index2022

AAAA

The Disintegration of the Two-Party System
and the
Descent into Barbarism

"Can't you just shoot them? Just shoot them
in the legs or something?"

(the sado-sexual eigenvector of GOP performativity)

the problemmatic of racism: character & cognition

the book is dead
(the significance of "Trump")

Still Life with Burning Candle (Peter Claesz, 1627)

From the New Deal to Donald Trump

This site uses figurative elements, including graphs, tables, charts, and maps, originally to advance an analysis of the historical trajectory: the New Deal to Donald Trump, but the events of the second decade of the 21st century, when viewed through the lens provided by The Social Origins of Language, forced me to see that there was a bigger picture. This bigger picture is represented by Figure 0. From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States.

This site began fifty years ago as a project which at the time I called an exercise in phenomenological marxism, and resulted in the publication of my book The Emergence of a UAW Local, 1936-1939: a Study in Class and Culture (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975). Edmund Kord, who was the key organizer in this plant, was one of the bildungs-proletarians who was part of the Reuther circle at Wayne State University in the 1930s.

The plant layout at the right was drawn by Kord in the course of our discussions.

Figure 2. The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943, emerged out of my discussions with a number of veterans of the formative years of the UAW (59 of whom are listed here). This map was only constructed in the time of Trump, although the interviews that produced it were conducted in the mid-1970s. Thus, it is only recently that I realized that the Unity caucus was a fusion of bildungs-proletarians and plebeian upstarts, was the vanguard of modernity in the factories of southeastern Michigan, and was organically related to the Keynesian elite in the New Deal state. The faction fight between the Unity caucus and the forces of Homer Martin was actually a specific manifestation of the fundamental battle lines that emerged following the French Revolution, nicely summarized by Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: the French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford, 2001). This faction fight ran parallel to the emerging reaction to the New Deal--indeed, it can be taken as the initial moment in the unfolding of the historical vector from the New Deal to Donald Trump.

The bildungsproletarian component of that fusion was made up mostly of communists and socialists. It was these bildungs-proletarians around whom formed the action networks of plebeian upstarts who created the modern UAW in the late 1930s. When placed in the contexts of Figure 0 and the periodization of the History of Reading and Writing provided by Lyons, the extended mind of the Unity caucus becomes a cultural historical base camp from which observations can be made regarding the historicity of language and cognition.

What made this whole site possible is the literary and cognitive capabilities of the bildungsproletarians and plebeian upstarts whom I interviewed.

I had no idea at the time (the mid-1970s) that these interviews would prove to be critical to a reconceptualization of modernity as a mode of lingusitic and cognitive performativity.

All of us historians who interviewed these workers back in the seventies and eighties were not only struck by their powers of mind, but also by what can only be described as their strength of character. For this reason I refer to them as bildungs-proletarians. (see the Bildung page).

figure1. Layout of Michigan Steel Tube (UAW Local 238), circa 1937

figure 2. The UAW-Unity Caucus, 1933-1943:
Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind
Bildungsproletarians and Plebeian Upstarts

Table 7.1, Successive layers in the evolution of human cognition and culture, provides a framework for understanding the multifaceted dynamic processes that give rise to the decisive feature of modernity described by Merlin Donald and James R. Flynn: print-based literacy. More than mere literacy, and contra the Cartesian myth, it is the embeddedness of organisms in the networks, webs, practices, and fields of biocultural (semiotic) activity that is primary (Dupré).*

*Margaret Jacob, The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, 2014). Jacob emphasizes the socio-cultural networks, circles, meeting houses of these first industrialists, and the role of books as emotionally charged world-opening objects. Nelson Cowan, Working Memory Underpins Cognitive Development, Learning, and Education, Educ Psychol Rev. 2014 Jun 1; 26(2): 197–223. Oberauer, K. (2019). Working Memory and Attention – A Conceptual Analysis and Review. Journal of Cognition, 2(1), 36. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/joc.58. Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again (Crown, 2022). Maryanne Wolf, Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (Harper Collins, 2018, p. 179): "The seriousness of the current reality means that at the present rate, the majority of eighth-grade children could be classified as functionally illiterate in a few years' time."

Table 7.1 from A mind so Rare (p. 260)

Successive layers in the evolution of human cognition and culture

Each stage continues to occupy its cultural niche today, so that fully modern societies have

all four stages simultaneously present.

Stage	Species/Period	Novel Forms	Manifest Change	Governance
EPISODIC	Primate	Episodic event perceptions	Self-awareness and event sensitivity	Episodic and reactive
MIMETIC (first transition)	Early homids, peaking in H. erectus 2M-0.4 Mya	Action metaphor	Skill, gesture, mime, and imitation	Mimetic style and archetypes
MYTHIC (second transition)	Sapient humans, peaking in H. sapiens sapiens 0.5-present	Language, symbolic representation	Oral traditions, mimetic ritual,narrative thought	Mythic framework of governance
THEORETIC (third transition)	Modern culture	External symbolic universe	Formalisms, large-scale theoretic artifiacts, massive external storage	Institutionalized paradigmatic thought and invention

Cognitive Modalities: a summary of sources

Psychometrics ("Q"): Flynn, Nisbett, Ceci; Hernstein and Murray

•IQ tests
•PISA
•MEAP

Evolutionary: Donald, Mind: cognitive evolution Table 7.1 p. 260

•episodic (primate)
•mimetic (homo erectus, h. sapients)
•oral-mythic (h. sapiens sapiens)
•theoretic (required by modern capitalism*)
•post-theoretic (Foucault, Sellars, Deleuze)

Developmental: Piaget et. al.

