Language

Fascism: texts

Fascism: data

this site is a rhizome

this site is a rhizome.  It consists of:        1. excerpts from state-of-the-art mainstream scholarly works        2. datasets (graphs, tables, charts, and maps)        3. comments that function as connective tissue Its principle of production is transcendental empiricism* This is a cell in a row containing three cells.  Some cells of this site are readble; others under construction.  The latter are indicated in faded letters as UNDER CONSTRUCTION.  *Excerpts from Levi R. Bryant, Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence (Northwestern University Press, 2008) * Notebook (Philosophy)

•First, the disintegration of the cognitive performativities of modernity itself: the "human" side of "capital."  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.  Thus, liberal obsession with the "misinformation" spread by "conspiriacy theories" like QAnon, expose themselves to ridicule. QAnon is not a theory.  It is a demonic accusation . . . Cognitive-developmentally speaking, conspiracy "theories" can be viewed as cartoon-like.  Vivid and simple-minded to the extreme, they appeal to the toddleresque mentalité of the milieu of American fascism.  The fact that the liberal media does not, perhaps cannot, recognize this says volumes about how far we have fallen since the New Deal. •Second, the explosion of fascist performativities within the orbit of the GOP (Robert O. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism: "The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism.").  Again, the liberal media cannot see the obvious: click on the Freud-Jamieson Black Hole of Liberalism now to see what I mean. •Third, the assault on rational-bureaucratic institutions--i.e., an assault on the very idea of science-based professionalism and public service.  (Richard Lachmann, Coda: American Patrimonialism: The Return of the Repressed: "Patrimonialism, until fairly recently, seemed an archaic social form, largely replaced by bureaucratic rationalism. That confident view of modernity, in the histories that Max Weber and his followers wrote, deserves to be challenged as patrimonial regimes reappear in states and firms throughout the world.") •Fourth, the triumph of nihilism(Nietzsche).  Some call this neoliberal subjectivity, but it might well be called the incredible shrinking self.  The Democratic Party, once the party of bildung (pragmatisim, progressivism), is now the party of nihilism.  (Thorsten Veblen "provided a strong criticism of hedonism, including marginal utility theory, satirizing its conception of man as a 'lightning calculator of pleasures and pains.'")

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

from It’s Just Too Much’: "A Florida Town Grapples With a Shutdown After a Hurricane, New York Times, 1-7-19.

from The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution, by Michael J. Klarman (Oxford, 2016):

It is a striking index of the cognitive insufficiency (to put it nicely),  near-illiteracy,  and the mendacity of our times, that the text itself is never actually discussed in the public sphere.  Why not?  (see Semiotic Regimes: the two-party discursive field.)

We no longer read.  We are a post-print, oral culture, possessed only of the technical capacity to sound out words.  But we don't actually read.  The entire public discussion of the Second Amendment bears witness to this fact.

 . . . a post-print, oral culture?  But not a culture rooted in locality, in face-to-face interactions--what used to be called "traditional" societies.  Powerful institutions, both global and national, work up us humans as materials to be shape to their needs and interests.

---

*Tom McCarthy, Satin Island (Knopf, 2015)

1. Civil War in Midland Steel: socio-technical analysis
2. Civil War in Midland Steel: the Elder report
3. Wage Adjustment List, 1941

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.

Fig. 0. (The bigger picture).  The Evolutionary Context of the 2016 election: from the origins of language to the end of print literacy in the United States

larger image

The rule governing this page is to think in terms of these figurative elements, which form a set of synthetic a prioris.  In certain cases a text is made to function as a synthetic a priori.  The  Southern Strategy: the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain is one such a case.  Another is the Freud-Jamieson Black Hole of Liberalism.  These synthetic a prioris are also elementary particles.*  That is, they are the building blocks of intelligibility within a hermeneutical modus operandi.  This may be what Deleuze means by transcendental empiricism, which is consistent with Hegel's notion of the concrete universal.  *synthetic a priori and elementary particles may appear contradictory.  Elementary particles usually refers to the building blocks of matter—the standard positivist-materialist reduction.  Here synthetic a prioris are the building blocks of intelligibility within a hermeneutical modus operandi.  See Alexander Luria, The Making of Mind.

