-wing paramilitary groups of ex-soldiers and officers formed in the aftermath of WWI—explores the unconscious fears and desires of this fascist masculinity. It shows the deep mysogyny of men who posssessed weak, fragmented egos, whose terrors of psychic dissolution were associated with femininization and female sexuality, and who, as a result, embraced a cult of masculine hardness and violence as an emotional defense mechanism. |
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." |