0207 Yes, Language, Perception and Thought, is the title of chapter fourteen. 

The following is what this examiner sees implicit within Mithen’s text, while the text itself explicitly arranges the same information according to an entirely different narrative.

The following seems like an imposition.  But, it conforms to the tenor of chapter fourteen. 

After the domestication of fire, hand-talk fundamentally changes, along with hominin perceptions and thought.  This change sets the stage for the question that Mithen implicitly addresses, asking, “How does the voice get added to hand talk in human evolution?”

0208 The basis for Mithen’s explicit arrangement, the critical assumption, is found in chapter four.  The author rules out consideration of the gestural origins of language.

0209 The basis for the implicit scenario is found in an independent approach, allowing consideration of the gestural origins of “language”, as defined by two characteristics, displacement and symbolic operations.  Clues that substantiate the implicit scenario run through Mithen’s text, starting with the identification of the two defining characteristics, displacement and grammar. 

One important clue is Mithen’s hypothesis of synaesthesia as the basis for the co-evolution of speech and displacement.  Synaesthesia happens when sensations cross modes.  For example, something visible cross modes to yield something acoustic.  Image gets confounded with sound.  In this manner, fully linguistic hand-talk is adorned with voluntary utterances.

0210 Another important clue is Mithen’s elevation of fire as a situation in which synaesthesia manifests.  Fossils of Homo heidelbergensis appear along with evidence for the domestication of fire.  Mithen presents the dots, but does connect them in a way that reveals how synaesthesia is crucially important.

The metaphor of the jigsaw puzzle is another clue.  When the metaphor is taken literally, when a word is like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, a picture emerges for how hand-talk gesture-words display displacement and provide the raw material for a symbolic order.

0211  I now attend to a different list of take-home messages for chapters ten and fourteen.  The third lesson in the list reflects Mithen’s hidden hypothesis.

0212 To start, after the domestication of fire, hand-talk becomes fully linguistic.  The foundational requirements are already established in proto-linguistic hand talk.  A key development (and it is substantial) is that fully linguistic hand-talk permits grammatically correct counter-intuitive statements that defy sensible construction.  Social construction is required.

0213 The Neanderthal and human lineages separate around 600kyr (thousands of years ago), long before this process is complete.  Neanderthal retains hand-talk in sensible constructions.

0214 With respect to our own lineage, natural (and cultural) selection operates on the social circle of the community (150).  The community (150) has higher number resonances, following Dunbar’s rule of three.  The mega-band (500) gathers seasonally.  The tribe (1500) gathers occasionally.  The voice is recruited for synchronization (communal singing).

With this type of general selection, sexual selection follows.

0215 Once the voice is under voluntary control, then Mithen’s intuition about the crucial role of synaesthesia in language evolution comes into play, in a way that the author does not explicitly envision.  Night-talk already involves singing and dance.  Hand-talk stories are told before the campfire, like the one where the fellow hit the vulture instead of the jaguar in the tree.  These stories trigger social construction of perspective-level cognitive spaces.  Each cognitive space serves as a way to actualize the community as the team of teams.

0216 One problem with this night-talk is that manual-brachial word-gestures are more difficult to recognize.  So, members of the team of teams act out a solution, by attaching a (purely-symbolic) vocalization to each word-gesture.  Mithen discusses the idea in chapter six, concerning iconic and arbitrary words.  Visual sensations from hand-talk spill into acoustic adornments.  In the process, the voice is added to hand talk, as an adaptation to night-talk.

0016 With the final chapter behind me, I turn to the introduction (pages 1-22).

Oh!  Before I complete my turning, a brief discussion of Peirce’s category of secondness is appropriate.

As already noted, secondness consists of two contiguous real elements.

Two hylomorphes come to mind.  The first belongs to secondness.  The second belongs to firstness.

0017 The first goes with Aristotle.  The two real elements are matter and form.  The contiguity, placed in brackets for proper nomenclature, carries the label, “substance”.  Of course, the word, “substance”, has fallen on hard times in our modern age.  People talk about substance abuse.  Here, I add one more meaning, presence and message.  The messageis that actuality is real.  The presence is between two real elements. The meaning is the contiguity between matter and form.

Here is a picture.