•pre-operational
•concrete operrational
•formal operational
•post-formal thought (Commons)

Psychoanalytic: Freud-Klein: mechanisms of defense

•projection
•displacement
•reaction formation
•denial
•identification

Cultural-historical: Vygotsky, Luria, Ong, Bruner, Flynn,

Tomasello. The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014)

• zone of proximal development
• joint intentionality
• intersubjectivity

a reconceptualization of modernity as a mode of lingusitic and cognitive performativity

Figure 0. From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States, is the framework for this entire site. It brings to the fore two questions frequently ignored or at best given short shrift. The first is the history of violence and domination:

. . . in the case of many nonhuman primates, dominance asserted through violence or threat is the internal principle of social organization. . . Primate-style dominance is periodically overthrown and then restored, only to be overthrown and restored again and again. (The Social Origins of Language, pp. 4-5; Mazur, Biosociology of Dominance and Deference (2005))

The second is the history of language and cognitive development, phylogenetically as well as ontogentically considered:

The accelerated encephalization in Homo heidelbegensis, both in Africa and Eurasia, from 700 kya, and especially from 300 kya, suggests a runaway feedback process of selection for social intelligence. (The Social Origins of Language, p. 201)

Evidence abounds in the public arena of a widespread dissolution of language and cognition. Because the media performs this cognitive decline, the decay of reason is invisible within the cognitively decaying public sphere. The historicity of language and cognition, their biocultural embeddedness, and their contemporary disintegration, is one of the fundamental questions posed by this site.

In order to pursue this line of investigation, one must bear in mind that History without philosophy is only a screen on which to project the shibboleths of our time. Thinking must first emancipate itself from the Cartesian presuppositional generative matrix--the ontological presupposition of the Cartesian self and its associated rhetorical elements of consciousness, belief, motive, ideology and interest. Failure to do so has the effect, a priori, of blocking conceptualization of questions of ontology, agency, intentionality, habitus, networks and contexts.*

The figure to the right, From the Enlightenment to Donald Trump and the End of Print Literacy, 1750 to 2023, reflects the periodization provided by Martyn Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing In the Western World (2010).

*see The Cartesian Presupposional Matrix and The President Who Doesn't Read

Figure 0. From the Origins of Language to the End of Print Literacy in the United States

modernity as a mode of lingusitic and cognitive performativity
(modernity as a biocultural niche)

from Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: the Evolution of Human Consciousness (W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 301-2

Literacy skills change the functional organization of the brain and deeply influence how individuals and communities of literate individuals perform cognitive work. Mass literacy has triggered two kinds of major cogitive reorganizations, one in individuals and the other in groups.

There is no equivalent in the preliterate mind to the circuits that hold the complex neural components of a reading vocabulary or the elaborate procedural habits of formal thinking. . . . Consider the impact of twenty or more years of schooling on the brain of someone who has acquired full symbolic literacy in several different technical, mathematical, scientific, and musical fields. These skills encumber neural resources on a vast scale and change how the person's mind carries out its work.

from James R. Flynn, What is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect (Cambridge Univesity Press, 2009)

Our ancestors in 1900 were not mentally retarded. Their intelligence was anchored in everyday reality. We differ from them in that we can use abstractions and logic and the hypothetical to attack the formal problems that arise when science liberates thought from concrete situations. Since 1950 we have become more ingenious in going beyond previously learned rules to solve problems on the spot. pp. 10-11

The scientific ethos, with its vocabulary, taxonomies, and detachment of logic and the hypothetical from concrete referents, has begun to permeate the minds of post-industrial peoples. This has paved the way for mass education on the university level and the emergence of an intellectual cadre without whom our present civilization would be inconceivable. 29

Science altered our lives and then liberated our minds from the concrete. This history has not been written because, as children of our own time, we do not perceive the gulf that separates us from our distant [circa 1900] ancestors: the difference between their world and the world seen through scientific spectacles. . . . As use of logic and the hypothetical moved beyond the concrete, people developed new habits of mind. They became practiced at solving problems with abstract or visual content and more innovative at administrative tasks." 172-174

a reconceptualization of modernity as a mode of lingusitic and cognitive performativity

modern culture contains within it a trace of each of our previous stages of cognitive evolution.

from Merlin Donald, "The mind considered from a historical perspective: human cognitive phylogenesis and the possibility of continuing cognitive evolution." In D. Johnson & C. Ermeling (Eds.) The Future of the Cognitive Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 360-61

mimetic representations are evident in human children before they acquire language competence. . . . They continue to be important in adults, taking the form of highly variable social customs, athletic skills, and group expressive patterns (such as mass demonstrations of aggression or rejection).

from Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), p. 262

. . . modern culture contains within it a trace of each of our previous stages of cognitive evolution. It still rests on the same old primate brain capacity for episodic or event knowledge. But it has three additional, uniquely human layers: a mimetic layer, an oral-linguistic layer, and an external-symbolic layer. The minds of individuals reflect these three ways of representing reality.

NOTE. Ronald J. Planer and Kim Sterelny, From Signal to Symbol: the Evolution of Language (MIT, 2021), And Dor, Knight, and Lewis, The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014), confirm and further develop Donald's early twenty first century insights.

Read these minutes! The logic of this site requires that certain sources be read (these minutes) or listened to (FDR’s Madison Square Garden speech of October 30, 1936) or looked at and scrutinized (the three photos below of congregant workers reading, meeting, and demonstrating). Table 7.1 is the first of several schemata that will be deployed to advance an understanding of cognitive-discursive performativity.

Walter Reuther is the bildungsproletarian in the room. The members of the Murray Body committee were plebeian upstarts. Reuther, born into the Socialist civilization of the midwest, had been a student at Wayne State University. The ad hoc committee members were most likely high school graduates. And they were almost certainly present in the meeting that that Richard Frankensteen was addressing during the 1937 sitdown strike (the second photo below).

Now compare the discussion among these UAW cadre with the discursive performativity of Donald Trump as described in Rucker and Leonnig's account of Trump’s meeting in the Tank with the Joint Chiefs in A Very Stable Genius. ("the tank meeting had so thoroughly shocked the conscience of military leaders that they tried to keep it a secret"), and Michael Schmidt's chapter on General John Kelly, Trump's chief of staff from July 31, 2017 to January 2, 2019, in Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President, January 17, 2023.

in the Tank meeting and in the UAW minutes we observe the unfolding of cognitive-discursive processes within well-defined rational-bureaucratic frameworks where certain kinds of cognitive-discursive performative competencies were to be expected. Context-dependent literacy: Trump clearly an illiterate in the context of the requirements of the office of president. But "Trump" is a cultural historical catastrophe as yet unconceptualized. This site is a contribution to such a conceptualization.