Source: "Membership List, May 1927," in the
Morris L. Cooke Papers, box 66, FDR Library
for more info on Fig.2 click on Keynesian Elite: Career Matrix

Martyn Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing In the Western World (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.")

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

	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

Martyn Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing In the Western World (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.")

We take reading for granted today without realizing that reading about something in newspapers, books, and pamphlets is different from the mere capacity to sound out words.  In my interviews with bildungsproletarians I found a milieu of the kind of print-based association we read about in the various works of scholars of the late 18th and early 19th century growth of a public sphere.  The salons where enlightened aristocrats and middle class readers met to discuss politics, philosophy, and society should be considered as nodes in the discursive field of modernity. Schiller Hall in Detroit should be viewed as just such a radical salon, a node in the discursive field of modernity, a meeting place of the bildungsproletarians.  Ed Lock (at the right), proud grandson of a Civil War veteran, communist, Ford, provides an account of the intellectual life of the bildungsproletarians who gathered in Schiller Hall.  Saul Wellman (communist, Detroit and Flint), provides an account of intellectual aspirations of new recruits to the Party in Flint in the  immediate post-war period.  Joe Adams (socialist, Dodge Main) provides an account of such modernist sensibilities on Detroit's east side, and more generally among the socialists he knew back in the day.  (click here) Reading was not only about something; it was also about becoming something, about self-fashioning: "We have seen," writes S.A. Smith, "that for 'conscous' workers in Russia and, to a lesser extent, in China, reading was an activity that was central to self-fashioning, constitutive of what it meant to be a cultured and autonomous individual." This is thus much more than mere reading in the sense that the term is understood in today's nearly illiterate society. comment on Margaret Jacob's The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, 2014).  Jacob's emphasis on the socio-cultural networks, circles, meeting houses of these first "industrialists"; her emphasis on the role of books as emotionally charged world-opening objects--one sees here both Vygotsky's notion of zone of proximal development broadened and historicized, and Alcorn's understanding of the development of self that can result from an an engagement with a text.  In this way Jacob expands our concept of the Enlightenment.  This  requires a reconceptualization of what is called the Enlightenment--the Enlightenment as a cultural-historical developmental leap--an ontological leap, a cognitive revolution, a new Symbolic Order.  The superorganisism of the enlightenment . . .  from the 18th century to the New Deal (Schiller Hall, Detroit (and the UAW bildungs-proletarians).  Scientific reasoning is not merely about knowledge.  It is about functioning on the formal-operational level.  In the adventure of it, the jouissance of developmental transgression and becoming, lies the secret of the bildungs-proletarians and plebian upstarts who gave us so many Nietzschean spectacles . . .

I have been using cognitive-discursive field, cognitive discursive web, and cognitive-discursive performativity with the understanding that these are provisional terms.  It now appears that I may have known what I was doing. cognitive-discursive performativity is the most straightforward.  It builds upon the work of Piaget and Vygotsky, of Luria and Ong, of  Wittgenstein and of course, of the authors of The Social Origins of Language.  It also takes to heart Stephen Ceci's observation* The possibility that there exists a more restless relationship between intelligence and context, in which thinking changes both its nature and its course as one moves from one situation to another, is enough to cause shudders in some research quarters.  It represents a move toward a psychology of situations . . . xvi The term intelligence is often used synonymously with "IQ", "g", or "general intelligence", especially in some of the psychometric literature. . .  however, the ability to engage in cognitively complex behaviors will be shown to be independent of IQ,  g, or general intelligence . . . cognitive complexity will be seen to be the more general of the two notions and the one most theoretically important to keep in mind when referring to intelligent behavior. p. 22 cognitive discursive web refers to actual networks of people who interact and discuss ideas and events in the context of a cognitive-discursive field.  Whereas cognitive discursive web refers to actual people in actual contact with one another, cognitive-discursive field is more elusive.**  Vivian Gornick’s memoirs (Fierce Attachments and Odd Woman and the City) provides us with vivid accounts of what such a field was and how it worked.  Gornick, in her teen years, became aware of the great world of possibility, of self-fashioning, a dialectical dance of encounter, immersion, and growth, a world that was nowhere and everywher.  This is the world of modern civilization. *from Stephen J. Ceci, On Intelligence: A Bioecological Treatise on Intellectual Development, expanded edition (Harvard University Press, 1996) **web refers to actual people in actual contact with one another, cognitive-discursive field is more elusive cognitive field is what Vivian Gornick

