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Invisible University TEST (aa1971@wayne.edu) Site Map |
from Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press Books, 2007), p. 141 .
. . the primary ontological units are not 'things' but
phenomena--dynamic topological / reconfigurings / entanglements /
relationalities / (re)articulations of the world. And the primary
semantic units are not 'words' but material-discursive practices
through which (ontic and semantic) boundaries are constituted.
This dynamic is agency.
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Figure 1.
PISA Math
Scores, 2003 - 2012: 25 Nations Southeast Asian nations are in light blue; Scandinavian nations + Switzerland in dark blue; Anglo-Saxon nations in orange; France, Germany, Belgium and Poland in green; Italy, Portugal and Spain in brown; the United States in red. (The advanced capitalist nations. Some have been omitted for the sake of visual clarity). Note the decline in the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian nations. The results of the 2015 tests will be released in December of 2016. |
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. . . As the old America dies a sociocultural death . . .
The Immigrant Advantage (New York Times, 5-24-14) In Heroin Crisis, White Families Seek Gentler War on Drugs (New York Times, 10-30-15) Death Rates Rising for Middle-Aged White Americans, Study Finds (New York Times, 11-2-15) U.S. Suicide Rate Surges to a 30-Year High (New York Times, 4-22-16) Drug Overdoses Propel Rise in Mortality Rates of Young Whites (New York Times, 1-20-16) How the Epidemic of Drug Overdose Deaths Ripples Across America (New York Times, 1-19-16) Heroin Epidemic Increasingly Seeps Into Public View (New York Times, 3-6-16) The battle to free Taunton from heroin’s deadly grip: as overdoses soar, a struggling city looks for answers (Boston Globe, 3-19-16) |
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Figure 2. cognitive developmental modalities* that span the history of the tribe hominini (cognitive-linguistic cardinality)
The Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein in the context of Merlin Donald, A
Mind So Rare, Table 7.1,p. 260; Piaget; and Vygotsky (apologies to George Cantor)אi
i = 4 internet and extended mind
i = 3 Foucault (Hegel, Nietzsche . . i = 2 Formal operational i = 1 Concrete operational i = 0 Pre-operational/oral-mythic i = -1 Mimetic/gestural i = -2 primate *Michael Cole, Cynthia Lightfoot, and Sheila R. Cole, The Development of Children (Worth Publishers, 2009); *Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: the Evolution of Human Consciousness (W.W. Norton, 2001) *from Sue Taylor Parker and Michael L. McKinney, The Origins of Intelligence: the Evolution of Cognitive Development in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) Donald
. . . proposes successive levels of mental adaptation (all of
which persist in humans): (1) the episodic culture of monkeys and apes,
(2) the mimetic culture of Homo erectus, (3) the mythic culture of
modern Homo sapiens, and (4) the theoretic cultures of literate humans.
(pp. 275-6; emphasis added)
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the Musso Rant
Video: Martin Bashir interviews John Cantin on MSNBC. Father
of gun victim to hecklers: ‘What happened to my daughter
wasn’t propaganda’
Video: Pro-gun advocate shamelessly heckles father of gun-violence victim before getting Tasered by police and arrested Daily Mail 21 June 2013 Video: John Cantin's Speech at Mayors Against Illegal Guns Rally Published on Jun 20, 2013 Article: Kelly Ayotte Criticized by Domestic Violence Activist, Examiner.com ![]() A security officer
hovers near John Cantin as gun rights activist
Daniel Musso him at a gun control rally |
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The Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain
from Wikipedia: Lee Atwater on the Southern Strategy (the third genetic ontology: Ressentiment and the Mechanisms of Defense) 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. Bob Herbert
reported on the interview in the October 6, 2005, edition of the New
York Times. On November 13, 2012, The Nation magazine released a
42-minute audio recording of the interview.[9] James Carter IV,
grandson of former president Jimmy Carter, had asked and been granted
access to these tapes by Lamis's widow. 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 byproduct 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." |
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Figure 3. The Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein: Five Genetic Ontologies
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![]() Renée Jorgenssen Bolinger, Ecce Homo Friedrich Nietzsche. Paired with Paul Klee |
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the patrimonialism of highly developed post-modern societies
The Trump-Berlusconi Syndrome Richard Lachmann, American Patrimonialism: the return of the repressed (in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science July 2011 vol. 636 no. 1 204-230), in Patrimonial Power in the Modern World, special editors, Julia Adams, Mounira M. Charrad Ivan Ermakoff and Richard Lachmann: Who Holds Power in the United States from Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard, 2014): . . . at the beginning of the twenty-first century Europe seems to be
in the avante-guard of the new patrimonial capitalism . . . "
154.
