Saturday, August 20, 2016

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: Brazilian Perspectivism?!

Art Prints




Teeth Necklace, A/Z's photograph available with other photographs and drawings at Fine Art America; 
Totonac carving, c. 1500, Jalapa, Mexico (image taken from Julian Bell's Mirror of the World);
J. Derrida, Joyce gramophone; 
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"Man schweigt, man behandelt mich in Deutschland mit einer düstern Vorsicht: ich habe seit Jahren von einer unbedingten Redefreiheit Gebrauch gemacht, zu der Niemand heute, am wenigsten im 'Reich', die Hand frei genug hat. Mein Paradies ist 'unter dem Schatten meines Schwertes'... Im Grunde hatte ich eine Maxime Stendhal's prakticirt: er räth an, seinen Eintritt in die Gesellschaft mit einem Duell zu machen. Und wie ich mir meinen Gegner gewählt hatte! den ersten deutschen Freigeist!"
Nietzsche

"BRASIL é o maior corta-barato que existe; um copo de leite, corta qualquer onda, menos a nossa é claro. Nunca vi tanta burrice e vulgaridade, por isso prefiro pensar em você e amá-la e fascinar-me com tudo o que você é e que nada tem a ver com aquilo: EXEMPLO DA EXCEÇÃO! E cada vez menos gente contacto por lá: IRMÃOS CAMPOS são dos poucos e de nível que sabemos e escrevi longamente sobre você e tudo o que me veio com sua carta, sopro vital, tão diferente da morna complacência brasileira de banho de bidê; dá-me arrepios sequer pensar naquilo tudo."
Hélio Oiticica (cara à Lygia Clark)
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"... mais le passage de chaque tranche verticale de temps présent à la suivante s'effectue de façon discontinue, par une sorte de saut qualitatif et non par une progression chronométrique linéaire et continue..."
Francis Bayer, De Schönberg à Cage
"On sait que pour le musicien, la compréhension du temps en tant qu’axe muni d’une seule dimension réelle est inacceptable. La réalité musicale du temps est vécue dans une variété fort complexe comprenant la stratification en rythmes locaux et globaux, en hiérarchies de courbes des tempi, et en dimensions temporelles engendrées par l’action et l’interaction de l’instrumentiste dans la genèse corporelle des vibrations sonores. Cette apparente confrontation des conceptions de temporalités ne se réduit pas à la simple négation de l’axe temporel et au contraire met en évidence le fait que cette mince ligne temporelle est une projection d’ontologies complexes dont les lois de la temporalité ne peuvent se concevoir en une seule dimension. Tout se passe dans un espace complexe temporel, dont la ligne du temps « mesuré » ne présente qu’une image illusoire."
Guerino Mazzola (La vérité du beau dans la musique) 

"Le mouvement simple est une banalité. Eliminer l'élément temporel. Hier et aujourd'hui come simmultanéité. La polyphonie dans la musique répondit dans une certaine mesure à ce besoin... La peinture polyphonique est supérieure à la musique en ce sens que l'élément temporel y est plutôt une donnée spatiale. Ne définissons pas le donné présent comme tel, définissons dans le passé et dans le futur; précisons largement, dans une perspective multilatérale. Définir isolément le présent, c'est le tuer... alternance simultanée... il faudrait alors passer [du rouge au vert, du vert au rouge] par saut..."
Paul Klee (traduction par Pierre-Henri Gonthier)

"C'est un point sur lequel Jakobson se sépare de Saussure de manière décisive en substituant à l'homogénéité de la ligne la structure de la portée musicale, «l'accord en musique» . Ce qui est ici en question, ce n'est pas l'affirmation par Saussure de l'essence temporelle du discours mais le concept de temps qui conduit cette affirmation et cette analyse : temps conçu comme successivité linéaire, comme «consécutivité». Ce modèle fonctionne seul et partout dans le Cours mais Saussure en est moins assuré, semble-t-il, dans les Anagrammes."
J. Derrida (Grammatologie)

