RulesOntologies

1. The Cassirer Rule--VMOs--refracted through Hegel
2. The Margolies rule--beware of scientism
3. the Hegel Rule--moments in the unfolding of becoming
(functional webs of facticity)
4. the Deleuze Rule: beware the image of thought

FOUR ONTOLOGIES OF POST-PALEOLITHIC HOMO SAPIENS

1. biology-primatology (linguistically inflected biology; 1st emergence--Chase) organization 1: culture
2. ressentiment & MD (effect of power inflected linguistically)
3. cogitive development-modern organization bildung (organization 2)
4. desire-entropy

Origins of the Four Ontologies

Ressentiment and the Mechanisms of Defense
Developmental Divergence: Cognitive Development in History

These two pages orginated in the attempt to use internet-accessible data to present for purposes of analysis the emotional and cognitive performances of 'the people'. The underlying problematic was to understand the triumph of reaction in post-war politics. Out of this developed the notion of semiotic regimes.

The approach is hegelian-pragmatist re. right excerpt. Each "ontology" is actually the antithesis of ontology as construed as fundamental being--the thing in itself. Ontology as I use the term is a reference to key elements within textual fields--eg, res and MD--that provide the generative matrix for the phennomena under examination. Thus, the philo and psycho texts contained in that field converge on ressentiment/MD. The latter, as fundamental, provides the necessary cognitive structure for the apprehension of phenomena. I think this is what Miguel de Beistegui, Truth and genesis: philosophy as differential ontology (Indiana University Press, 2004) is getting at, and more explictly, for my purposes, what Margolies has to say: . . . Hegel's strategy . . . retires altogether the very idea of reference to a 'noumenal' world or a world the properties of which are seperable from from whatever they are said to appear to be to human inquirers . . .

Thus, I make no assertions as to what really is, only that certain textual fields converge on fundamental generative matrices within a textual-phenomenal field. The biological-primatalogical field of Wrangham, which he uses to explicate gang violence, can and must be similarly applied to similar phenommena. There is an arguement about the place of biology in undestanding history in the sense of what really is, of what reality is. But . .
I don't get involved in that, except to say that it is obvious that Chase, Gould et al allow history into the discussion, and reductionist aproaches have not only been unable but unwilling to approach the mass of stuff that makes up our post-paleolithic history. Directly "seing" racism and power is still prohibited. A most peculiar example of this is The Righteous Mind J Haidt

The New Creationism: Biology Under Attack, By Barbara Ehrenreich and Janet McIntosh (The Nation, June 9, 1997)

. . . the basic idea [of activity theory] is not "evolution," that is, the idea of adaptation to the environment, but "revolution," that is, change of the environment. The dialectical analysis of human history, as it was done, for example, by Hegel and particularly by Marx, showed not only that humans adapt to the environment but also that they change it in accordance with their demands . . . Activity is not an active adaptation to the environment but the transformation of the environment and--in inrtrerelation with it--of humans themselves. Although this idea is not new, it has only begun to prove its explanatory potental. Among the first to apply this idea to psychology were Vygotsky and one of his closest students, Leontiev. (pp. 103-105; emphasis added)

1. BIOLOGY

Gould

Biology has been used by conservatives to justify war and hierarchy. The crude reductionism of many of these attempts, and their obvious locus and function in the web of power, renders them useless. The antidote to this kind of reductionism is contained in the excerpt to the right, from Chase's The Emergence of Culture. Chase is one of many leading primatologists and other biologists who in the past twenty years have produced important works on the relationship between the behavior of contemporary homo sapiens and our nearest relatives (chimpanzees and bonobos). Best know of these is Franz de Waal (Our Inner Ape). While Marxists and semioticians dislike this--in the past this use of biology served the political purpose of an apologetics for the existing state of affairs--de Waal and Wrangham et. al., on the contrary directly confront and negate this misuse of biology. The work of de Waal, Wrangham, Mazur and others are genuine atttempts to integrate biology into sociology and history, and are not reductive.

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 creting 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

2. Ressentiment and the Mechanisms of Defense

To the right are some of the texts that constitute the ontological zone of ressentiment. They are to be borne in mind when looking at the stuff from the semiosphere, just as, now (in the age of the internet), this stuff should be borne in mind when reading texts.

3. Bildung (and Cognitive Development)

4. Desire (and Entropy)

Since debates about human aggressiveness invariably revolve around warfare, the command structures of armies should make us think twice before drawing parallels with animal aggression. . . . Are wars born from anger? Leaders often have economic motives, internal political reasons, or act out of self-defense. . . . With supreme cynicism, Napoleon observed, "A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon." I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that the majority of people in the majority of wars have been driven by something other than aggression. Human warfare is systematic and cold-blooded, making it an almost new phenomenon.

The critical word is "almost." Tendencies toward group identification, xenophobia, and lethal combat--all of which do occur in nature--have combined with our highly develoed planning capacities to "elevate" human violence to its inhuman level. The study of animal behavior may not be much help when it comes to things like genocide, but if we move away from nation-states, looking instead at human behavior in small-scale societies, the differences are not that great anymore. (emphasis added)

The Rules that Govern this Site

1. The Cassirer Rule

Let us begin, therefore, with what I call the Cassirer rule: the obligation to survey all that is, and, since this is without modifcation an impossible task, to develop rules and methods by which to determine what texts, data, images, and videos will be selected for consideration--what semiotic materials, from works of philosophy and history to expletives shouted and signs displayed at political rallies, must be deployed and analyzed.

