We are now engulfed in the implosion of neo-liberal "society."
We are now engulfed in is the implosion of neo-liberal "society."
The term "society" is bracketed because, in the conventional use of the
term, an ontological stability is implied, whereas in reality this
society is in the process of blowing its brains out, and that along
four axes of ontological catastrophe.
First, the disintegration of the cognitive performativities of
modernity itself: the "human" side of "capital." (decognification,
disindividuation; Trump's rhetorical performances seen from the
standpoint of literacy and cognition as contingent not
normative: schools without books).*
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.").
Third, the patrimonial assault on rational-bureaucratic institutions
(demonized as "the deep state")--i.e., an assault on the very idea of
science-based professionalism and public service.
Fourth, the triumph of nihilism** (or as it is known today, neoliberal
subjectivity or just plain "liberalism"). This nihilism is manifest in the victim culture of
the Democratic Party's appeal, which defines "self" not as citizen but
as consumer (Veblen) and victim. The New Deal's civic republicanism*** is
dead. (In this context, read Satin Island by Tom McCarthy and watch "The Social Dillema." Also: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food, NYT 2-20-13; Ed Schools’ Pedagogical Puzzle, NYT July 21, 2011)
* see Measures of Cognitive Performativity. The
gap between Obama and Trump is
two orders of magnitude. Cognitive
performativity is context-dependent (as Ceci
speculated twenty years
ago)
** from Lawrence J. Hatab, A Nietzschean Defense of Democracy (1995), p. 28:
. . . the happy nihilism of the 'last man,' who makes everything comfortable, small, and trivial.
*** on civic republicanism: Harold Mah, Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in
France and Germany, 1750-1914 (Cornell, 2003)
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Analyzing Power Relations: Six Frameworks
Max Weber
Deleuze & Guattari
Vincent/McMahon
Piaget/Vygotsky
Michael Mann
This site
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Three regimes (charismatic, patrimonial, rational-bureaucratic)
Three regimes (primitive, despotic, capitalist)
Left vs. Right: (topologies of the two-party system)
Cognitive modalities (topologies of the two-party system)
Four networks of power
Five genetic ontologies (topologies of the two-party system)
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from Michael Mann, The Sources of
Social Power. Volume II: The rise of classes and national states
(Cambridge University Press, 1993)
It is a basic tenet of my work that societies are not systems. There
is no ultimately determining structure to human existence--at least
none that social actors or sociological observers, situated in its
midst, can discern. What we call societies are only loose aggregates
of diverse, overlapping, intersecting power networks. p. 506
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. p. 638
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Frameworks of Intelligibility
In order to comprehend this phenomenological horror show we need frameworks of intelligibility. Analyzing Power Relations: Six Frameworks,
assembles six such frameworks. For example, without Weber's concept of
patrimonialism* is it impossible to understand the significance of what
"Trump" is doing to the rational-bureaucratic state.
Herding Primates: Semiotic Regimes: the Two-Party System,
provides a conceptual framework enabling the decoding of the rhetorical
activity** of hegemonic corporate*** media (MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News).
* from Richard Lachmann, "Coda:
American Patrimonialism: The Return of the
Repressed” in Patrimonial
Power in the Modern World, Julia Adams and Mounira
Charrad, eds.
(Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2011)
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.
** from F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, "The Improvers of Mankind" (1)
Media
statements "are therefore never to be taken literally: so understood,
they are always merely absurd. Semiotically, however, they remain
invaluable: they reveal, at least for those who can interpret them, the
most valuable realities of cultures and psychologies that did not know
how to "understand" themselves. [Media discursive practice] is only a
language of signs, a group of symptoms: one must know how to interpret
them correctly to be able to profit from them."
from Jerome Kagan, The Human Spark: The Science of Human Development (Basic Books, 2913)
A
number of abstract psychological concepts remain popular because they
satisfy the need for consistency among the investigator's semantic
networks. The networks for the concepts of positive emotion and
negative emotion are an example . . . . The problems trailing
attempts to preserve semantic consistency are clearest for concepts
related to the antonyms good and bad. Many popular terms for
human qualities belong to semantic networks that have good and bad as
nodes. p. 271
*** I use the word
corporate not as demonic reference, but to refer to analyzable networks
of power, input-output flows, etc. See
Elites: Strategic and Otherwise
The Clinton Foundation
In Hacked D.N.C. Emails, a Glimpse of How Big Money Works (the New York Times, July 25, 2016)
After Lying Low, Deep-Pocketed Clinton Donors Return to the Fore (the New York Times, July 28, 2016)
Ego Clashes Exposed in Leaked Emails From Democratic National Committee (the New York Times, July 24, 2016)
Business Leaders Call on Congress to Accept the Electoral College Results (The Partnership for New York City, January 4, 2021)
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Herding Primates:
Semiotic Regimes: The Two-Party System
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LEFT*
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RIGHT
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Topology
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depressive
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paranoid-schizoid
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Political style
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progressive
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proto-Dorian
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Cognitive mode
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concrete & pre-op
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pre-op and gestural
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Regime type
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rational-bureaucratic
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patrimonial
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Here are the sources for this conceptualization of the Two-Party System: Semiotic Regimes:
Simon Clarke, Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism (Palgrave Macmillan; 2003)
Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009)
Eli Zarestsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (Vintage, 2005)
Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightement: the French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 48-52**
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Note on use of the term "Left."
Progressivism and Liberalism are opposites, not twins. The genetic ontology of Progressivism is civic republicanism (Bildung and the Will to Power"; The genetic ontology of Liberalism today is commercial republicanism taken to an extreme (Nihilism).
Today's liberalism is referred to as the left, covering over the
genetic-ontological transformation of the post-war years (see Hall et.
al.) The New Deal is not represented in the above figure and table, The Two-Party System: Semiotic Regimes.
** from McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightement, pp. 48-52
What were
the elements of this emergent right wing vision? The fundamental
importance of religion in maintaining political order, a preoccupation
with the perils of intellectual and social license, the valorization of
the family and history, the critique of abstract rights, the dangers of
dividing sovereignty, and the need for a strategic alliance between
throne and altar . . . Even more fundamental was a Manichean
readiness to divide the word in two: bewtween good and evil, right and
wrong, Right and Left.
Yet to say that the anti-philosophe discourse fulfilled an ideological
function is not to assert that it offered a fully developed political
platform. Rather it provided a "symbolic template" through which
to construe a perplexing and rapidly changing world, a number of
"authoritative concepts" and "suasive images" by which they could be
grasped.
By invoking this mythic golden past . . . anti-philosophes revealed
signs of a romantic, qasi-utopian yearning for wholeness and social
unity that would characterize a strain in far Right thinking for years
to
come.
Reactive, reductive, Manichean, this thinking is less noteworthy,
perhaps, for its particulars than for its general form. It was
precisely this tendency to view society as a battleground between
opposing camps that stands as a hallmark of the bipolar, Right-Left
model of politics so fundamental to subsequent European history. . .
. Dividing the world between good and evil, between the pious and
the profane, anti-philosphes saw their struggle as a cosmic war in
which the winners would take all."
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A Psychoanalytic Framework of Intelligibility
Today, many of our socials 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.
Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age (McGill-Queens University Press, 2010)
We are changing, of course,
but that does not necessarily mean we are progressing. Combined
with all the forces that today exhort us to look into our own private
lives, the “civilization of change” has stimulated a massive interest
in psychic disorders. It can be heard from all quarters, and it
takes form in the many marketplaces that offer inner balance and
tranquility. Today, many of our socials 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. pp. 185-6
As addictive explosion reflects depressive implosion, so the
drug-taker’s search for sensation reflects the depressed person’s lack
of feeling. Depression, that crossroads of pathology, serves as a
canvas upon which to sketch out the changes in modern subjectivity, the
displacement of the hard task of being healthy. In a context in
which choice is the norm and inner insecurity the price, these
pathologies make up the dark side of contemporary private life.
Such is the equation of the sovereign individual: psychic freedom and
individual initiative = identity insecurities and the incapacity to
act. p. 232
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i. the
disintegration of the cognitive performativities of modernity and the end of print literacy
•The first axis of ontological catastrophe, the
disintegration of the cognitive performativities of modernity itself:
the "human" side of "capital." (decognification, disindividuation;
Trump's election is a lagging indicator the implosion of literacy and cognition.) This disintegration is comprehended within the context of Figure 0. from the origins of language to the end of print literacy, with a special focus on the Guttenberg Parenthesis, the period of the emergence of print literacy (the sine qua non of modernity).
Only
now is it possible to comprehend the importance of all that print
literacy, on a more than rudimentary level, implies: the ability to
think, and the biocultural niche
within which modern thought emerges, a domain defined by books most of
all, and by the semiotic webs that books embody; and the salons and the
public sphere (Habermas) where discussions unfold within the context of
the print-based biocultural niche of modernity.*
Conversely,
the end of print literacy, so perfectly
embodied by the 45th president of the United States, andby the
admin policy in many charter schools in south east Michigan of
forbidding students to touch the books on display (for political
rerasons) in the bakc of the classrooms--schools without books--
.involves an unwinding of Mind, a deflation,
reduction, simplification of the performativities of post-modern
biocultural niches. Damped harmonic occilations would be an apt
image for this process of decognification and semiotic disintegration. Read these three boxes now:
The election of Donald
Trump is a lagging indicator of the disintegration of cognitive
performativities. Preceding his election was the decline of
mathematical competence indexed by Figures 3a and 3b, which
indicate that a catastrophic decline in cognitive performativity
preceded and made possible the fascist-patrimonial victory of November
2016. The coronavirus debacle that is Trump is a product of
and an accelerant of that decline. As I write this the second time as farce
is being played out in a bizarrely idiotic post-election dance of
semiotic regimes, Trump's fascist performativities (the sado-racism**
that is his hallmark and chief means of mass mobilization) are
dialectically bound up with the liberal media's pathetic parries: from
that's not presidential to he's an authoritarian.