In the Schmidt-Kelly interview we have a stunning complement to the Rucker and Leonnig chapter on the Tank meeting.

x
x
x
The half century between the 1880s and the 1930s was
the golden age of the book in the West

Martyn Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing In the Western World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

9. The Reading Fever, 1750-1830 ("Everyone in Paris is reading . . . People read while riding in carriages or taking walks . . . Women, children, journeymen and apprentices read in shops. On Sundays people read while seated at the front of their houses; lackeys read on their back seats, coachmen up on their boxes, and soldiers keeping guard."

10. The Age of the Mass Reading Public (“Between the 1830s and the First World War . . . a mass reading public came into existence.”)

11. New Readers and Reading Cultures ("The half century between the 1880s and the 1930s was the golden age of the book in the West.")

Minutes of the Murray Body Committee Local 2 at Executive Board Meeting, April 26, 1939, Toledo Ohio, Addes Collection, Box 14.11, Reuther Archives.

The members of the Local 2 Committee were:

Brother Hall from Spring & Wire
Brother McDonnell from Stamping
Brothers Sanders and McWilliams from Trim
Brother Smith from Frame (Ecorse plant)
Brother Manini, Vice President
Also present was Executive Board member Walter Reuther

from the Enlightenment ot Donald Trump and the end of print literacy, 1750-2023

Thurdsay, January 12, 2023. I have made a decision about the relationship between the elements of column A and the elements of column B. The latter consists of data only. This column (A) is mostly two kinds of texts: excerpts from state-of-the-art scholarship, my own comments, and the occasional graphic insert.

Column B consists entirely of data, mostly 1. lists of event-related persons: Midland Steel lists of workers who held or ran for office in the late 1930s, by faction. January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol: lists of arrestees, by state and organization. Nineteen Thirty Seven list of the Keynesian elite in the New Deal state, by administrative agency. 2. Maps. 3. Schemata. 4. Minutes of meetings. 5. key "texts", each of which can function as a synthetic a priori (e.g., The Southern Strategy: the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain, and the Freud-Jamieson Black Hole of Liberalism).

Scrutinize Lee Atwater’s laying out of the inner logic of the Southern Strategy. He is describing the sado-sexual eigenvector of GOP performativity. He is also giving an account of its evolution.

This page (and this site) cannot be read as you would read a book. It is a rhizome.* Scroll down and look at the lists of Some Arrestees fron Jan. 6th Assault on the Capitol, and at the three lists of Midland Steel workers. The ethos of transcendental empiricism requires that all "data" be treated as "live". When data is subsumed under a concept and then forgotten, the result is a profoundly and sometimes fatally flawed product. Consider the following:

"From Navy SEAL to Part of the Angry Mob Outside the Capitol," the New York Times, January 26, 2021:

One striking aspect of the angry crowd at the Capitol was how many of its members seemed to come not from the fringes of American society but from white picket-fence Main Street backgrounds — firefighters and real estate agents, a marketing executive and a Town Council member.

And The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists, (the Atlantic, Febuary 2, 2021), by Dr. Robert A. Pape, principal investigator, and Dr. Kevin Ruby, senior research director of "The Face of American Insurrection"**

40 percent are business owners or hold white-collar jobs. Unlike the stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot have a lot to lose. They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants. Strikingly, court documents indicate that only 9 percent are unemployed.

* from John Marks, Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity (Pluto Press, 1998), p 45

The rhizome is a figure borrowed from biology, opposed to the principle of foundation and origin which is embedded in the figure of the tree. The model of the tree is hierarchical and centralized, wheas the rhizome is proliferating and serial, functioning by means of the principle of connection and heterogeneity.

Deleuze and Guatarri argue that the book has been linked traditionally to the model of the tree, in that the book has been seen as an organic unit, which is both hermetically sealed, but also a reflection of the world. In contrast, the rhizome is neither mimetic nor organic. It only ever maps the real, since the act of mapping is a method of experimenting with the real: and it is always an open system, with multiple exits and entrances. In short, the rhizome is an 'acentred' system; the map of a mode of thought which is always 'in the middle'.

** The University of Chicago, Division of the Social Sciences, the Chicago Project on Security and Threats: The Face of American Insurrection: Right-Wing Organizations Evolving into a Violent Mass Movement (Update of 2=5=21).

The Southern Strategy: the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain

from Wikipedia: (Lee Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy)

As a member of the Reagan administration in 1981, Atwater gave an anonymous interview to political scientist Alexander P. Lamis. Part of the interview was printed in Lamis's book The Two-Party South, then reprinted in Southern Politics in the 1990s with Atwater's name revealed. . . . Atwater talked about the Republican Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan's version of it:

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now you don't have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

FDR vs. "the Slave Power"

Roosevelt and Frankfurter: their correspondence, 1928-1945, annotated by Max Freedman (Little, Brown, 1967)

The following memorandum by Frankfurter, as Roosevelt recognized and indicated, was a historic document, for it showed that Roosevelt knew he would have trouble with the Congressional leaders of his party as early as the summer of 1935. The memorandum destroys the myth that the divisions in the Democratic party became serious only because of the court-packing fight and the attempt to purge uncooperative Democrats like Senators George and Tydings.

Memorandum

The White House, July 10, 1935

Last night, after a very delightful dinner on the South Porch, the President asked Ferdinand Pecora and me into his study in the Oval Room. He said he had a nasty little problem—a row between Senator Tydings, Chairman of the Senate Investigating Committee now examining conditions in the Virgin Islands, and Senator Harold Ickes. The latter had sent an irate letter to Tydings charging him with unfairness in the conduct of the investigation. Tydings had replied with acerbity. There are involved several personalities—a constituent of Tydings, a Judge, a former Congressman, and Senator Pat Harrison who has taken up the cudgels for Tydings. Pat Harrison has enlisted the support of Senator Joe Robinson, and these Democratic leaders are asking for the scalp of Ickes. The President said Ickes is hot-tempered and impulsive and all that and treats Congressmen and Senators with brusqueness; but he is very valuable and the President refuses to let him go.

