1. Nietzsche's Critique of the Two-Party System  →

2. Topologies of the Two-Party System

3. Deep Structure of the Two-party System: Emotional Configurations

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

5. Comments: Rabids

6. Comments: Thoughfuls

7. Seven Telephone Threats to Judge Engoron

8. Three Telephone Threats to Lawmakers

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

from Werner Stark,  Sociology of Religion: A Study of Christendom (Fordham University Press, 1966-72) vol. 1, p. 188

The original impetus for the analysis presented on this page emerged from a reading of the comments published in The Connecticut Post of August 31, 2006 re. the Jonathon Edington murder case (Table 1).  I noticed the similarities between this set of comments and the pro- and anti-war demonstrators' signs in a CNN newscast, 4:00 to 6:00 PM, 9-15-07 (Table 2). 

The comments that were the basis for the drafting of table 1 to the right were sent to the Connecticut Post at the end of August, 2006 in response to an awful story of mistaken revenge.  The link is inaccessible to me now, so I have to provide the background for these comments.  The comments themselves are exactly as they appeared in the online version of the Conn Post.

A man, active in right to life and similar efforts, living in a small home in a modest lower middle class section of Bridgeport, Connecticut, hears over the phone from his wife that their two year old daughter has just told her that she was molested by the next-door neighbor, whereupon the father grabbed a knife, exited through his kitchen window and across the narrow alley into the home of the guy next door and stabbed him. The wounds were fatal.

At the time of the killing the story got extensive media coverage, and stimulated a wave of responses. 

Later it was determined that it was all a tragic mistake, and the killer is being tried for murder.

These responses have been organized into two categories--rabid and thoughtful. 

Table 1, Comments from the Connecticut Post, is what resulted from my analysis of these comments.

Figure 1.  The Two-Party System: Semiotic Regimes I: Cognitive Performativities and Emotional Configurations, was originally titled Topologies of the Two-Party System.

By topologies I mean the following: take the set of all statements made in a well-defined bounded discursive space (the two-party space). 

First, the rhetorical elements form two disjoint sets.

Second, there is a structure on each data set: a left structure and a right structure. Each data set has both a psychoanalytic and a cognitive dimension.

These psychological-semiotic structures are provided by Simon Clarke, Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).  The Clarke text is deployed as interpretive grid.  Without this psychoanalytic framework it is impossible to understand the rhetorical performances of right-wing political actors--and the responses of their right-wing audiences.

The cognitive-semiotic structures are provided by standard developmental theory (developmental divergence (old), Language-Thinking-Education).  Pre-operational and gestural cognitive modalities dominate the right rhetorical set (Fox News).  Concrete operational and pre-operational cognitive modalities dominate on the left (MSNBC).  Notwithstanding MSNBC's ostensible commitment to science, in practice a smug dogmatism combined with mathematical and scientific incompetence better describes MSNBC's discursive practices.

We are changing, of course, but that does not necessarily mean we are progressing.  Combined with all the forces that today exhort us to look into our own private lives, the “civilization of change” has stimulated a massive interest in psychic disorders.  It can be heard from all quarters, and it takes form in the many marketplaces that offer inner balance and tranquility.  Today, many of our socials tensions have been expressed in terms of implosion and depressive collapse [liberalism] or, in a similar way, its flip side: [fascism] explosions of violence, rage, the search for new sensations.  pp. 185-6

[liberalism] As addictive explosion reflects depressive implosion, so the drug-taker’s search for sensation reflects the depressed person’s lack of feeling.  Depression, that crossroads of pathology, serves as a canvas upon which to sketch out the changes in modern subjectivity, the displacement of the hard task of being healthy.  In a context in which choice is the norm and inner insecurity the price, these pathologies make up the dark side of contemporary private life.  Such is the equation of the sovereign individual: psychic freedom and individual initiative = identity insecurities and the incapacity to act.  p. 232

So what is the nature of the present crisis?  Confining myself to the United States and by extension to other parts of the late-capitalist world . . . I want to suggest the following elements.

First, beginning in good Marxist fashion from the current transformations of economic life, I would foreground the still unfolding consequences of fundamental capitalist restructuring.  That would include deindustrialization; the dismantling of Western capitalism's historic manufacturing base; post-Fordist transitions; the transnationalization of labor markets and the re-proletarianizing of labor; a new regime of accumulation ordered around the mobility of capital and the spectacle of consumption; a regime of regulation ruthlessly validating private accumulation and the gutting of public goods; and the hypertrophied dissorder of a deregulated financial center whose dominance is severed (or freed) from any apparent mechanism of accountability or relationship to productive investment [see FF to FDR].  This first element--the fiscal crisis of late capitalism -- has profound implications for the conduct of government, for the reliable stabilities of political order, for the organized distribution of state power, and for the practice sovereignty.

Second, the entailment of late capitalist restructuring is a drastic and thoroughgoing process of class recomposition.  Class formation in the United States is always highly regionalized, always porous to cross-border migrancy on a vast scale, always structure around race, always subject to extraordinarily effective mystification, always construed into being something else [CDP].  Yet, by any objective criteria, the working class of today — as a social category of wage-earners dependent for a livelihood on the sale or exchange of labor power — is larger, less secure, and less reliant on the collective solidarities of residence, workplace, associations, and organized political agency than ever before.  Of course, even in the 1950s and 1960s the social citizenship of some workers ( mainly skilled, male, white) — their job security, higher wages and greaer benefits, access to healthcare and housing, expectation of pensions, limited recognition under the law — always. presupposed a much wider reservoir of cheap and disposable labor power (mobil, low-waged, insecure, unprotected), whether located inside the sovereign borders or iin the neocolonial elsewhere.  In these terms, the postwar experience of relatively humanized capitalism remained no less beholden to globalized systems of exploitation of natural resources, human material, and grotesquely unequal terms of trade than the preceding era of imperialist expansion.  Postwar gains were embedded in the privileged prosperity of a metropolitan boom whose very possibility rested on historically specific repertoires of extraction and exploittion eperating on a world scale.  But now even that relative working-class prosperity stands reveal as a finite and passing phenomenon. At an ever-accelerating pace, the social relations of work have been t ransformed since the 1980s into the new low-waged, semi-legal, and deregulated labor market of a maiinly service-based and transnationalized economy.  This as-yet unstoppable story of the de-skilling, de-unionizing, de-benefiting, and de-nationalizing of labor via the rampant processes of metropolitan deindustrialization and global capitalist restructuing has comprehensively undermined the model of significant social improvement around which so much of postwar poltical culture became built.

Not the least of the changes under way since the 1970s is thus a re-proletarianization of labor.  From our vantage point now [2013 pub. date] the relative working-class prosperity of the postwar boom re-emerges as a highly contingent interlude in the life of a capitalist social formation whose ordering principles look very different over the fullest span of its history.  From the mid 1970s, every element in the potentially democratizing architecture of a postwar political imaginary was brought under brutally effective political attack.[Stayin’ Alive; Williams/Pontiac]  By the 1990s, little remained of either the practices or the principles, let alone the material structures and institutional relations previously organizing the political common sense.  The Social contract associated with the New Deal and the Great Society was gone. (pp. 215-216) . . . .  This new dialectic of international conflict and societal crisis may well enable a politics that resembles fascism to coalesce.

"the software used to transcribe the voicemails censors profanity.  The asterisks contained in the transcriptions are used in place of the profanity." 

What happens when you sanitize and sane-wash this language?  You conceal the essence of these cognitive-discursive performances: their sado-sexual character, their adolescent rage, their intellectual poverty.

Now (September 19, 2024), bomb threats have been made to Springfield, Ohio.  If we could read the unexpurgated (or even the sanitized) version of these threats, we would likely find that they are generated by the same-sado-sexual eigenvector: they are all variations on the same theme:

Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Yale, 2004):

These are certainly threats, but they are also symptoms of a post-modern bio-cultural catastrophe.

Take these threats  all together as a phenomenological bundle, and you would see that these threats speak a very restricted language--let's call it fucklish.  Analyzed in this way, one sees that all of these threats can be reduced--without any loss of meaning--to fuck you.  This is the intellectual level of "the base."

I have filled in the words.  Here is the key: