Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

I'm going to try to make this intro to semiosis as straightforward as I can, but I want to say straight off the bat that this subject usually requires people to radically reconstrue certain concepts.

The first part of semiosis is "firstness," the direct part of raw experience. "First" experience is going to be the ground of reference later. But for now, "firsts" are pure feeling, pure sense, that kind of thing. For Peirce, the continua of experience (like heat, color, or weight) are fundamental

The equivalent parallel of this for students of Peirce is that here, too, every atom of experience is processed by the system of meaning managed by some organism -- germ cell, human, Hobbesian leviathan, whatever. And as with Hegel, these glimpses of meaning add up to larger & larger systems -- but in an open-ended sense. No telos. The critical thing here is that there is a definite process that concerns any particular organism capable of winning-through to meaning: viz. the process of semiosis.

So let's think more about the trade that Dewey made in this exchange: he gets his powerful anti-philosophy and all he has to do is to think about how ideas bear consequences in the world of experience. Seems reasonable? Remember -- you're looking at a post-Hegelian. For Hegel, every atom of experience can be analyzed and interpreted to find the participation of that atom in a larger ecosystem of consciousnesses driving world-historical revolutions in self-awareness.The part goes up to the whole

So what was it about Peirce's pragmatism that was so appealing to Dewey? Pragmatism is really more of an anti-philosophy. The prime directive of pragmatism is to look for the way any belief would cash out in real experience -- and this comes with the corollary that if some theoretical novelty has no observable consequences, then it's only so much more verbiage. So at this point, Dewey gets to burn all his old notes (I'm imagining; I don't have a source for this) about Hegelian Absolute Being etc

The German generation of '48 brought over a lot of revolutionary Geist to US frontier metropolises, such as St Louis. (See Henry Clay Brockmeyer for example <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Clay_Brockmeyer>).
The upshot of Hegel for Dewey was that it gave him a framework to think about the history of ideas: the ages & stages of history that necessitated certain intellectual adaptations, the continuity between those, and so on. But for all of this, Hegelianism imposes a wagon-train of theoretical baggage.

So I've said Dewey was a pragmatist. In this case that means that he was directly a student of the inventor of pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce. (It is sometimes said that Peirce was Dewey's dissertation advisor, but this is impossible for certain reasons academic logic.)

The main thing that you need to know at this point in the thread is that Peirce converted Dewey away from American Hegelianism. Yes, there was a distinctly American (albeit German-accented) school of Hegelianism at the time.

I've had a stressful day so here's a knowledge dump about Benjamin S Bloom, Dewey, and the fundamental semiotics of pragmatist theories of learning.

If you went to a school in the developed world that was taught by professionals, those professionals probably had a bit of their education shaped by John Dewey. Dewey occupies a weird memory-holed bit of American history. He reached maturity during the Gilded Age but only became known as a progressive pragmatist in the Great Depression.

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shakalakalaka
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I don't know what happens in the long run, but I know that LegacySite.com is still losing money for its Nth owner and even Pitchfork is dead these days. It's getting harder and harder for these overproduced elites to leverage the MFA into a byline someplace. Hateclicks still sell ads, but not so many. TikTok doesn't really honor credentials.

The sun is low and it's getting cold.

So for practical purposes, this is what you see:
(combining the 1st and 2nd bullet) LegacySite.com publishes steady drumbeat of headlines promoting wildly unpopular politics, like reparations or degrowth, driving popular political conversation from discussions of the plausible to the fantastical
- (combining 2 and 3) a concept like "degrowth" is genuinely not appreciated by these the freelancers for LegacySite.com, whose personal catastophe has consisted in failure to launch to the middle class

Some aspects of this dynamic to highlight:
- the overproduced elites are the ones who are still trying to keep the culture war bubbling because they have sold their MFAs as a way to get clicks on LegacySite.com
- for these people, the worst-case economic catastrophe has already happened, and so they no longer have any fear of radical redistribution being imposed on the rest of the world, and might even see themselves as the beneficiaries
- they genuinely do not think in terms of labor or output

I think that the "elite overproduction" narrative basically conforms to reality, I think that a lot of credential-elites are downwardly mobile, I think that a lot of them have turned to a kind of politico-cultural resentment to ameliorate their weakness to the narratives that they learned during their erstwhile ascendancy, I don't necessarily think that they've been defeated by a meritocracy, and I don't think that that reactionaries get to count this as a "win" for their worldview either.

Above all, fight the kulturkampf because it is your way to participate in a vast decentralized ARG with graphics and characters that are way more stimulating than anything else that could come from your idleness. And you are so idle. There are so many days that you've let slip into the grave and nobody even noticed. But at least in the kulturkampf you are needed on the front lines! If you miss even one hour you will have let your enemies rise in your absence! You must stay logged on to win!

Fight the kulturkampf because you are so very bored and because you may not matter very much in the big scheme of things. Fight the kulturkampf because your peers did a little bit better in their fleeting chances to climb the meritocracy. Fight the kulturkampf because you believe in nothing, because the most you can believe in is a belief-in-belief, and because in this whirling void of genuine compelling virtue you will substitute your own consumer preferences for one brand of 20th C. nostalgia.

And nobody was very happy with this because it kind of meant that History Ended and All I Got was this Participation Trophy.
So the suplus elites, the over-educated downwardly-mobile failsons and faildaughters, summoned up a hundred thousand Tumblr conversations about the unfairness of the world (from a puerile perspective) and latter-day GamerGaters took the opposing side. Now we have dumb goo goo ga ga shit as the kulturkampf -- except nobody's even really trying to win. The struggle is all.

Say what you will about GWOT culture, but there was a definite aesthetic stack:
- muted color palette, blue-orange filters, shaky-cam midwit culture
- (post-90s post-Baudrillard) pop-as-surreality porn, complete iconoclasm of "reality" in popular mass media, neon casino pornified pop culture
- emplotments of suspicion and constructed truth in high culture (see McKewon's Atonement)

It's bonkers how much everyone's just larping late 20th century culture because we reached a point of absolute disgust with the GWOT-era culture of the early 21st century.

Ja, wer auch nur eine Seele
Sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund!
Und wer’s nie gekonnt, der stehle
Weinend sich aus diesem Bund!

Freude trinken alle Wesen
An den Brüsten der Natur;
Alle Guten, alle Bösen
Folgen ihrer Rosenspur.
Küsse gab sie uns und Reben,
Einen Freund, geprüft im Tod;
Wollust ward dem Wurm gegeben
und der Cherub steht vor Gott.

The reference at the heart of all of this is impossibly obscure. It's impression on your will is crooked and self-mocking. But in all of it there is enough looseness, enough play between the elements that there is the possibility that it is all redeemed by this experience of beauty. You cannot say that this beauty is what the roaches felt, or even what your human neighbors feel, and you cannot say how the cereal makes it possible. But the possibility is undeniable, and it stirs in you a theme:

The more you find yourself contemplating the aesthetic the more it becomes a source of profound inner clarity, deeper even that what you can even articulate in private words.

Beauty. Beauty itself. Beauty in its endless resplendent array of senses. Beauty from the senses but beyond the senses. Beauty that seems somehow beyond the whole world, even though it's only glimpsed in such things as the groin of a tree or an unexceptional historical tea set. Here too beauty is rescuing the world.