The Cassirer rule requires a survey of all academic fields relevant to whatever problematic is under investigation. Obviously no one can read everything. But every adequately educated citizen can fairly quickly determine what are the major works in any field. These works I call Very Massive Objects. Status in the field of its peers rather than ideology determines what is to be approached as a VMO.

Examples of the Cassirer rule in practice:

The question of that which is called "Stalinism." After reading the linked materials it is apparent, first of all, that that which is called Stalinism is a complex social and historical process whose context is Russian barbarism (Lewin, Heretz, Mironov . . .), and that developments from 1917 to 1924 were radically discontinuous with the past history of Russian (and European) social democracy and marxism. Cold War scholarship on this is scholarship only in a formal, procedural way. Its subservience to the web of power and the latter's ideological prescriptions, and its supercession and negation by the real scholarship of Lewin et. al, renders Cold War "scholarship" on Stalinism a removable singularity.

"Collective Violence: Comparison Between Youths and Chimpanzees", by Richard W. Wrangham, Department of Anthropology, Peabody Museum, Harvard University, and Michael L. Wilson (Department of Ecology and Behavior, University of Minnesota, and Gombe Stream Research Centre, the Jane Goodall Institute, Tanzania [Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1036: 233–256 (2004)]

Primatologists and other biologists have in the past twenty years produced important works on the relationship between the behavior of contemporary homo sapiens and our nearest relatives (chimpanzees and bonobos). Best know of these is Franz de Waal (Our Inner Ape). While Marxists and semioticians dislike this--in the past this use of biology served the political purpose of an apologetics for the existing state of affairs--de Waal and Wrangham et. al., on the contrary directly confront and negate this misuse of biology.

from Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment

The problem of intellectual “progress” throughout the eighteenth century appears in this light. Perhaps no other century is so permeated with the idea of intellectual progress as that of the Enlightenment. But we mistake the essense of this conception, if we understand it merely in a quantitative sense as an extension of knowledge indefinitely. A qualitative determination always accompanies quantitative expansion; and an increasingly pronounced return to the characteristic center of knowledge corresponds to the extension of inquiry beyond the periphery of knowledge. One seeks multiplicity in order to be sure of unity; one acepts the breadth of knowledge in the sure anticipation that this breadth does not impede the intellect, but that, on the contrary, it leads the intellect back to, and concetrates it in, itself. For we see again and again that the divergence of the paths followed by the intellect in its attempt to encompass all of reality is merely apparent. If these paths viewed objectively seem to diverge, their divergence is, nevertheless, no mere dispersion. All the various energies of the mind are, rather, held together in a common center of force. Variety and diversity of shapes are simply the full unfolding of an essentially homogeneous formative power. When the eighteenth century wants to characterize this power in a single word, it calls it “reason.”

2. The Margolies rule

" . . . the record of the last half-century is, philosophically, largely a record of the dawning exhaustion of an impressive vision (scientism) and the incompletely developed, still somewhat inchoate, possibilities of a promising alternative philosophy (pragmatism). The strength of the latter lies, I think, in being closer to the corrective lessons of the post-Kantan and post-Hegelian world that never lost sight of the inescapable strategy by which to escape the paradoxes of pre-Kantian philosophy. But, truth to tell, it has never managed to overcome the nagging aporiai of what is now read as Catersianism." p. xii

"For the truth is that Hegel introduces the theme of history and cultural evolution into the debate about cognition in an inexpungeable way, although he does not quite explicitly develop his idea along specifically historicist and collective lines." p. 13

"By 'Cartesianism' or 'Cartesian realism' I mean any realism, no matter how defended or qualified, that holds that the world has a determinate structure apart from all constraints of human inquiry and that our cognizing faculties are nevertheless able to discern those independent structures reliably. 'Cartesianism' serves here as a term of art, as not confind to Descartes's own doctrine. It ranges over pre-Kantan philosophy, Kant's own philosophy (quixotically), and even over the views of such contemporary theorists as Putnam and Davidson. Twentieth-century analytic philosophy is, in this respect, thoroughly pre-Kantian or Kantan in a way in which Kant himself is pre-Kantian: it is an unabashed continuation of seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophy threatened in precisely the same way its ancestors originally were. . . . The main feature of Hegel's strategy, which, in American philosophy, is preserved (almost without attribution) among the classic pragmatists (particularly Dewey) retires altogether the very idea of reference to a 'noumenal' world or a world the properties of which are seperable from from whatever they are said to appear to be to human inquirers, and reinterprets 'appearances' (Erscheinungen) as open to the recovery of no more than a 'constructed' realism, that is, a realism shorn of the recuperative use of the 'Cartesian' habit of opposing or disjoining 'appearance' and 'reality' completely. (If, that is, 'realism' is a proper term for rendering the sense of the Phenomenology's argument.)" 49-50

4. the Hegel Rule (Hegel after Derrida)

The particulars--the particles--in the phenomenological field must be seen as moments in the unfolding of . . . what? Ressentiment and the Mechanisms of Defense begins with anti-Obama placards, but presents these particles as moments in the unfolding of ressentiment, from the first Crusade to the presidential campaign of 2012. Nothing is to be taken in isolation from the context of its unfolding, as John E. Jones III, United States District Judge, in the KITZMILLER, et al. v. DOVER AREA SCHOOL DISTRICT, et al.: MEMORANDUM OPINION, December 20, 2005, has observed. I provide excerpts from this case in The Political Morality of Ressentiment, wherein Judge Jones comments on the "lies", "ignorance", and "mendacity" of the defendants. Concepts such as the fascist aesthetic are contained in, and subordinate to, the concept of ressentiment.

