(aa1971@wayne.edu)
SITE MAP
(this is not good news)
the Sapient Paradox: Psuedo-Speciation and Transcendental Empiricism
(Genetic ontologies and the historicity of Being)
from Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, 2005, p. 51
Agency is about the most difficult problem there is in philosophy
from Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 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.
from Eelco Runia, Moved by the Past: Discontinuity and Historical Mutation (Columbia U. Press, 2014)
how
to make evolutionary sense of the fact that humans, alone among
species, “took off” on a kind of autonomous development that made it
their destiny “to ply the seas eternally”? . . . .The more we disarmed
our environment the more we became our own environment. pp. 180-84
Luciano Berio, Sinfonia (Third Movement). Full text here.
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. Only Dodge Main and Midland Steel are clearly visible.
Friederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 242
Friederich Nietzsche, The Will To Power, Book IV, 960
The very same new
conditions that will on average lead to the leveling and
mediocritization of man--to a useful, industrious, handy, multi-purpose
herd animal--are likely in the highest degree to give birth to
exceptional human beings of the most dangerous and attractive
quality.
Friederich Nietzsche, The Will To Power, Book IV, 960
From now on there will be
more favorable preconditions for more comprehensive forms of dominion,
whose like has never yet existed. And even this is not the most
important thing; the possibility has been established for the
production of international racial unions whose task will be to rear a
master race, the future "masters of the earth"; a new, tremendous
aristocracy, based on the severest self-legislation, in which the will
of philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants will be made to endure
for millennia -- a higher kind of man who, thanks to their superiority
in will, knowledge, riches, and influence, employ democratic Europe as
their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the
destinies of the earth, so as to work as artists upon "man"
himself. Enough: the time is coming when politics will have a
different meaning.
The situation that we face today: the wreckage of socialism, the persistence of fascism, and the triumph of nihilism
1. The Wreckage of Socialism
The wreckage not only of socialism but more broadly of Progressivism, of the entire
cultural-historical self-formative project (Bildung) that grew out of
the Enlightenment and gave us the Russian Revolution, Scandinavian Social Democracy, and the American New Deal.
The Russian Revolution and the
New Deal (and Finnish Social Democracy) are homologous:
their
common root was committment to science, planning, and human capital
development; and their social base was amongst cosmopolitan moderns,
in the universities, in workplaces (white collar and blue collar), and
in progressive business and management milieux (Zizek, Less Than, 488); their psychological
disposition was the jousisance* of
a cognitive-developmental leap combined with an inclusive
humanism.
This general cultural-historical-political dynamic is
better understood by approaching it through the American experience of
Progressivism, New Deal, UAW: there is no such thing as American
exceptionalism (see Michael Mann at the right); and therefore the
history of the United States can serve as a field of investigation into
the global state of affairs that we face today. Thus, just as
there is no American exceptionalism, there is no Russian
exceptionalism. (Morris L Cooke ≣ Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) Songti SC LightThe photo above right shows the scene of the first sit-down strike in Michigan in November 1936 (at Midland Steel); and the scene of the massive wartime strike of May 1943 (at Dodge Main). Below the photo of Dodge Main and vicinity are two excerpts from Nietzsche. I interviewed dozens of Nietzsche's exceptional human beings of the most dangerous and attractive quality who organized these unions and led these strikes. The only texts I have run across that capture the essence of these struggles as related to me by these workers are Nietzsche's scattered comments on the übermensch. From the standpoint of activity, of agency, these two excerpts put the problematic of these UAW workers in its proper context, while the Nietzsche quote directly to the right articulates, at the most fundamental level, the problem of agency as the "aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces" that might be seen as homologous with Lacan's concept of "the Real" and implicit in Hegel's concept of Bildung. This is the first level of the problematic of agency. This is a complex and unfinished--never to be finished--thought: what is ontologically prior to the Symbolic Order is also realized within and also in opposition to (aufhebung) the Symbolic Order (the fourth "nihilism" of Diken). This problem of agency I work out within several arenas of activity. Here I confine myself to the question of agency as it relates to the UAW, the latter taken not as a substantive entity, but rather as a series of events wherein the problem of ontology and agency is confronted.
These outward events (as distinct from the inner logic that geneated them), the underlying dynamic and ontological transformations that both generated and were consequences of these events (including not only the Midland Steel and Flint sit-down strikes, but also the civil war within the UAW that unfolded from late 1936 to the spring of 1941), cannot be consigned to a bygone Fordist past. The very notion of a "class with radical chains" (Marx) was bogus from the outset, in part because the very concept of class is a Platonic ideal whose content is the Cartesian self writ large, in part because empirical investigation of a class in itself becoming a class for itself--the most celebrated example of which is the Flint sitdown strike of 1936-7--destroys the very concept of class by rendering it superfluous. In the process of such investigations it becomes clear that understanding the present and imagining the future is not possible without understanding in a new and very different way both the New Deal and the UAW. The question of agency is also a question of "being"; and the present sorry state of affairs raises difficult and depressing questions about the nature of human history, something entirely different from the question of human nature. The genetic ontology of the exceptional human beings of the most dangerous and attractive quality I refer to as Bildung and the Will to Power. The cultural-historical-political form Bildung and the Will to Power (BWP) took was known varously as socialism communism, and progressivism.
*from Lionel Barry, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide (2009), p. 124.
There is just as much, if no greater jousisance in
the functioning of the mind than in the functioning of any other bodily
part. The abiity to cross the bar of metaphor, to operate in the
symbolic realm--to conceptualize, to analyze, to rationalize--all are
libidinal functions, which entail enjoyment of the mere functioning of
the intelllect.
Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power. Volume II: The rise of classes and national states (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
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
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
from Friederich Nietzsche, Geneology of Morals, II, 12
The
democratic idiosyncracy which opposes [the will to power] has permeated
the realm of the spirit and disguised itself in the most spiritual
forms to such a degree that today it has forced its way, has acquired
the right to force its way into the strictest, apparently most
objective sciences; indeed, it . . . has robbed life of a
fundamental concept, that of activity. Under the influence of the
above metioned idosyncracy, one places instead "adaptation" in the
foreground, that is to say, an activity of the second rank, a
mere reactivity; indeed, life itself has been defined as a more and
more efficient inner adaptation to external conditons (Herbert
Spencer). Thus, the essence of life, its will to power, is
ignored; one overlooks the essential priority of the spontaneous,
aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces that give new interpretations
and directions, although 'adaptation' follows only after this; the
dominant role of the highest functionaries within the organism iself in
which the will to life appears active and form-giving is denied.
from Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City (2015), p. 65Consciousness as a first value, we each discovered, whas what we together were exploring. This absorption grew in us day by month by year, fed by the excitement of abstract thought joined to the concreteness of daily life.
Lock
Wellman
This concept of a cultural-historical space-time vector can be illustrated using the diagram at the right (original use: to illustrate string theory). Imagine the plane at the left as circa 1756 (the year of Mozart's birth), the plane at the right circa 1953 (the year my godfather was hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee). This concept was gradually forced on me by my interviews with some of the bildungs-proletarians whom I interviewed. There are two humans in this figure. The smaller one at the left and the larger one at the right. Let the latter represent the interviewees recollections of their cultural experiences and modalities of the 1930s.
Enlightenment(1756) ➤ New Deal(1953)
Norman Bully (Buick, UAW Local 599, Reuther supporter) can be taken as paradigmatic. Joe Adams on atheism
BWP hs not ceased to exist as a genetic ontology; but it has ceased to exist in its political manifestation. The high point of this manifetation was in what I must call, with some misgivings, the Keynesian elite in the New Deal state. (cartesian myth of individual and idea) What has not only displaced it but murdered it was the politics of ressentiment and the mechanisms of defense: fascism (McCarthyism to Trump). This huge issue can be elucidated by consideration not only of the triupmphal march of donald trump through the battlefield of american politics (return of the repressed), but in the specific, even peculiar way in which media discourse finds it imposslble to observe the obvious (book on Limbaugh), and instead performs a masking operation--entirely unaware of what it is doing--whic itself becomes just another symtom of the diminution of being that is the chief charcteristic of nihilism, the other triumphan gentic onology of our time. (See stupid party, RMD)
1756 1953
The Interviews
late 19th century 1927------1944
1975--77
2013-
family histories
events
the
interviews listening to
the interviews
Mozart to McCarthy--you get my drift. There are many levels on which to understand McCarthyism, many ways to approach it. Landon R.Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton University Press, 2012) provides an opening.
