(aa1971@wayne.edu)

The situation that we face today (man is a bridge)

  . . . the happy nihilism of the 'last man,' who makes everything comfortable, small, and trivial.

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 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.

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!

George W. Bush Tries to Suppress Publication of PISA Data

Among the starkest revelations has been the decline of the US school system. This former education superpower has been caught up and left behind by many other countries, particularly in Asia.

This was distasteful medicine and Mr. Schleicher says that the U.S. administration was deeply unhappy with the 2006 results and was trying to apply pressure on the OECD.

The U.S. politician who intervened to defend the importance of publishing the results was Ted Kennedy, says Mr. Schleicher. Kennedy, who had chaired the senate committee on education, had become very supportive of the Pisa project.

"It was Senator Kennedy who saved my life at the OECD," he says.

          Figure 2.  Donald Trump Talks Like a Third-Grader

The analysis by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case may offer the most rigorous evidence to date of both the causes and implications of a development that has been puzzling demographers in recent years: the declining health and fortunes of poorly educated American whites. In middle age, they are dying at such a high rate that they are increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case found.

The mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education* increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014. [From 601.4 in 1999 to 735.8 in 2013.]

“Wow,” said Samuel Preston, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on mortality trends and the health of populations, who was not involved in the research. “This is a vivid indication that something is awry in these American households.”

David M. Cutler, a Harvard health care economist, said that although it was known that people were dying from causes like opioid addiction, the thought was that those deaths were just blips in the health care statistics and that over all everyone’s health was improving. The new paper, he said, “shows those blips are more like incoming missiles.”

They concluded that taken together, suicides, drugs and alcohol explained the overall increase in deaths. The effect was largely confined to people with a high school education or less. In that group, death rates rose by 22 percent while they actually fell for those with a college education.

All-cause mortality, ages 45–54 for US White non-Hispanics (USW), US Hispanics (USH), and six comparison countries: France (FRA), Germany (GER), the United Kingdom (UK), Canada (CAN), Australia (AUS), and Swe- den (SWE).
from Death Rates Rising for Middle-Aged White Americans, Study Finds (New York Times, 11-2-15)

***   pseudo-speciation (Hegel-Marx-Nietzsche-Vygotsky)

This site is a rhizome


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.

transcendental empiricism applied: planes of immanence result

names as nodal points in (or merely as a means of reference to) the flux of thought and experience:

. . . Kant-Hegel-Marx-Nietzsche-Heidegger-Vygotsky-Deleuze . . .
. . . Dewey-Lenin-Brandeis-Cooke-Carmody . . .
. . . Mortimer-Anderson-Kraus-Simons-Williams-Jenkins-Kord . . .

*** pseudo-speciation vs. racism

Agency is about the most difficult problem there is in philosophy

Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, 2005, p. 51

from Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words, pp. 107-8

(But see Pauketat's critique of Bourdieu in An Archeology of the Cosmos: Rethinking Agency and Religion in Ancient America, 2012: 30)

<----Man is a Bridge, Psuedo-speciation, and Vygotsky redux

If the intrinsically plastic human brain undergoes constant change subject to various developmental, environmental, and cultural factors, it cannot simply be assumed that “anatomically modern human intelligence” refers to a fixed and stable speciation event. As we saw in chapter 3, for Material Engagement Theory the hallmark of human cognitive evolution is metaplasticity—that is, ever-increasing extra-neural projective flexibility that allows for environmentally and culturally derived changes in the structure and functional architecture of our brain.

What can the above Zizek quote possibly mean?  Four comments:


1. First comment: an intellectual practice that would dynamically reappropriate the Enlightenment heritage through a process of decanonization.  No more exegeses of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lenin, Deleuze . . .  Think of authors as nodal points in the flux of thought and experience.  Be aware of the crippling effect of the Cartesian presuppositional matrix on the usefulness of texts.  An intellectual practice that engages the world as something to be understood and as a field of practice.  To be understood?  That is the aim of this site.  As a field of practice?  Even if only as thought experiments, Deleuzian science fictions: Ferguson, Missouri and Detroit, Michigan.