Biology has been used by conservatives to justify war and hierarchy. The crude reductionism of many of these attempts, and their obvious locus and function in the web of power, means that they should be taken in the context of Nietzsche's famous comment of semiotics:

"Moral judgments are therefore never to be taken literally: so understood, they are always merely absurd. Semiotically, however, they remain invaluable: they reveal, at least for those who can interpret them, the most valuable realities of cultures and psychologies that did not know how to "understand" themselves. Morality is only a language of signs, a group of symptoms: one must know how to interpret them correctly to be able to profit from them." p. 55 Twilight of the Idols

Walsingham: Your Grace is arrested. You must go with these men to the
Tower.
Norfolk: I must do nothing by your orders. I am Norfolk.
Walsingham: You were Norfolk. The dead have no titles. You were the
most powerful man in England and could have been greater still but
you had not the courage to be loyal.

This is the third in a (dialectical) sequence of four sets of textual authorities bound together by the problematic they address. The second, already mentioned, is Ressentiment and the Mechanisms of Defense. (Fascism then and now; in Europe and America: Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, and Ravetto, The Unmasking of Fascist Aesthetics)

The fourth, Appetite and Entropy: Subverting Cognitive Development, is fully developed in Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture: crime, exclusion and the new culture of narcissism, by Steve Hal, Simon Winlow and Craig Ancrum (Willan Publishing, 2008). I provide a list of contemporary novels that complement, in ways that only great literary novels can, the problematic presented by this book. This book is a stunning rebuke to the crude materialism--to the economism--of the "Marxist" remnants of today. It should be read by all those who would further develop the dialectic of the Enlightenment under 21st century conditions.

A settling of accounts with that which is called "Marxism"

"Marxism" was only a moment in a socio-cultural and cognitive-developmental trajectory which came to an inglorious end with the fetishization of Marx-Lenin. This attempt to recover and further develop the inner logic of this trajectory under 21st century conditions requires a settling of accounts with that which is called "Marxism."

Of the four phenomenological fields that adequately cover homo sapiens today--biology (including primatology); ressentiment (the pathological reaction of the organism to power--one of Nietzsche's great ideas); cognitive development (Marx had an inkling of this); and the culture of narcissism as understood by Hall et. al. (and, as Hall et. al. write, this is a phenomenon that emerges in full force on a mass scale only in the 1960s)--none falls within the intellectual territory of that which is called Marxism. The intellectual povery of that which is called Marxism is striking. Unlike the Baron Ludwig von Westphalen (who was Marx's mentor and then father-in-law*) and Karl Marx, both of whom carried on and further developed the great Enlightenment practice of being aware of and participating in the intellectual developments of their own time, today's radicals, such as they are, seem unaware of the major developments in sociocultural historical understanding of the past hundred years.

The quote from Ernst Cassirer's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment captures this dynamic of Mind as historical-developmental power, and is consistent with Wellman and Ranciere. This provides the first rule of this site, the first of a set of methodological categorical imperatives.

*Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (Little, Brown and Co., 2011)