It is in this same theoretical context that one can browse through the issues of the Bulletin of the Taylor Society, wherein the Second New Deal was developed from the mid-1920s to the August 1933 issue in which the corporatism of the NRA (the "first" New Deal) was questioned (An Interpretative Forecast of the NRA: Is the Trend Toward Fascist or Socialized Self-Government?).
But then, all this is also applicable to the cosmopolitan Progressives who comprised the staff of the state apparatus associated with the Second New Deal. Thus, the UAW (Unity Caucus) and the Keynesian elite are homologous: they spring from and are an expression of the same cultural-historical existential vector* that begins more or less with the Enlightenment and ends, more or less, with the anti-modernist terror of McCarthyism.
* The concept of a superorganism is useful here. "The superorganism account of human sociality: How and when human groups are like beehives", by Selin Kesebir (Personality and Social Psychology Review. 2012 Aug;16(3):233-61). Also: Superorganism (Wikipedia).
| 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 |
* Jack Skeels interviews, Walter P. Reuther Library
** d
** d
Zizek, Less Than Nothing, p. 643; Yovel, Hegel's Preface to the Phenomenology
Figure 1.
PISA Math
Scores, 2003 - 2012: 25 Nation
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.
Songti
dasein
A
precursor to McCarthyism is to be
found in the UAW's Progressive caucus, which was seen by key leaders of
the Unity caucus (Kraus, Mortimer), and by a former member of the
Progressive Caucus (Paul Silver) as fascist. This theme is
developed on several pages on this site; here it is only introduced as
the persistence of fascism.
Modernist cosmopolitanism vs. Fascist provincialism and traditionalism
(family-God-country): these are not simply counterposed
ideologies (The shibboleth of ideology is the evil twin of
Cartesianism). They are such fundamentally different ontologies
that they must be understood as psuedo-species, as different from each
other as homo sapiens sapiens is from homo erectus, with the difference
being that this is not a biological but a cultural-historical
developmental difference
(see below). At a minimum, what is required is a concept of the
post-biological quantum heterogeneity of Dasein, "The fundamental historicity of Being" (Zizek, Less Than Nothing, p. 108).
Without this, it is impossible to understand the actual rhetorical performances and crowd reactions in today's (2015) right-wing rallies.
Without this, it is impossible to understand the actual rhetorical performances and crowd reactions in today's (2015) right-wing rallies.
Skeels:
Was there a feeling from 1931 on that there would be a need for
unionization, you think? Or do you think it came all of a sudden?
Roland: I Think it came with the NRA and Roosevelt. I think the confidence the working man had in Roosevelt and in the NRA led to the organization of the mass production industries, not only in Chevrolet but others and Auto-Lite.
Roland: I Think it came with the NRA and Roosevelt. I think the confidence the working man had in Roosevelt and in the NRA led to the organization of the mass production industries, not only in Chevrolet but others and Auto-Lite.
the fourth is contingency as the action-space within which the three
levels of agency--biological, cultural-historical, and political--come
together in the production of events.
This line of thought emerged out of my attempt to understand that
something inexpressible whose inexpressibility is covered up by the use
of event-names--the Flint Sit-down strike of 1936-37, for
example. An ontological coherence of this event is presupposed:
it was, supposedly, generated by the will of the workers to acheive dignity, better
conditions, etc., the usual fluff that covers over the black hole
of becoming; the usual Cartesianism--the working class as the Cartesian
self writ large.
