Luke Barnesmoore

The net of problems of injustice in the world, past, present and in the oncoming future-present are characteristically rooted in the many and varied contextual manifestations of the superiority-supremacism form. In search of the metaphysical pathology hidden by the banal invisibility of Western thought (worldview/ideologies) for Western subjects, the authors critically recognize, conceptualize and unveil the superiority-supremacism form, the conflation of dualistic and nondualistic phenomena… Show more

The net of problems of injustice in the world, past, present and in the oncoming future-present are characteristically rooted in the many and varied contextual manifestations of the superiority-supremacism form. In search of the metaphysical pathology hidden by the banal invisibility of Western thought (worldview/ideologies) for Western subjects, the authors critically recognize, conceptualize and unveil the superiority-supremacism form, the conflation of dualistic and nondualistic phenomena, and the all too common synthesis of superiority-supremacism and the conflation of dualistic/nondualistic phenomena that form an essential aspect of the Colonial Modernist Worldview (C.M. Worldview ; see Barnesmoore 2018) as a critique of Western knowledge and conceptions of human history manufactured therein. Show less

In this wandering we (via mother-and-son-dialogue) explore the desire to be frightened. How do the wicked problems of our world lead us into desire for fear? When is the desire free, and when is it fearbased/addictive? Moving from the assumption that the moment of shock associated with fear is a reflection of the same ‘Nothing-Infinite Eternal Form’ that structures the process of death & rebirth, it could be said that we are wandering through the question of why people desire ‘death’ in its… Show more

In this wandering we (via mother-and-son-dialogue) explore the desire to be frightened. How do the wicked problems of our world lead us into desire for fear? When is the desire free, and when is it fearbased/addictive? Moving from the assumption that the moment of shock associated with fear is a reflection of the same ‘Nothing-Infinite Eternal Form’ that structures the process of death & rebirth, it could be said that we are wandering through the question of why people desire ‘death’ in its many, different and irregular expressions. Are we fated to an unhealthy configuration of co-creating a ‘death culture’ or are there other possibilities? Or is the true danger the ‘life culture’ and associated sun cult—the fear of death and the subsequent quest to find immortality in time? Should we fear death or the Deatheaters? Through dialogue we discuss the various symbolic/mythological (Moore, 1972) roles that monsters and dragons play in our relationships with fear in the neoliberal contexts of the MegaMachine’s (Mumford, 1967, 1970) dominant present incarnation, and ultimately we ask what we can learn from fear and our identity as ‘monsters’ in the eyes of Artificial-Domineering Worldview(s) (Barnesmoore, 2018) as we wander in search of ‘wicked good road(s)’ (Barnesmoore, 2019) that will lead us back to a place where we can enter the natural good road(s). Show less

Moving from Barnesmoore's (2016) theorization of humans as beings with the potential for conscious (epistemological) evolution, this article argues that a revolution in the ideas by which ('world view' in which) we conceive of potential practice must necessarily precede a revolution of academic and social practice (that theory necessarily precedes practice). Revolution must be rooted in revolutionary ideas and cannot be facilitated by practices that rise from (are rationalized within) the… Show more

Moving from Barnesmoore's (2016) theorization of humans as beings with the potential for conscious (epistemological) evolution, this article argues that a revolution in the ideas by which ('world view' in which) we conceive of potential practice must necessarily precede a revolution of academic and social practice (that theory necessarily precedes practice). Revolution must be rooted in revolutionary ideas and cannot be facilitated by practices that rise from (are rationalized within) the hegemonic essence (ideas, axioms and logics) of the regime against which revolution is being waged. Show less

Moving from Barnesmoore’s (2016) theorization of humans as beings with the potential for conscious (epistemological) evolution, this article argues that a revolution in the ideas by which (‘world view’ in which) we conceive of potential practice must necessarily precede a revolution of academic and social practice (that theory necessarily precedes practice)—revolution must be rooted in revolutionary ideas, and cannot be facilitated by practices that rise from (are rationalized within) the… Show more

Moving from Barnesmoore’s (2016) theorization of humans as beings with the potential for conscious (epistemological) evolution, this article argues that a revolution in the ideas by which (‘world view’ in which) we conceive of potential practice must necessarily precede a revolution of academic and social practice (that theory necessarily precedes practice)—revolution must be rooted in revolutionary ideas, and cannot be facilitated by practices that rise from (are rationalized within) the hegemonic essence (axioms and logics) of the hegemonic regime against which revolution is being waged. Show less

This article expounds a new theory of humanity that problematizes the discrete, biomaterialist and materially rational individual of Modernity through sensitivity to the human potential for Conscious Evolution (evolution of the ‘invisible self’, which is to say the cultivation of reason, free will, intuition and the other ‘high epistemological faculties’ that allow humans to actualize the potential for self-mediation of the biological desires and animal (irrational) passions). After defining… Show more