"A plusieurs reprises, j'ai raconté ce songe qui s'apparente à une vision: je considérais une gravure montrant un square autour duquel on aperçoit les portiques et les arcades que vous avez là devant vous — subitement accourt, monté sur une draisienne, les jambes ballantes, touchant à peine le sol, un personnage vêtu à la mode du Directoire et qui, venant à ma rencontre, soudain s'immobilise à quelques pas dans le geste de cette locomotion déjà rapide, bien qu'il est vrai absolument silencieuse — alors seulement, je réalise que ce n'est plus une gravure; que je suis contemporain de l'époque révolue où se déroule la scène. Dans ce genre d'expérience, c'est comme si j'utilisais un chevalet en plein air; je fais constamment autant de projections du même type, tandis que je ne puis participer à cette ambiance dans laquelle pourtant je vis; et derechef, parce que je vis dans cette ambience, le où je vous parle se semblera peuplé de schizophrènes... mais en raison inverse de l'emploi prêté d'ordinaire à ce mot. Si la réalité est fausse autour de moi, elle n'es est pas moins authentique quand je reste dans mon lieu: en quoi la sorte d'hallucinose qui me saisit est un état qui m'absorbe complètement — car si le temps est aboli, tous les temps son adjacents — et transporté au gré d'une situation intemporelle... je me vis tel que si le songe m'avait pu donner le change."
Pierre Klossowski (entretiens avec Jean-Maurice Monnoyer)

"... une sorte de psychologie dans l'espace... puisque la mémoire, en introduisant le passé dans le présent sans le modifier, tel qu'il était au moment où il était le présent,  supprime précisément cette grande dimension du Temps suivant laquelle la vie se réalise."
"... ce tintement rebondissant, ferrugineux, intarissable, criard et frais de la petite sonnette qui m'annonçait qu'enfin M. Swann était parti et que maman allait monter, je les entendis encore, je les entendis eux-mêmes, eux situés pourtant si loin dans le passé."
Marcel Proust, le narrateur

"Revenir, l'être de ce qui devient."
Gilles Deleuze
"... ce oui-là ne s'efface plus... Le temps n'apparaît que depuis cette singulière anachronie..."
J. Derrida (L'Ouia), Joyce gramophone
"Ici est donc à côté, là est aussi ici... il n'y a pas de temps, il n'y a que des dates, il n'y a qu'une seule mer toujours à elle-même survivante."
Hélène Cixous (Portrait de Jacques Derrida)
"... eu tenho agora minha infância mais do que enquanto ela decorria... Joana também podia pensar e sentir em vários caminhos diversos, simultaneamente."
Clarice Lispector
"Preso, ainda, a classificações tradicionais, Gullar considerava o tempo e a sintaxe como 'fatalidades' a que nos devíamos curvar, sob pena do silêncio e do caos."
Augusto de Campos (Memória e Desmemória)