The
cognitive-performative gap between Obama and Trump is two orders of
magnitude. The basis for this statement can be found here (Measures of Cognitive Performativity. Cognitive
performativity is context-dependent (as Ceci speculated twenty years
ago). Emotional overload short-circuits complex thought.
This cognitive-performative gap is a key aspect of the coronavirus mask-fight.
But cognitive disintegration can also be observed in the rhetorical performances of MSNBC, about which I will have more to say later.
*
from David R. Olsen, The Mind on Paper: Reading, Consciousness, and Rationality (Cambridge, 2016):
To understand the cognitive implications of literacy it is also
necessary to see writing not only as a tool for solving problems but
rather as a generalized means or medium for repesentation and
communication that give rise to those unique forms of human competence
we in modern society define as intelligence and rationality.
** The sado-racist
performativities are a subgroup of the sado-sexual eigenvector of
GOP. This is interesting, in that sexuality dominantes the notion
of the other, and, indeed, if one examines the campaign issues and
media productions of the GOP, one finds not only an obsession with
sex, (Freud, Totem)
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Figure 1.
The UAW (Unity Caucus): Bildungsproletarians and Plebeian Upstarts,
1933-1943: Detroit and the lower great lakes
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the bildungs-proletarians of southeast Michigan circa 1935-44
So
far this page has moved, perhaps haphazardly, from the origins of
language to the contemporary scene in the United States (Figure 0),
while making clear at the outset that philosophy (Kant to Foucault, et
al) is at the very center of this enterprise, and that one of the major
problematics of this enterpise is the decline and perhaps catastrophic
implosion of both individual cognitive development and cognitive
performativity in real-life arenas (rallies, press conferences, "news"
shows, interviews with rally attendees, etc.).
Enter
the bildungs-proletarians* of southeast Michigan circa 1935-44.
Figure 1, The UAW (Unity Caucus) will have many uses and emerge in many
contexts on this site. Look at History of Reading NOW. Chapter 11 provides an indespensible context.
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.")
The first thing that must be said is that these
bildungs-proletararians were intensely rather that merely
literate. They were quintessentially modern. (Red-diaper
babies know what I'm talking about. As I found out when I came to
Detroit, the pink-diaper babies who grew up in the Socialist
milieu of Reuther, Mazey, Silver, Kord, Jenkins, Bully, and so
on, were similarly quintessentially modern.)**
It
is our heritage--we red- and pink-diapered ones who had been
born into this modernist milieu of bildungs-proletarians--that we
are part of the extended mind of working-class modernity (Joe Adams
Dodge Main sums it up).
Now it becomes clearer what I am up to. These interviews are a set of dialogic unfoldings that form a lens
through which to examine the ontologies and events, the transformations
and reactions, that are subsumed under the term unionization. The
factories, meeting halls, and neighborhoods of southeastern Michigan
are laboratories in which to investigate the play of forces: first, the
deep structures, the genetic ontologies (the principles of the
production of practices--Bourdieu) that dominate the manifold areas of human
activity; and second, the irruption of forces of an entirely different
kind (Bordieu), referred to variously as agency, bildung, and the will
to power. In addition, some of these interviews forced me to
include the more nebulous concept of jouissance.
It was these bildungs-proletarians around whom formed the action
networks of plebeian upstarts (the Unity Caucus) who created the modern
UAW in the 1930s. From the standpoint of praxis both
the Unity Caucus and the Keynesian elite should be conceived of as
vanguard formations within the biocultural field of Progressivism. Hence the juxtaposition of Figures 1 and 2.
What made this whole site possible is the literary and cognitive capabilities of the bildungsproletarian whom I interviewed.
In the cell to the right I provide a few examples.
1. Neil Leighton
and the shock of recognition. All of us historians who
interviewed these “workers” back in the seventies and eighties were
struck by their powers of mind, and also by what can only be described as
their strength of character.
2. Saul Wellman wasn't a historian. He was a communist (post-war chairman of the Mich CP).
3. Joe Adams sums up the mentalité of his peers
4. Read these
minutes and think of Donald Trump. These workers were mostly
plebeian upstarts, not bildungsproletarians. Imagine what a
Donald Trump in that context would sound like. To get an idea of
this, read Philip Rucker and Carol Leonning, A Very Stable Genius, pp. 129-139, on Trump's first big national security meeting in "The Tank" (when Tillerson called Trump a "fucking moron").
5. Reading the Kraus interview . . . Once I had gotten things organized
(Figure 1) I went back to see how Fig 1 would work as a synthetic a
priori. Bingo! (This needs explaining)
* see Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., Narcissism and the Literary Libido: Rhetoric, Text, and Subjectivity (New York University Press, 1994): excerpts
**
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1. NL.: the shock of recognition
one of the most interesting things for those of us working on this
project is that after just a very short period of time in talking to a
lot of rank-and-file people, you realize that, although they look like
everybody else in Flint, they’re not, down deep they’re not. And their
views on politics and religion may be the same as everybody else; they
may be different. But there’s a certain level below which―and they’ve
got these skills. Of course, the people coming out of the academic
world, you know, particularly those out of a middle-class background,
they cannot believe that anybody that hasn’t been to college can read.
2. Saul Wellman (CP): on cogntive and cultural "awakening" in Flint immediate post-war years
Wellman: Flint is what I consider to be the asshole of the world; it's
the roughest place to be. Now we recruited dozens of people to
the Party in Flint, and they came out of indigenous folk. And
those are the best ones. But we couldn't keep them in Flint very
long, once they joined the Party. Because once they came to the
Party a whole new world opened up. New cultural concepts, new
people, new ideas. And they were like a sponge, you know.
And Flint couldn't give it to them. The only thing that Flint
could give you was whorehouses and bowling alleys, you see. So
they would sneak down here to Detroit on weekends--Saturday and
Sunday--where they might see a Russian film or they might . . .
hear their first opera in their lives or a symphony or talk to people
that they never met with in their lives. . . .
On the other hand the reality of joining a movement of this type is
that the guy who is in the indigenous area looks around and says this
is idiocy, I can't survive here.
3. Joe Adams (Dodge Main) interview conducted around 1975-76
“My
background on unionism. Mostly it was like on my dad with the
newspaper socialism. He believed in socialism. He used to
sit there and talk. I had seven brothers, and hell, the old man
used to sit down. He was a pretty intelligent guy, like the
Reuther boys we used to listen to the old man.”
“Religion was a bunch of
bullshit. As a statesman Reuther got to be where he went to some
church and just went there once in a while just to make it look good,
but shit when he died he [they] let nobody near him—any of
them—godddamn rabbis or preists or ministers, he felt the same way
about all of them there like [Roy] and him, up your bunhole, just burn
it and get the hell over with it. That’s the way I feel about
it.”
“There are a
nucleus of people in any organization that make all organizations
function. I don’t care what you say. You can have a million
members and there can be fifty of them that makes the UAW function,
which is what happened there for the last thirty five years. The
Reuthers, the Woodcocks, myself. You know when a guy like me
brings in 250,000 members into this goddamn union he has to have a
semblance of some intelligence. he just can’t go out and say ‘I’m
an organizer’. In Patterson NJ there was 32,000 people in Wright
Aeronautical, and I got 23,000 votes out of them people for the UAW.”
4. Minutes,
Murray Body Committee Local 2 at Executive Board Meeting, April 26,
1939, Toledo Ohio, Addes Collection, Box 14.11, Reuther Archives
Detroit re. competitive situation in the spring and wire industry
5. Reading the Kraus interview through the lens of figure 1
5. Packard Rept
6. Chrysler Emergency Meeting Schiller Hall 1939
7. Christofel-Lilienthal (and Lindahl): Allis Chalmers (Milwaukee, UAW Local 248), and Packard (Detroit east side, UAW Local 190)
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ii. the explosion of fascist performativities
•The second axis
of ontological catastrophe is the explosion of fascist performativities
within the orbit of the GOP. Robert O. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, provides the most concentrated formulation of the Dasein of fascism:
"The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism."
A corrections officer in Florida put it this way:
subsumable under this concept of fascism are the following well-known performances of sadism:
Donald Trump coming down the escalator
Donald Trump encouraging police to beat up suspects
Donald Trump's holocaust at the border
Fascism is a Concept not an Epithet
Fascism and Patrimonialism
Fascism: history
Theater of ressentiment (2011 re. the Giffords shooting)
The Imus Brouhaha
The Stupid Party
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Figure 2. The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal state
Source: "Membership List, May 1927," in the Morris L. Cooke Papers, box 66,
FDR Library; and United States Government Manual 1937
Felix Frankfurter Papers (Library of Congress, manuscript division)
for more info on Fig.2 click on Keynesian Elite: Career Matrix;
also see the Papers of John M. Carmody
Joanna Bockman. Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism (Stanford University Press, 2011): three reviews
MEMO Ben Cohen to Leon Henderson, June 12, 1939
MEMO Corwin Edwards to Leon Henderson April 22, 1939
FF to FDR 11-21-34 re. Leffingwell |
Three
Levels of Contextualization re. question of fascism (primate
inheritance--family furnishings; ressentiment and the mechanisms of
defense)
LEVEL 1
two commentaries on Victor Nell, "Cruelty’s rewards: The gratifications of perpetrators and spectators," Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29, 211–257
1. from Mika Haritos-Fatouros, “Cruelty: A dispositional or a
situational behavior in man?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29,
p.230
The
basic question remains, however: How far are aggression, violence, and
cruelty in humans today the result of predisposition factors, or
biological or archetypal processes, and how far are they the result of
cognitive/emotional processes evoked by situational factors?
2. from Albert Bandura, “A murky portrait of human cruelty,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2006) 29, p. 225
At
the macrosocial level, Nell greatly exaggerates the prevalence of human
cruelty. There exist wide intercultural differences representing
both warring and pacific socities with large intracultural variations
and even rapid transformation of warring societies into peaceful
ones.
The Stupid Party; Limbaugh
from Merlin Donald, "The mind considered from a historical perspective:
human cognitive phylogenesis and the possibility of continuing
cognitive evolution." In D. Johnson & C. Ermeling (Eds.) The Future
of the Cognitive Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 360-61
Mimetic
representations are evident in human children before they acquire
language competence. . . . They continue to be important in
adults, taking the form of highly variable social customs, athletic
skills, and group expressive patterns (such as mass demonstrations of
aggression or rejection).
Juan Carlos Gomez, Apes, Monkees, Children and the Growth of Mind (Harvard University Press, 2004)
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 socally 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 develoment that change the nature
of cognitive ontogeny. (pp. 262-3)
The Social Origins of Language pp. 4-5
.
. . in the case of many nonhuman primates, dominance asserted through
violence or threat is the internal principle of social organization . .
. . primate-style dominance is periodically overthrown and then
restored, only to be overthrown and restored again and again.
LEVEL 2
from Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers. It was
reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without
courage. There was not an atom of foresight or of serious
intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware
these things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear
treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more
moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into
a safe. . . . They were conqurerors, and for that you want only
brute force--nothing to boast of, when you have it. p. 40
2. from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Geneology of Morals, II, 14
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! PAUKETET
Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry, passim
The Lynching for Rape DiscourseSEE BEYOND FASCISM--new page
LEVEL 3
backlash--stupid party
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x
x
A History of Reading and Writing In the Western World
Chapter headings from A History of Reading and Writing In the Western World PalgraveMacmillan, 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.")
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Texts & Interviews
E.P. Thompson; Rancier, Rose, Chase
Postel; , Kelly
Joe Adams re modernist atheism
Saul Wellman
Henry Kraus on Wyndham Mortimer
Paul Silver on Literacy and Orality
Minutes Murray Spring div
Luria
Emergence of a UAW Local
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3/4: Third,
the patrimonial assault on rational-bureaucratic institutions--i.e., an
assault on the very idea of science-based professionalism and public
service.** Why does Trump get along so well with the alpha males of
other patrimonial regimes? Not simply because he is one of
them. The inner logic of such regimes--esp. in the case of
Trump--besides predation, is the objective necessity to destroy the
entire culture of science-based administration in agency after agency
as an existential imperative. This is the significance of Trump's
appointments (Wolf, Caputo, Whitaker, Barr, etc.). This is the significance of the demonic shibboleth: "the deep state".
In other words, while predation (sometimes the word "transactional" is
used) is the goal of indididual actors in the trump orbit, at a deeper
level (where one might obserbve the immanent logic of patrimonialism as
"strategic" praxis the very existence of a science-based
rational-bureaucratic "state"poses an immediaete threat to the nascent
patrimonial regime (For the deep state of the New Deal and the
Administration of FDR see figure 3, the Keynesian elite in the New Deal state.)
4/4: Fourth, the triumph of nihilism (or as it is known today, neoliberal
subjectivity). This nihilism is manifest in the victim culture of
the Democratic Party's appeal, which defines "self" not as citizen but
as consumer and victim. The New Deal's civic republicanism*** is dead.
To understand the cognitive implications of literacy it is also
necessary to see writing not only as a tool for solving problems but
rather as a generalized means or medium for repesentation and
communication that give rise to those unique forms of human competence
we in modern society define as intelligence and rationality.
--
Nicholas Kristoff's
discussion of the differences in cognitive performativity of McDonald
workers in the U.S. and Denmark is disturbing.
Discussions of Trump’s cognitive perfomativity--in the Tank as well as
at rallies or in interviews--are disturbing, and also in a similar
way. That is, as an indicator of how far homo sapiens maralogsis
has become a new kind of pseudo-species, obsrevable within the
frameworks of intelligibility that the Absolute 3.0 emerges. (Absolute? Absolutely!)
MSNBC and NIHILISM
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1. prelude to Trump: a half-century of decognification
box 1
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.
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2. "He's a Fucking moron": Trump's cog performativity as seen by those around him
"Fauci Says Trump's Attention Span Is a 'Minus Number,' Only Cares
About Getting Re-elected": Woodward, Rage, from Newsweek 9-9-20
from David A. Graham, "The President Who Doesn't Read," The Atlantic, January 5, 2018
Ironically, it was the publication of a book this week that
crystallized the reality of just how little Donald Trump reads. While,
like many of the tendencies described in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury,
Trump’s indifference to the printed word has been apparent for some
time, the depth and implications of Trump’s strong preference for oral
communication over the written word demand closer examination. “He
didn’t process information in any conventional sense,” Wolff writes.
“He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all
practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate.”
from Jonathan Bernstein, "Where Does Trump Get His Odd Ideas?" (Bloomberg Opinion, May 28, 2019)
The reporting is pretty clear: Trump doesn't read briefings, on
politics or anything else. He doesn't appear to have absorbed the
basics of public policy, whether on health care or national security or
even issues, like trade, that he cares about. Instead, he seems to pick
up fragments of information in conversation or, more often, from cable
television. Often, it's partisan talking points, which isn't surprising
since much of what airs on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC consists of partisan
talking points.
Philip Rucker and Carol Leonning, A Very Stable Genius, pp. 129-139
from Robert Costa and Philip Rucker, "Woodward book: Trump says he knew
coronavirus was ‘deadly’ and worse than the flu while intentionally
misleading Americans" (Washington Post 9-9-20)
Trump says he knew coronavirus was ‘deadly’ and
worse than the flu while intentionally misleading Americans."
Washington Post 9-9-20 LINK
In a separate conversation recounted by Woodward, Mattis told Coats,
“The president has no moral compass,” to which the director of national
intelligence replied: “True. To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what
he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a
lie.” PRE-OPERATIONAL!
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3. Donald Trump and Brain Plasticity: the cognitive implications of literacy
box 3
Daniel Dor and Eva Jablonka, “Why we need to move from gene-culture co-evolution to culturally driven co-evolution"
The
range and boundaries of plasticity are not fixed, however, and in some
cases plasticity itself can be plastic. This is especially clear
in the case of complex behaviors. For example, the cultural
technologies of reading and writing seem to have extended human memory,
enabled abstract chains of reasoning, and guided new ways of scanning
visual items, thus making human[s] even more cognitively plastic. 23
from David R. Olsen, "History of Writing, History of Rationality," in Eurasia at the Dawn of History (Cambridge, 2016)
Quotes Ong: "Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not
think as it does. . . . More than any other single invention, writing
has transformed human consciousness." (48)
David R. Olsen, The Mind on Paper: Reading, Consciousness, and Rationality (Cambridge, 2016)
To understand the cognitive implications of literacy it is also
necessary to see writing not only as a tool for solving problems but
rather as a generalized means or medium for repesentation and
communication that give rise to those unique forms of human competence
we in modern society define as intelligence and rationality.
from Almudena Herndando, "The Impact of Social Differentiation on Identity," in Eurasia at the Dawn of History
Research
on the contrast between orality and literacy unanimously confirms that
writing individualizes people. . . . writing allows subjects to
establish abstract, more rational connections with phenomena outside
their own personal experience, whereas in oral societies only that
which can be experienced in person may be processed as part of
reality." (58)
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Figure 3a. PISA Math Scores, 2003 to 2018:
21
Developed Nations & 4 East Asian City-States (SHMC)
note
1. . . . several limitations in the data used in
non-response-bias analyses submitted by Hong Kong (China) and the
United States. see"inexplicable anomalies" |
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Figure 3b. PISA Math Scores, 2003 to 2018:
18 Anglo-European Nations
see"inexplicable anomalies"
Problems with the U. S. Data:
Political (2006) and "Technical" (2018) |
notes
Cognitive-linguistic Cardinality (orders of magnitude/index of cognitive complexity)
 The Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein in the context of Merlin Donald, A
Mind So Rare, Table 7.1, p. 260 (apologies to George Cantor)
אi
i = 4 internet and extended mind
i = 3 Foucault (Hegel, Nietzsche . .
i = 2 Formal operational
i = 1 Concrete operational
i = 0 Pre-operational/oral-mythic
i = -1 Mimetic/gestural
i = -2 primate
Michael Cole, Cynthia Lightfoot, and Sheila R. Cole, The Development of Children (Worth Publishers, 2009)
Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: the Evolution of Human Consciousness (W.W. Norton, 2001)
from Sue Taylor Parker and Michael L. McKinney, The Origins of Intelligence: the Evolution of Cognitive Development in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)
[Merlin] Donald
. . . proposes successive levels of mental adaptation (all of
which persist in humans): (1) the episodic culture of monkeys and apes,
(2) the mimetic culture of Homo erectus, (3) the mythic culture of
modern Homo sapiens, and (4) the theoretic cultures of literate humans.