And then, the President, after ruminating on the situation, said, “Moreover, at bottom, the leaders like Joe Robinson, though he has been loyal, and Pat Harrison are troubled about the whole New Deal. They just wonder where the man in the White House is taking the old Democratic party. During their long public life, forty years or so, the knew it was the old Democratic party. They were safe and when Republicans got into trouble, the old Democratic party won nationally. But in any event they, and in the South without opposition, were all right and old-fashioned. But now they just wonder where that fellow in the White House is taking the good old Democratic party. They are afraid there is going to be a new Democratic party which they will not like. That’s the basic fact in all these controversies and that explains why I will have trouble with my own Democratic party from this time on in trying to carry out further programs of reform and recovery. I know the problem inside my party but I intend to appeal from it to the American people and to go steadily forward with all I have.”

Frankfurter noted that he read his minutes of this conversation to the President, who asked Frankfurter to keep the memorandum because of its "historic value.”

Read these minutes! ➞

a cultural historical base camp from which observations can be made regarding
the historicity of language and cognition

Minutes of the Murray Body Committee Local 2 at Executive Board Meeting, April 26, 1939, Toledo Ohio, Addes Collection, Box 14.11, Reuther Archives.

The members of the Local 2 Committee were:

There is no equivalent in the preliterate mind to the circuits that hold the complex neural components of a reading vocabulary or the elaborate procedural habits of formal thinking. . . .

There are 7 photos, tables and charts in this row, as well as a cryptic statement (bildungsproletarians and plebeian upstarts: think Chartists). In the row below a Detroit News story of May 2, 1937 about the Ku Klux Klan in Flint, and a Febuary 15, 1942 United Auto Worker (Packard Edition) story about the Ku Klux Klan in Packard, and below that three tables of UAW local 410 members who either held or ran for office.

The tables and charts provide an ontological sense of the situation in the auto plants of southeast Michigan. First, the flow chart of automobile production helps us to focus on the socio-technical structure of production. The stronghold of opposition to industrial unionism was the skilled trades (German, Irish, Kashub, and French Canadian Catholics). The stronghold of the Unity Caucus was in the trim and body-in-white departments. The major occuptional classifications in body-in-white were metal finishing and welding. These were the semi-skilled occupational classifications.* (For more on this question of skill and classification, click here.) The “masses,” if I may use that politically charged but intellectually vacuous term, were the unskilled laborers and production workers, comprised of blacks, Poles, and hillbillies.

* I am just now (Jan 19-20, 2023) going over the Frank Fagan interviews (welder, Murray Body). On tape 1, side B there is a detailed discussion of metal finishing, and of the body-in-white more generally. There is also an extraordinary, extremely detailed account of the IWW "strike" at Murray Body in September 1933. When read together with (!) the Leon Pody account of that strike, (2) the materials on the Edgewater strike, (3) the account given by Sidney Fine in the Automobile under the Blue Eagle, and (4) the newspaper account of the tar-dipping party in Fisher Body (event occured on June 10, 1937 Pontiac)--incident reported (clippings in Joe Brown Collection): "Unionists Linked to Tar-Party" Detroit Times 6-11-37 (short article, (blurred). Results of hearing reported: "Tar-dipping is Laid to Five" Detroit News, 12-10-37. Superficially read, these sources contradict each other. Read dialectically, however, they provide a picture of the elusive “white man” (or, as Frank Fagan referred to them with disdain, the “Americans”).

Strikers relax on car seats and read newspapers inside ofFisher Body Plant No. 1
during the Flint Sit Down Strike. (Reuther Archive).

Richard Frankensteen addresses the workers of Murray Body Co. during their
1937 sit-down strike Detroit, Michigan. (Reuther Archive)

U. A. W. -C. I. O. ; Det. ; Mass Meeting - Cadillac Square. Chrysler Rally Dispute
1939-11-15

X
X
X

bildungsproletarians
and
plebeian upstarts

think Chartists

praxiological ratios

a. plebeian upstarts

1. the Joe Adams ratio: 10.6% (Dodge Main) PF
2. the Charlie Yaeger ratio: 7.2% (Buick) Skeels
3. the Bud Simons ratio: 7.5% (Fisher Body 1) Skeels p. 16

b. bildungsproletarians: 0.1%, or about one in
thousand

Dodge Main: 2 ratios (21,894 members in Fall 1939)

n=13 (0.06%): Meeting of the Chrysler Executive Boards and shop committees, November 7, 1939

n=34. (0.16%): Emergency Meeting of Chrysler Executive Boards and Shop Committees, October 8, 1939

Bildungsproletarians' encounters with the "world"

1. encounters with "the masses"

a. patrimonial formations: gangs and grifters
b. Masons and K of C
c. the middle (hometownsmen): Elder, Wainwright
d. Polish women (Herman Burt)
e. workhorse uncle toms
f. Hillbillies

2. encounters with "the middling sort"

a. Ben Wainwright interview
b. the Elder report

3. encounters with the skilled trades

a. Mazey on the skilled trades in Briggs
b. Fagan on the "Americans"
c. Kluck on skilled trades
d. Kord on the colonization of the tool room

4. encounters with plebeian upstarts

a. Bud Simons on Toledo flying squadron
b. Edmund Kord on guys from front welding
c. Edmund Kord on the youth "gangs" in the press
rooms
d. Bill Mazey and Joe Adams on the Italians

5. encounters with management

a. Earl Reynolds
b. Bud Simons and Frank Fagan
c. Murray Body spring committee

6. encounters with fascism*

a. Bud Simons experience in Saginaw

b. Victor Reuther experience in Anderson

* see Fascism: texts

the sado-sexual eigenvector of GOP performativity ➞ the sado-sexual eigenvector of fascism ➞ two conceptualizations of fascism (Lichtenstein and Weitz)

There are two major misconceptions
See Victor Reuther's account of the fascist violence directed against the Unity Caucus in Anderson Indiana . . . .

and Bud Simon's account of his failed effort to organize auto workers in Saginaw . . .
(racism p. 24; numbers 27,

University of Michigan-Flint Labor History Project

Detroit News, May 2, 1937

the KKK in Packard, circa February 15, 1942

In the matter of

Preferment of Charges against Frank Buehrle by Kurt Murdock President of PACKARD
LOCAL U.A.W.-C.I.O. #190, held at the local Headquarters of the Local
at 6100 Mt. Elliott Avenue, in the City of Detroit, Michigan. April 3rd, 1942, at 7:30 P.M.