This article expounds a new theory of humanity that problematizes the discrete, biomaterialist and materially rational individual of Modernity through sensitivity to the human potential for Conscious Evolution (evolution of the ‘invisible self’, which is to say the cultivation of reason, free will, intuition and the other ‘high epistemological faculties’ that allow humans to actualize the potential for self-mediation of the biological desires and animal (irrational) passions). After defining Conscious Evolution, comparing it with Mechanical Evolution and providing a brief overview of the epistemological processes involved in Conscious Evolution, we examine the ways in which Modernism axiomatically, logically and practically negates the potential for Conscious Evolution and self-mediation as well as the manifestations of this negation in Modernist epistemology and Modernist social systems like Economic Theology or ‘the police’ that, due to their biomaterialist understanding of humans as discrete, biological, materially rational individuals, aim to mediate biological desires and animal passions through external, forceful, hierarchical domination rather than the cultivation of Conscious Evolution and subsequent actualization of the potential for self-mediation. This critique of epistemological and social systems that seek to create order through external, forceful, hierarchical domination and sets the stage for a follow up paper titled “Conscious Evolution, Social Development and Environmental Justice” that critiques contemporary Planning Theory and Practice and calls for planning of social systems from a theoretical perspective where seeking to cultivate Conscious Evolution and the actualization of the social order implicit in the self-mediation made potential by Conscious Evolution is possible (which is to say that (r)evolution of theory must precede (r)evolution of practice). Show less

With the rise of social media as a focal point for interaction in both global and local social communities, big data has become a key feature of social science research in the 21st century. As the size of corpora on sites like Facebook and Twitter have grown, a need has risen for more and more sophisticated computer science tools to collect data and identify statistical trends therein. After describing our integration of Netvizz scraping software with our Statnews.org language analysis software… Show more

With the rise of social media as a focal point for interaction in both global and local social communities, big data has become a key feature of social science research in the 21st century. As the size of corpora on sites like Facebook and Twitter have grown, a need has risen for more and more sophisticated computer science tools to collect data and identify statistical trends therein. After describing our integration of Netvizz scraping software with our Statnews.org language analysis software we provide a case study of our tool’s application through analyzing Libertarian Facebook data within the lens of Barnesmoore’s History of Assemblage Model (HoAM). Show less

The purpose of this paper is to extend the UC Berkeley Statnews.org research program into the study of religion. Through synthesis of a precise semantic analysis conducted with the Statnews.org machine learning software and Barnesmoore’s History of Assemblages knowledge generation model, we present a mixed method approach for analysis of the relationship between causal discursive materials (in this case religious texts), ontological assumptions and epistemic mechanisms embedded in these… Show more

The purpose of this paper is to extend the UC Berkeley Statnews.org research program into the study of religion. Through synthesis of a precise semantic analysis conducted with the Statnews.org machine learning software and Barnesmoore’s History of Assemblages knowledge generation model, we present a mixed method approach for analysis of the relationship between causal discursive materials (in this case religious texts), ontological assumptions and epistemic mechanisms embedded in these discursive materials and norms of thought, behavior and being in societies socialized by analyzed texts. In so doing, we present a history of the dominant forms (ontological assumptions and epistemic mechanisms) embedded in the religious scriptures that have structured normative cognitive environments in the west. In so doing we hope to provide a point of entry for outlining the cognitive context in which forms manifest in the western world for future applications of the History of Assemblages methodology. Show less

As the social media sphere has come to the fore of international politics and civil society, algorithmic tools for big data analysis have become essential tools for social science and humanities research; this has lead many researchers, including our own team at the UC Berkeley Statnews.org Lab, to focus their work on development of software packages that analyze and visualize statistical narratives in large data text corpora. While the necessity of algorithmic language analysis software and… Show more

As the social media sphere has come to the fore of international politics and civil society, algorithmic tools for big data analysis have become essential tools for social science and humanities research; this has lead many researchers, including our own team at the UC Berkeley Statnews.org Lab, to focus their work on development of software packages that analyze and visualize statistical narratives in large data text corpora. While the necessity of algorithmic language analysis software and techniques for developing such software packages are both very well theorized topics, questions concerning issues the transformation of linguistic meaning through the process of quantification have not been given the attention they deserve. This paper presents a novel analytic for conceptualizing the transformation of linguistic meaning through the process of quantification. The analytics essential concepts include ‘the datascope’, ‘relative infinity’, ‘planes of dimensional consistency’ and ‘dimensional incommensurability’. This analytic represents a node of Barnesmoore’s History of Assemblage Model (HoAM), an analytic model (‘analytic software package’) designed to interrogate the relationship between ontological regimes and norms of thought, behavior and being with sensitivity to the potentials of power established therein. Show less

With the rise of social media as a focal point for interaction in both global and local social communities, big data has become a key feature of social science research in the 21st century. As the size of corpora on sites like Facebook and Twitter have grown, a need has risen for more and more sophisticated computer science tools to collect data and identify statistical trends therein. After describing our integration of Netvizz scraping software with our Statnews.org language analysis software… Show more

With the rise of social media as a focal point for interaction in both global and local social communities, big data has become a key feature of social science research in the 21st century. As the size of corpora on sites like Facebook and Twitter have grown, a need has risen for more and more sophisticated computer science tools to collect data and identify statistical trends therein. After describing our integration of Netvizz scraping software with our Statnews.org language analysis software we provide a case study of our tool’s application through analyzing Libertarian Facebook data within the lens of Barnesmoore’s History of Assemblage Model (HoAM). Show less

The mobility of neoliberalism requires further examination, specifically concerning its manifestation in existing societal flows. Through a synthesis of Foucault’s governmentality model, Deleuzian assemblage approaches and Barnesmoore’s history of assemblages model, we analyze the interaction of neoliberalism and religion by problematizing the biopolitical dynamics manifest therein and the ontological assumptions from which these dynamics rise. We analyze ethnographic data concerning spiritual… Show more

The mobility of neoliberalism requires further examination, specifically concerning its manifestation in existing societal flows. Through a synthesis of Foucault’s governmentality model, Deleuzian assemblage approaches and Barnesmoore’s history of assemblages model, we analyze the interaction of neoliberalism and religion by problematizing the biopolitical dynamics manifest therein and the ontological assumptions from which these dynamics rise. We analyze ethnographic data concerning spiritual training programs conducted in factory and corporate settings. Our focus is on the amalgamation of value formation and self-governing strategies with economic practice. From here we move to an analysis of social media discussions on relevant Facebook pages; in so doing, we examine the effects of ontological assumptions embedded in neoliberal spiritual training projects upon norms for thought, behavior and being within publics socialized by the trainings. We conclude with a discussion of the incommensurability of neoliberal ontology with the religious ontologies that professional trainings have appropriated and the subsequent implications of rearticulating religious symbols within a neoliberal ontological framework. Show less

Poster

The goal of this paper is to present a mixed method approach for application of machine learning software in analysis of large data text corpora developed with the statnews.org team at UC Berkeley. Through synthesizing a precise statistical study of semantics in large collections of news items with a knowledge generation model developed using Michel Foucault’s History of Thought Methodology and the work of Giles Deleuze and Aihwa Ong’s on assemblages we present a methodological approach for… Show more

The goal of this paper is to present a mixed method approach for application of machine learning software in analysis of large data text corpora developed with the statnews.org team at UC Berkeley. Through synthesizing a precise statistical study of semantics in large collections of news items with a knowledge generation model developed using Michel Foucault’s History of Thought Methodology and the work of Giles Deleuze and Aihwa Ong’s on assemblages we present a methodological approach for analysis of the forms that give rise to socially normative forms of thought, behavior and being. We use innovative tools to visualize narratives over time in large data text corpora and are thus, following Foucault, able to quickly summarize the discursive forms (i.e. rules of veridiction, matrices of behavior and modes of being) embedded in bodies of text too large for analysis by an individual human scholar. Then, following Ong, we back test our findings by examining whether the forms isolated by our application of Foucault’s History of Thought methodology manifest themselves in socially normative phenomena (i.e. political interventions and ethical regimes) in societies socialized by the analyzed texts. Show less

In this paper, we propose a general framework for topic-specific summarization of large text corpora, and illustrate how it can be used for the analysis of news databases. Our framework, concise comparative summarization (CCS), is built on sparse classification methods. CCS is a lightweight and flexible tool that offers a compromise between simple word frequency based methods currently in wide use, and more heavyweight, model-intensive methods such as latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). We… Show more

In this paper, we propose a general framework for topic-specific summarization of large text corpora, and illustrate how it can be used for the analysis of news databases. Our framework, concise comparative summarization (CCS), is built on sparse classification methods. CCS is a lightweight and flexible tool that offers a compromise between simple word frequency based methods currently in wide use, and more heavyweight, model-intensive methods such as latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). We argue that sparse methods have much to offer for text analysis, and hope CCS opens the door for a new branch of research in this important field.

For a particular topic of interest (e.g., China, or energy), CSS automatically labels documents as being either on- or off-topic (usually via keyword search), and then uses sparse classification methods to predict these labels with the high-dimensional counts of all the other words and phrases in the documents. The resulting small set of phrases found as predictive are then harvested as the summary.