(pp. 275-6; emphasis added)
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the Lacan-Atwater Signifying Chain
from
Wikipedia:
(Lee
Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy)
As a member of the
Reagan administration in 1981, Atwater gave an
anonymous interview to political scientist Alexander P. Lamis. Part of
the interview was printed in Lamis's book The Two-Party South, then
reprinted in Southern Politics in the 1990s with Atwater's name
revealed. . . . Atwater talked about the Republican Southern Strategy
and Ronald Reagan's version of it:
Atwater:
As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others
put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have
been a central part of keeping the South. Now you don't have to do
that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in
place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal
conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole
cluster.
Questioner:
But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter
and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal
services, by cutting down on food stamps?
Atwater:
You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you
can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like
forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so
abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these
things you're talking about are totally economic things and a by-product
of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously
maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if
it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away
with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because
obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more
abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract
than "Nigger, nigger."
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from Lisa McGirr, "Piety and Property: Conservatism and Right-Wing Movements in the Twentieth Century," in A History of Our Time: Readings on Postwar America (Oxford, 2008)
. . . in the wake of Goldwater’s defeat Reagan and other conservatives
had refashioned their discourse, moving away from tirades on socialism
and communism and toward attacks on liberal “permisiveness,” “welfare
chiselers,” and “runaway spending. p. 365-6
National political contenders like Nixon and Wallace picked up on the
discourse of “morality,” “law and order,” “welfare chiselers,” and
“liberal permissiveness,” and rode a tide of popular middle- and
lower-middle-class resentment toward the social changes of the decade. p. 366
Free marketeers, the senior partners in the conservative coalition,
have been at the cutting edge of recent historial change. Religious
conservatives, while obtaining new access to the corridors of power,
are still waiting to see their concerns over abortion, homsexuality,
and obcenity reflected in pubic policy.” p. 370
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The
excerpts to the right and the next two cells below
it assemble contemporary materials from the media and from recent work
in the history of cognitive performativities.
Nicholas Kristof's
comparison of the cognitive performativity of lower end of the labor
force in Denmark and the United States should send chills down your
spine.
Philip Roth's comments on the extinction of reading are equally stunning.
Maryanne Wolf's comment--the majority of eighth grade children could be classified as funtionally illiterate in a few years' time--must now be viewed, in the light of our current crisis, as optimistic.
Frenkel and Wu is another
gut punch. Each of these comments ought to be taken
seriously. Even before this crisis, were were loking into the
abyss.
• • •
In the next box of quotes Trump's cognitive performativity is addressed.
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In box 2 of quotes Trump's cognitive performativity is addressed.
Public policy making re. the pandemic depends upon an understanding of
the concept of exponential growth. When GOP governors (Texas,
Florida, Georgia) reject science-based advice with the standard
rhetorical gesture--we will close things down if there are a lot of cases, but there are only a few cases now--they
reveal their inability to think on the formal-operational level.
They are actually saying (implicitly) we will only act when it is too
late, and not a moment sooner. Repeat eternally. (Nietzsche laughs).
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In the third box of quotes are examples of contemporary scholarly
thinking on the significance of print literacy. Let what these
scholars are saying sink in, and you begin to realize the enormity of
what is happening.
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Family Furnishings: Our Primate Inheritance
.
. . in the case of many nonhuman primates, dominance asserted through
violence or threat is the internal principle of social organization . .
. . primate-style dominance is periodically overthrown and then
restored, only to be overthrown and restored again and again. @(The
Social Origins of Language pp. 4-5)
The accelerated
encephalization in Homo heidelbegensis, both in Africa and Eurasia,
from 700 kya, and especially from 300 kya, suggests a runaway feedback
process of selection for social intelligence. (The Social Origins of
Language, p. 201)
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From Homo heidelbegensis to Homo maralagosis
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The Map is not the Territory
Understanding
the current sitution demands adequate conceptualization of the
phenomenological bundles addressed by the concept of fascism. Fascism
is not a thing or a person or a situation or a state of affairs. It is
a heuristic device that must be deployed. When done either
analytically or dialectically, deployment of such "devices" enables us
to "realize similarities and relations among things and see contexts
and construct coherent systems of belief about this reality. Our
experience and knowledge of reality . . . is therefore embedded in a
network of concepts delineating what we perceive as our environment.
I unfold the problematic of fascism first analytically, by analyzing
key texts and finding the major themes as well as dealing with various
approach. This work is presented on Fascism and Patrimonialism.