2. Second comment: a careful choice of ancestors qua symbolic order.  Above comment refers to a cultural ancestry, embodied in but not reducible to texts.  But ancestry?  Are we speaking of genes?  Not at all.  Households and extended families are of developmental significance as zones of proximal development embedded in wider cultural and historical fields.  Beyond such kin-based zones of proximal development are the networks of auto workers, for example, formed in the context of the worldwide cultural, economic, and poliltical upheavals of the first two industrial revolutions, circa 1750 to 1950, known by some cultural anthropolitists as sodalities: generative social spaces for agency, imagination, and social action.  Figure N, Bildungs-proletarians of southeastern Michigan, is the sodality out of which arose the perspective taken by this site.

3.  But there is an apparent contradiction between these two.  The first is an incorporation of the entirety of the western canon as a living project, but without reference to "class".  This many Marxists would find objectionable.  The second is a very explicit, precisely defined reference to what, in the context of southeast Michigan in the 1930s, could be called the vanguard of the industrial proletariat of north America.  Do these two loyalties really clash, or do they rather imply each other?

4.  And finally, the dissolution of species-being, of any possibility of considering homo sapiens sapiens circa 2015 and beyond as any kind of stable subject.  A certain biological core, but only as a point of departure, only as the raw material upon which so many forces work.  This is the end not only of socialism, liberalism, conservatism.  It is the end of the subject, the end of Man, the end of that which is presupposed by each of the three ideologies of the modern era.  Man has been dissipated into a proliferation of effects.  The question is no longer what is to be done, but what are we to become, if indeed there is even a "we" to speak of.  See psychoanalysis, novels, Joan Didion's essays, New York Times on Dasein, cable news, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  More on this later and elsewhere.

<--- the Enlightenment as a cultural-historical developmental leap
(the Symbolic Order of Progressivism)

The broader context

 . . . 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.

America has not so much been exceptional as it has gradually come to represent one extreme on a continuum of class relations.  America has never differed qualitatively from other national cases.  Differences have been of degree, not kind. . . .  Explanations asserting an original and enduring American exceptionalism . . . have only a very limited truth.  638

On representation, Russia was at the opposite extreme from the United States. . . .  But even the eastern edge of the western ideological community experienced the more liberal legacy of the Enlightenment. . . .  Among Russian professionals, gentry and aristocrats, and state administrators, a self-conscious, partly autnomous intelligentsia emerged, advancing alternative versions of progress.  660 here

*** the sapient paradox and Vygotsky's heart of darkness

Let us add at once that . . . the existence on earth of an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, was something so new, profound, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and pregnant with a future that the aspect of the earth was essentially altered.  Indeed, divine spectators were needed to justice to the spectacle that thus began and the end of which is not yet in sight . . . .  From now on, man . . . gives rise to an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as if with him somethin were anouncing and preparing itself, as if man were not a goal but onl a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise.

Oh this insane, pathetic beast--man!  What ideas he has, what unnaturalness, what paroxysms of nonsense, what bestiality of thought erupts . . .

All this is interesting, to excess, but also of a gloomy, black, unnerving sadness, so that one must forcibly forbid oneself to gaze too long into these abysses.  Here is sickness, beyond any doubt, the most terrible sickness that has ever raged in man . . . .  There is so much man that is hideous!--Too long, the earth has been a madhouse!

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!

< --- the post-biological epoch and the sapient paradox

What we may term the ‘speciation phase’ of human evolution (Renfrew 2006, p. 224, 2007a, p. 94), the period when biological and cultural coevolution worked together to develop the human genome and the human species, as we know it, was fulfilled already 60 000 years ago. This implies that the basic hardware—the human brain at the time of birth—has not changed radically since that time.