Barney Kluck transcript
Kluck never held or ran for office or was on any committees, as far as I have found. Nevertheless, he provided not just insights into the political culture of the tool room, but an existential horizon. The aspiration for status, the existential gulf between the patriarchal and the republican

Barney Kluck part one

Barney Kluck part two

Kluckoutline

Kluck on 1941 LIST

Civil War in Midland Steel: the Elder report, September 2, 1939

After the Sitdown Strike: the Second Generation

Detroit News, May 2, 1937

From the Enlightenment to Donald Trump

This page (and this site) cannot be read as you would read a book. It is a rhizome.* Scroll down and look at the lists of Some Arrestees fron Jan. 6th Assault on the Capitol, and at the three lists of Midland Steel workers. The ethos of transcendental empiricism requires that all "data" be treated as "live". When data is subsumed under a concept and then forgotten, the result is a profoundly and sometimes fatally flawed product. Consider the following:

"From Navy SEAL to Part of the Angry Mob Outside the Capitol," the New York Times, January 26, 2021:

*The University of Chicago, Division of the Social Sciences, the Chicago Project on Security and Threats: The Face of American Insurrection: Right-Wing Organizations Evolving into a Violent Mass Movement (Update of 2=5=21).

Now things begin to get interesting. The industrial structure discussed above was associated with the golden age of the "working class", which ended roughly in the early 1970s (Stayin' Alive; Bully interview). In the tables to the right, Some Arrestees fron Jan. 6th Assault on the Capitol, the concept of class is inapplicable, and the characterization of the arrestees as “middle-class” by the two sources cited is fundamentally mistaken, notwithstanding the sources (the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the University of Chicago center for this and that

New Jersey: N=9 Arrestees fron Jan. 6th Assault on the Capitol

NAME	NOMOTHETIC AND HERMENEUTICAL MATERIALS	FUZZY SET CATEGORIES
Abual-Ragheb, Rasha N.	cosmetologist In November 2020, a Facebook account with display name Rasha Abu participated in Facebook and Telegram group chats involving the New Jersey chapter of the American Patriot 3%. In the Facebook chat, user Rasha Abu advised the revolution will start not by standing by but by standing up. In addition, she advised civil war is coming and they need to show support, and rise up and fight for our Constitution.	cosmetologist
Baranyi, Thomas	graduated Trenton State College In a Facebook post, Baranyi’s father said his son graduated from the College of New Jersey, joined the Peace Corps, and also went into basic training for the U.S. Marine Corps but was discharged. From 2018 to 2020, he served in the Peace Corps in Albania. On December 22, 2020, his father took to Facebook to say they have not seen each other in person since 2017.	went into basic training for the U.S. Marine Corps but was discharged. BTR
Fairlamb, Scott	a New Jersey gym owner, Fairlamb held a protest at his Pompton Lakes gym in May in response to Gov. Murphy’s coronavirus restrictions. Fairlamb, a mixed martial artist who turned pro in 2000, owned and operated Fairlamb Fit in Pompton Lakes. The gym's website has been taken down and the phone number is disconnected. Social media accounts for both Fairlamb and his co-workers have been removed.	gym owner martial artist
Guthrie, Leonard	(married with a daughter; identified himself as a street preacher. His father told a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter that his son went to the rally as the chaplain for a group that met in Washington to "pray and support President Trump and the whole movement.”	a street preacher
Hale-Cusanelli, Timothy Lewis	He is an white supremacist and a Nazi sympathizer, according to an informant who contacted Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) special agent Daniel J. Meyers on January 12, 2021. The informant is enrolled as a confidential human source (CHS) with the NCIS. He has served in the U.S. Army since 2009 but has never deployed. In 2011, when he was 19 years old, he was arrested after stabbing a man he and his mother were living with in Pepperidge Court, Jackson, New Jersey. With a wound to the abdomen, the victim underwent surgery in the Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune Township, New Jersey. As a contractor at Naval Weapons Station Earle, he maintains a secret security clearance and has access to a variety of munitions. He is enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves. He is a human resources specialist with the 174th Infantry Brigade at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in Trenton, New Jersey. He was a regular poster on anti-Semitic social media groups Jackson Strong and Rise Up Ocean County.	VIOLENCE Military PDLV
Hazelton, Stephanie	aliases Ayla Wolf and Ayla Wolfe a prominent right-wing activist from South Jersey, one of the loudest supporters of Atilis Gym, that Bellmawr business that refused to follow New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy’s shutdown orders. Hazelton has helped organize protests against New Jersey’s shutdown orders and is active in the anti-vaxxer movement. Hazelton’s LinkedIn says she is the founder of New Jersey for Medical Freedom, the state chapter of an anti-vaccine network.	POLITICO
Stedman, Patrick Alonzo	a self-described “dating [and] relationship strategist” In addition to offering relationship advice and touting his $500 master class—which he claims is the “fastest and most effective way to change your outcomes with women”—Stedman frequently writes about political topics and his affinity for Trump.	GRIFTER
Suarez, Marissa A.	worked as a correctional police officer in Monmouth County since 2019 but resigned after her arrest. At the time, Suarez was a probationary corrections officer at the Monmouth County Corrections Facility	correctional police officer
Todisco, Patricia	the performative domain of “legitimate” violence pdlv PDO"L"V PDLV	correctional police officer