comment 1

The brutishness in language and behavior that are the chief characteristics of Trump's (and the GOP's) mass-oriented performances must be understood as manifestations of something of great ontological and evolutionary significance.  The sado-sexual eigenvector  of these performativities  (widely recognized but not understood) goes back to the Know-Nothing roots of the GOP (Gniepp), later 19th century anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic political rhetoric, the lynching for rape discourse, the southern strategy, and the infamous Willie Horton episode in George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign. 

Brutish means crudely vulgar and aggressively (but not self-consciously) stupid.  But, while the vulgarity of the 45th President of the United States has been conceptualized in the public sphere (conceptualized but also euphemised), his truly stunning stupidity has not been conceptualized, although sometimes snickered at by media pesonalities.

Among the books I have read on 45 it is only Michael Wolff's Trump Trilogy* that addresses the cognitive-discursive catastrophe that is so evident yet completely unconceptualized in the public sphere.  The above row of two excerpts and one comment provides a context for Wolff's books.  In addition, one should read Rucker and Leonnig's account of Trump’s meeting in the Tank with the Joint Chiefs in A Very Stable Genius.

---

*Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (2018); Siege: Trump Under Fire (2019);  Landslide: the Final Days of the Trump White House (2021)

comment 2

* Robert O. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism

Media personalities operating with the two-party discursive field report the sexual obsessiveness of GOP rhetorical performativity in each particular instance, but sees no connection between separate instances.  Yet this sexual obsessiveness is the prevailing theme of such rhetorical performativity, while sadism is the emotional content.  The grilling of Judge Jackson by Cruz, Graham et. al. on the theme of child pornography was an outstanding example of this.  Over and over again, it recurs, eternally (Nietzsche).

The two-party discursive field excludes the very processes described by Foster (t the right).  For example, "Trumpism" is a word used often in the two-party discursive field.  By tacking "ism" to the noun "Trump" a speaker implies that a concept has been born.  Fascism is a concept; Trumpism is a psuedo-concept.  Its uses reveals in an instant* the cogntive minimalism of the two-party discursive field.

The expression "culture war" is pervasive in media discourse.  It is similar to the term "extremism:" both reveal the inner drive of liberal media discourse: euphemization.  One side of the culture war involves deployment of the sado-sexual eigenvector of GOP performativity.**

---

*Arnold Schoenberg on Anton Weber: " . . . to express a novel in a single gesture . . .

**Inflicting pain on the other is an expression of the sado-sexual eigenvector of right-wing politics, and thus sadism is the core value of the values voters.  So-called "conspiracy theories" become intelligible as instances of the political mobilization of the paranoid-schizoid position (Simon Clarke, Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism).  Cognitive-developmentally speaking, conspiracy "theories" can also be viewed as cartoon-like.  Vivid and simple-minded to the extreme, they appeal to the toddleresque mentalité of the milieu of American fascism (DATA)

Abortion, Trump rallies, telephone threats, guns, death, torture, school board assault, etc.

4) The Sado-sexual Eigenvector of GOP Performativity

  from Imanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787)
from Eckart Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: a Systematic Reconstruction (Harvard, 2012)

 . . . concepts have their basis in functions, by which Kant understands “the unity of the act of bringing various representations under one common representaton.” (A68).  A concept is a rule for combining certain representations (and thus also a principle for excluding certain others).  Thus the represesntations’white’, ‘grainy’, ‘saline’ are combined and ordered in the concept ‘salt, while the representations ‘colorless’, ‘liquid’, ‘tasteless’ (say) are not.  In this way a concept is a rule allowing me to unite certain representations and to bring them under a higher representation, i.e. the concept. (pp. 22-3)