That brings us to the sapient paradox.

Colin Renfrew's keynote article in this volume focuses on what he calls the ‘sapient paradox’, a puzzle that has been a thorn in the side of prehistory researchers for some time. There seems to have been a long—in fact, inordinately long—delay between the emergence of anatomically modern humans and our later cultural flowering. Both genetic and archaeological evidence converge on the conclusion that the ‘speciation’ phase of sapient humans occurred in Africa at least 70 000–100 000 years BP, and possibly earlier, and all modern humans are descended from those original populations.

Renfrew labels a later period, extending from 10 000 years ago to the present, as the ‘tectonic’ phase. This has been a period of greatly accelerated change, stepping relatively quickly through several different levels of social and material culture, including the domestication of plants and animals, sedentary societies, cities and advanced metallurgy. It has culminated in many recent changes, giving us dramatic innovations, such as skyscrapers, atomic energy and the internet. The paradox is that there was a gap of well over 50 000 years between the speciation and tectonic phases. The acceleration of recent cultural change is especially puzzling when viewed in the light of the hundreds of thousands of years it took our ancestors to master fire, stone tool making and coordinated seasonal hunting.

If human beings were biologically modern 70 000 years ago, why the long delay before this cultural potential was realized?

c

Table 1.  Bildung-proletarians of Southeast Michigan

Bildungs-proletarians of Flint and Pontiac: interviews

Norman Bully	Buick (Flint)	UAW Local 599
Larry Jones	Chevrolet (Flint)	UAW Local 659
Bill Genski	Fisher Body #1 (Flint)	UAW Local 581
Bud Simons*	Fisher Body #1 (Flint)	UAW Local 581
Cliff Williams/Henson	Yellow Cab (Pontiac)	UAW Local 594
Charles Yaeger*	Yellow Cab (Pontiac)	UAW Local 594
Saul Wellman	Flint	CP

Bildungs-proletarians of Detroit's East Side: interviews

Frank Fagan	Murray Body	UAW Local 2
Dick Frankensteen	Dodge Main	UAW Local 3
Charles Watson	Dodge Main	UAW Local 3
Harry Ross*	Dodge Main	UAW Local 3
Joe Adams	Dodge Main	UAW Local 3
Joe Ptazynski	Dodge Main	UAW Local 3
Earl Reynolds	Dodge Main	UAW Local 3
Jack Zeller	Chrysler Jefferson Ave	UAW Local 7
Francis Moore	Hudson	UAW Local 154
John McDaniel	Packard	UAW Local 190
Harry Kujawski	Packard	UAW Local 190
Eddie Dvornik	Packard	UAW Local 190
James Lindahl**	Packard	UAW Local 190
Leonard Klue	Michigan Steel Tube	UAW Local 238
Paul Silver	Detroit Steel Products	UAW Local 351
N = 35 interviewees	Midland Steel	UAW Local 410
Bill Jenkins	Chrysler Highland Park	UAW Local 490
Tony Podorsek	body-in-white supervisor	Dodge, Cadillac

a critique of the "people"

from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 863

pseudo-speciation

neo-liberalism in action

Piaget was principally (though not entirely) preoccupied with the ontogenesis of causal explanation and its logical and empirical justification. This was even the focus of his masterful studies of moral development, a topic that does not ordinarily lend itself to such an approach. Vygotsky, on the other hand, was principally (though not entirely) concerned with the ontogenesis of interpretation and understanding. Piaget devised methods of inquiry and a theory appropriate to analyzing how children explain and how they justify their explanations - and did it brilliantly. The price he paid, of course, was the usual price one pays for ignoring context, transactional dynamics, background knowledge, and cultural variation. To grasp how somebody interprets or understands something, which was Vygotsky's concern, requires that we take into account their cultural and linguistic background and the context in which they find themselves both `in the small', in the sense of a particular communicative situation, and `in the large' of a patterned cultural system. Vygotsky's emphasis, accordingly, was on situated meanings and on situated meaning-making, which inevitably generates a cultural-historical approach. The two approaches, in consequence, diverged increasingly as they matured perhaps, some would say, to a stage of incommensurability.