Tennessee: N=10 Arrestees fron Jan. 6th Assault on the Capitol

name	hermeneutical materials	fuzzy set categories
Matthew Bledsoe	•He is the owner of Primetime Movers •BBB: the company's accreditation was suspended due to failure to respond to one or more customer complaints filed with the BBB. •He was accused of kicking in the front door of his home in Cordova, chasing his wife Kathryn Bledsoe, picking her up by her throat and slamming her onto the floor.	grifter violence
Jack Jesse Griffith	“I’m not a domestic terrorist,” Griffith said. “For all the people slandering, libeling, mislabeling my name, I’m a citizen I had nothing to do with any violence, vandalism, and I love all my fellow citizens.” Griffith went on to promote his social media handles and Trump video game. “Have an exuberant evening,” he said, as he hopped in a car to leave.	grifter
Eric Munchel	Munchel currently lives in Nashville most likely working at Kid Rock’s Big Honky Tonk bar downtown. He was accused of assaulting a man and woman in 2013. He lists his profession as a bartender but Kid Rock’s doesn’t hire male bar staff. This means he is likely working in the kitchen or security. With his connections to others in private security, that could very well be his role there. No record of military service has been found. . . . He spent his summer hanging out with local Proud Boys* and Qanon conspiracy theorists	grifter
Blake Austin Reed	From 2004 to 2009, he attended the University of Memphis in Memphis, Tennessee where he earned his bachelor’s degree in organizational leadership. From 2012 to October 2013, he was the superintendent of Bluff City Operations‘ human resources management. From February 2014 to November 2015, he was a superintendent at Regent Homes in Nolensville, Tennessee. From November 2015 to September 2017, he was a project manager at Blalock Homes in Franklin, Tennessee. From April 2018 to October 2019, he was a senior project manager at Vintage South Development in Nashville. He owns Black Lion Brokers, which he established in November 2017 and is based in Nashville. There is a Black Lion Realty in Nasvhille, NOT Black Lion Brokers	grifter
Ronald L. Sandlin	Ronald L. Sandlin, 33, a self-styled internet blogger and protest organizer from Tennessee, sobbed loudly and at one point blurted out, “Judge, have mercy on me,” during his videoconference detention hearing on multiple charges arising from the Jan. 6 breach at the Capitol. How To Write Copy That Turns Into Cash - AWOL Elite Conference On December 31, 2020, he took to Facebook to announce that he was “organizing a caravan of patriots” who were going to Washington D.C., USA to “stand behind” Trump. He shared a link of the GoFundMe page asking for donations for him, Josiah Colt and Nathaniel J. DeGrave and said the three of them had already booked and paid for their trip to Washington, D.C. On January 3, 2020, he revealed on Facebook that their GoFundMe page was deleted. On January 2, 2021, he wrote on Facebook that in 2020, he had a “huge financial blow,” “got dumped” by his fiancé, crashed his motorcycle and lost his grandfather. During a detention hearing in federal court in February 2021, the judge told him he owes $500,000 in back taxes. In the same month, the I-Team found that no community where he is known to have resided can find a record of him voting in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.	grifter
Eric Chase Torrens	Torrens appeared in an Instagram video with Matthew Bledsoe and Jack Jesse Griffith (GRIFTER network)	grifter
Padilla, Joseph Lino	a company spokesperson for Wacker Chemie plant told us that Padilla worked at their Bradley County plant until 2016.	subproletariat? former worker?
Michael Lee Roche	He works as a server at Farmers Family Restaurant in Murfreesboro	working poor?
Ronnie B. Presley	looked at 10+ local stories: NO INFO RE. WORK!	BTR
Bryan Wayne Ivey	looked at 10+ local stories: NO INFO RE. WORK!	BTR

Minnesota: n=3 Arrestees fron Jan. 6th Assault on the Capitol

NAME	AGE	NOMOTHETIC AND HERMENEUTICAL MATERIALS	FUZZY SET CATEGORIES
Victoria White	39	Larvita McFarquhar, a friend of White. McFarquhar owns Havens Garden cafe, in Lynd, Minn., where White has worked. Attorney: Video shows police attacking Trump supporter Victoria White on Jan. 6	marginal working class?
Jonah Westbury	26	Westbury is from the city of Lindstrom (University of Mary North Dakota) a former wrestler for the University of Mary Marauders in Bismarck, N.D.	BTR
Jordan K. Stotts	31	works in nurseries and greenhouses during the summer and travels in his van during the winter.	marginal working class

Florida: N=19 Arrestees fron Jan. 6th Assault on the Capitol

NAME	NOMOTHETIC AND HERMENEUTICAL MATERIALS	FUZZY SET CATEGORIES
Adams, Howard Berton	Edgewater
Anderson, John Steven	Courthouse records on the Clerk of Court website show ANDERSON involved in contentious divorce litigation alleging domestic violence, as well as dismissed charges of assault, and fines paid for driving without wearing a seatbelt, driving with an expired license tag.
Biggs, Joseph Randall	Proud Boys, Ormond Beach, Florida. is supporting his ex-wife and child
Camargo, Samuel	Like many of the MAGA fanatics who have been arrested in the two weeks since the insurrection, Samuel Camargo implicated himself by bragging about his participation on social media, authorities said.
Counsil, Matthew	A Tampa Bay resident
Curzio, Michael	spent time in prison for attempted murder.VIOLENCE	VIOLENCE
Garcia, Gabriel Augustin	ran as a Republican in District 116 in Miami-Dade a former U.S. Army captain, ran for Florida House District 116 as a Trump backer.	STORMTROOPER GOP
GOSSJANKOWSKI, Vitali	a student at Gallaudet University Katherine Jankowski, his mother, was formerly an administrator at Gallaudet.
Honeycutt, Adam Avery, 39	works as a bail bondsman in Northeast Florida Honeycutt has three prior arrests on charges of drug possession, domestic battery and breach of peace, but he was only found guilty of that last charge.	police
Johnson, Adam	Johnson Is a Stay at Home Father Who Makes Furniture	marginal
Maldonado, Steven Omar	Maldonado alias Emilio Maldonado is a Puerto Rico native and lives in Palm Bay, Brevard County, Florida, according to Conan Daily. Previously, he was arrested for a couple of misdemeanors in 1998 and is a real estate sales associate. The site also listed him as a diver and he worked at the Treasure Coast Dive Charters as a boat captain where he offered diving and spearfishing trips on the Treasure Coast in Florida.
MARIOTTO, Anthony R. (aka, Tony Mariotto)	fort pierce
PERT, Rachael Lynn	Pert, who is the assistant manager of a Circle K convenience store in Middleberg, requested time off work to go D.C. with Winn. “We’re on our way to DC because us as American patriots, we’re tired of this shit,” Winn allegedly said in their live-stream. “It’s time to make a stand. I never really knew how deep and corrupt all this crap was and how far back it’s gone. But American needs to wake up. We’re on the verge of fucking losing it.”
RIVERA, Jesus (aka, JD Rivera, Jesus Delmora Rivera)	U.S. Marines (Former)
STEPAKOFF, Michael	Stepakoff leads Temple New Jerusalem, a Messianic synagogue in Palm Harbor. He is also a former attorney. Palm Harbor, Florida, rabbi
Sweet, Douglas	She said Douglas was a self-employed man who does "handyman stuff" but spends most of his time with his extremist groups. attended the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville see photo! “The Daughter Of A Trump Rioter Arrested At The Capitol Says She Is "Ashamed And Disgusted”” Douglas Sweet from Hudgins and Cobbs Creek resident Cindy Fitchett
Weeks, Bradley W., 43	a Clay High School graduate who attended the University of North Florida WEEKS then sets up his camera to show his face and launches into a speech declaring both the actions he has taken and his intentions. “We’ve reached the steps. We’ve had to climb scaffolding. We’ve had to climb ladders. We’ve had to break things to get through, but we’ve gotten through. We’ve gotten through, and we are going to take back the Capitol! We’re taking back our country! This is our 1776! This is where it’s gonna happen! This is where Tyranny will fall! This is where America will rise! Look at this, America! Look at this!”
WILLIAMS, Andrew	firefighter paramedic
WINN, Dana Joe	A Lemon Bay High School graduate see Pert.