To validate our tool, we, using news articles from the New York Times international section, designed and conducted a human survey to compare the different summarizers with human understanding. We demonstrate our approach with two case studies, a media analysis of the framing of "Egypt" in the New York Times throughout the Arab Spring, and an informal comparison of the New York Times' and Wall Street Journal's coverage of "energy." Overall, we find that the Lasso with L2 normalization can be effectively and usefully used to summarize large corpora, regardless of document size. Show less

Abstract: Media frames tend to be defined relationally to the dynamic relationship
between global flows of governance and the local norms, identities, values and banal
practices of targeted markets. Through synthesizing a precise statistical study of
semantics in large collections of news items with Foucault’s History of Thought
Methodology and DeLeuze’s Assemblage theory, we present a mixed-method analytic
approach, The History of Assemblages, for studying macro frames of… Show more

Abstract: Media frames tend to be defined relationally to the dynamic relationship
between global flows of governance and the local norms, identities, values and banal
practices of targeted markets. Through synthesizing a precise statistical study of
semantics in large collections of news items with Foucault’s History of Thought
Methodology and DeLeuze’s Assemblage theory, we present a mixed-method analytic
approach, The History of Assemblages, for studying macro frames of representation in
socially normative texts. Our approach examines how the manifestation of neoliberal
ontological assemblages in local cognitive environments inflects the construction of
representational discursive frames. We use innovative tools to visualize narratives over
time in sources with multiple language services and are thus able to quickly summarize
how differing news media sources and language services narrate topics in the space
between ontological and epistemic norms associated with neoliberal globalization and the
socio-political, cognitive environment of target language markets.

Key words: Assemblage, History of Thought, Machine Learning Methodologies, Comparative
Research/Methodology, Anthropology, Show less

Currently a Working Paper: Social Media has increasingly been a source for gaining international news media attention by social movements. From the initial success of the Arab Spring to the global proliferation of the Occupy movements, social media has become an increasingly relevant source for the compilation of “real time” on the ground news. The imbrication of social media and mobile ICT’s has allowed news media outlets to retain their position as the gatekeepers of information while… Show more

Currently a Working Paper: Social Media has increasingly been a source for gaining international news media attention by social movements. From the initial success of the Arab Spring to the global proliferation of the Occupy movements, social media has become an increasingly relevant source for the compilation of “real time” on the ground news. The imbrication of social media and mobile ICT’s has allowed news media outlets to retain their position as the gatekeepers of information while impelling a sense of banal commonality among targeted audiences. This paper will utilize innovative visualization tools to demonstrate the diffusion of news media narratives over time. We use more traditional statistical methods to identify the dominant frames within virtual voice. The visuals will utilize key language in major international print media outlets, and are thus able to effectively demonstrate congruities between the frames of the global news media, structured by the liberal individualistic norms of global civil society, and frames identified within local articulations of virtual voice, which are an assembled amalgam of global and local norms. It also demonstrates the dominant frame of narration for the social movement manufactured by the print media. Our purpose is to sketch the border between the norms of global civil society and the formation of virtual voice in local contexts. Show less

Currently a Working Paper: Media frames tend to be defined relationally to the norms, identities, values and banal practices of targeted markets. Through a precise statistical study of semantics in large collections of news items, in Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic respectively, we present in a visual and intuitive manner, a comparative study of media representation of the macro frames of representation used in the Arab spring, and the relation of the diffusion of these frames over… Show more

Currently a Working Paper: Media frames tend to be defined relationally to the norms, identities, values and banal practices of targeted markets. Through a precise statistical study of semantics in large collections of news items, in Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic respectively, we present in a visual and intuitive manner, a comparative study of media representation of the macro frames of representation used in the Arab spring, and the relation of the diffusion of these frames over time to the regional norms, identities, and values of the targeted markets of each of Al Jazeera's language service. We use innovative tools to visualize the diffusion of these of these narratives over periods of time, and in doing so, are able to quickly summarize how the news media in the differing languages narrate the aforementioned macro frames in relation to socio-political and economic regional norms. Show less

Currently a Working Paper: Through a careful statistical study of semantics in large collections of news items in both countries, we present in a visual and intuitive manner, a comparative study of media representation of the US in China news, of China in the US news, and of the ways each country depicts important world events or issues. We use innovative tools to visualize the dynamics of these images over periods of time. In doing so, we are able to quickly summarize how the news media in the… Show more

Currently a Working Paper: Through a careful statistical study of semantics in large collections of news items in both countries, we present in a visual and intuitive manner, a comparative study of media representation of the US in China news, of China in the US news, and of the ways each country depicts important world events or issues. We use innovative tools to visualize the dynamics of these images over periods of time. In doing so, we are able to quickly summarize how the news media in the respective countries construct the other' s identity.

At this point of the research, we have finalized the visualization tool, and we have collected and analyzed data on the American side. We have preliminary results and raw date on the Chinese side. Full analysis will be forthcoming. Show less