I think, and I hope you agree, that we are enormously fortunate to have had two such rich theoretical accounts as an inheritance from our mentors, even if they prove to be incommensurate. Just as depth perception requires a disparity between two views of a scene, so in the human sciences the same may be true: depth demands disparity. So I conclude this excursion into the thought of these two great developmental psychologists with a salute to their profound difference. To have had either of them as a guide would have been a gift. To have had them both is stronger stuff, and even though it may at times seem overwhelming, we are the better for it.

c

The cognitive developmental modalities that span the entire history of the tribe hominini, which contains the genus homo (the only extant variety of which is homo sapiens sapiens) and the genus pan (this latter contains chimpanzees and bonobos).  Consider the excerpts from the work of Donald, Wrangham and Wilson, Price and Feinman, Gomez, Tomasello, Chase, Renfrew, Malafouris, Dunbar, Dupré and others in ArchaeologyAnthropology, regarding the ontologically indeterminate nature of homo sapiens as cultural-historical primate . . .  and note the references to Vygotsky. Donald observes that contemporary homo sapiens' semiotic behavior "contains within it a trace of each of our previous stages of cognitive evolution."  Wrangham and Wilson state that "patterns of collective violence found among humans include similarities to those seen among chimpanzees."  Gomez writes of  "the possibility that, at a reduced scale, the mind of an ape can be upgraded by giving him, on the one hand, a regime of socially controlled attention and interactive experiences with humans, and on the other, a new, more explicit form of representing the world, would confer dramatic support to the Vygotskian notion that higher cognition can be created through cultural processes of development that change the nature of cognitive ontogeny."  Malafouris and Renfrew, in How Things Shape the Mind, write that "the human mind exists as a historically situated actuality—that is, an emergent product of complex ecological relationships and flexible incorporative forms of material engagement."  And Dupre: "It is . . . clear that recognition of the variety of factors involved in development makes possible a diversity of individual outcomes within even quite narrowly defined populations."

Pseudo-speciation: Genetic Ontologies

Dupre: "It is . . . clear that recognition of the variety of factors involved in development makes possible a diversity of individual outcomes within even quite narrowly defined populations."

Figure at right summarizes The Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein: Table of Sources.  Notice that the three post-paleolithic genetic ontologies are built around three of Nietzsche's key concepts: ressentiment, bildung and the will to power, and nihilism. 

Figures 1 and 2 are about cognition.  They leave out modalites of social and psychological being/praxis (as distinct from cognitive performativity).  Figure 3 is both biological and psychoanalytical.  The post-paleolithic genetic ontologies are effects of power: 1. in Nietzsche's sense of power as confinement and its effect: ressentiment; 2. in Foucault's sense of power as productive (bildung: see Dupré); and in a third sense of power: nihilism as the effect of the socio-cultural engineering project of global corporate networks of unimaginable reach and power, generating an entropic process of disindividuation. 

A note on politics--a new politics.  To grasp this fifth genetic ontology--nihilism--is to pose a fundamental existential dillema never before faced by a species.  Dupre puts it well, if I may summarize: we are becoming, from a cultural-historical-psyhological standpoint, nothing.  Nothing but a bundle of little things--appetites, fears, needs: the incredible shrinking self (the self of Hegel and Kohut).  The  ultimate "freedom": being-free creatures, ontological nullities, bundles of desires and impulses, media cannon fodder.  What is to be done?

But to return to Figure 3.  The Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein is generated by the application of the Cassirer Inclusion Rule and the Margolies Exclusion Rule (see Philosophy and History).  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 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.