Oathkeepers N=14 Arrestees fron Jan. 6th Assault on the Capitol

NAME	NOMOTHETIC AND HERMENEUTICAL MATERIALS PBs	FUZZY SET CATEGORIES
Kelly Meggs	general manager at a car dealership
Connie Meggs
Kenneth Harrelson	Retired Army Sgt. Kenneth Harrelson
Donovan Crowl	Marine veteran, militia a self-employed carpenter Prosecutors said he does not have a stable address
Jessica Watkins	bartender who runs a self-identified militia, joined by three others in her unit, drove to Washington D.C. last week
Joshua James	window washer
Robert Minuta	tatoo parlor owner; High School graduate
Stewart Rhodes	Stewart Rhodes grew up in the Southwest and joined the Army after finishing high school. He became a paratrooper, receiving an honorable discharge due to an injury in a night parachuting accident. Then Rhodes attended college at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, graduating in 1998. Rhodes has said that he taught street crime survival and rape prevention at the college women’s center and also worked as a certified Nevada concealed-carry firearms instructor. After college, his first politically oriented job was supervising interns in Washington, D.C., for libertarian Ron Paul, then a Republican congressman from Texas. Rhodes subsequently attended Yale Law School, graduating in 2004, and clerked for Arizona Supreme Court Justice Michael D. Ryan. A trial lawyer and libertarian, he later volunteered on Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign. more: SPLC
Tanios, George Pierre 39	a West Virginia sandwich shop owner GROUP OF 8 PHOTO
Grayden Young	an Army and Navy reserve veteran; a brother, husband and a small business owner; brother of Steele; Manager at Young Children's Academy
Laura Steele	a former High Point police officer; sister of Young
Sandra Parker
Bennie Parker*

Proud Boys: N=13 Arrestees fron Jan. 6th Assault on the Capitol

NAME	NOMOTHETIC AND HERMENEUTICAL MATERIALS	FUZZY SET CATEGORIES
Enrique Tarrio	"Arested Proud Boys chairman has history of business failure, apparently lives with mom" (WAPO JANUARY 8, 2021)
Joseph Biggs	Ormond Beach, Florida. is supporting his ex-wife and child. This Wikipedia entry is a must-read: Joe Biggs.
Ethan Nordean	•Auburn, Washington.has been a Proud Boys chapter president and member of the group’s national “Elders Council.” willing to stake the home where his wife and child were living (?) •Proud Boy activist who was fired by his father, Mike Nordean, over his membership of the group. Mike Nordean owns Wall’s Chowder House and Wally’s Drive-In in Des Moines, Washington.
Zachary Rehl	Zach Rehl biography: 13 things about Proud Boys member from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Charles Donohoe	presidents of his local Proud Boys chapter
Ashlock, Ryan	Gardner, Kansas. Kansas City metro chapter of the Proud Boys
Chrestman, William
DECARLO, Nicholas	In some photos, DeCarlo was seen with Nicholas Ochs, one of the founders of Hawaii’s chapter of the Proud Boys, neofascist group. In addition to his work for Murder the Media, DeCarlo said he also worked trading bitcoin online currency. DeCarlo said he was not a member of the Proud Boys. But he said the Proud Boys had raised money for his defense	posible Grifter
GARCIA, Gabriel Augustin	a former U.S. Army captain, a 2020 candidate for the Florida State House and a reported member of the Proud Boys / ran for Florida House District 116 as a Trump backer
GOODWYN, Daniel	A San Francisco freelance web developer who calls himself a Proud Boy and has an extensive history of COVID denialism has been charged for his alleged involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Goodwyn has a large digital footprint. According to his personal website, he attended City College of San Francisco and works as a freelance web and app developer. He lists Jews for Jesus as one of his clients and, strangely, posts links to everything from his Gab, Parler, Venmo and Pandora accounts to his dating app profiles. On his Twitter account Goodwyn claimed in September he was "arrested and cited" for not wearing a mask on Muni. Afterward, he posted video of himself on YouTube, maskless, reading a statement in front of the Hall of Justice. In it, he repeats a number of lies about the coronavirus pandemic, including denying it outright and falsely claiming COVID vaccines will contain "a microchip.” He used the citation to fundraise for himself on a Christian crowd-funding site used by other far-right extremists like Stop the Steal founder Ali Alexander. Goodwyn raised $1,689 of his $5,000 goal.
Greeson, Kevin	On Jan. 4, Kelly allegedly wrote, “I’ll be with ex NYPD and some proud boys. This will be the most historic event of my life.” Read this: The Radicalization of Kevin Greeson.
KELLY, Christopher M.	works for a fixed wireless company in Cedar Rapids
Pezzola, Dominic	“The Proud Boy Who Smashed a US Capitol Window Is a Former Marine” The Aquinas Institute in a suburb of Rochester, New York. One person who has known Pezzola for over 20 years described him as a hardworking father of two daughters whose politics grew increasingly extreme over the last two years. VICE News attempted to contact Pezzola via phone numbers connected to his business “Out of everyone in our class, I would have picked him out as a domestic terrorist,” one classmate, who asked to remain anonymous for her safety, told VICE News. “He was always a bit machismo,” remarked another, who had the same request for anonymity. Pezzola, of Rochester, N.Y., also has been named in state tax warrants totaling more than $40,000 over the past five years, according to public records. His attorney declined to comment.