See Paul Krugman's review of Capital in the Twenty-First Century: Why We’re in a New Gilded Age -------- Figure 3 is a summary of a version of the Absolute: from Hegel through Cassirer to Figure 3 (a summary of archive1). The rules for the production of an archive are found in philohistory. a. the Cassirer inclusion rule b. the Margolies exclusion rule (the Cartesian death star rule) 3. exclusion by impeachment (i.e., Griffin, Modernism and Fascism) 4. A different kind of rule is the Meta-cognition Rule (Vygotsky redux authors). This rule demands critical awareness of the crippling effect of the Cartesian presuppositional matrix on the usefulness of texts. The Cartesian presuppositional matrix : the Cartesian self and the associated rhetorical elements of belief, motive, ideology, and interest. This matrix appears in its crudest form on cable TV "news" shows. But it has been hegemonic in much of academic discourse. |
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Figure 3. The Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein: Five Genetic Ontologies
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Detroit News, May 20, 1943
![]() Dodge
Main, center. Midland Steel, lower right. Detroit Steel
Products just out of sight, lower left. Michigan Steel Tube about
five blocks north of Dodge. Murray Body two block east of
Dodge. Chrysler Highland Park is just to the north west of
Dodge. Packard is just out of sight at the lower left of this
photo.
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Donald Trump Talks Like a Third-Grader (Politico, August 13, 1915). ttt
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Figure 2.
Taylor
Society I: Keynesian
Elite in the New
Deal State RR
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 |
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Detroit News, May 20, 1943![]() |
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| Figure 1, PISA Math Scores, 2003-2012: 25 Nations,
is pregnant with all sorts of meanings, prospective as well as
retrospective. It is about the development of our cognizing
powers, and the subversion of that development. It figures
throughout this site. It enters into any serious consideration of
the Trump campaign: Donald Trump Talks Like a Third-Grader. (Politico, August 13, 1915.)
Figure
1 is an example of one of the key moves that characterize this site:
the use of graphical formulations embodying ideas, data, relationships,
sets, structures . . . It is intened that Figure 1 should hover over every page.For presidential hopefuls, simpler language resonates: Trump tops GOP field while talking to voters at fourth-grade level, (Boston Globe, Auguast 20, 2015). Milbank: Trump’s ‘Captain Underpants’ campaign (Washington Post, Feb. 26, 2016). Donald Trump Incites His Crowds — And His Crowds Incite Him 'A cauldron of the baser instincts of humanity': inside Donald Trump's Nevada triumph Donald Trump, the Winning Wild Card (Thomas B. Edsall MARCH 8, 2016 NYT) The Lurking Menace of a Trump Rally (DAVID A. GRAHAM, the Atlantic, MAR 10, 2016) How to cool down Donald Trump (FDR's comments on Huey Long and Genl Macarthur) The Trump campaign of 2016 is in one sense the continuation of demonization as the geneaotive matrix of discourse production in appeals to the "people." .
. . according to Sellars's view, the difference between theoretical
objects and observable objects is methodologcal rather than
ontological. That is, theoretical and observable objects are not
different kinds of things. They differ only in how we come to
know about them. (362)
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Figure 3 subsumes Figures 1 and 2. Figure 3 represents a rejection of the
Cartesian metaphysic, (Descola), a synthesis of cognitive and
psychoanalytic psychology under the aegis of philosophy, and the
historicization of Dasein. As Zizek puts it, we are here
concerned with "the historicity of being".
on
reading e.g. Mills on biopolitics (in the context of Trump) one
realizes that the crisis of being is manifested everywhere as a
substitution of lateral discourses for action/project/power.
lateral d iscourses: the prolifeation of "towards a . . . "; the
endless commentaries on foundational humans (Kant, Plato, Foucault . .