"A caça aqui e agora — constituída como dois acontecimentos paralelos que se refletem um no outro e que compreendem, cada um, duas dimensões paralelas que se refletem uma na outra — pode ter sido sonhada por um dos caçadores. Ela é, nesse caso, um acontecimento paralelo a outro transcorrido em outro momento e lugar. Ou seja, a caça-e-seu-outro tem ela mesma seu outro, deslocado no tempo e no espaço. Tempo e espaço obedecem, assim, ao mesmo princípio de paralelismo, colocando um problema particular e mais complexo — o tempo, particularmente, já que se permite desconhecer a simultaneidade."
Tania Stolze Lima (O Dois e Seu Múltiplo
"El Universo es una esfera cuyo centro está en todas partes y la periferia en ninguna [Nicolas de Cusa]: ¿podría extenderse al tiempo está concepción tradicional del infinito? ¡Qué mejor símbolo del fin de la confusión entre irreversibilidad y degradación! Reencontraríamos aqui la flecha del tiempo asociada a la inestabilidad y a la probabilidad, y ella no significaría ya evolución hacia la muerte térmica, hacia el fin de toda historia, sino posibilidad de un eterno volver a comenzar. El Universo sería creación continua, sucesión infinita de Universos que nacen por doquier y van hacia el infinito... No podemos pensar en un nacimiento absoluto del tiempo... la cuestión de saber «cuándo empezó el tiempo» escapa más que nunca a la física, como sin duda escapa también a las posibilidades de nuestro lenguaje y nuestra imaginación... El tiempo «absoluto» que precede a toda existencia y todo pensamiento nos sitúa así en ese enigmático lugar que reaparece una y otra vez en la tradición filosófica, entre el tiempo y la eternidad."
Spanish translation (by Javier García Sanz) from the end of chapter 7 of Prigogine & Stengers' Entre le temps et l'eternité [it is an ill-fated instance of the malignancy of this world that it happens I don't have the French original of this book, & shall therefore by my ashes stand forever indebted to the heroine soul (chaste star!) who peradventure send me, with all her fraternity, the French original of just this choicest morsel so I could definitely pen it down here as a seasonable kindness to our whole parish!]
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It is said that Lévi-Strauss considered the work of Viveiros de Castro as highly innovative. In Castro’s From the Enemy’s Point of View we read sentences like this: “The invariant of the Tupi-Guarani cosmological structure is the metaphysical encompassment of the domain of the social by the macrodomain of the extrasocial [nature and supernature]. The interior of the socius and its values are subordinated to exteriority” (86-87). They challenge traditional sociological and anthropological views, which tend to understand ceremonies and rites as merely reflecting stable structures internal to a given society.
But on the whole how far does Viveiros de Castro's so called perspectivism go?
His conception of exteriority seems frustrating when compared to, for instance, Blanchot’s. This is a problem that goes beyond sociology and anthropology, and might have passed somewhat unnoticed even to Lévi-Strauss. 
Is it legitimate to conceive of a radical exteriority while maintaining concepts such as presence, pure negativity, and a conception of time which is, in the end, linear?*** 
In key moments of his argumentation, Viveiros de Castro does appeal to concepts such as, on the one hand, “full presence” (210), “presence and plenitude,” and, on the other, “pure negativity,” even if he insists that what is important is the “middle term” between them (252). It is true that he characterizes becoming as “neither identity nor contradiction,” and calls it “an ontological restlessness” (270). But the fact that he doesn’t subordinate “the future to the past” (as Florestan Fernandes does) (278) means very little. In the end, he does something worse: he subordinates future and past to the vortex of the present, to the “temporal cycle of vengeance.” The latter is for him “an absolute present” (291), in which one is “effectively present” (292, original emphasis), and whose aim is the “future” ahead (306).
To put it bluntly, this is time conceived linearly and chronologically, as an arrow. In Deleuze, for instance (and differently), we would have Aion besides Chronos, and they both make up a kind of primordial chaos (Logique du sens, p. 13-14, 77-78). This chaos is made of residues, corporeal and incorporeal. Displayed against this scenario, the Araweté’s notion of specter (ta’o we) (which suffers a “double corruption” transforming itself into a “dead opossum” after the corruption of the cadaver) seems rather something “corporeal” — Artaud’s corps-passoire — than the incorporeal of ancient Stoicism as suggested by Castro (From the Enemy’s Point of View 205-206). The latter is similar only to Araweté’s notion of celestial soul. But Castro says that when the celestial soul is finally cannibalized and scalded by the gods in the sky, “mourning” comes “to an end” (214). Then where are the residues? Without residues, what would be the meaning of the living as “middle term”? 
If my reading is fair, Castro’s “anthropological perspectivism” turns out to be flawed. What he calls “affirmation” (294) cannot be equated to Nietzsche’s. Castro’s conception is much more Hegelian (or rather romantic) than Nietzschean or truly post-structural. 
There is, however, another Brazilian intellectual who confronted similar problems more effectively: Haroldo de Campos — he understood the thought of authors such as Derrida much more thoroughly. In books such as O Sequestro do Barroco na Formação da Literatura Brasileira, Haroldo truly challenged the basis of Brazilian traditional conceptions of culture, which have always depended on a linear conception of time and history (as elsewhere in the Occident). In anthropology, Aracy Lopes da Silva is also worth mentioning. In the end of her book Nomes e Amigos: da prática Xavante à uma reflexão sobre Jê (1986), she engaged with concepts such as "difference" and "alterity" in a quite singular way. One of her main references was Pierre Clastres' conception of "primitive war" (fundamental also to Deleuze and Guattari's "Traité de Nomadologie" in Mille Plateaux). Her ideas, however, were not fully developped.
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***Questions such as this emerge many times in the work of Derrida. I will quote just one passage which I have not referred elsewhere: "C'est cette evenementialité-là qu'il faut penser mais c'est elle qui résiste le mieux à ce que on appelle le concept... on ne la pensera pas tant qu'on se fiera... à une temporalité historique faite de l'enchaînement successif de présents identiques à eux-mêmes et d'eux-mêmes contemporains" (Spectres de Marx). 

*****See also: 
And also:

Friday, August 19, 2016

Facebookers, Pokemongoers & Francophonie (Der Rest is bloss die Menscheit)

Art Prints










Tree and Scaffolding at Rheims, A/Z's photograph available with other drawings and photographs at Fine Art America; 
Aleppo Media Center Image's Boy in the Ambulance;
Alexandr Sokurov's La Francophonie, 2016;
Basilique Saint-Remi, Reims, picture by A/Z (for more pictures, see heres); 
"The Seven Commandments of Fake News," (Adam B. Ellick, Adam Westbrook and Jonah M. Kessel, The New York Times);
Paul Virilio's interview (France Culture);
Henri Guillemin sur l'affaire Dreyfus (1965); 
L'Affaire Duhamel: un vrai cas de "biberon" [fake news diffusée par la droite brésilienne pour combattre Lula et Haddad à la présidentielle de 2018], et il doit y en avoir d'autres surtout parmi ces décadents de l'université et même ceux qui se disent de gauche, comme Duhamel (une gauche alignée sur des perspectives comme la défense de Cuba); ces gens à l'intelligence un peu au-dessus de la moyenne (et qui ne sont que des prédateurs capables de calculer) dominent mainte fois les milieux bureaucratiques, comme l'université; cela n'a rien à voir avec les vrais penseurs (qui excellent en France, mais là encore ils se comptent sur les doigts, et ont généralement un rapport beaucoup plus distant avec l'académie), comme Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva; l'affaire Duhamel est très représentative du cas typique et pitoyable des professeurs arrogants, qui finalement (incapables de penser) ne produisent rien d'original par eux-mêmes, et qui se considèrent comme des sommets de l'intelligence parce qu'ils humilient les étudiants, manipulent les collègues et se disent détenteurs de la vérité dans certaines niches: bref, l'essence même de l'intelligentsia académique bien établie, généralement applaudie et félicitée!!! 
Les francs maçons et le pouvoir (documentaire Stéphane Khémis & Gabriel Le Bomin/France 5);
Mossad, l'histoire sécrète d'Israel (documentaire Christophe Widemann/France 5); 
BBS, prince d'Arabie (documentaire Antoine Viktine/Le monde en face) [video became unavailable at Youtube]; 
Les Aigles Foudroyés (documentaire Frédéric Mitterrand/France 2);
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"Mas um campo de concentração não é diferente."
Gerald Thomas, Entre Duas Fileiras
"Suddenly, you find yourself thinking about ozone depletion, chiggers, and dead babies."
James St. James
"... il aurait vu dans l'électricité de nos machines à écrire à la fois une exténuation de l'électricité vivante et une violence retournée contre elle..."
Jacques Derrida, Artaud le Moma
"... à l'inverse de l'ère industrielle des fabriques et des usines analysée par le marxisme, on n'exploite plus, on expulse et on extermine de plus en plus fréquemment..."
"Signalons enfin que, de retour des camps de concentration, Primo Levi passait des heures devant l'écran de son ordinateur sans écrire, ou encore au chevet de sa mère et qu'il attendait, la nuit, la libération du sommeil, en répétant devant ses proches, juste avant de se jeter dans la cage de son escalier pour se donner la mort: 'C'est pire qu'à Auschwitz.'"
Paul Virilio

"Mon petit frère était mort pendant la guerre du Japon. Il était mort, lui, sans sépulture aucune. Jeté dans une fosse commune par-dessus les derniers corps."
"... son visage, ce trou, au bout du corps sans yeux..."
"J'ai vu le ciel avec le soleil à travers les arbres, eux aussi tués dans les champs, mutilés, les arbres noirs."
Marguerite Duras (Écrire)
"Uno de sus orgullos era haber combatido de marzo a mayo de 1871 con los comuneros de París por la libertad del género humano y haber sido testigo del genocidio de treinta mil hombres, mujeres y niños perpetrado por las fuerzas de Thiers."
Galileo Gall/Mario Vargas Llosa (La gerra del fin del mundo)

"Equipped with a team of Orientalists (and sitting on board a flagship called the Orient), Napoleon used Egyptian enmity towards the Mamelukes and appeals to the revolutionary idea of war against Islam... Napoleon tried everywhere to prove that he was fighting for Islam; everything he said was translated into Koranic Arabic, just as the French army was urged by its command always to remember the Islamic sensibility. Compare, in this regard, Napoleon's tactics in Egypt with the tactics of the Requerimiento, a document drawn up in 1513—in Spanish—by the Spaniards to be read aloud to the Indians: 'We shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses, the King and Queen of Spain, may command; and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey...'"
Edward Said
"Es ist nicht unmöglich, daß ihre Mutter, meine Urgroßmutter, unter dem Namen 'Muthgen' im Tagebuch des jungen Goethe vorkommt. Sie verheirathete sich zum zweiten Mal mit dem Superintendenten Nietzsche in Eilenburg; an dem Tage des großen Kriegsjahres 1813, wo Napoleon mit seinem Generalstab in Eilenburg einzog, am 10. Oktober, hatte sie ihre Niederkunft. Sie war, als Sächsin, eine große Verehrerin Napoleon's; es könnte sein, das ich's auch noch bin."
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
"Hat Kant sich nicht gefragt, ob es eine Begebenheit gibt, die gar nicht anders erklärt werden könne als durch eine moralische Anlage der Menschheit, sodass mit ihr, ein für allemal, die 'Tendenz der Menschheit zum Gutten' bewiesen sei? Antwort Kants: 'das ist die Revolution'. Der fehlgreifende Instinkt in allem und jedem, die Widernatur als Innstinkt, die deutsche décadence als Philosophie — das ist Kant!"
Nietzsche, Der Antichrist
"While the American Revolution had produced a republic, and a founding constitutional document, strong and flexible enough to survive until our own times, the French Revolution of 1789 had soon collapsed into terror and then Bonapartism. What explained these very different trajectories? Arendt's essential line of argument was that, in France, 'political' questions to do with freedom receded from the public stage to the degree that they were overtaken by utopian 'social' demands to end poverty.  In the process, the very meaning of 'freedom' had been turned on its head..." 
Peter Baehr

"A comment is essential at this point. We have learned by experience that in some circumstances unconditional pacifism can be a more than questionable, a treacherous and pernicious affair. For years pacifism hung over Europe and the world as nothing but the mask for fascist sympathies. True friends of peace felt that the peace of Munich, which the democra­cies concluded with fascism in 1938 allegedly to spare the na­tions of the world the horrors of war, was the nadir of Euro­pean history."
Thomas Mann (Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Light of Recent History/translation by Richard and Clara Winston)
"Negotiations between Hitler and the British and French Prime Ministers, Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier, resulted in the infamous Munich Agreement (September 1938), which allowed the annexation of Sudetenland to Germany. The Allies did not respond either to Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939 or to Mussolini's invasion of Albania on 7 April... The partition of Poland had been prepared in August, when the German and Soviet Foreign Ministers, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, signed a non-aggression pact... Stalin's opportunistic collaboration [with Hitler] was underlined in the Red Army's simultaneous attack on Finland. The Soviet invasion of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia followed in June 1940. This coincided with the crushing force of German Blitzkrieg in the west. In April [it] swept through Denmark and invaded Norway, where they met their first serious resistance. In May they pushed through the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg; they entered France on 10 May... On 14 June, Paris."
Matthew Gale

"... les sots sont en tout pays les plus nombreux; nul doute que, vivant en Allemagne, les sots allemands défendant avec sottise et passion une cause injuste ne l'eussent irrité; mais, vivant en France, les sots français défendant ave sottise et passion une cause juste ne l'irritaient pas moins. La logique de la passion, fût-elle au service du meilleur droit, n'est jamais irréfutable pour celui qui n'est pas passionné. M. de Charlus relevait avec finesse chaque faux raisonnement des patriotes."
Marcel Proust (le narrateur, Le Temps retrouvé)
"The war against Hitler, or rather the mere readiness to make war against him—which would have suf­ficed—was desired by those friends of peace. But when we see—and how can we not see?—the destruction, ruin, and cor­ruption engendered by even a war waged for humanity, the demoralization, the unleashing of every brutal, selfish, and  antisocial instinct..."
Thomas Mann (Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Light of Recent History/translation by Richard and Clara Winston)

"Avec ce qu'un Michelet (par exemple) dit de la patrie, de la nation et de la France, l'universalisme allégué ne peut s'accorder qu'à la condition d'une logique exemplariste dans laquelle nous avons reconnu la stratégie profonde de tous les nationalismes, patriotismes ou ethnocentrismes."
"France, affranchissement, fraternité."
"J'entends ce mot français au sens de la chasse, là où acharner revient à disposer un leurre de chair. Ce livre s'acharne lui-même auprès de la chose nommée France."
"... la fraternité n'est universelle que pour être d'abord française..." (demi-ironique)
Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l'amitié (1994)
"Il a été privé de sa liberté pendant neuf ans où il a été interné dans les asiles d'aliénés français."
Paule Thévenin

"Le sens du jeu peut se traduire sans doute, dans la paraphrase d'autres langues; mais non l'économie formalisante du glissement entre les deux homonymes dans cette langue dont on pourra dire ici qu'elle est, singulièrement, la mienne ('tout' comme adjectif pronominal indéfini et 'tout' comme adverbe, autre comme adjectif pronominal indéfini et autre comme nom). Voilà une espèce de schibboleth, la formule secrète dans telle ou telle langue..."
Jacques Derrida (Donner la mort)