FOUR RULES 1. The Cassirer Rule--VMOs--refracted through Hegel 2. The Margolies rule--beware of scientism 3. the Hegel Rule--moments in the unfolding of becoming (functional webs of facticity) 4. the Deleuze Rule: beware the image of thought FOUR ONTOLOGIES OF POST-PALEOLITHIC HOMO SAPIENS 1. biology-primatology (linguistically inflected biology; 1st emergence--Chase) organization 1: culture 2. ressentiment & MD (effect of power inflected linguistically) 3. cogitive development-modern organization bildung (organization 2) 4. desire-entropy	The Rules of the Game and the Four Ontologies
Origins of the Four Ontologies Ressentiment and the Mechanisms of Defense Developmental Divergence: Cognitive Development in History These two pages orginated in the attempt to use internet-accessible data to present for purposes of analysis the emotional and cognitive performances of 'the people'. The underlying problematic was to understand the triumph of reaction in post-war politics. Out of this developed the notion of semiotic regimes. The approach is hegelian-pragmatist re. right excerpt. Each "ontology" is actually the antithesis of ontology as construed as fundamental being--the thing in itself. Ontology as I use the term is a reference to key elements within textual fields--eg, res and MD--that provide the generative matrix for the phennomena under examination. Thus, the philo and psycho texts contained in that field converge on ressentiment/MD. The latter, as fundamental, provides the necessary cognitive structure for the apprehension of phenomena. I think this is what Miguel de Beistegui, Truth and genesis: philosophy as differential ontology (Indiana University Press, 2004) is getting at, and more explictly, for my purposes, what Margolies has to say: . . . Hegel's strategy . . . retires altogether the very idea of reference to a 'noumenal' world or a world the properties of which are seperable from from whatever they are said to appear to be to human inquirers . . . Thus, I make no assertions as to what really is, only that certain textual fields converge on fundamental generative matrices within a textual-phenomenal field. The biological-primatalogical field of Wrangham, which he uses to explicate gang violence, can and must be similarly applied to similar phenommena. There is an arguement about the place of biology in undestanding history in the sense of what really is, of what reality is. But . . I don't get involved in that, except to say that it is obvious that Chase, Gould et al allow history into the discussion, and reductionist aproaches have not only been unable but unwilling to approach the mass of stuff that makes up our post-paleolithic history. Directly "seing" racism and power is still prohibited. A most peculiar example of this is The Righteous Mind J Haidt The New Creationism: Biology Under Attack, By Barbara Ehrenreich and Janet McIntosh (The Nation, June 9, 1997)	The main feature of Hegel's strategy, which, in American philosophy, is preserved (almost without attribution) among the classic pragmatists (particularly Dewey) retires altogether the very idea of reference to a 'noumenal' world or a world the properties of which are seperable from from whatever they are said to appear to be to human inquirers, and reinterprets 'appearances' (Erscheinungen) as open to the recovery of no more than a 'constructed' realism, that is, a realism shorn of the recuperative use of the 'Cartesian' habit of opposing or disjoining 'appearance' and 'reality' completely. (If, that is, 'realism' is a proper term for rendering the sense of the Phenomenology's argument.)" 49-50 Barad against reductionism: the double emergence and the giant sliding scale: the applicability of the primate template is widely variable, from the primitive human through whom the primate is given a linguistic inflection (Wrangham) to the uber-human: the formal operatonal bourgeois individual where the primate no longer governs
The expression--species being--seems to contradict the revolutionary essense of what this concept evokes, which is a continual process of development. This is clearly stated in the contemporary work of cultural historical actvity theorists (CHAT)--the quote to the right is a gem of concentrated meaning. Steps towards a sociocultural theory of learning, by Bert van Oers, Department of Education and Curriculum, Free University Amsterdam. Lecture University of Jyväskylä, Finland, 10 December 2004 provides a succinct (20 pp.) account of CHAT. This page--this site--applies this approach to the totality of society conceived of as a multitude of zones with both positive and negative developmental consequences. The earliest pages looked at international test score data and political culture in the United States (Ressentiment and the Mechanisms of Defense). This page and the home page (The Present as History) are the latest. They explore the possibility that major forces in modern society can have negative developmental effects hitherto unimagined. This seems to be especially the case in the United States, but it is too soon to tell if the forces impacting negatively on cognitive development will be confined to the U.S. Because of my earlier "marxist" leanings, I was extremely reluctant to incorporate the biological perspective of the primatologists	from Hartmut Geist, "The Formation Experiment in the Age of Hypermedia and Distance Learning," in The Transformation of Learning: Advances in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, edited by Bert van Oers, Wim Wardekker, Ed Elbers, and René van der Veer (Cambridge University Press, 2008) . . . the basic idea [of activity theory] is not "evolution," that is, the idea of adaptation to the environment, but "revolution," that is, change of the environment. The dialectical analysis of human history, as it was done, for example, by Hegel and particularly by Marx, showed not only that humans adapt to the environment but also that they change it in accordance with their demands . . . Activity is not an active adaptation to the environment but the transformation of the environment and--in inrtrerelation with it--of humans themselves. Although this idea is not new, it has only begun to prove its explanatory potental. Among the first to apply this idea to psychology were Vygotsky and one of his closest students, Leontiev. (pp. 103-105; emphasis added)