. )Figure 3 summarizes the materials contained in several pages on this site. The Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein: Five Genetic Ontologies from Wikipedia: Heidegger sought to use the concept of Dasein to uncover the primal nature of "Being" (Sein), agreeing with Nietzsche and Dilthey that Dasein is always a being engaged in the world: neither a subject, nor the objective world alone, but the coherence of Being-in-the-world. This ontological basis of Heidegger's work thus opposes the Cartesian "abstract agent" in favour of practical engagement with one's environment. Dasein is revealed by projection into, and engagement with, a personal world - a never-ending process of involvement with the world as mediated through the projects of the self. Heidegger raised the question of the ontological status of homo sapiens. The obscure romanticism of his language is not unrelated to the fact that he became an important Nazi (the rector of the University of Freiburg). His static primordialism is in sharp contrast to the dynamic historical and developmental ontological thinking of Hegel-Marx-Vygotsky. The weakness of the latter triad is in their naïve progressivism, the assumption that modern rationality would become the dominant ontology of modern society. They did not comprehend the volcanic force of ressentiment that showed its face in the ultra-nationalism of the nineteenth century and the fascism of the twentieth century . . . and today almost everywhere. Nor did they grasp that nihilism (neoliberalism's greatest if unintended achievement--see New York Times on Nihilism at the right) was the ultimate result of the cultural logic of capitalism. The one thinker of that epoch who got it right, who speaks to our Now of the twenty first century, is Nietzsche. Of the five genetic ontologies three belong to the era of state power. Ressentiment: again and again it appears, always claiming to be new, always the same old shit. Eternal return (of the same old shit). Bildung and the Will to Power. Here Nietzsche and Hegel should be supplemented with some key contemporary texts, including Alcorn and Dupre. It was Alcorn who opened my mind to an understanding of the pre-1960s left: the Communists and Socialists of New York and southeastern Michigan. It was Alcorn who enabled me to make sense out of what Saul Wellman (Communist Party Detroit) and Cliff Williams (UAW Pontiac) were telling me. On nihilism: the last man; disindividuation; decognification; the incredible shrinking self--it is uncanny how dead-on Nietzsche's scattered comments are in the early Twenty-first century. Genetic ontology (Miguel de Beistegui: "Transcendental empiricism is concerned with isolating the genetic and immanent conditions of existence of the real"), historicity of being (Zizek), Modes of Existence (Latour), psuedo-speciation (Mary Migdley); Paul James, Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In different orders of being "The fundamental historicity of Being" (Zizek, Less Than Nothing, p. 108). |
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| The
Lacan-Atwater open-ended chain can be viewed as series of substitutions
for the N-word. Atwater's explantion of the GOP's rhetorical
strategy cannot be improved upon! One of the major patterns of
Trump's rhetorical performances is his further elaboration of this
chain. My conjunction of Atwater and Lacan represents neither and
affirmation nor a rejection of Lacan's ideas. It is the essence
of TransEmp that one never leaves the field of immanence of
phenomena--something only possible in the context of the technology
deployed at this very moment by you, the reader, and by me, the
assembler. Simultaneously, while immersed in this field one
deploy's texts that might illuminate these phenomena. Thus,
Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Melanie Klein are deployed when relevant
to the field of immanence within which they then become enmeshed. consilience affinity attunement The evocation of a sexually charged evil and the channelling of rage against a scapegoat (various forms of the other) is the stock-in-trade of Republican politiciams. In this respect Trump is no different (see GOP as the Stupid Party) concept of brutishness Let us call this the Lacan/Atwater hypothesis. Political elites demonization--heart of darkness--trope--signifying chain But what is new with the Trump campaign--and decisively so--is that a charismatic demagogue has literally hijacked the base of the Republican Party. The genetic ontology of ressentiment produces a subject. But that subject--the Trump enthusiasts one sees at rallies and in interviews and focus groups--has been embedded in the cultural-historical field of white supremacy (see The Imus Brouhaha and that which is called "Racism"). The containment of white rage has depended on two things. First, an economy of white affirmative action guaranteeing great masses of "white" folk sole access to those sectors of employment embedded in local government (police, fire, govt administration, utilities, transportation, building services, construction, and even manufacturing). And second, a semioitic regime of ego-reinforcing symbols (positive and negative identifications). When you add the election of Barak Obama to the economic consequences of the regime of neoliberal globalization (which includes declining wages as well as job losses) you add insult to injury, and one gets a psycho-cultural crackup of world-historic proportions. This is what Trump exploits. |
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| 1. history of ressentiment in politics 2. Walzer 3. Gienapp 4. Enlightenment/Progressivism vs. God, King and Country, family: MCMahon, Vincent 5. 1937-8; 1953; 1963, 1964; Atwater The linkage of Jacques Lacan and Lee Atwater exemplifies the fundamental orientation of this site: Transcendental Empiricism. As Wilfrid Sellars has put it (as interpreted by Robert B. Brandom, "The Centrality of Sellars's Two-Ply Account of Observations to the Arguments of 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind', in Robert B. Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Harvard University Press, 2002)) |
1. The New York Times (and others) on Nihilism
Screen Addiction Is Taking a Toll on Children (7-6-15)
Steve Jobs Was a Low-Tech Parent (9-10-14) Teens spend nearly nine hours every day consuming media (W. Post 11-3-15) Is Internet Addiction a Health Threat for Teenagers? (7-16-15) In ‘Screenagers,’ What to Do About Too Much Screen Time (3-15-16) Technology Addiction: Concern, Controversy, and Finding Balance (Common Sense Media) How Facebook Warps Our Worlds (Frank Bruni, op-ed column 5-21-16) The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food (2-20-13) Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley (3-25-16) Evolution’s Sweet Tooth (6-5-12) Today’s Exhausted Superkids (8-15-15) Failure to Thrive (3-12-15) Unequal, Yet Happy (4-11-15) Michel Houllebecq's 'Submission', reviewed by Karl Ove Knausgaard (NYT, 11-2-15) The Immigrant Advantage (5-24-14) In Heroin Crisis, White Families Seek Gentler War on Drugs (10-30-15) Death Rates Rising for Middle-Aged White Americans, Study Finds (11-2-15) U.S. Suicide Rate Surges to a 30-Year High (4-22-16) Drug Overdoses Propel Rise in Mortality Rates of Young Whites (1-20-16) How the Epidemic of Drug Overdose Deaths Ripples Across America (1-19-16) Heroin Epidemic Increasingly Seeps Into Public View (3-6-16) The battle to free Taunton from heroin’s deadly grip: as overdoses soar, a struggling city looks for answers (Boston Globe, 3-19-16) |
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| *** These
sado-sexual fixations that are the essense of right-wing signifying chains may dress themselves up as issues (such as
abortion or Obamacare), as if they
were subject to rational debate and beholden to empirical checks.
But they are clearly not, and one of the indications of the
intellectual bankruptcy of liberal and progressive discourse is that it
is fundamentally incapable of grasping this elemental fact. Figure 1, PISA Math Scores, 2003 - 2012: 25 Nations, should be studied carefully, referred to frequently, borne in mind constantly. For more on Figure 1 see the PISA Results: Evolutionary, Historical, Developmental, and Psychological Perspectives. This figure is pregnant with all sorts of meanings, prospective as well as retrospective. The development of our cognizing powers, and the subversion of that development. In the context of Fig. 1, an interesting New York Times article: Reforms to Ease Students’ Stress Divide a New Jersey School District (12--25-15). sexual insymbolic contet--sado-sexual. This may be obvious in the anti-abortion, anti-obama care videos (proctologist and gynecologitst, in the content of the demonic (public discourse of the liberal variety refers to demonization but does not explore the cotntent of the demonic ur-content). The term super-predator, use of which got bill clinton into trouble in early April, while refering only to violence, evokes the whole tangled mas of sexual content and pirmal fears at the core of audeince repsones to right wing demagogues. Here is Nietzshce's eternal rutrn in all it slgory! ------------------------------------ The Kennedy Assassination and Dark Politics In mid thirties in michigan an expose of the black legion in local politics But what is new with the Trump campaign--and decisively so--is that a charismatic demagogue has literally hijacked the base of the Republican Party. The genetic ontology of ressentiment produces a subject. But that subject--the Trump enthusiasts one sees at rallies and in interviews and focus groups--has been embedded in the cultural-historical field of white supremacy (see The Imus Brouhaha and that which is called "Racism"). The containment of white rage has depended on two things. First, an economy of white affirmative action guaranteeing great masses of "white" folk sole access to those sectors of employment embedded in local government (police, fire, govt administration, utilities, transportation, building services, construction, and even manufacturing). And second, a semioitic regime of ego-reinforcing symbols (positive and negative identifications). When you add the election of Barak Obama to the economic consequences of the regime of neoliberal globalization (which includes declining wages as well as job losses) you add insult to injury, and one gets a psycho-cultural crackup of world-historic proportions. This is what Trump exploits. Blumenthal on Nixon riots search terms: "hard hat riot may 1970 new york" War Foes Here Attacked by Construction Workers (NYT 5-9-70) |
Basic Forms and the Realization of Human "Being-in-the-World" Fig 2 psuedo-speciation . . . Man is the as yet undetermined animal . . . Fig 1--and the Trump campaign--pose the question of the fate of intelligence. Foucault, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze & Guatarri Freud, Klein, Lacan The enlightenment assumption of the rational citizen as ontologically prior to history is now only a tired shibboleth. Developmental divergence, variation and perversion are now fundamental features of postmodernity: the liberal-Enlightenment presupposition of a cognitively homogeneous citizenry collapses in the face of this data. Such developmental divergence figures critically into understanding the rhetorical productions of political actors, and the relationship between actor and audience (see Rozik) in the town-halls mobs, tea party rallies, in the Congressional debate on the auto bailout, in the 2011-12 GOP debates, and now the 2016 Trump campaign. The standard presupposition--that the set of all voters is cognitively homogeneous--is itself a key