I then proceed dialectically: the materials on page 1 are forced into
an encounter with the American reality, as well as key works on this
reality (Carter, ...)
Hovering over this whole enterprise is the ghost of Nietzsche and Joesph Conad's Heart of Darkness.
The map is not the territory.
Understnding the current situation and how we got here is not possibel within the discursive domain of MSNBC
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from Imanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787)
Thoughts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.
from Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body (University of Illinois Press, 2005)
For
Nietzsche, language lets us grasp, order, and judge what we regard as
reality, and it also gives us the means to reflect on this reality
through the development of general terms and concepts, which let us
realize similarities and relations among things and see contexts and
construct coherent systems of belief about this reality. Our
experience and knowledge of reality . . . is therefore embedded in a
network of concepts delineating what we perceive as our environment.
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Prelude to Trump: the Civil War in the UAW
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the AFL federated unions period (the NRA period), sept 1933 to
AIWA and AAWA
The UAW (Unity Caucus): Bildungsproletarians and Plebeian Upstarts,
1933-1943: Detroit and the lower great lakes.
intersubjectivity and shared intentionality: the extended mind of the Unity Caucus
accumultion points and networks of action/purpose and arenas
electorates
(hillbillie, foreign language (communist), home townsmen (Mack Walker),
black peasants, Polish peasants); patrimonial gangs (Bert Harris,
Fisher 1, press room; Pat Zomba, Pakcard)
(Bildung + חֻצְפָ)
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from Charles Yaeger (Buick Local 156 -->594, Pontiac) Oral History transcript, pp. 11-12)
Finally the CIO group [Unity Caucus], the Addes and Reuther forces in the union at
that time, called a special convention with the blessing of the parent
CIO in Cleveland, and there we organized what became the UAW-CIO.
We attended the Cleveland Convention [March 27, 1939], and it was there
that the union was born after all this factional problem. Then, of
course, we had to go back and reorganize the plants because as much as
the International was torn asunder the locals were, too. We took over
the local union with(in) our unit of the old amalgamated [Local 156],
which became [local] 594. We took it over with about 7,000 people
working in the plant and 503 or 504 members. This was all the
membership we had. We did not have the union. [7.2]%
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Elites:
sources (Burch et. al.; Mann, Mizruchi)
concepts(strategic elites, provincial elites
current usage of the term
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from Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers. It was
reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without
courage. There was not an atom of foresight or of serious
intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware
these things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear
treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more
moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into
a safe. . . . They were conqurerors, and for that you want only
brute force--nothing to boast of, when you have it. p. 40
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Elementary particles and associated comments, lists,
transcripts, remembrances of things past (civic republicanism 1933-1943: Bildung + חֻצְפָ), cog nitive
regimes,
intersubjectivity and shared intentionality, proximal processes,
biocultural niche (Schiller Hall, Fox News, MSNBC), brain plasticity,
cognitive performativity*, paranoid-schizoid position
(the sado-sexual eigenvector of “Trump” performativities: ressentiment
and the mechanisms of defense), the
depressive position ("liberalism": nihilism, nietzsche, and you), the
lynching for rape discourse, herding primates: semiotic regimes,
patrimonialilism and the fundamental incompetence** of the Trump
regime. Why Trump could not possibly have acted differently re. Covid
19.
Phenomenological manifold
Deep structure of
ressentiment and the precarious cultural-historical achievements of
“civilization”: defining barbarism (while being mindful of James C.
Scott’s discussion of the “barbarians” in Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale, 2017)).
The collapse of a civilization in the context of advanced capitalism;
regression to primate; collapse of cognitive performativity across the board by one
order of magnitude* in post-Fordist USA; the journalism of disintegration ( Who Killed the Knapp Family? NYT 1-9-20); hapless liberalism . . . and more. The show goes on.
Now we are witness to a patrimonial bacchanale and the wholesale
destruction of the rational-bureaucratic organizations of government
that continues unabated.***
* see Measures of Cognitive Performativity The
gap between Obama and Trump is two orders of magnitude. Cognitive
performativity is context-dependent (as Ceci speculated twenty years
ago). Emotional overload short-circuits complex thought. More.
Also see Proximal Processes.
** the
fundamental incompetence of the Trump regime, a regime of schmoozers,
hucksters, operatives, marginal real estate and gambling, financial
operatives of a preadatory not productive significance. Modern
capitalism's cultural-historical intersubjective discursive field, the formal-operational systems thinking of modern
management (Keynesian elite, Committee for Economic Development and more), is far beyond Trump's . . .
***(Marie Yovanovitch says State Department 'being hollowed out from within' (UPI November 15, 2019). Statement from leader of federal vaccine agency about his reassignment (April 22, 2020)
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