0018 The second goes with what is of the Positivist’s judgment.  The Positivist’s judgment is first developed in Comments on Jacques Maritain’s Book (1935) Natural Philosophy (by Razie Mah, available at smashwords and other e-book venues).  A judgment contains three elements: relation, what is and what ought to be.  When each of these elements is assigned to one of Peirce’s categories, the judgment becomes actionable.  An actionable judgment unfolds into a category-based nested form.

0019 So, what is what is of the Positivist’s judgment?

I call it, “Kant’s slogan”, even though Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) never uttered the formulation.  Or, maybe he did.  A noumenon [cannot be objectified as] its phenomena.  The thing itself [cannot be objectified by] its observable and measurable facets.

Here is a picture.

0020 This apparent hylomorphe belongs to firstness.  It has the appearance of secondness, because it is a hylomorphe.  Yet, it is a monad, belonging to the realm of possibility.  How is it a monad?  A noumenon does not exist without its phenomena.  And, visa versa.  What is odd is that only phenomena are observed and measured by scientists.  Science ignores the noumenon.

The Aristotle’s hylomorphe applies to the noumenon.  Aristotle’s hylomorphe is the first step in natural philosophy.  Yet, the noumenon is abandoned by empirio-schematics.  The thing itself is the coin that moderns toss into the ferryman’s hand for passage across the river into the land of science.

0021 Now, for some practice, I offer a few examples.

The following content-level actuality pertains to industrial scale… um… production.  Production is on the content-level of a three-level interscope.  The market stands on the situation level.  Assessment occupies the third level.

0021 Here is the hylomorphe.

The two real elements are raw materials and specified product.  The contiguity is [construction].  What about pollution?  Well, pollution is a possibility₁ that must be… um… situated.

If I compare the above figure to Aristotle’s hylomorphe and what is of the Positivist’s judgment, then I suppose that the former wins out.

0022 Here is a more disconcerting example.  It applies to the content-level of the post-truth condition (as discussed in Parts 1-3 of Original Sin and the Post-Truth Condition, by Razie Mah, available at smashwords and other e-book venues).  The content-level is labeled, “the scrappy player”.

0024 What is the [contiguity] with this hylomorphe?

It depends on the beholder.

For someone like another scrappy player, the contiguity is [reflects], or even, [substantiates].

So, what I think [substantiates] what I say.

An expert surveys the scrappy player, in order to build psychometric models.  The contiguity between the two content-level real elements is not [substantiates].   It is Kant’s slogan, [cannot be objectified as].  What I think corresponds to noumenon, the thing itself.  What I say expresses the noumenon’s observable and measurable facets.

So, what I think [cannot be objectified as] what I say.

I ask, “Which of these hylomorphes is more likely to belong to Zizek’s audience?”

0025 One more example?

I have two real elements on the perspective level.  The perspective level virtually puts the situation level into context.  The situation level virtually situates the content level.

The two real elements?

One is capital and acquisition.  These are real elements that sustain the doctrines of capitalism.

The other is social and the exercise of order.  These are real elements that sustain the doctrines of socialism.

0026 The substance is [wealth and power].

Here is a picture of the hylomorphe.

If I compare this hylomorphe to Aristotle’s exemplar, then [wealth and power] are not real elements.  They are the contiguity between capital & acquisition as matter and social & exercise of order as form.  The entire hylomorphe, just like Aristotle’s matter [substance] form, constitutes a single thing. 

0027 If I separate these two real elements and treat them independently, then what happens to the contiguity?  Wealth reifies into matter.  Power reifies into form.

If I want the two real elements to serve as matter and form_2c, within one “emancipated collective”, then the actuality_2cmust be contextualized by a normal context_3c and potential_1c that do not reify [wealth and power].  Is this what Zizek aims for?  Christ₃ is the normal context₃ and ‘truth’₁ is the potential₁.

0028 What is the alternative to Zizek’s perspective-level configuration?

If I compare the above actuality₂ to what is of the Positivist’s judgment, then capital & acquisition would associate to a noumenon and social & the exercise of order would correspond to its phenomena.

This is clearly nonsense.

Or is it?