shibboleth of liberalism . . . (continued here). ***But there is also a psychoanalytic dimension with two major components. First, there is ressentiment, the dark energy against which the Enlightenment is powerless. It bubbles and explodes in the 2009 anti-"Obamacare" town hall meetings. Some see ressentiment as backlash--as episodic and event-driven (ie, as reactions to ghetto rebellions, school busing, student radicalism); they are wrong. There is a deep structure of rage that is endemic to our more broadly conceived historical situation (the third genetic ontology of Dasein)--inchoate rage expressed in the theater of ressentiment that politics provides. This is the heart of darkness at the center of civilization--and the core psychodynamic logic that generates the rhetorical performances of the Right, from the Know Nothing Party of 1856 up to and beyond the present GOP campaign of 2016. The whole story of the GOP's electoral strategy involves the manipulation and channelling of this emotional raw material by a variety of political and economic elites. |
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| ***There is a simple brutishness
to the rhetorical performances of the right, an inexhaustible reservoir
of rage, cognitively primitive, sadistic in impulse and sexual in
symbolic content (although this is often implicit--see Lacan:
signifying chain). Several pages on this site contain images, videos,
newspaper reports, and political ads that span the years 2009 to
2013. Two of the videos (Father of Gun Victim and Kelly Ayotte Criticized), from June 20, 2013. are presented here. They are concrete moments in the unfolding of QHD-3, ressentiment and the mechanisms of defense. John Cantin, who had just lost his daughter to gun violence, and was simply reading the names of recent victims of gun violence, was treated by the Tea Party crowd with a relentless and simple-minded brutishness. The first video includes an interview with Martin Bashir of MSNBC. In it Cantin comments on the cognitive performativity of the crowd, and especially of Musso you will hear Cantin comment on the intellctual limitations of Musso. The article gives you a sense of the texture of the event. These people are not expressing an opinion on gun legislation; they are performing their rage in the theater of ressentiment that politics provides. |
the Musso Rant
A security officer
hovers near John Cantin as gun rights activist
Daniel Musso harrases him at a gun control rally Article: Kelly
Ayotte Criticized by Domestic Violence Activist, Examiner.com
Samantha Bee Sits Down With A Diverse Group Of Educated Millennial Trump Supporters realclearpolitics, March 16, 2016 |
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| re. why one supports a candidate: "The so-called 'motive': another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, an accompaniment to an act, which conceals rather than exposes the antecedentia of the act." {re Imus and that which is called racism} Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (Penguin, 1968), p. 49 |
from Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, III, 14: Here the works of
vengefulness and rancor swarm; here the air stinks of secrets and
concealment; . . . and what mendaciousness is employed to
disguise that this hatred is hatred! What a display of grand
words and postures, what an art of "honest" calumny!
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| About this page: 1. provides a graphic-based overview of the site as a whole 2. provides a summary of the main points of each graphic in the context of contemporary american politics and culture 3. Heidegger, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Freud (prior to research); Cooke, Brandeis (out of research); Nietzsche; Deleuze, Zizek 4. diff with above authors: TrEmp QHD-5 Cognitive development is critical (Fig above right) Cultural-historical development inclusive of psychoanalysis (Trump-fascism) Cognitive regimes Elites (Mann) Economic, Political, Military, Religious Fig general Fig KE Hiss List CED Philip Burch antinomies of progressivism "politics" is art of manipulating the elements of fig 3 Charles Beard, Walter Lippman, and Dick Cheney--neolib and neocon civic republicanism vs. commercial reublicanism the other biology: Genetic/Brain science determinism vs the other biology: ethology, primate studies Hegel; Heidegger; Wittgenstein; Freud-Reich |
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Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx : conversations with Duccio
Trombadori, translated by R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito
(Semiotext(e), 1991) "It
was a matter of calling the theme of the subject into question once
again, that great, fundamental postulate which French philosophy,
from Descartes until our own time, had never abandoned. Setting
out with psychoanalysis, Lacan discovered, or brought out into the
open, the fact that the theory of the unconscious is incompatible with
a theory of the subject (in the Cartesian sense of the term as well as
the phenomenological one). . . Indeed, Lacan concluded that is
was precisely the philosophy of the subject which had to be abandoned
on account of this incompatibiity, and that the point of departure
should be an analysis of the mechanisms of the unconscious." p. 56-7
--- Paul Greensboro, NC 18 minutes ago (comment on The Trump-Berlusconi Syndrome)
Take heed and read. The level of functional illiteracy in America is
the frightening part of the electorate. I'm afraid we the electorate
need another Enlightenment. I for one will keep reading not only the Wall Street Journal news but
the NYT opinion page, and, at times the Nation, the Progressive, and
even the Guardian and the Economist. I'm not sure what the best of the
rest of America reads. Thanks for the valued historical perspective
Roger Cohen.
