Detroit and the lower great lakes
see list of interviews
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"Thoughts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind." "Philosophy always arrives too late . . . . The Owl of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk begins to fall." "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." History without philosophy is only a screen on which to project the shibboleths of our time. Hitler is to Trump as tragedy is to farce. |
We are now engulfed in the implosion of neo-liberal
"society." The term "society" is bracketed because, in the
conventional use of the term, an ontological stability is implied,
whereas in reality this society is in the process of blowing its brains
out, and that along four axes of ontological catastrophe:
•First, the disintegration of the cognitive performativities of modernity itself: the "human" side of "capital." (decognification, disindividuation; Trump's rhetorical performances seen from the standpoint of literacy and cognition as contingent not normative cultural-historical developments. Luria, Ong, Flynn, Wolf, et. al. Critique of media re. its Cartesianism and its performative framework (synthetic a priori). The Four Isomorphisms: Ehrenberg, Zaretsky, Clarke, McMahon: mapping onto FIG "semiotic regimes." The President Who Doesn't Read
•Second, 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."). Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment. This is the inner logic of GOP rhetorical performativity--its sado-sexual performtivity. The paranoid-schizoid position (Klein). Fascism and racism. Fascism and patrimonialism. Fascism reconsidered as a theoretical construct. Why does Trump refer to impeachment as a lynching? Because it is precisely the kind of crude in-your-face racism that is the mothers' milk of the contemporary republican party.
•Third, the assault on rational-bureaucratic institutions--i.e., an assault on the very idea of science-based professionalism and public service. Max Weber's concept of patrimonialism "covers" the phenomena labeled as "corruption" in the currrent history of the Trump "administration".
•Fourth, the triumph of nihilism (Nietzsche). Neoliberal subjectivity; the incredible shrinking self. The depressive position (Klein). Repressive desublimation (Marcuse). The Democratic Party's transformation (DLC, Cliinton Foundation (Domhoff). Nihilism.,
•First, the disintegration of the cognitive performativities of modernity itself: the "human" side of "capital." (decognification, disindividuation; Trump's rhetorical performances seen from the standpoint of literacy and cognition as contingent not normative cultural-historical developments. Luria, Ong, Flynn, Wolf, et. al. Critique of media re. its Cartesianism and its performative framework (synthetic a priori). The Four Isomorphisms: Ehrenberg, Zaretsky, Clarke, McMahon: mapping onto FIG "semiotic regimes." The President Who Doesn't Read
•Second, 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."). Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment. This is the inner logic of GOP rhetorical performativity--its sado-sexual performtivity. The paranoid-schizoid position (Klein). Fascism and racism. Fascism and patrimonialism. Fascism reconsidered as a theoretical construct. Why does Trump refer to impeachment as a lynching? Because it is precisely the kind of crude in-your-face racism that is the mothers' milk of the contemporary republican party.
•Third, the assault on rational-bureaucratic institutions--i.e., an assault on the very idea of science-based professionalism and public service. Max Weber's concept of patrimonialism "covers" the phenomena labeled as "corruption" in the currrent history of the Trump "administration".
•Fourth, the triumph of nihilism (Nietzsche). Neoliberal subjectivity; the incredible shrinking self. The depressive position (Klein). Repressive desublimation (Marcuse). The Democratic Party's transformation (DLC, Cliinton Foundation (Domhoff). Nihilism.,
Figure 1. The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal state
Source: "Membership List, May 1927," in the Morris L. Cooke Papers, box 66,
FDR Library; and United States Government Manual 1937
for more info on Fig.2 click on Keynesian Elite: Career Matrix
also: the Papers of John M. Carmody
Joanna Bockman. Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism (Stanford University Press, 2011): three reviews
a. the wreckage not only of socialism but more broadly of Progressivism, of the entire cultural-historical self-formative project (Bildung) that grew out of the Enlightenment and gave us the Russian revolution, Scandinavian Social Democracy, and the American New Deal. Bildunsproletarians and plebeian upstarts. See
b. the persistence of the political culture, psychological dispositions and praxiological modalities of ressentiment (the inner life of racism and fascism)
c. the triumph of nihilism as the socio-cultural engineering project of global corporate networks of unimaginable reach and power, generating an entropic process of disindividuation. Mass consumption as a mode of absorption and transformation of the organism. The fiction of freedom, the subversion of individuation, the inner logic of addiction, the commodification of distress, the infantilization of public discourse . . . in short, the dissipation of the species homo sapiens sapiens into a proliferation of effects. DSM-V as the operating manual of the post-human ontology. The incredible shrinking self. This is the new Democratic party whose rhetorical vector is liberal not progressive
Bliss, the Structure of Manufacturing
Stanback
ERC List
TS input-output
input-output matrices: capital formations and the two-party system
| "The Origins of the "Welfare State": The Keynesian Elite and the Second New Deal, 1910-1936" (manuscript, 1987) |
|
This
first block of interviewees were all early leaders of the emergent
forces that came to be known as the UAW. Most of them were
Midwestern "socialists." Others were "communists." I refer
to them as bildungs-proletarians, around whom formed the action
networks of plebeian upstarts (the Unity Caucus) who created the modern
UAW in March of 1939. From the standpoint of praxis both
the Unity Caucus and the Keynesian elite should be conceived of as
vanguard formations within the field of Progressivism. From the
summer of 1936 to the spring of 1941 the "union" was ripped by a civil
war between the forces of progressivism and the forces of
reaction. The latter (who called themselves the "Progressive"
Caucus) were rooted in the craft- and status-oriented milieu of a
largely Catholic (among the captive toolrooms:German, Irish, Fr. Canadian) skilled tradesmen, and
were able to mobilize southern klansmen. What made this whole site possible is the literary and cognitive capabilities of the bildungsproletarian whom I interviewed Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: a Theory of Ontogeny (Harvard, 2019): Shared, Collective intentionality; the cultural intelligence hypothesis Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., Narcissism and the Literary Libido: Rhetoric, Text, and Subjectivity (New York University Press, 1994) Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth's Philosophical Song (Cambridge, 2007): Beyond the transcript Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience since the Sesventeenth Century (Cambridge, 2005) |
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The
election of 2016 occured in the context of the situation
indexed by Figure 1, and is inconceivable outside this context.
Many have commented on the cognitive performativity of the candidate
and then the President, but don't take seriously the historicity, fragility,
and reversibility of cognitive development as a cultural-historical
phenomenon; and thus, the significance of Donald Trump.
Figure 2 is an effect of cultural-historical developmental processes, of which
schooling itself is only one of several key inputs affecting the
cognitive and cultural development of situated organisms (not Cartesian
selves). Cognitive development is not a normative, inevitable
process (Wolf). It is an effect of history and politics, as well as
evolution, and can suffer reversal or collapse. This indeed is what is happening, and on a colossal scale. Cognitive development is also not a solely ontogenetic process: the contextual and embedded character of mind; the social character of mind and agency; and the institutional and historical contexts of cognitive performativity must be borne in mind. (Jan Derry, Vygotsky, Philosophy, and Education, Wiley, 2013, pp. 17, 24) Figure 1 suggests that a catastrophic decline in cognitive performativity preceded and made possible the fascist-patrimonial victory of November 2016. Focusing on the person of the Chief Executive and his various performative moments obliterates the cultural-historical dimensions of history. 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 significance. To understand this, thinking must first emancipate itself from the Cartesian presuppositional matrix--the ontological presupposition of the Cartesian self and its associated rhetorical elements of consciousness, belief, motive, ideology and interest. Failure to do so has the effect, a priori, of blocking conceptualization of questions of ontology, agency, intentionality, habitus, networks and contexts. And thinking must approach the question of "ontology" as a question of genetic ontology (see below): the performative dimensions of ontology. |
