the work of transcendental empiricism so far
|
A. R. Luria, Cognitive Development: It Cultural and Social Foundations (Harvard, 1976) Jean Piaget, Genetic Epistemology the "Schtick": Always Trump, all the time. R. I. Moore sapient paradox Gutenberg parenthesis |
"Philosophy always arrives too late . . . . The Owl
of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk begins to fall."
"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic
facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add:
the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
History without philosophy is only a screen
on which to project the shibboleths of our time
Hitler is to Trump as tragedy is to farce
"There is no way to refute the world of primary orality. All you can
do is walk awasy from it into literacy."
Contextualizing Figure 1
|
In
this book, Ong used the phrase ‘secondary orality’, describing it as
“essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based
permanently on the use of writing and print” (Ong, 1982, p. 133).[1]
According to his way of thinking, secondary orality is not primary
orality, the orality of pre-literate cultures. Oral societies operated
on polychronic time, with many things happening at once—socialization
played a great role in the operation of these cultures, memory and
memorization were of greater importance, increasing the amount of
copiousness and redundancy. Oral cultures were additive rather than
subordinate, closer to the human life world, and more situational and
participatory than the more abstract qualities of literate cultures.
Secondary orality is orality that is dependent on literate culture and the existence of writing, such as a television anchor reading the news or radio. While it exists in sound, it does not have the features of primary orality because it presumes and rests upon literate thought and expression, and may even be people reading written material. Thus, secondary orality is usually not as repetitive, redundant, agonistic, etc. the way primary orality is, and cultures that have a lot of secondary orality are not necessarily similar to primarily oral cultures. Secondary orality should not be confused with "oral residue" in which a culture has not fully transitioned to literate / written culture and retains many of the characteristics of primary oral cultures. Secondary orality is a phenomenon of post-literacy era, whereas oral residue is a stage in the transition from pre-literate to literate. A. R. Luria, Cognitive Development: It Cultural and Social Foundations (Harvard, 1976) Jean Piaget, Genetic Epistemology the "Schtick": Always Trump, all the time. R. I. Moore sapient paradox Gutenberg parenthesis |
Figure 3 suggests that a catastrophic decline in cognitive performativity
preceded and made possible the fascist-patrimonial victory of November 2016
| The
election of 2016 occured in the context of the situation
indexed by Figure 3, and is inconceivable outside this context.
Many have commented on the cognitive performativity of the candidate
and then the President, but don't take seriously the historficity, fragility,
and reversibility of cognitive development as a cultural-historical
phenomenon.
Figure
3 is an effect of cultural-historical developmental processes, of which
schooling itself is only one of several key inputs affecting the
cognitive and cultural development of situated organisms (not Cartesian
selves). Cognitive development is not a normative, inevitable
process. It is an effect of history and politics, as well as
evolution, and can suffer reversal or collapse. Cognitive development is also not a solely ontogenetic process: the contextual and embedded character of mind; the social character of mind and agency; and the institutional and historical contexts of cognitive performativity must be borne in mind. (Jan Derry, Vygotsky, Philosophy, and Education, Wiley, 2013, pp. 17, 24) Mainstream elite media* observe but do not comprehend the cognitive-discursive peculiarities of Trump's performances, and thus take Trump's utterances at face value, arguing the merits and feasibility of building the wall and the ban on Muslims. They note the dog-whistle character of Trump's rhetoric, but discuss only the whistle, never the dog: the cognitive and emotional reactions of the audience toward whom the whistle is directed. Media, therefore, must also be scrutinized in the context of Figure 3. Figure 3 suggests that a catastrophic decline in cognitive performativity preceded and made possible the fascist-patrimonial victory of November 2018. (An alternative title for Figure 3: From the New Deal to Donald Trump.) Focusing on the person of the Chief Executive and his various performative moments obliterates the cultural-historical dimensions of history. The brutishness in language and behavior that are the chief characteristics of Trump's mass-oriented performances must be understood as manifestations of something of great ontological significance. To understand this, thinking must first emancipate itself from the Cartesian presuppositional 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. And thinking must approach the question of "ontology" as a question of genetic ontology (see below): the performative dimensions of ontology.f Figure ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *situated in cultural-historical bundles such as: 1. Schiller Hall bundle; 2. European Socoalist bundle; 3. E. V. Debs bundle; individudation and associated milieux Modernization is key concept, not class struggle or socialism. R. I. Moore, The War On Heresy (Harvard, 2012) |
Figure 3a. PISA Math Scores, 2003 to 2018***:
21
Developed Nations & East Asian Cities and City-States
|
|
|
. . . 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 F. Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a
sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and
embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem
firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about
which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are
worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their
pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
transindividual; individuation associated milieu |
Programme for International Student Assessment WIKI
Korea and Japan are in light blue; Asia: Asian cities and city-states (C & C-S) are in light orange (see below for a breakout of the components of this category); Scandinavian nations + Switzerland are in dark blue; Anglo-Saxon nations in orange; France, Germany, Belgium and Poland in green; Italy, Portugal and Spain in red; the United States in yellow.
Of the European nations omitted from this graph, Croatia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and Cyprus scored below the United States in math. Ahead of the United States but not shown are Estonia, Slovenia, Ireland, Austria, Russian Federation, Czech Republic, Iceland, Luxembourg, Latvia, Malta, Lithuania, Hungary, and the Slovak Republic.
The United States does better on reading and science, but math is taken by many as the more important indicator.
Korea and Japan are in light blue; Asia: Asian cities and city-states (C & C-S) are in light orange (see below for a breakout of the components of this category); Scandinavian nations + Switzerland are in dark blue; Anglo-Saxon nations in orange; France, Germany, Belgium and Poland in green; Italy, Portugal and Spain in red; the United States in yellow.
Of the European nations omitted from this graph, Croatia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and Cyprus scored below the United States in math. Ahead of the United States but not shown are Estonia, Slovenia, Ireland, Austria, Russian Federation, Czech Republic, Iceland, Luxembourg, Latvia, Malta, Lithuania, Hungary, and the Slovak Republic.
The United States does better on reading and science, but math is taken by many as the more important indicator.