Agency & Genetic Ontology
Agency & Genetic Ontology
interviews
KE
Stupid Party
Development vs. Democracy: the elitism of sucking up to the people vs. the elitism of progressivism
the
same cultural-historical existential vector that begins more or less
with the Enlightenment and ends, more or less, with the anti-modernist
terror of McCarthyism
Agency:
1. Nietzsche;
2. Alcorn-Mozart semiotics
3. Progressive networks/institutions (New Deal "state")
4. Election of 1932/NRA (7a); mid-1935 breakout of KE (second New Deal) Wagner Act; Election of 1936
2. the persistence of fascism
The persistence of fascism--of the political culture, psychological dispositions and praxiological modalities of ressentiment (the inner life of fascism); the possibility that the inner logic of ISIS and the Tea Party are identical, That ISIS is the Tea Party on steroids, and that Melanie Klein's is the voice most in tune with our time (which is not the same as affirming the validity of her theoretical perspective). In the United States fascism has become normalized, legitimized within media discourse. Nevertheless if one focuses on the inner logic of fascism--ressentiment--rather than on its outward form--street violence, concentration camps, the Führer principle--then we have today the Führer principle in practice, exhortations to racist violence, and the promise of the camps. And this brings us to Figures 1 and 2. (See Paxton on KKK, Black Legion, Coughlin Zizek wrong on fascism 434
Figure 2. Donald Trump Talks Like a Third-Grader
On psuedo-speciation: Consider the GOP rhetorical performances of the Summer of 2015: What are the psychological and cognitive characteristics of the audience response in these theaters of ressentiment that politics provides? One must wonder at the primitive and repetitive nature of the discourse of the current leader on the right, not merely his racist attacks on a variety of others, but also his primitive language (I like; I don't like; good guys; bad guys; I'm great--so great it will make your head spin; he's stupid; what a face; you're ugly, fat, on the rag . . . ). At what grade-level is the Trump rhetorical performance? Donald Trump Talks Like a Third-Grader. (Politico, August 13, 1915. Chart above from For presidential hopefuls, simpler language resonates: Trump tops GOP field while talking to voters at fourth-grade level, Boston Globe, Auguast 20, 2015.) This fourth-grade mentality holds the sphere of public discourse hostage. Applying the Piagetian schematic (as presented by the Vygotskian Michael Cole*) to the rhetorical theatrics of politics and the various media outlets enables us to assign a place in the cognitive-linguistic scheme of things. Fox News and CNN: third to fifth grade; MSNBC: maybe fourth to sixth grade; PBS Newshour: perhaps at the level of a high school graduate. (See Cog divergence LINK) This is one dimension of a concept of psuedo-speciation. "The fundamental historicity of Being" (Zizek, Less Than Nothing, p. 108)
*Michael Cole, Cynthia Lightfoot, and Sheila R. Cole, The Development of Children (Worth Publishers, 2009)
Nietzsche, Hegel, Vygotsky: three who thought the historicity of Being
Compare the Democratic and Republican debates of the Fall of 2015: a concept of psuedo-speciation is required to make sense of the differences, which are fundamental. We are dealing here with different orders of being (and simultaneously with ontological instability) having nothing to do with genes and everything to do with history and culture, culture and power, power and the reactions to power, all made possible by that wonder of wonders, mind and language: The more we disarmed our environment the more we became our own environment. (Mind: embodied, extended, enacted and distributed.) construction and deconstructon of the subject
This rhetorical performance of the right is not only cognitively primitive. It should be obvious that on the right there are not issues, but postures, gestures, various encodings of the same sado-sexual reflex (the inner logic, the generative matrix, of racism). Postures, gestures, various encodings (floating signifiers) of the same sado-sexual reflex--we are no longer in the land of the Cartesian self and its motivations and interests. Rage enacted in a political-media theater of violence (psychologically, the "issue" of immigration is the script for a generalized lynch-mob): This is the essence of what is called "Conservative" today. And not only rage, but political pornography. Sex and violence make up the entirety of the inner logic, the generative matrix of the other, of populist Republicanism. These sado-sexual fixations may dress themselves up as issues, as if they were subject to rational debate and beholden to empirical checks (see GOP as the Stupid Party). Language on the threshold of gesture and reflex. Regression to infantile narcissism via processes of identification, to a politics of patrimonialism. Certain American classics of the 1940s should be reread today: Lillian Smiths's Killers of the Dream, Wilbur Cash's The Mind of the South, and others. "The fundamental historicity of Being" (Zizek, Less Than Nothing, p. 108).
"truth has the structure of fiction" Less than Nothing, 252, 494)
a critique of the "people"
from Werner Stark, Sociology of Religion: A Study of Christendom (Fordham University Press, 1966-72) vol. 1, p. 188
As
democratic convictions became settled . . . 'the people' emerged
increasingly as the true sovereign, and the conception gained ground
that 'the people' is sane and sound, and its voice, at least to some
extent, is sacred.
from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 863
The
values of the weak prevail because the strong have taken them over as
devices of leadership.
from Johathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton, 2010)
Sovereign in appearance,
in reality the common people in a direct democracy are the slaves of
'perverse demagogues' wo know how to manipulate and flatter them.
In direct democracy the people often have no real conception of what
liberty is and their rule can be harsher than that of the worst
tyrant. Liberty without reason, held d'Holbach, is of scant value
in itself; consequently, the 'history of most republics,' he
admonished, 'continually conjures up the gruesome picture of nations
bathed in their own blood by anarchy.' (p. 64)
from Yrjö Engeström and Reijo Miettinen, "Activity theory and individual and social transformation," in Reijo Miettinen, and Raija-Leena Punamaki, Perspectives on Activity Theory (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 25-6:
Differences in cognition across
cultures, social groups, and domains of practice are thus commonly
explained without seriously analyzing the historical development that
has led to those differences. The underlying relativistic notion
is that we should not make value judgements concerning whose cognition
is better or more advanced--that all kinds of thinking and practice are
equally valuable. Although this liberal stance may be a
comfortable basis for academic discourse, it ignores the reality that
in all domains of societal practice value judgements and decisions have
to be made every day.
Racism and Psuedo-speciation
Some might say a concept of psuedo-speciation smacks of racism. Nothing could be further from the truth.
This concept of pseudo-speciation is the antithesis of the varieties of neo-racism that now permeate the semiosphere--for example, Nicholas Wade's neo-racist A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History* (Penguin Press, 2014), and Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending's neo-racist The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009). Serious neo-racist works, such as these, have three characteristics. First, " . . . the authors employ an undefined and oftentimes arbitrary racial classificatory scheme, assume race to be a natural fact, use ethnocentric metrics to measure intelligence (but see Ceci's critique of the concept of intelligence) and attempt to lay the ground work for the racial classification of humanity by intelligence."** Second, these works merely dress up in psuedo-scientific terms the dark side of neoliberalism--its racist mass appeal; and third our whole culture seems to be animated by a feverish hostility to understanding humans as extremely complex cultural historical, ontologically indeterminate organisms. ("The quest of biological psychiatry, adopted and aided by DSM, is to claim a brain disease for every human trouble." Kirk et. al., Mad Science)
Indeed, one might say that the racist conception of human difference is not only intellectually null. It is also a symptom of the primitive cognitive processes characteristic of racism. This site takes the bull by the horns, and addresses human differences from a cultural-historical and a political perspective. Taking the bull by the horns means goring a few sacred cows. When this is done our number one sacred cow bites the dust--the myth of the individual, the Cartesian self in a market economy (the self-evident ontological given and eternal truth of our being, the selfy self-same self)--and is replaced, as a first, and only first, approximation, by the Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein: Five Genetic Ontologies***: Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Vygotsky, Descola, Latour; the Sapient Paradox: . . . Figure 3 will be discussed below and throughout this site. (Genetic ontology and transcendental empiricism: the genesis of the pages)
*See Jonathan Marks' review and blog (anthropomics). Also Geneticists say popular book misrepresents research on human evolution (Nature)
**reviewed by Cadell Last, Explorations in Anthropology, Vol.12, No. 1, pp. 120–123.
***Miguel de Beistegui, Truth and genesis : philosophy as differential ontology (Indiana University Press, 2004)
Figure 3. The Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein: Five Genetic Ontologies
(Five Principles of the Production of Practices)
(Five Principles of the Production of Practices)
| Genetic Ontology |
Sources (Full page here) |
| Primate Dominance and Deference |
Mazur, deWaal, Wrangham . . . |
| Paleolithic Dynamic Egalitarianism |
Whiten, Descola, Chase, Price . . . |
| Ressentiment & the Mechanisms of Defense Despotic regime; Racism; Nationalism; Fascism |
Nietzsche, Deleuze & Guattari, Clarke, Paxton, Knox . . . |
| Bildung & the Will to Power (Jouissance) Progressive Narcisism; Individuation; Progressivism, Socialism, Communism the UAW and the Keynesian Elite |
Hegel, Nietzsche, Vygotsky, Piaget, Alcorn . . . |
| Nihilism & the Last Man Regressive Narcissism and the Culture of Consumption; Repressive Desublimation; Disindividuation; Neoliberalism |
Nietzsche, Hall, Ehrenberg, Stiegler, Illouz, Marcuse . . . |
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
Ontology, Transcendental Empiricism, Emergence
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)
The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food (2-20-13)
Today’s Exhausted Superkids (8-15-15)
Is Internet Addiction a Health Threat for Teenagers? (7-16-15)
Failure to Thrive (3-12-15)
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)
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)
Teens spend nearly nine hours every day consuming media (W. Post 11-3-15)
3. The triumph of nihilism (and the New York Times on Dasein)
So far: the wreckage of socialism and the persistence of fascism . . . and now:
The triumph of nihilism as the socio-cultural engineering project of global corporate networks of unimaginable reach and power, generating an entropic process of disindividuation. Mass consumption as a mode of absorption and transformation of the organism. The fiction of freedom (see Dupre), the subversion of individuation, the inner logic of addiction, the commodification of distress, the infantilization of public discourse . . . in short, the dissipation of the species homo sapiens sapiens into a proliferation of effects. DSM-5 as the operating manual of the post-human ontology. The vortex of un-becoming . . . and the point of departure for a new kind of politics (or not). Zizek doesen't know how right he is when he says (843) . . . . . and 453 "no final Aufhebung
The New York Times on Dasein. Out of the set of all New York Times articles subsets can be formed. The New York Times on Dasein is one such subset. The Times on Dasein can be read in the context of Ehrenberg ("Today, many of our social tensions have been expressed in terms of implosion and depressive collapse or, in a similar way, its flip side: explosions of violence, rage, the search for new sensations"); Stiegler ("the entropic vicious circle that leads to dissociation, desocialization, and disindividuation"); these more lengthy excerpts from Hall et. al.("This specific mode of identification and desire, motivated by the terror of helplessness and insignificance that afflicts each prematurely born and maladapted human being in early childhood, is, of course, infantile narcissism, and it creates and sustains precisely the types of unconscious desires and drives that consumer culture and its para-political civic life require"); Kirk et. al. ("The quest of biological psychiatry, adopted and aided by DSM, is to claim a brain disease for every human trouble. On the one hand, the drug industry’s marketing efforts and its massive infusions of money to support psychiatric activities, and on the other hand psychiatry’s enthusiastic acceptance of the partnership, have completely subsumed psychiatry as a satellite branch of the multinational pharmaceutical industry.); and Usher ("consumption is a matter of consuming signs, it is the experience itself that counts, i.e., that signifies and defines"). A plane of immanence is formed when this is done. This plane of immanence can be given a name: Nihilism. This is the inner world of neoliberalism. (The fundamental historicity of Being.)
from Lawrence J. Hatab, A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy, p. 28
. . . the happy nihilism of the 'last man,' who makes everything comfortable, small, and trivial.
Trump Rally Goer: Ted Cruz A "Pussy"
The grotesquely obvious sado-sexual chain of signifiers (abortion, the wall, all lives matter (deployed aggresssively against black lives matter, once again suppressing recognition of any black presence as citizens; also, similarly, the use of the term urban to signify black, the people without a name, the people who exist only in the shadows of racism )
The rhetorical performance of the elite-mass dialectic consists solely of this (the question of taxes has over the decades become linked with welfare and blacks)
patrimonialism: doers, toughness: regressive identification
Clinton likewise, women et al as dependents not citizens, who are recognized as recipients or victims, not as citizens "Fighting for Us" not an apppeal to citizenship
vs. Sanders analytical Progressive analytical framework, appeal to citizens
Who's that owl? Minerva? Why now? Why fly? Why fly now? Is flight even possible? The owl of Minverva flies only by night. That time has come, but there's no owl in sight. Oy vey.
The rhetorical performance of the elite-mass dialectic consists solely of this (the question of taxes has over the decades become linked with welfare and blacks)
patrimonialism: doers, toughness: regressive identification
Clinton likewise, women et al as dependents not citizens, who are recognized as recipients or victims, not as citizens "Fighting for Us" not an apppeal to citizenship
vs. Sanders analytical Progressive analytical framework, appeal to citizens
Who's that owl? Minerva? Why now? Why fly? Why fly now? Is flight even possible? The owl of Minverva flies only by night. That time has come, but there's no owl in sight. Oy vey.
Who's that owl? Minerva? Why now? Why fly? Why fly now?
Is flight even possible? It has been said that the owl of Minverva flies only
by night. That time has come, but there's no owl in sight. Oy vey.
Why Dasein? Part II
As with all such grand schemata, they are useful only if they get us on our way; only if they form pedal notes in the practice of transcendenta empiricism
Derrida; Zizek; Hall; Timimi et al.
genetic ontology
New Light on Fascism: France: the Dark Years; The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–1945
Drugs
Fashion
Education
Media
the invisible power structure (the sodalities of racism: local govt
seeDiken, Nihilism in Dark Age
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Eelco Runia, Moved by the Past: Discontinuity and Historical Mutation (Columbia U. Press, 2014)
“For historians, ‘not thinking’ goes under the name of ‘positivism’ and takes the form of allowing yourself to become wrapped up in your subject. It implies consenting to be a vehicle for what Hayden White has called prefigurations . . . to the extent you succumb to prefigurations you only replicate your subject” p. xii
“how to make evolutionary sense of the fact that humans, alone among species, “took off” on a kind of autonomous development that made it their destiny “to ply the seas eternally”? p. 180
“The more we disarmed our environment the more we became our own environment.” 184
Rebecca Muhle, Stephanie V. Trentacoste and Isabelle Rapin Pediatrics 2004;113;e472-e486
Although many genes and proteins have been im- plicated as causes of autism, too little is known about their functions or their role in brain development to generate a parsimonious hypothesis about the brain dysfunctions that underlie autism. Evidence from multiplex families with the broader autism pheno- types, together with twin studies, indicates that sin- gle-gene defects are rare even within families. This is a general feature of many genetically influenced complex disorders such as obesity or diabetes be- cause, first, different mutations in a given gene in different families do not have the same consequences for gene inactivation, and, second, phenotypic vari- ability within a family may be a random stochastic event or result from interactions among different genes in different members of the same family. Fur- thermore, brain development and complex behaviors are multidetermined, with genes turning cascades of proteins on or off while they influence one another. A specific mutation, deletion, or unique set of genetic polymorphisms may determine one’s susceptibility to autism, yet even then environmental triggers may modify the phenotypic expression of the disorder.88
Despite the profusion of investigations into the genetics of autism, few significant genetic linkages to autism have been identified. Even when strong ge- netic linkage is suggested, its significance remains undetermined until the functions of the gene product have been defined and its influence on brain devel- opment and physiology have been elucidated.
Review - Behavioral Genetics in the Postgenomic Era
Metapsychology online