What if social institutions and the sovereign exercise of order are the observable and measurable facets of capital and the capacity to acquire?   Then, [wealth and power] operate as a veil, in so far as {capital and acquisition [cannot be objectified as] sociality and the sovereign exercise of order}₂.

0029 Egads!  Does this imply that both capital & acquisition and sociality & political order emerge from (and situate) a death drive₁ that reproduces itself as a way to maintain the life of some particular Relativist One₃?

Plus, does the Relativist One₃ stay alive by maintaining the scientific actuality₂ that {capital & acquisition [cannot be objectified as] sociality & the sovereign exercise of order}₂…

…even though [wealth and power] is the natural and philosophical contiguity between the two real elements?

Only one who stands independent of the financial, the labor, the bourgeois, the proletariat, the religious, the irreligious and all other jurisdictions can contextualize such a serpentine actuality₂.

Plus, the Relativist one₃ operates on the potential of… ‘what’₁?

‘Staying alive’?

Or ‘fixating on wealth and power as two distinct and independent… spiritual beings’?

What potential is so delusional as to support the twisted contiguity where [wealth and power] also corresponds to [cannot be objectified as] within the actuality₂ of Zizek’s perspective?

Oh, I have an idea.

It probably includes the potential to crucify Christ₁.

0030 So, is this really about [wealth and power]?

For an author that self-identifies… er… is selflessly identified as a Hegelian philosopher, a Lacanian psychoanalyst and a Marxist materialist, the uninitiated has a simple question, “Why not just grasp the bronze serpent of pure atheism and be done with it?”

Well, I suppose that the bronze serpent is a little too nonscientific to intellectually accept.

Even though it keeps us alive.

After all, plagues can be unnerving.

So, let me tone down the dragonian imagery and replace the Freudian ‘death drive’_1c with the less draconian term, ‘our truth’_1c.   Of course, in the following figure, the “our” is already fading, because, well, the Relativist One₃ stands above all jurisdictions, including whatever dominion lays claim to me.

Here is the adjusted picture, where the Relativist One₃ stands as the alternative to Zizek’s Christ₃.

0031 Isn’t that more palatable?

However, I have not addressed the question, asking, ” Why does Zizek find Christian atheism attractive?”

Why Christ₃?

One answer is that Christianity is not direct.  It is the only religion that cannot be accessed directly.  To get to the New Testament, one must pass through the Old Testament.  The passage is perilous, because Judaism is like a tar baby.  Once you touch it, you are stuck with it.  And, if you dare to shake the tar baby off, your are left with an indelible stain.  Today, that stain is called “antisemitism”.

Of all “-isms”, antisemitism is unique because it occupies the passage to Jesus, the Messiah.  Jesus is Christ because the elites of the second Temple do not want any competitors.  So what does the Messiah do?  He turns their establishment into a doormat.

0032 The execution of Jesus is a routine political operation.

The Roman occupiers are intent on preventing the appearance of a king that would unite all Jews with the Second Temple.  In this regard, they are like socialists.  Socialists are in the business of exercising order.  Rome rules an empire.  Order is paramount.

The Sadducees and Pharisees are intent on maintaining their authority, in regards to their “readings” of the Pentateuch. They distill laws from the text.  The laws multiply, like all regulations do.  The elites earn nice incomes from determining laws and devising pathways to evade the laws that they determined.  They are the bourgeois who represent God… er, the Text… to the proletarians.  In this respect, the elites of the Second Temple are like capitalists.

0033 The operation?

The capitalist offers a crisis for the socialists to fixate on, and, in the process, remove a potential roadblock to the status quo of continuing acquisition.

Here, the Second Temple elites offer a “king”, actually, a potential competitor who might undermine their um… “business practices”, for the Romans to worry about, arrest and execute.

0034 In Hegel’s terminology, the capitalists offer a thesis, that produces a socialist antithesis, inadvertently advancing the agenda of the capitalist, while, at the same time, generating an objective being, a “truth”, if one accepts the term, that is accessible to all who pay attention.

0035 Above the crown of the dying Jesus, the Romans post a sign, proclaiming, “King of the Jews”.

Below the feet of the dying Jesus, attending elites mutter about how incorrect that proclamation is.  The declaration should say, “He claims that he is King of the Jews.”