QHD-5 should be thought of as an operator deployed in any encounter with an "empirical" field.  The GOP as the Stupid Party: an Inadequate Conceptualization is a result of such a deployment.  It is a plane of immanence.  New shit happens: the Summer of 2015 political campaign.  But it's the same old shit, and it finds its place in this plane of immanence.  Nietzsche's eternal return of the same.  One of the beauties of transcendental empiricism is the transcendental side--the theoretical formulations and concepts--makes the shit that happens--the empirical side--more deeply empirical.  (The interview with Jim Peters: Midland Steel--Plymouth line--Assembly department is a case in point, revealing the structure and practice of white supremacy in the plant and in the nation.  I have not yet transcribed this interview.  Stay tuned.)

Much of modern history and politics can be understood as manifestations of the three post-paleolithic genetic ontologies of ressentiment, bildung & the will to power*, and nihilism.

Ressentiment emerged as an adaptive response to the discipline imposed by power in the first civilizations.  According to Nietzsche, ressentiment is more than simply a form of adaptation of an otherwise intact organism to power.  Ressentiment is the chief characteristic of “natures that, denied the true reaction, that of deeds, compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge.”  (Bernstein, Bitter Carnival, p. 102)  It is a fundamental reconfiguring of the organism, an alteration of Being, a transformation of Becoming.  It is something new, contrary to the existence of hunter-gatherers.  It is a particular type of Being that is the characteristic element of the age of civilization and the state.  It is the psychological heart of ultranationalism, racism, and fascism, all of which, contrary to Progressive/Enlightenment assumptions, are alive and well in the 21st century.

Bildung and the will to power is the inner logic of the historical trajectory Enlightenment to New Deal.  The Enlightenment not misconstrued (as it usually is) as ideology, but, more fundamentally, as an inflection point in cognitive development as cultural-historical process--as not simply the emergence of the scientific frame of mind, but more profoundly, as developmental leap. Thus, the enlightenment as developmental trajectory of a superorganism marked both by the emergence and continued development of science and formal operational competence (see PISA results): the habitus of progressivism; and by the hermeneutical complexity of the Geisteswissenschaften: the Second Enlightenment of Hegel,  Dewey, and Vygotsky.  (See Oliver Sacks, "Romantic Science.")  The psychological side of this cultural-historical trajectory is developed by Alcorn (Narcissism and the literary libido) and by Hall.  Both of these works illuminate in the most striking way my interviews with UAW creators (bildungs-proletarians and plebian upstarts), the cultural-historical development of Bolshevik workers, and my own experience growing up in a Communist milieu in New York.

The wreckage of socialism?  Enlightenment hopes of a rational collective subject arising in response to the challenge of capitalism proved to be illusory.  Instead, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ressentiment triumphed over bildung as the hegemonic existential modality of homo sapiens.  In this regard Stalinism, fascism and McCarthyism are homologous (on Stalinism see Harris, Getty, Mironov, Haretz, Lewin, Smith, and especially Wendy Z. Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: the Social Dynamics of Repression, Cambridge 2007).  The failure of the political offshoots of the Enlightenment (Marxism, Progressivism, etc.) reflects not the inherent limits of these "ideologies", but rather a cultural-historical catastrophe that unfolds on the level of Dasein.

---

Bildungs-proletarians of Flint and Pontiac: interviews

Bildungs-proletarians of Detroit's East Side: interviews

America has not so much been exceptional as it has gradually come to represent one extreme on a continuum of class relations.  America has never differed qualitatively from other national cases.  Differences have been of degree, not kind. . . .  Explanations asserting an original and enduring American exceptionalism . . . have only a very limited truth.  638

On representation, Russia was at the opposite extreme from the United States. . . .  But even the eastern edge of the western ideological community experienced the more liberal legacy of the Enlightenment. . . .  Among Russian professionals, gentry and aristocrats, and state administrators, a self-conscious, partly autnomous intelligentsia emerged, advancing alternative versions of progress.  660 here

The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal State