Sunday, May 20, 2018
Far from the full liberation target, still!
NIGGA YA BLACK,
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Poetical Expansion
THE BLACK CURSE IN THE USA
TA-NEHISI COATES – BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME – 2015
This
small book is a pamphlet but this pamphlet is so strong that it will give
nightmares to everyone who has in anyway been dependent on someone else who
domineered them, harassed them, sexually or not, exploited them in all possible
ways. The author described the black side of this dependence and he keeps in
mind – and starts from – the crucial declaration of the most racist white
Southerner I know, John Calhoun who wrote: “The two great divisions of society
are not the rich and poor, but white and black. And all the former, the poor as
well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as
equals.” This clearly means the blacks are neither poor nor rich, hence are not
human. More openly racist is not possible. Calhoun thought the two classes in
society were the humans, necessarily white, and the chattel, necessarily black.
And we have to remember a black person is less valuable than a horse. An
escaping horse will never be put to death. They definitely do not shoot
escaping horses. But an escaping slave will probably be put to death by a band
of dogs sicked onto the slave who will be literally dismembered by the dogs and
probably abandoned to die slowly in some ditch or in the middle of a road to be
used as an example to other escaping candidates. . . [. . .]
Dr.
Jacques COULARDEAU
In Ten Days in Chengdu
Mind-Language the Expanding Heart of Cognition
Abstract:
On the basis of already published research on the phylogeny of language during the emergence of Homo Sapiens starting around 300,000 years ago, and on still-to-be-published research in its final phase on the psychogenesis of language starting in the 24th week of gestation, I will present my work on the central role of two virtual human constructs of man’s nervous system and brain confronted to their real environment, both natural and social. These two constructs, the mind, and language, are the results of the development of the general pattern-capturing potential of the brain’s architecture. The mind and language develop simultaneously, reciprocally and in close coordination transforming the pattern-capturing potential of the brain into the mental and linguistic conceptualizing power of men and women. This long process of development can be captured in six stages: to sense; to perceive; to discriminate (or recognize) patterns; to experiment; to speculate, and to conceptualize spatial items and temporal processes. In psychogenetics, these six stages are essential for education. Lev Vygotsky, among others, has proposed the best approach to this conceptualizing competence in children and young adults and expanding in our whole life.
Research Interests:
Languages, Cognitive Psychology, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy Of Language, Education, Languages and Linguistics, Cognition, Theory of Mind, Cognitive Linguistics et ConceptualizationSaturday, May 19, 2018
There are NO scientific prophets
NO ETERNAL SCIENTIFIC TRUTH
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Linguistics is just like any other science at all. It does not know what eternal truth means. Like in any other science some linguists will leave behind them a name, a theory and a few concepts, but the future will step beyond this theory, will trample some of these concepts, will see a more advanced theory rise from the melting pot or the salad bowl of experience, experimentation and simple intelligence.
Gustave Guillaume constructed the very basic of the first cognitive approach of the mind and language but he never asked the fundamental question: What is the origin of language?
He could not because he could not go against the statutes of the Linguistics Society of Paris that was banning – and it hasn’t yet changed its statutes – the very question as unscientific.
But he could not ask the question because archaeology was in its infancy and biology did not even know what DNA meant. If we want to understand what cognition really means for any human individual at any age, we better ask the question because without knowing what dynamic logic is behind language we cannot control communication and the acquisition of any new knowledge.
The time of rote learning through repetition and drills that were as painful as they were boring is finished, gone forever, even if in the head of many we learn by simply repeating what we want to learn as if we could assimilate any knowledge at first sight.
I submit hereafter some recent moments and some future events that should be able to bring together a new generation of linguists, cognitivists, communicationists and didacticians who may bring us out of the neverending repetition of what this/that genius said in the past. In science there has never been and will never be any prophet of any sort.
CROMAGNON’S LANGUAGE
Cro-Magnon’s language is an ambitious project in phylogenic linguistics. The objective is to go back to the shift from animal to human articulated language. Homo Sapiens some 300,000 years ago, found himself endowed with mutations selected by his being a long distance fast bipedal runner: a very low larynx; a complex articulating apparatus; a sophisticated coordinating system bringing together diaphragm, breathing, heartbeat, legs and general body posture. These three physiological improvements permitted new linguistic possibilities: more consonants; more vowels; a brain able to construct a mind both producing and produced by articulated language. This developed the ability to conceptualize and develop abstract thinking.
The phylogeny of language from a purely linguistic and cognitive point of view activates three articulations to generate human language: vowels and consonants; the morphology of the word from root to stem and then frond; the syntactic structures of utterances. This is based on the communicational syntax conveyed by the human communicational situation that requires the power to conceptualize, both daily procedural communication and inter/intra-generational cognitive and didactic communication.
Homo Sapiens evolved in Africa from previous hominins (Homo Faber or Homo Ergaster) that already migrated out of Africa to the Middle East and Central Asia where Neanderthals and Denisovans respectively evolved from them. The nest of this evolution is debated due to recent archaeological discoveries, but the first migration was in Africa from sub-Saharan Africa to Northern Africa. Then out of Africa.
I assume the migrations took place every time the phylogeny of language stabilized on the basis of each articulation. The first migration was on the basis of the simple consonant-vowel articulation producing root languages (all consonantal root languages). The second migration on the basis of the morphological articulation produced stems categorized as nouns or verbs, spatial or temporal. These languages are isolating invariable-character languages. The third migration corresponded to the production of fronds, words syntactically categorized as functional nominals and conjugated verbals ready to build syntactic utterances. The communicational syntax was essential to build discourse in root language and little by little was integrated in langue itself reducing the extension and role of discourse, and in the last forms many categories integrated in words are exteriorized outside the words as determiners, prepositions, auxiliaries, adverbs, thus realizing in langue abstract systems of categorizing operations and forms.
These migrations lead us to three phylogenic linguistic families: consonantal root languages; isolating invariable-character stem languages; and agglutinative or synthetic-analytical frond languages. These languages spread in the world along with the successive migrations of Homo Sapiens. The answer then to the question about Cro-Magnon’s language is simple and clear: an agglutinative Turkic set of languages and dialects we could call Old European languages to be replaced after the Ice Age by Indo-European languages coming from the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia.
Follow the detail of this exploration in this book, a life-time research and exploration and the first stage of a vaster research. The next stage is the linguistic psychogenesis of human children and language learners. That next stage will come soon. The final stage will be the exploration of how acculturation-deculturation-acculturation is the very human process of human civilization and corresponds to the Buddhist birth-death-rebirth vision invented in the other branch of Indo-Iranian languages, viz. the Indo-Aryan languages that migrated from the same nest as Indo-European languages but east instead of west.
Saturday, May 12, 2018
Chinese cats in the window of the curiosity shop
THE
END OF THE WEST COMES FROM THE EAST
or should I say THE MIDDLE EAST?
In our present time of crises
and contradictions we have to stop one moment and think as clearly as possible
upon this following question: “Will we
survive the present crisis, not as individuals, not as nations, but as
humanity?” They all tell us about the ecological dangers in the present
time: the warming up of our planet; the climate change on our planet; the
carbon cycle that comes to a peak that will cause the eradication of some 80 to
90% of all species on our planet soon, even if it takes ten thousand years to
be completed. And then you can add the various bubbles – debt, real estate,
overproduction, financial speculation, and even the social bubble of unrefrained and uncontrolled migration and the
explosion of refugees among these migrants – building up here and there in the
economy and the craziness of some of the
extremes of our political system who pretend that states do not have to mind
their debts and that more money to the poor will bring economic growth. States
can do what they want, provided they keep
their national currency autonomy.
This last idea is the proof
the world is sick and probably dying of insanity because there are so many
examples in history and particularly over the last four or five centuries of
crises in one country, in several countries, in many countries that prove a limited financial crisis can bring the
world down and Keynes has not changed that. He has at best given us the
illusion that we can live on credit, not as individuals who are always caught
up by their debts, but as nations who can always do what they want with their
currency, close their borders, introduce limitations on the circulation of
money, foreign currencies and many other things of the sort like imports and
exports.
Keynes could not know the
globalized world we are just entering. And in this globalized world goods,
money, currencies, everything is one and no country can survive alone, no
country can even live alone, and unluckily no country can die alone. What
happens in one country is at once propagated into the whole world like ripples
or waves on the ocean. And some want to see everything is so connected that it
is all some kind of predestination, some fate: all is in all and everything is everywhere at once. . .
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Thursday, May 10, 2018
China in three weeks and Paris in two months
Psychomechanics in China and Paris
Abstract:
(Association Internationale de Psychomécanique du Langage)
PARIS, les 11, 12 et 13 juillet 2018 à l’Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris III (Centre Universitaire Censier, 13, rue de Santeuil 75005 Paris)
THÈME :
Cognition, fonctionnement systémique des langues et psychomécanique du langage : aspects théoriques et applications
PARIS, les 11, 12 et 13 juillet 2018 à l’Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris III (Centre Universitaire Censier, 13, rue de Santeuil 75005 Paris)
THÈME :
Cognition, fonctionnement systémique des langues et psychomécanique du langage : aspects théoriques et applications
PARIS BY STRIKES
Research Interests:
Communication, Languages and Linguistics, Cognition, Phylogeny/phylogenetics, Phylogeny et Psychogenesis
Monday, May 07, 2018
Transhuman Delirium is NO Science
Trans-Intelligence
VERSUS Humanity
Kurzweil & Harari versus Hawkins & Lanier
From Delirium Sapiens To Delirium Deus
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Four names,
four men – and no women – but a crucial stake in the heart of our vampiric
future history. Ray Kurzweil, the dystopic businessman. Yuval Noah Harari, the
self-proclaimed Biblical prophet of the next apocalypse. Jeff Hawkins, the
neurobiologist in continuation of Bertrand Russell. Jaron Lanier, the musician
turned computer scientist. From the superficiality of transhumanism to the
depth of human creativity.
The choice
is yours. Enjoy it.
But take
some fruit juice along in case you might get slightly thirsty for relief and
escape. Transhumanism is a dystopia but in no way a curse or our fate. We
can control the future.
Sunday, May 06, 2018
Cynja, the hero of cyber war in cyber space
Cyber War, the new Cold War
explained to children
To teach Internet security
to children can be very tricky.
THE CYNJA VOLUME 1 – CHASE CUNNINGHAM – HEATHER C.
DAHL – SHIROW DI ROSSO, illustrator – © 2013
CODE OF THE CYNJA VOLUME 2 – CHASE CUNNINGHAM –
HEATHER C. DAHL – SHIROW DI ROSSO, illustrator – © 2015
Saturday, May 05, 2018
Be Scared and enjoy it
BACK FROM PARIS, FRANCE, WITH THREE LITERARY NIGHTMARES
CORMAC McCARTHY – ALL THE PRETTY HORSES – 1992
A very fascinating book of western suspense as thick and dense as a summer thunderstorm.
The style and the language are perfect both when the author uses his own words and when he uses the words of his Texan heroes, but also when he uses the Mexican words of the Mexican characters or of the Texans who can speak Mexican. And there are plenty of Mexicans, both in Mexico of course and in Texas. And these Spanish words are not always translated. The Texan dialect is no problem. The Mexican discourse is more evanescent for readers who do not speak Spanish, but it is rather easy with a little bit of linguistic imagination.
But what is best in this novel is the real depth of the characters. They are deeply contradictory and mostly always true, even when they are going to die. They do not tell themselves lies even when they don’t tell others the whole truth. It is mostly men, young men, and older men, but the two female characters of some importance are also built on the same pattern. They are all real flesh, and real ethics, and real mind, and real vice. And when a uniformed person is vicious, he is vicious right through to the end of it, and it is mostly a characteristic of all Mexican officers of the law. Only the county judge in Texas is fair and honest, though yes he has his own doubts about a young man he sent to the electric chair in his younger years, and yet if he had to do it again he would do it again, so he says at least.
The plot is superb though frankly anti-Mexican. True enough, there are some good Mexicans but the main Mexican characters are vicious, corrupted, violent, totally inhumane, etc. But beyond this trait typical of 1947, when the action takes place, it explains the deep rivalry between Mexicans and Americans, though it is only Texans on the American side. The hostility, this romantic attraction and total rejection of Mexicans by Texans, is the deep feeling a certain Trump is playing with when he deals with his wall and this anti-Mexican and anti-Latino feeling of too many Caucasian Americans.
The final power of the text I want to insist on is the superbly dense and frenetic tempo of the story. There is only one episode that is too slow: when the Mexican aunt tells John Grady her own past experience. Then this is a moralistic slow episode that is maybe necessary but it slows down the story.
But the most mysterious page is the final page where John Grady is riding alone through a semi-desertic landscape. He is being watched from afar by some Indians who he does not see and with no communication between the two sides, and the sun is setting turning the whole landscape into a red fiery wasteland. That vision of the Indians living unseen and primitive – which is not exactly right – in this reddish wasteland crossed by a Caucasian Texan, on a horse, who does not even establish any mental contact with this reality, is pathetic. America has forgotten its origins. True enough these Indians have been genocided. But even so. . .
ANDY MUSHIETTI – STEPHEN KING – IT – 2017
This new production of this IT novel by Stephen King is only the adaptation of the first older part of the story when the main characters are children, hence twenty-seven years before the present time. And as such, it is a refreshing approach to the novel. Let’s hope the second chapter of it will come sometime soon.
So we have here no flashbacks about the past but a direct story about the past, of the past. The monster is very clearly and mainly associated with the clown, though it can change shape and appear under different likenesses. It is in no way revealed what kind of real monster it is or hardly. The clown form is obviously effective with the bunch of kids he has to fight against, though he also for one little moment take the form of dead Georgy to confuse the brother of this Georgy who has never accepted his death.
The film is also clear about the existence of a band of bullies in the community who attack and harass children, girls or boys, at school, of course since school is a bully stadium, and outside in the city at large, often with no one saying nothing at all and just passing their way as if they were passing water in their private outhouse. These bullies though seem to have a particular attraction for blacks. There are not many blacks in this community but there is one in the band of kids, one who is pure and simple saved from being lynched by the bullies thanks to the girl who is not yet in the band, and the band she is going to be opted into straight away.
Note the gay bashing that opens the novel is not mentioned and the entering door of the clown is seen as some kind of sewage well in the underground section of an old abandoned and of course haunted house. The haunted house is a common theme with Stephen King.
The research of one of the boys about the cyclical episodes of disappearing kids and other catastrophes in factories is clearly documented and we know then this monster appears every twenty-seven years. The present cycle is broken up and defeated by the band of kids we are speaking of and that includes a girl, a Jewish boy, a black boy and an overweight if not obese boy, plus three more boys who are in no way exceptional. Seven altogether and this number is fundamental in meaning and references:
1- the Holy Week;
2- the creation of the world;
3- the seven planets of the Babylonian astrologers;
4- the seven days of the week;
5- the seventh month of September;
6- the seventh day of the Jewish week which is, in fact, the starting day of the week before the six others (first to sixth), namely Sabbath;
7- the seven churches to which the Book of Revelation is dedicated;
8- the seven colors of the rainbow as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet;
9- the opposite sides of a dice always equal the number seven when added;
10- the seven dwarfs of Snow White: Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy;
11- the seven Lucky Gods of Japan: Hotei, Jurojin, Fukurokuju, Bishamonten, Benzaiten, Daikokuten, Ebisu;
12- the seven Cherokee clans;
13- the seven people privately beheaded on Tower Green within the walls of the Tower of London: William Hastings, 1st Baron Hastings, June 13, 1483 – Anne Boleyn,2nd wife of King Henry VIII, May 19, 1536 – Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, May 27, 1541 – Catherine Howard, 5th wife of King Henry VIII, February 13, 1542 – Jane Boleyn, sister-in-law of Anne Boleyn, February13, 1542 – Lady Jane Grey, the Nine Day Queen, February 12, 1554 – Robert Devereux,2nd Earl of Essex, November 10, 1601 (this last execution was turned into an opera by Benjamin Britten);
14- the Seven Sacraments in the Catholic Church set by the Council of Trent (1545-63): Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Penance, Anointing of the sick, Holy Orders, Matrimony;
15- the Seven Deadly Sins: Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, Pride that are behing Dante’s Inferno and the film Sev7n;
16- and so many others.
There is a universal dimension of the number seven in the world and in all civilizations. Note the number twenty-seven is also important since it is close to what we call a generation. It contains seven and it is three times nine, hence 9+9+9 (or 3x3x3), the beast in the Book of Revelation in a way or another.
Stephen King in this first chapter of his story is trying to frighten us with traditional children’s fears because children are haunted at times by what they love best, clowns for instance, and clowns are the best trap for children to make them do what they know they are not supposed to do. Who does not like a clown? And yet who is not frightened by what we love best, clowns among other things. The best friends of man can often become their most frightening monsters. Stephen King has exploited this ambiguity so often with cats, dogs, cars, grandfathers and so many others.
This first chapter is, of course, admirable because of the seven kids, in fact, eight with Georgy. They are perfectly managed and directed in circumstances and scenes that are supposed to frighten the audience, that are extreme. We assume these scenes must have been great fun for those kids. At least they could do exactly what they know they are not supposed to do in everyday life. The cinema is a tool of freedom.
MIKHAIL KUZMIN – WINGS – 1906-2007
Kuzmin was a Russian poet who died in the 1930s under the Soviet rule he supported. This novella is important in many ways because it is easier to read than poetry, but yet the main theme is that of Kuzmin’s poetry, love in all possible forms.
A good man, “Vanya, Ваня, a unisex diminutive of the Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian and other Slavic given name Ivan. It is the Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian and other Slavic form of John, itself derived from a Hebrew name, meaning "God is gracious" or "Gracious gift of God".” (Wikipedia)
It is the story of a young man just stepping out of his teenage years, attracted by older men but unable at first to sort out what this attraction is all about. He has a fixation on a certain Larion Dmitriyevich, aka Stroop, but this man is openly gay and has an affair with a servant, Fyodor, who Vanya is jealous of. This affair causes the suicide of Ida Golberg who was in love with Stroop too.
At the same time Vanya hesitates because he lives on a religious and philosophical, as well as poetical but founded on ancient Greek poetry mainly, vision of love as a totally immaterial dimension whereas the physical nature of the “act” is seen as sinful, dirty, evil, etc., particularly on the side of clerics, Orthodox at times but mainly Catholic, with whom Vanya associates.
He is confronted to what is, in fact, aggressive approaches from women, older women, including what could have become a rape if he had not been forceful in pushing the women away who was already on top of him. He gets advice from his Greek teacher, and many friends, mostly artists, who lead him to the idea that the act itself is not anything worth even speaking or thinking of it since it is nothing but a mechanical response of the body to some attraction, appeal, or even simple hormonal impulse. The act only gets any value of any sort from the motivations, the feelings, the passion that can become its goal or target.
That’s how he finally steps into the shoes that are going to lead him to his love affair with Stroop, a love affair that was planned and announced from the very start but that had to overcome all the obstacles on its road, and there were quite a few, I mean quite many.
A very sensitive and well-balanced story about love that has many forms and all forms of love are admirable, beautiful and to be accepted without any restraint. The real problem is for any person to accept this love, which means giving one’s mind, soul or even being to another person who is supposed to do the same reciprocally. And this gift is often turned into possession of some kind.
This century-old Russian novella is refreshing in our times of unrestrained physical and hormonal promiscuity seen as freedom, a freedom that is being pushed back as male domination by the #MeToo movement against the harassment of women that implies on the side a similar harassment of men, though less openly considered.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