21 Developed Nations & East Asian Cities and City-States
I proceeded immanently, from within the cultural-historical discursive fields generated by KE New Deal and UAW Det and SE Mich
on human nature
Chase
Dupre
Sahlins
Renfrew
on the cognitive-linguistic gulf between oral and print culture
Luria
Ong
Rosenfeld
Flynn
Frank Fagan and workers wanting him to drive a fancy car (Proto-Dorian convention/patrimonialism)
the mid-nineteenth century turn
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body (U. of Illinois, 2005)
Philippe-Joseph Salazar, "Reconnaissances of Marx", Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 48, No. 4, 2015
Jerrold Seigel, Modernity and Bourgeois Life: Society, Politics, and Culture in England, France and Germany since 1750 (Cambridge, 2012)
Donald Trump and the sliding scale*
the Sapient Paradox
the Gutenberg Parenthesis
the Flynn effect
the Wolf premonitions
the Gutenberg Parenthesis
the Flynn effect
the Wolf premonitions
The
possibility that, at a reduced scale, the mind of an ape can be
upgraded by giving him, on the one hand, a regime of socally controlled
attention and interactive experiences with humans, and on the other, a
new, more explicit form of representing the world, would confer
dramatic support to the Vygotskian notion that higher cognition can be
created through cultural processes of develoment that change the nature
of cognitive ontogeny. (pp. 262-3)
The remnants of that party of FDR (Bernie, Sherood Brown) were eliminated by the Clinton revolution--the taking over of the Democratic Party by the forces arrayed around the Democratic Leadership Council. In place of the social democratic orientation of yesteryear,and more, general systems orientation
The transformation of Porgressivism into Liberalism (Clark, Ehrenberg, Zaretsky)
we got globalization uber alles. In place of an appeal to working class needs and recognition of the life experience of working people, we got, in this election, an appeal to college-educated women, a variety of life-style groups, and minorities. Democratic surrogates and media talking heads actually showed contempt for those stupid white people who lived, for example, in my state of Michigan.
The polls were wrong because the ground had shifted (and the cartesian trap exposed).
But also consider the role played by the Democratic Party in producing this electoral result: In place of an appeal to working class needs and recognition of the life experience of working people, we got, in this election, an appeal to college-educated women, a variety of life-style groups, and minorities. Democratic surrogates and media talking heads actually showed contempt for those stupid white people who lived, for example, in my state of Michigan.
Racism is real but also mutable, a psychological resource exploited by right-wing politicians but dependent on context: globalization, and the failure of the Democrats to address this existential threat to my rust belt neighbors.
The four axes of ontological catastrophe can be placed in historical contexts. Instead of the great dream of the Enlightenment that was the core sensibility of Progressivism (the New Deal), Socialism (Scandanavian Social Democracy), and Communism, we have:
a. the wreckage not only of socialism but more broadly of Progressivism, of the entire cultural-historical self-formative project (Bildung) that grew out of the Enlightenment and gave us the Russian revolution, Scandinavian Social Democracy, and the American New Deal. Bildunsproletarians and plebeian upstarts
b. the persistence of the political culture, psychological dispositions and praxiological modalities of ressentiment (the inner life of racism and fascism)
c. the triumph of nihilism as the socio-cultural engineering project of global corporate networks of unimaginable reach and power, generating an entropic process of disindividuation. Mass consumption as a mode of absorption and transformation of the organism. The fiction of freedom, the subversion of individuation, the inner logic of addiction, the commodification of distress, the infantilization of public discourse . . . in short, the dissipation of the species homo sapiens sapiens into a proliferation of effects. DSM-V as the operating manual of the post-human ontology. The incredible shrinking self. This is the new Democratic party whose rhetorical vector is liberal not progressive
United States Population Density, 2000
Midwest Auto Parts, 2006
the Two-Party System: Semiotic Regimes
| 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 |
from CNN newscast, 4:00 to 6:00 PM, 9-15-07: pro- and anti-war demonstrators' signs (applying the concept of cognitive regime):
pro-war
demo signs: "Traitors Go to Hell!"
"Deport
Anti-war Protesters!"
"Treason!"
"Treason!"
anti-war
demo signs: "End
the War Now!"
"U.S. Out of
Iraq!"
"Support the Troops! End the War!"