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Fig. 2a. Cognitive Regimes: Topography of the Two-party system Bourgeois (1): CNN/MSNBC Bourgeois (2): Universities/NPR (modern corporation) (human capital, cultural capital) Concrete Operational (and preop.) Formal Operational (and concrete op) ![]() Preoperational (and gestural)
Ressentiment: Fox News (rentier sectors; provincial capitals; racist political ecologies) |
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| Genetic ontology Only Nietzsche prepares us for the twenty-first century. Only Nietzsche prepares us for Donald Trump. Miguel de Beistegui: "Transcendental empiricism is concerned with isolating the genetic and immanent conditions of existence of the real") historicity of being (Zizek) Modes of Existence (Latour), psuedo-speciation (Mary Migdley) Paul James, Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In To make any sense of the 2016 political/cultural-historical scene, we must jump right and proceed immanently. Consider this example from Sophia Rosenfeld, A Revolution in Language: the Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France (Stanford, 2001). Two other examples, drawn from the current political scene, are the Musso rant (below right) and the Ground Zero debate. The enormous cognitive gulf between the enlightened representatives of the French Revolution and the villages folk, between the two protagonists in the Ground Zero debate, and between Musso and the modern civilized citizen (Cantin), has been inadequately conceptualized. The two ontological modalities on display in these texts and videos are both emotionally and cognitively at odds. (Of immediate relevance: this excerpt from Jeremy E. C. Genovese, "Piaget, Pedagogy, and Evolutionary Psychology.") Cartesian self as a priori synthesis immanent to standard discourse. Thus, in the flux of political discourse and argument, gesture and posture, a standard self is presupposed. "The so-called 'motive': another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, an accompaniment to an act, which conceals rather than exposes the antecedentia of the act." {re Imus and that which is called racism} Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (Penguin, 1968), p. 49 -------------------------------- troy laraviere msnbc Cantin ok When I went up I just looked at some of their signs and talked to them a little bit and realized they really didn't know much about what they were there for. forhe din't realize I was talking about my daughter. . . wwwwBut anyway as I started speakin this man came up to me on the right and he tried talking to me, yelling at me actually, and he tried to intimidate me, the intimidation didnt work, i kept on reading . . . and realized that they didnt know what they were there for. man in red shirt: ok. . . He had a very limited vocabulary from what I could see. He wasn't making a lot of sense. I don't even know if he knew why he was there for sure. I don't think he realized what we were actually there for. . . . ------------------------------------ ///epithet; gutteral------ “I blocked him out,” Cantin told Martin Bashir Friday afternoon. “I don’t even know if he knew why he was there for sure. I don’t think he realized what we were actually there for.” Thomas B. Edsall MARCH 8, 2016 Tom Davis similarly noted that the shift of the Republican base to more working class white communities has changed the cultural character of the Republican electorate. Republican voters are now more “guttural,” as Davis put it, more comfortable with Trump’s boastful, violent rhetoric and less connected to the cosmopolitan, modulated language of suburbia. |
Fig. 2b. Cognitive Regimes: Topologies of the Two-party System
![]() LEFT
RIGHT
TOPOLOGY depressive* paranoid-schizoid* POLITICAL STYLE progressive proto-Dorian COG MODE formal + concrete pre-operational + gestural ((psuedo-concrete) *Simon Clarke, Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
*Michael Rustin, "Race, Ethnicity, and Natonality," in Textbook of Psychoanalysis, 2nd ed. (American Psychiatric Publishing, 2012) |
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