0036 Both are political accusations.  They parallel one another.  Jesus is actual king₂ by way of Roman authority.  Jesus purports to establish his kingdom as a normal context₃ upon the potential of his rule being not of this world₁.

Then, wait three days, the divine consequences shake the capital. The political parallels appear to converge on a single point, a single “substance”.   Jesus is dead and now… um… lives to tell about it.  An ontological reality coincides with a transcendent reality. Jesus [is] king_2b and his kingdom_3b manifests the potential of the Messiah_1b.

I [am] who I am crowns His Son as king of a sovereignty that is both of and not of this world.

0037 To the Hegelian, the capitalist, who is concerned about accumulating offers a thesis that taunts the socialist, who is concerned about the exercise of order.

That thesis keys into [wealth and power].

The socialist responds to the capitalist’s thesis with an antithesis, inadvertently advancing the agenda of the capitalist, while at the same time generating a “suprasubjective being”, a “truth”, if one accepts the term, that is experienced as a revelation.

0038 By 70 AD, the congruence of the two systems that executed Jesus ends.  The Romans destroy Jerusalem and level the second Temple, in a military act whimsically called, “Operation Gaza”.

0039 Christianity may overcome the gap that separates humans from God.  But, that is not the issue at hand.  For the purposes of this examination, Christ₃ provides a way to step on the doormats of capitalism and socialism, or the accumulation of capital and the social exercise of order, on the way to… what?.. understanding ‘truth’₁?

0040 Both capital and social are doormats.  In Lacan’s terms, instances of desire, or mental organization, or fixation, or whatever the French term, objet a, indicates, are like doormats, that is actualities₂ that must be stepped upon in order to contextualize₃ the potential of truth₁.

Also, the contiguity, [wealth and power], which everyone can talk about even though they cannot picture or point to what it is that they are talking about, may be labeled petit objet a.  

0041 A petit objet a serves as a clue that an objet a is present, even though it is too close or too far, too enveloping or too miniscule, to recognize.  This makes sense, here, insofar as objet a is both matter and form.  Plus, matter and formbelong to the first abstraction in a natural philosophy of the thing itself.

If capital & accumulation (thesis) explains whatever demands the exercise of social interests & order (antithesis), then where is the synthesis?

0042 Let me make a comparison of Aristotle’s hylomorphe and this perspective-level economic thing_2c.

0043 Every term in the above figure is an explicit abstraction.

0044 What do I mean by that?

Spoken words can label everything and anything, wholes and parts, big and small, whatever.  In this sense, a spoken word precedes its referent.  The label precedes the thing that is labeled.

0045 In contrast, the manual-brachial gestures of hand talk picture and point to their referents.  Referents precede the gestural word.  This is why humans innately imagine that, when hearing a spoken word, that the referent can be pictured or pointed to.

This lesson even applies to some rather odd hand-talk names.

Consider the paleolithic artifact that combines two hand-talk works, [image LION] and [image MAN].  When my compatriot gestures [LION][MAN], I know that the referent is both lion and human.  The referent either has the matter of a lion and the form of a man or the matter of a man and the form of a lion.  Or, the referent is a mixture of these two arrangements.

This is an implicit abstraction.

0046 Aristotle and Peirce agree that speech-alone talk confounds our intuition because we expect that every word has a referent that is so whole as to be pictured or pointed to.  That is why hylomorphes shine.  They substitute for what would be [image MATTER][image FORM], if matter [and] form could be pictured using manual-brachial word-gestures. 

The same goes for what [point to CAPITAL & ACQUISITION][point to SOCIAL & EXERCISE OF ORDER] would be,if these spoken terms could be pictured or pointed to.  But, even though hylomorphes shine in this regard, the explicit abstraction inherent in spoken words confuses our intuition.

0047 A good rendition of a [LION][MAN] appears in the 1930s movie, The Wizard of Oz.  This is the movie where Dorothy’s silver shoes (in the book) are replaced by ruby slippers (in the movie), shifting what grounds Dorothy from the honesty of a precious metal to the deviousness of fiat currencies.  Red is the color of both bankruptcy and blood.

But, back to the movie, at the happy end of the yellow-brick road, in the Emerald City, the lion man, who would be courageous if he only was not a scaredy cat, receives a medal of honor and thereby assumes (through acquisition, thesis) a heroic place in the social order (antithesis).