1. BIOLOGY Gould Biology has been used by conservatives to justify war and hierarchy. The crude reductionism of many of these attempts, and their obvious locus and function in the web of power, renders them useless. The antidote to this kind of reductionism is contained in the excerpt to the right, from Chase's The Emergence of Culture. Chase is one of many leading primatologists and other biologists who in the past twenty years have produced important works on the relationship between the behavior of contemporary homo sapiens and our nearest relatives (chimpanzees and bonobos). Best know of these is Franz de Waal (Our Inner Ape). While Marxists and semioticians dislike this--in the past this use of biology served the political purpose of an apologetics for the existing state of affairs--de Waal and Wrangham et. al., on the contrary directly confront and negate this misuse of biology. The work of de Waal, Wrangham, Mazur and others are genuine atttempts to integrate biology into sociology and history, and are not reductive. Wrangham and Wilson's, "Collective Violence: Comparison Between Youths and Chimpanzees"* can at most be accused of attacking questions that would not offend dominant ideologies. Thus, one can discuss the chimpanzee roots of lower-class, generally non-white gang violence, but not the chimpanzee roots of fascism, the GOP right, or these forms of tea party violence (protolynchings). But this only means that the interpretive reach of Wrangham and Wilson can and indeed must be extended. Their work, and the work of de Waal, Mazur and others cannot be ignored by those who would look at the present as history. And by work I mean literally their texts, not any putative "reality" that their texts refer to. Thus I am not concerned with the truthiness of their work, but way their work helps to constitute one of the four fundamental ontologies immanent in the present as history. The ontological is defined as the generative matrix of praxis. The four ontologies refer to the four generative matrices that produce the phenomena of the public sphere. *"Collective Violence: Comparison Between Youths and Chimpanzees", by Richard W. Wrangham, Department of Anthropology, Peabody Museum, Harvard University, and Michael L. Wilson (Department of Ecology and Behavior, University of Minnesota, and Gombe Stream Research Centre, the Jane Goodall Institute, Tanzania [Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1036: 233–256 (2004)] Raymond C. Kelly, The evolution of lethal intergroup violence (Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005 October 25; 102(43): 15294–15298)	from Philip G. Chase, The Emergence of Culture. The Evolution of a Uniquely Human Way of Life (Springer, 2006) 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 creting 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
2. Ressentiment and the Mechanisms of Defense To the right are some of the texts that constitute the ontological zone of ressentiment. They are to be borne in mind when looking at the stuff from the semiosphere, just as, now (in the age of the internet), this stuff should be borne in mind when reading texts.	Nietzsche Freud Bernstein Balzac to Houllenbeck Vernon God Little Paxton
3. Bildung (and Cognitive Development) Narcissism as defined by Alcorn. Here too there is an abundance of texts, already given in the LIST in Developmental Divergence
4. Desire (and Entropy) Narcissism as defined by Hall.	Hall et. al. Smith
Or, to cast our net more widely, to ask whether or to what extent what Wilbur Cash describes as the proto-Dorian convention can be seen as rooted in our primate biology. Indeed, certain forms of "patriotism"--those form which are crudely performative and lack any concept of the nation as such and as a whole--can be seen as a mobilization of primate "modes of atunement" (de Waal, piece of colored cloth) Since what I am doing is the opposite of positivism, I am not looking for the truth. I am simply deploying sets of texts according to the three rules of Cassirer, Margolies, and Hegel. That different sets of texts may be applicable to the same problem (fascist performativities, for example) is no problem--is to be expected. (This evokes the term overdetermination.) What is so striking when the prohibitions against deconstructing our sacred cows are cast aside, as is the case when we apply Wrangham and Wilson to our own sacred cows, is the stunningly radical results obtained.	from Franz de Waal, Our Inner Ape (pp. 128-9) Since debates about human aggressiveness invariably revolve around warfare, the command structures of armies should make us think twice before drawing parallels with animal aggression. . . . Are wars born from anger? Leaders often have economic motives, internal political reasons, or act out of self-defense. . . . With supreme cynicism, Napoleon observed, "A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon." I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that the majority of people in the majority of wars have been driven by something other than aggression. Human warfare is systematic and cold-blooded, making it an almost new phenomenon. The critical word is "almost." Tendencies toward group identification, xenophobia, and lethal combat--all of which do occur in nature--have combined with our highly develoed planning capacities to "elevate" human violence to its inhuman level. The study of animal behavior may not be much help when it comes to things like genocide, but if we move away from nation-states, looking instead at human behavior in small-scale societies, the differences are not that great anymore. (emphasis added)
The Rules that Govern this Site 1. The Cassirer Rule Let us begin, therefore, with what I call the Cassirer rule: the obligation to survey all that is, and, since this is without modifcation an impossible task, to develop rules and methods by which to determine what texts, data, images, and videos will be selected for consideration--what semiotic materials, from works of philosophy and history to expletives shouted and signs displayed at political rallies, must be deployed and analyzed. The Cassirer rule requires a survey of all academic fields relevant to whatever problematic is under investigation. Obviously no one can read everything. But every adequately educated citizen can fairly quickly determine what are the major works in any field. These works I call Very Massive Objects. Status in the field of its peers rather than ideology determines what is to be approached as a VMO. Examples of the Cassirer rule in practice: The question of that which is called "Stalinism." After reading the linked materials it is apparent, first of all, that that which is called Stalinism is a complex social and historical process whose context is Russian barbarism (Lewin, Heretz, Mironov . . .), and that developments from 1917 to 1924 were radically discontinuous with the past history of Russian (and European) social democracy and marxism. Cold War scholarship on this is scholarship only in a formal, procedural way. Its subservience to the web of power and the latter's ideological prescriptions, and its supercession and negation by the real scholarship of Lewin et. al, renders Cold War "scholarship" on Stalinism a removable singularity. "Collective Violence: Comparison Between Youths and Chimpanzees", by Richard W. Wrangham, Department of Anthropology, Peabody Museum, Harvard University, and Michael L. Wilson (Department of Ecology and Behavior, University of Minnesota, and Gombe Stream Research Centre, the Jane Goodall Institute, Tanzania [Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1036: 233–256 (2004)] Primatologists and other biologists have in the past twenty years produced important works on the relationship between the behavior of contemporary homo sapiens and our nearest relatives (chimpanzees and bonobos). Best know of these is Franz de Waal (Our Inner Ape). While Marxists and semioticians dislike this--in the past this use of biology served the political purpose of an apologetics for the existing state of affairs--de Waal and Wrangham et. al., on the contrary directly confront and negate this misuse of biology.	from Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment The problem of intellectual “progress” throughout the eighteenth century appears in this light. Perhaps no other century is so permeated with the idea of intellectual progress as that of the Enlightenment. But we mistake the essense of this conception, if we understand it merely in a quantitative sense as an extension of knowledge indefinitely. A qualitative determination always accompanies quantitative expansion; and an increasingly pronounced return to the characteristic center of knowledge corresponds to the extension of inquiry beyond the periphery of knowledge. One seeks multiplicity in order to be sure of unity; one acepts the breadth of knowledge in the sure anticipation that this breadth does not impede the intellect, but that, on the contrary, it leads the intellect back to, and concetrates it in, itself. For we see again and again that the divergence of the paths followed by the intellect in its attempt to encompass all of reality is merely apparent. If these paths viewed objectively seem to diverge, their divergence is, nevertheless, no mere dispersion. All the various energies of the mind are, rather, held together in a common center of force. Variety and diversity of shapes are simply the full unfolding of an essentially homogeneous formative power. When the eighteenth century wants to characterize this power in a single word, it calls it “reason.”
2. The Margolies rule Scientistic (not scientific) reductionism denies the validity of the entire trajectory of philosophy since Kant. It attempts to reduce the social sciences, literature and art to biology as a positivist discipline (Kandel). See Margolies on Pinker, for example. It has a natural affinity with racism, and rejects the very concept of the historical development of cognitive processes. Not only is Kant et. al. important; the "continental" form of Mind incorporates and contextualizes, from a standpoint of greater complexity, the scientistic world view. On the other hand, this kind of reductionism is absent from the Wrangham and de Waal subset of biologists. The Margolies rule therefore modifies the Cassirer rule.	from Joseph Margolis, The Unraveling of Scientism: American Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century (Cornell University Press, 2003) " . . . the record of the last half-century is, philosophically, largely a record of the dawning exhaustion of an impressive vision (scientism) and the incompletely developed, still somewhat inchoate, possibilities of a promising alternative philosophy (pragmatism). The strength of the latter lies, I think, in being closer to the corrective lessons of the post-Kantan and post-Hegelian world that never lost sight of the inescapable strategy by which to escape the paradoxes of pre-Kantian philosophy. But, truth to tell, it has never managed to overcome the nagging aporiai of what is now read as Catersianism." p. xii "For the truth is that Hegel introduces the theme of history and cultural evolution into the debate about cognition in an inexpungeable way, although he does not quite explicitly develop his idea along specifically historicist and collective lines." p. 13 "By 'Cartesianism' or 'Cartesian realism' I mean any realism, no matter how defended or qualified, that holds that the world has a determinate structure apart from all constraints of human inquiry and that our cognizing faculties are nevertheless able to discern those independent structures reliably. 'Cartesianism' serves here as a term of art, as not confind to Descartes's own doctrine. It ranges over pre-Kantan philosophy, Kant's own philosophy (quixotically), and even over the views of such contemporary theorists as Putnam and Davidson. Twentieth-century analytic philosophy is, in this respect, thoroughly pre-Kantian or Kantan in a way in which Kant himself is pre-Kantian: it is an unabashed continuation of seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophy threatened in precisely the same way its ancestors originally were. . . . The main feature of Hegel's strategy, which, in American philosophy, is preserved (almost without attribution) among the classic pragmatists (particularly Dewey) retires altogether the very idea of reference to a 'noumenal' world or a world the properties of which are seperable from from whatever they are said to appear to be to human inquirers, and reinterprets 'appearances' (Erscheinungen) as open to the recovery of no more than a 'constructed' realism, that is, a realism shorn of the recuperative use of the 'Cartesian' habit of opposing or disjoining 'appearance' and 'reality' completely. (If, that is, 'realism' is a proper term for rendering the sense of the Phenomenology's argument.)" 49-50
4. the Hegel Rule (Hegel after Derrida) The particulars--the particles--in the phenomenological field must be seen as moments in the unfolding of . . . what? Ressentiment and the Mechanisms of Defense begins with anti-Obama placards, but presents these particles as moments in the unfolding of ressentiment, from the first Crusade to the presidential campaign of 2012. Nothing is to be taken in isolation from the context of its unfolding, as John E. Jones III, United States District Judge, in the KITZMILLER, et al. v. DOVER AREA SCHOOL DISTRICT, et al.: MEMORANDUM OPINION, December 20, 2005, has observed. I provide excerpts from this case in The Political Morality of Ressentiment, wherein Judge Jones comments on the "lies", "ignorance", and "mendacity" of the defendants. Concepts such as the fascist aesthetic are contained in, and subordinate to, the concept of ressentiment.