Cognition does not consist merely in the collecting of phenomena; rather we strive to forge conceptual links between them and to grasp the laws of nature that are valid for specific classes of objects as cases of yet more general laws, whereby we are guided by the ideal of a unified explanation of nature. (p. 38)

“To make concepts out of representations one must be able to compare, to reflect, and to abstract, for these three logical operations of the understanding are the essential and universal conditions for the generation of every concept whatsoever.  I see, e.g., a spruce, a willow, and a linden.  By first comparing these objects with one another I note that they are different from one another in regard to the trunk, the branches, the leaves, etc.; but next I reflect on that which they have in common among themselves, trunk, branches, and leaves themselves, and I abstract from the quantity, the figure, etc., of these; thus I acquire a concept of a tree.” (pp. 250

The GOP as the Stupid Party?
GOP Sexual Obsessions on display re. child porn (Senate Confirmation Hearings on Judge Jackson)

from 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.

A great advantage of the new technology making this site possible is that one can do better than merely bearing certain things in mind.  One can copy and paste, so that instead of bearing the above excerpt in mind one can repeat it.  Space becomes cheap, and links can leap about in the archive of mind.  Even if you don't reread the excerpt from A Mind So Rare, its physical appearance above can serve to recall it's contents and importance. The excerpts and graphs at the right should be seen in the context of the above excerpt. One thing The PISA Results: Evolutionary, Historical, Developmental, and Psychological Perspectives assembles excerpts from the scholarly literature that help contextualize the data represented at the right. Note, however, that in that page the data only goes up to 2015.  You should look at the link above now, if only to see more clearly the overall pattern.  For an American New Deal Nationalist such as myself, it's a grim picture. In the graphs at the right that go up to 2018, things appear to have improved, even though we are still at the bottom among what used to be called the advanced industrial nations. But wait!  There's fraud and chicanery almost certainly involved in the reporting of the American data (see "inexplicable anomalies").  Just what data were omitted?  Here's a project for an enterprising student to undertake.  Meanwhile, it is prudent to assume that honest reporting would have produced a graph where the downward trajectory of the U.S. results would have been more pronounced. All of the materials in The PISA Results: Evolutionary, Historical, Developmental, and Psychological Perspective were assembled before The Social Origins of Language was published.

Nicholas Kristof, "McDonald’s Workers in Denmark Pity Us," New York Times, May 8, 2020 Think of it this way. Workers at McDonald’s outlets all over the world tend to be at the lower end of the labor force, say the 20th percentile. But Danish workers at the 20th percentile are high school graduates who are literate and numerate. In contrast, after half a century of underinvestment in the United States, many 20th-percentile American workers haven’t graduated from high school, can’t read well, aren’t very numerate, struggle with drugs or alcohol, or have impairments that reduce productivity. from Philip Roth unbound: interview transcript (Daily Beast, October 30, 2009) Tina Brown: You said in an interview that you don’t think novels are going to be read 25 years from now. Were you being provocative or do you believe that to be true? Philip Roth: I was being optimistic about 25 years really. No, I think it’s going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them, but it’ll be a small group of people—maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range. . . .  To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. . .  I think that that kind of concentration, and focus, and attentiveness, is hard to come by. It’s hard to find huge numbers of people, or large numbers of people or significant numbers of people who have those qualities. from 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. from Edward Frenkel And Hung-Hsi Wu, "Republicans Should Love 'Common Core'.  National standards can revive the way we teach math and science," Wall Street Journal, 5-6-13 Mathematical education in the U.S. is in deep crisis. The World Economic Forum ranks the quality of math and science education in the U.S. a dismal 48th. This is one of the reasons the 2010 report "Rising Above the Gathering Storm" by the National Academies warned that America's ability to compete effectively with other nations is fading. . . .  [The report refers to] the current lock-step march to the bottom of international student performance in math and science.

Commercial republicanism       Civic republicanism
concrete-operational and          formal-operational and
pre-operational                         concrete operational

Fox News

    RESSENTIMENT

Fascism

pre-operational and gestural

rentier sectors; provincial capitals; patrimonial
and predatory businesses and racist political ecologies