If the following figure fits the above comparison, then what does that imply about the substance, [wealth and power]?

0048 Am I saying that every citizen has “skin in the game”?

If citizens hold the liberty to acquire property and build capital, then will those citizens order themselves, as a spontaneous social exercise, through the [substance] of [wealth and power]?

Hmmm.  Does “capitalist substantiated spontaneous socialism” sound like Zizek’s “emancipatory collective”?

0049 Here is a comparison.

According to Ferdinand de Saussure (1859-1913), the father of modern linguistics, language consists of two arbitrarily related systems of differences, parole (speech) and langue (whatever goes on in our heads in regards to speech).  Paroleas speech is like capital and acquisition, it provides the resources to utter and to decode. Langue as thought is like social behavior and the exercise of an order within the brain… er… mind.

Plus, parole [utter and decode] langue is a single act, just as matter [substance] form connotes a single thing or event.

0050 Her is another comparison, which shows how the “substance” may be degenerate.

Degenerate?

Isn’t that like “either/or” depending on how two real elements approach one another?

For quantum physics, “degenerate” labels two or more standing waves that have the same (or “degenerate”) orbitalenergies.

0051 Taking the carbon atom as an example, electrons orbit the nucleus as standing waves.  One electron has a magnetic moment that pairs with another electron’s magnetic moment.  A magnetically coupled pair of electrons occupy an orbital (or standing wave).

Once two electrons occupy one orbital, then that is it.  The orbital is occupied.  All other electrons will be repelled.

Carbon has six protons in its nucleus and six electrons in orbitals around the nucleus. The first two electrons go into a spherical orbital close to the nucleus, labeled 1s, yielding 1s² (two electrons in the first spherical orbital).  The next two electrons have to park themselves further out on the second level, yielding 2s².

Then, unlike the first level, the second level has additional orbitals corresponding to standing waves with one node (or empty location).  These are called “p-orbitals”.  After all, they are perpendicular to one another.  So, the remaining two electrons go – willy nilly – into the p-orbitals, yielding a final electron configuration of 1s²2s²2p₃² for the six electrons.  Why willy nilly?  The three “p” orbitals are “degenerate”.  They have the same energy.

Here is a picture.

0052 Ah, can I guess why Zizek wants to use quantum mechanics as a “specialized language” for his discourse?

First, scientific terms such as “degenerate” are used by common folk to refer to human behaviors.  

Second, there is an ambiguity concerning what a fundamental particle, such as an electron, actually is.  Is it a charged particle or is it a moving or standing wave?

Here are two suggestions. 

0053 Of course, whether one observes the electron as a particle or as a wave depends on the measuring apparatus.  So, if matter associates to presence and if form associates to what the scientific instrument measures, then what is the electron?  What is it?

Here is one option, where the electron is observed as a standing wave.

0054 Here is another option, where the electron is observed as a particle.

0055 Finally, the actuality₂ that is the electron is only understood in a category-based nested form.

Here is a picture.

0056 The electron’s substance is well… difficult to imagine.  Is [and] sufficient?  It makes me wonder about all substances.  A [substance] is not one of the two real elements.  [Substance] is the contiguity between two real elements.

Clearly, a choice has been made by material science, at least, in regards to an electron.

It (matter) is a negatively charged, mass-bearing fundament.

Its form is a standing wave, orbital, and so forth. 

The selection of the normal context₃ and potential₁ is a choice that curiously establishes the form that the actuality₂manifests.

Here, the normal context is a measuring apparatus₃ and the potential is observations and measurements of phenomena₁.

0057 In the chapter three, on superpositions and athings, Zizek delves into Bell’s theorem and observations of spooky interactions at a distance.  Things in the real are not what we imagine them to be.  Or, should I say, what they imagine themselves to be? In this examination, I will make an effort to use examples that are not so cutting edge, such as the electron subject to a measurement apparatus.

My effort does not stand in the way of Zizek’s approach.  If quantum mechanics is the mechanics of very small particles, and if these small particles constitute all material, then quantum mechanics should not be ignored in the philosophy of a real materialist… degenerate or not.