II. The Four Ontolgical Levels a (dialectical) sequence of sets of textual authorities bound together by the problematic they address I. biology-primatology (organization 1) II. ressentiment & MD (effect III. cogitive development-organization-bildung (organization 2) IV. desire-entropy and then there are institons--of the old kind and the new ("capitalist-borugeois") kind examples of the Cassirer rule: Blanning The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815, Tim Blanning (Viking, 2007) 4. Transcendental empiricism and the Internet 5. Emancipation vs. Development 6. the social hitorical context of this site (networks within which I was situated) 1941-59: red networks 1975-2000 uaw detroit suthwest suburbs mainly detroit 7. combats (va cutbacks; urban networks; solidarity; 8. loci (cadillac asssembly, bcbsm, southwest detroit; my suppressed class and the leflet that spread everywhere *(Miguel de Beistegui, Truth and genesis: philosophy as differential ontology (Indiana University Press, 2004)	The "People" have also been fetishized. (But see Ranciere) It seems that, contrary to the standard presupposition of a cognitively homogenious human population, we should refer to the nominally human. Only after empirical investigation into actual cognitive performances can we assign a more specific characterization to specific subsets of humans. Again, one of the major effects of racism is the implicit prohibition against conducting this kind of analysis of the nominally "white" population. This site does two things. First, it treat the whole terrain of human praxis as decodable through the deployment of a set of critical texts to the semiosphere, a performative field that includes at one extreme both the mass media and the various sets of elite discourses that of course never make it into the public realm; and at the other extreme the micro fields of everyday life, of shopfloor and office, of family and streets . . . re. "Texts": in opposition both to the fetishization of Marx-Lenin and the obvious corruption of acaemic work by the forces of reaction (the concept of totalitarianism as the academic side of McCarthyism) I follow the fundamental rule of assembly, summiarized under the rubric "Very Massive Objct." and indespensible field. in decoding the semiosphere, the major works within the manstream of academic work . . . Second, the world is construed as networks of people, discourses, and institutions. This is what I did in decoding the Keynesian elite. The results of this can be seen in Progressivism to New Deal: the Keynesian Elite in the New Deal State, and in Planes of Immanence. "Difference" is a touchy subject. Margarita Azmitia's review of Cole's Cultural Psychology: The Once and Future Discipline, is indicative of this. Her critical remark--there is no discussion of cultural factors such as race, gender, or ethnicity, etc.--reflects this "sensitivity", which itself is one of the more subtle effects of racism. In fact, one of the striking things about modern American discourses on "race" and intelligence is its failure to scrutinize the extreme variations in "white" cognitive performativity. Notwithstanding liberal snickering at the bizarre cognitive performances of Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential campaign, its character and significance remain untouched as subjects of discussion. The great failure of liberal discussions of Palin et. al. on the campaign trail is that liberals fail to ask the obvious questions about the nature of her audiences. Yet when taken as an organic whole--performer plus audience--the question of the intelligence (qua cognitive performtivity) of the audience is necessarily raised.
What is Ontological Analysis? This whole site is governed by what I think is a Deleuzian concept of the probem of being that starts by negating the static givenness of being. In KE in New Deal, for example, the ontological problem is contained in the task of fusing being and praxis: being must be found in the generative matrix of praxis. This is discussed in plane of immanence, and so I will use that work as an example. Starting with a major problem among lefties: what was the New Deal? Presumably, we mean in part or in whole the New Deal state, whose organizatonal chart and personnel matrix are given in KE. Thus, this is the empirical point of departure. But it is not enough to merely identify the elements of this state, and even to link these elements to subsets of business and other organizations. One must analyze the immanent praxis of these elements that links them together, tht is, one must analyze the poicly-oriented discourse of significant actors. Out of this emerges a concept of the input-output matrix of the mass consumption sector of american capitalism. It is the hgemonic actors within this input-output matrix that generates the disocuse and strtegic policy orenttion now as Keynesianism. But this approach is too limited, for what one finds in examining the -raxis of the KE is not simply a reflex determined by input-output flows and a conceptualiztion of a strategic interest of the mass consumptin sector (relutation and eevleopment of infrstructure, expansion of consuption, application of scient to mangement and organizational and socal problems, etc). This would be mrely another version of a recutive materialism (a key feature of materialism is that somewhere along the line humanbeings disappear into the logical srutures of interest). This is where a conept of Bildung is esential in decoding the KE in New Deal (but ot in decoding sec bloc,or the forces of the ancin regime): it is not a mere coincidence that Communists, Labor activists, and scientific managers . . . and strategically significant CEOs (who arenything but far-sighted traitors to their class) thus, there is a double ontological anlaysis here: first, a decoding of the inter-organiatonal flows thatprovides the exitential matrix within which and upon which human agencs act; but then thee must alwasy be an analysis of the specifically huamn compoents of action, those comonents that interact with and develop with such contexts. This is a dialctical process. Miguel de Beistegui, Truth and genesis: philosophy as differential ontology (Indiana University Press, 2004)	Biology has been used by conservatives to justify war and hierarchy. The crude reductionism of many of these attempts, and their obvious locus and function in the web of power, means that they should be taken in the context of Nietzsche's famous comment of semiotics: "Moral judgments are therefore never to be taken literally: so understood, they are always merely absurd. Semiotically, however, they remain invaluable: they reveal, at least for those who can interpret them, the most valuable realities of cultures and psychologies that did not know how to "understand" themselves. Morality is only a language of signs, a group of symptoms: one must know how to interpret them correctly to be able to profit from them." p. 55 Twilight