Intersubjectivity, Shared Intentionality, and the Extended Mind:
The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal state

Source: "Membership List, May 1927," in the Morris L. Cooke Papers, box 66, FDR Library

"The Origins of the "Welfare State": The Keynesian Elite and the Second New Deal, 1910-1936" (manuscript, 1987)

Keynesian Elite pp. 1-8
Keynesian Elite pp. 9-18
Keynesian Elite pp. 19-29
Keynesian Elite pp. 30-37

Keynesian Elite: Notes

Keynesian Elite: Appendices

KE2019

U.S. Political Economy by Sector, 1910 to 1939
input-output matrices: capital formations and the two-party system

The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal State: Career Matrix

CODE	STATE FUNCTIONS	CAREER VECTORS
	Department of the Interior
MR	Harold Ickes	Chicago Progressivism: Rosenwald-Crane-Merriman/People's Progressive League 1922/People's Traction Leaugge 1929-30/PWA 1933-39/NRC 1934-39
TS	Harry Slattery
	Oscar Chapman
FF	Nathan Margold
	Public Works Admin.



	National Power Policy Admin.
	Rural Electrification Admin
Housing

I. History and Philosophy

History without philosophy is only a screen on which to project the shibboleths of our time. Thinking must first emancipate itself from the Cartesian presuppositional generative matrix--the ontological presupposition of the Cartesian self and its associated rhetorical elements of consciousness, belief, motive, ideology and interest. Failure to do so has the effect, a priori, of blocking conceptualization of questions of ontology, agency, intentionality, habitus, networks and contexts.*

II. the internet

The site as a whole recognizes that the Internet is the techno-cognitive axis of a praxiological revolution in thought, where the extended mind is fused with philosophy as the critical accompaniment to empirical practice. The links below suggest some what can now be done. They are subsumed under the heading of The Sado-Sexual Eigenvector of GOP Performativity:

Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (Yale Univesity Press, 2008) excerpts (a key text)

GOP as the Stupid Party: an inadequate

resentiment and the mech of def

theater of ressentiment (Giffords shooting)

The Imus Brouhaha and that which is called "Racism"

* Marcus Gabriel (I am Not a Brain: Philosophy of Mind for the 21st Century (2017); The Meaning of Thought (2021); "Why the world does not exist but unicorns do" (2015) interview)

X
X
X
A key text

The Social Origins of Language (excerpts)

summary

In many cases it is behavioural change that comes first, subsequently determing genetic change.

language’s evolutionary emergence would have required profound social and political change, [and] more trusting, stable relationships

. . . in the case of many nonhuman primates, dominance asserted through violence or threat is the internal principle of social organization . . .

. . . primate-style dominance is periodically overthrown and then restored, only to be overthrown and restored again and again

Language consitutes a ‘biocultural niche’, embedded within the entire human semiosphere—everything in human culture, material and non-material, that is symbolic in nature.

. . . the cultural technologies of reading and writing seem to have extended human memory, enabled abstract chains of reasoning, and guided new ways of scanning visual items, thus making human[s] even more cognitively plastic.

Language . . . is a quasi-artefactual biocultural niche, and the capacity to acquire and use it involves the evolution and replication of a phenogenotypic biocultural complex.

intersubjectivity and shared intentionality . . . Whiten and Erdal (2012) emphasize the socio-cognitive complex of cooperation, egalitarianism, and mindreading alongside language and cultural transmission in the evolution of humans as successful hunter-gatherers.

All languages are socially constructed technologies for the instruction of imagination, but the actual dynamics of exploration and stabilization in each and every language could be as variable as their communities, their histories, their particular communicative needs, their collective capacities, and the private experiential worlds of their speakers.

‘conventional knowledge sits in a kind of “middle ground” between objective and subjective knowledge about the world . . . it is neither strictly objective, nor subjective—it is ‘intersubjective’

Only given social forces of counter-dominance—where individuals with allies can resist being dominated—and reverse-dominance—where the collective dominates any would-be dominant individual—is language likely to emerge.

IV. Two Rules (there is no truth; only methods and works)

1. The Cassirer inclusion rule: there is a set of authoritative texts--authoritative in the sense of being highly respected state of the art works--that must be taken into account, or good reason given for not doing so. For example, the semiotic field constituted by the set of texts on on slavery in the Atlantic world (click here).

An exception to the Cassirer inclusion rule is provided by the Margolies exclusion rule:

2. The Margolies exclusion rule: Texts that address cultural, psychological, political, and historical questions through scientistic reductionism are excluded for the following reasons:

they expel from the field of discourse all of post-Kantian, hermeneutical philosophy

they thereby also exclude literature as a relevant resource for thinking about the human

they exclude the psychoanalytically-inspired textual modalities (not theories) that, together with literature, provide indespensible resources for comprehending not only depth and complexity, but also the dark side of our existence.

modernity as a mode of lingusitic and cognitive performativity

from Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University, 2007)

Discourse is not a synonym for language. Discourse does not refer to lingusitic or signifying systems, grammars, speech acts, or conversations. To think of discourse as mere spoken or written words forming descriptive statements is to enact the mistake of representationalist thinking. Discourse is not what is said; it is that which constrains and enables that which can be said. Discursive practices define what counts as meaningful statements. Statements are not the mere utterances of the originating consciousness of a unified subject; rather, statements and subjects emerge from a field of possibilities. This field of possibilities is not static or singular but rather is a dynamic and contingent multiplicity. 146-7

. . . 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.

from Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body (University of Illinois Press, 2005), p. 75

In Die fröliche Wissenschaft (1882) Nietzsche proposes that language enables us to “produce” things, to shape our conception of reality: “This has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realize that what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are . . . it is sufficient to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create, in the long run, new ‘things’” (GS 58).

The two-party System: Semiotic Regimes I
Cognitive Performativities and Emotional Configurations

	LEFT*	RIGHT
Topology	depressive	paranoid-schizoid
Political style	progressive	proto-Dorian
Cognitive mode	concrete & pre-op	pre-op and gestural
Regime type	rational-bureaucratic	patrimonial