2. rabids vs. thoughtfuls
Analysis of comments sent to Connecticut Post, August 31, 2006 re. Jonathon Edington murder case (article no longer accessible)
|
This is an elementary particle: a momernt in the unfolding of the Absolute
Here are the sources for this conceptualization of the Two-Party System: Semiotic Regimes: Simon Clarke, Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism (Palgrave Macmillan; 2003)
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) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Note on use of the term "Left." Progressivism and Liberalism are opposites, not twins. The genetic ontology of Progressivism is Bildung and the Will to Power; The genetic ontology of Liberalism is Nihilism. Today's liberalism is referred as the left, covering over the genetic-ontological transformation of the post-war years (see Hall et. al.) The New Deal is not represented in the above figure and table, The Two-Party System: Semiotic Regimes. Donald Trump is a result of this genetic-ontological transformation. |
the performative complex of the Southern strategy
*from Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994 (Louisiana State U. Press, 1996), pp. 8-9.
The depth of Wallace’s racism—the
degree to which it was part of his core beliefs—was always
unclear. He sometimes manifested an air of apologetic cynicism;
when forced to break away from informal gatherings because of a
speaking engagement, he would often turn to his friends and ask to be
excused with a sheepish grin and a half-embarassed explanation: “I got
to give ‘em a little nigger talk.”
Seymour Wolfbein, a Labor Department expert in the Kennedy administration, was convinced it was all an act. . . . Wolfbein found Wallace fascinating and amusing, but hardly sinister, a kind of roguish political con man eager to let him in on the joke.
When confronted with the question of whether Wallace was “sincere” in his racial views, a Montgomery attorney who knew the governor well said it best. “If George had parachuted into the Albanian countryside in the spring of 1962,” reflected John Kohn, one of Wallace’s advisers in the 1960s, “he would have been head of the collective farm by harvesttime, a member of the Communist Party by midwinter, on his way to the district party meeting as a delegate by the following year, and a member of the Comintern in two or three years.” George, said Kohn, “could beieve whatever he needed to believe.”
Seymour Wolfbein, a Labor Department expert in the Kennedy administration, was convinced it was all an act. . . . Wolfbein found Wallace fascinating and amusing, but hardly sinister, a kind of roguish political con man eager to let him in on the joke.
When confronted with the question of whether Wallace was “sincere” in his racial views, a Montgomery attorney who knew the governor well said it best. “If George had parachuted into the Albanian countryside in the spring of 1962,” reflected John Kohn, one of Wallace’s advisers in the 1960s, “he would have been head of the collective farm by harvesttime, a member of the Communist Party by midwinter, on his way to the district party meeting as a delegate by the following year, and a member of the Comintern in two or three years.” George, said Kohn, “could beieve whatever he needed to believe.”
the political construction of identity
from Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (Yale Univesity Press, 2008)
Politics is not merely the realm where preexisting interests,
grievances, and passions are given expression. Rather, it is in
and through politics that interests, grievances, and passions are
forged and new collective identities created. Backlash, the
ideological cornerstone and justification for modern conservatism,
masks what was a long-term process whereby various groups in different
places and times attempted to link racism, anti-government populism,
and economic conservatism into a discourse and institutional strategy
through linguistic appeals, party-building, social movement organizing,
and the exercise of state power. In the process, the very
interests and self-understanding of these groups were continually under
construction as they moved from coalition to collective political
identity. As opposed to being entrenched and traditionalist (or
reactionary, depending on one's politics), the Right that
developed is better viewed as contingent, mobile, and highly adaptive,
constantly responding to changing conditions on the ground. 4-5
Kant thinks
that there lie in the human cognitive faculties certain forms which are
necessary for things to become objects of our cognition. If this is
true, then synthetic a priori judgments are possible, for since the
forms are necessary for there to be any experience whatsoever, we know
a priori, i.e. independently of any particular experience, that all
objects will conform to these forms. That is, the objects will have all
those properties that the forms impose on them. This Kant calls
transcendental idealism."
Just so. Below--elaborating on Kant/Hegel--I present several graphemes that not by compulsion or immanent necessity, but rather by varied atttempts to construct usable "synthetic a priori": here are some of them. I call them elementary particles (ha ha)."