of the Idols However, Primatologists and other biologists have in the past twenty years produced important works on the relationship between the behavior of contemporary homo sapiens and our nearest relatives (chimpanzees and bonobos). Best know of these is Franz de Waal (Our Inner Ape). While Marxists and semioticians dislike this--in the past this use of biology served the political purpose of an apologetics for the existing state of affairs--de Waal and Wrangham et. al., on the contrary directly confront and negate this misuse of biology. But recent writings--de Waal, Wrangham, Mazur--are genuine atttempts to integrate biology into sociology and history, and are not reductive. Wrangham and Wilson's, "Collective Violence: Comparison Between Youths and Chimpanzees" can at most be accused of lacking "the courage to be loyal": attacking questions that would not offend dominant ideologies. Thus, one can discuss the Chimpanzee roots of lower-class, generally non-white gang violence, but not the chimpanzee roots of fascism, the GOP right, or these forms of tea party violence (LINKS) Walsingham: Your Grace is arrested. You must go with these men to the Tower. Norfolk: I must do nothing by your orders. I am Norfolk. Walsingham: You were Norfolk. The dead have no titles. You were the most powerful man in England and could have been greater still but you had not the courage to be loyal. Or, to cast our net more widely, to ask whether or to what extent what Wilbur Cash describes as the proto-Doiran convention can be seen as rooted in our primate biology. Indeed, certain forms of "patriotism"--those form which are crudely performative and lack any concept of the nation as such and as a whole--can be seen as a mobilization of primate "modes of atunement" (de Waal, piece of colored cloth) Since what I am doing is the opposite of positivism, I am not looking for the truth. I am simply deploying sets of texts according to the three rules of Cassirer, Margolies, and Hegel. That different sets of texts may be applicable to the same problem (fascist performativities, for example) is no problem--is to be expected. (This evokes the term overdetermination.) What is so striking when the prohibitions against deconstructing our sacred cows are cast aside, as is the case when we apply Wrangham and Wilson to our own sacred cows, is the stunningly radical results obtained. Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence Of The Old Regime : Europe To The Great War (Pantheon Books, 1981) addresses something that marxists have not wanted to face. There are many faces to that something: here are two of them. On one level of analysis the provincial Protestantism and Catholicism of McCarthy's social base and the provincialism of the Russian Orthodox base of Stalinism (see Stalinism) are disimilar. On another, systems level of analysis, however, they occupy the same place and perform the same function in the two systems of power: the Republican right (now the entire GOP) and Stalinism mobilized these forces of ressentiment against the representatives of the Enlightenment.
Cells to Civilisation the social conuest of the earth wrangham and de waal on Youtube	the excursion into history (not merely culture, lest you violate the immanently historical dimension of evolutionary theory) by biologists et. al. can be sen as an effect of power. Why the desire to avoid the obvious (RMD, etc) and to produce immanent justifications for the way things are (J. Haidt, for example)?
American Exceptionalism: the Psychometric Data Developmental Divergence: Cognitive Development in History American Exceptionalism: Ressentiment and the Mechanisms of Defense Appetite and Entropy: Subverting Cognitive Development Semiotic Regimes (cognition, ressentiment, and desire) Education in Finland and the United States Progressivism to New Deal: the Keynesian Elite in the New Deal State Bildung: Was Mozart a Communist? Progressivism to New Deal: Charts Progressivism to New Deal: Documents Philosophy and History Planes of Immanence
This is the third in a (dialectical) sequence of four sets of textual authorities bound together by the problematic they address. The second, already mentioned, is Ressentiment and the Mechanisms of Defense. (Fascism then and now; in Europe and America: Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, and Ravetto, The Unmasking of Fascist Aesthetics) The fourth, Appetite and Entropy: Subverting Cognitive Development, is fully developed in Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture: crime, exclusion and the new culture of narcissism, by Steve Hal, Simon Winlow and Craig Ancrum (Willan Publishing, 2008). I provide a list of contemporary novels that complement, in ways that only great literary novels can, the problematic presented by this book. This book is a stunning rebuke to the crude materialism--to the economism--of the "Marxist" remnants of today. It should be read by all those who would further develop the dialectic of the Enlightenment under 21st century conditions.	A settling of accounts with that which is called "Marxism" "Marxism" was only a moment in a socio-cultural and cognitive-developmental trajectory which came to an inglorious end with the fetishization of Marx-Lenin. This attempt to recover and further develop the inner logic of this trajectory under 21st century conditions requires a settling of accounts with that which is called "Marxism." Of the four phenomenological fields that adequately cover homo sapiens today--biology (including primatology); ressentiment (the pathological reaction of the organism to power--one of Nietzsche's great ideas); cognitive development (Marx had an inkling of this); and the culture of narcissism as understood by Hall et. al. (and, as Hall et. al. write, this is a phenomenon that emerges in full force on a mass scale only in the 1960s)--none falls within the intellectual territory of that which is called Marxism. The intellectual povery of that which is called Marxism is striking. Unlike the Baron Ludwig von Westphalen (who was Marx's mentor and then father-in-law) and Karl Marx, both of whom carried on and further developed the great Enlightenment practice of being aware of and participating in the intellectual developments of their own time, today's radicals, such as they are, seem unaware of the major developments in sociocultural historical understanding of the past hundred years. The quote from Ernst Cassirer's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment captures this dynamic of Mind as historical-developmental power, and is consistent with Wellman and Ranciere. This provides the first rule of this site, the first of a set of methodological categorical imperatives. Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (Little, Brown and Co., 2011)