And also (clipping):
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Below you find a series of articles on (1) Glenn Greenwald's decision to close Snowden's archive & what seems to be (2) a very controversial figure behind The Intercept: Pierre Omidyar. I'm not in a position to endorse or discredit the information provided in these articles, because I've not the necessary know-how to evaluate them. I'm listing them here in an attempt to expose the level of sheer insanity attained by contemporary misinformation and "cultural" wars, in which ordinary people (me included) are treated as nothing but easy prey for big corporation interests and unscrupulous egotistic predators & social climbers alike. In what matters Glenn Greewald, what I can say is that I never really understood what looks like the totally indiscriminate support he's given to the Worker's Party here in Brazil, in the middle of the many corruption scandals and ecological disasters (such as the Mariana mining collapse). He could certainly have better contributed to raise the level of the political debate instead of simply helping strengthening the mad ideological polarization that led straight to the 2018's election of a Bolsonaro. To boot, disguised behind what only sounds like an emancipation fuelling discourse, he has also assumed what could be called actually a patronizing attitude towards the Brazilian people, as if the country's most recent history was shaped by nothing but manipulations of the "time-honored" media The Intercept's destine is supposedly to overthrow:
About Omidyar, the following article says: 
"As Yasha Levine, the author of Surveillance Valley: The Military History of the Internet, told MintPress: 'This kind of multi-level approach — combining a journalism startup on the front-end with a behavior profiling risk management system on the back-end — is very much inline with Omidyar’s vision for how to use technology to manage society — and make money in the process. Central to most of his investments is the use of user profiling and behavioral tracking to manage and run all areas of modern life: journalism, transportation, banking and finance, and government administration. To him it’s not just about running a single service, but integrating things together to give technocrats, business executives and government officials a God’s-eye view of the world — to manage and control society more efficiently.'"
"Omidyar’s enthusiasm for American empire appears motivated as much by his own bottom line as it is by ideological zeal. Having earned his fortune through eBay and Paypal, the billionaire is seeking to rope the cash-dependent global poor into a system of profitable electronic transfers through an initiative called “Better Than Cash Alliance.” According to Omidyar Partners, “The organization focuses on shifting away from cash payments in order to improve the livelihoods of those in low-income areas who lack access to more efficient digital payments.” His partners in this faux humanitarian alliance include noted altruists like Mastercard and Visa Inc., as well as USAID."
- Pierre Omidyar's Influence Empire: How One of America's Premier Data Monarchs is Funding a Global Information War and Shaping the Media Landscape (Alexander Rubinstein & Max Blumenthal, MintPress, 02/18/2019);

Postscript on the demonic & the newfangled: 


There is something Carl Jung called "shadow," and also something Johann W. von Goethe called "the demonic." Unfortunately or not, idealists are very rarely successful. But some of them (perhaps of a very special subclass) will be able to accomplish one or another stunning thing. When this happens, not only they but everyone around will have to face what is still more unexpected: their own very personal, idiosyncratic shortcomings, of which they (and their followers) are usually completely unaware. So goes the boring old tale of the human condition & contradiction. It's paramount to good literature, and not necessarily a cliché. It doesn't say people don't deserve what is stunning. Only that they are not automatically up to the challenge lying always a few little steps further than they imagine. What do hackers and political activists nowadays read (not even Animal Farm)? How do they read? What movies do they see, and how do they see them? It is interesting to note that in earlier generations (I mean the 70s, the 80s), supposedly less engagé, cutting-edge inventive people were at least more wary & less prone to idolatry. It wouldn't be fair to say they didn't accomplish anything. Would anyone in sane mind trust these people for a revolution?! It would certainly end  up even worse than the Russian of 1917.

"Appelbaum says that he has stopped drinking and begun therapy. “I have obviously seriously hurt people’s feelings unintentionally and I deeply regret this,” he said. He hopes to focus on his doctoral work on cryptography in the Netherlands, claiming he can’t return to America because he could be investigated over his work with WikiLeaks and Der Spiegel about classified US surveillance."
"Violet Blue claims that it was Assange and Snowden who helped to elevate Appelbaum to a position of power, whether or not they knew about his behaviour. “We need look no further for proof that hero worship and the cult of belief is pure poison,” she writes. “This didn’t happen because we’re broken as a hacker culture, or because we’re hackers and thus too undeveloped to comprehend empathy.”"
Power, secrecy and cypherpunks: how Jacob Appelbaum ripped Tor apart (Anna Catherin Loll, The Guardian 10/11/2016)

***What should have been the ultimate piece on Glenn Greenwald (& still much more on Assange): 
"What’s astonishing about their ascent to heroism is the breadth of their support. The embrace of the antiwar left and the libertarian right was to be expected. But effusions of praise for the leakers can also be found throughout the liberal establishment... Contrary to [Snowden's] claims, he seems to have become an anti-secrecy activist only after the White House was won by a liberal Democrat who, in most ways, represented everything that a right-wing Ron Paul admirer would have detested... In several cases over a five-year span, Greenwald represented Matthew Hale, the head of the Illinois-based white-supremacist World Church of the Creator, which attracted a small core of violently inclined adherents... Greenwald’s other clients included the neo-Nazi National Alliance, who were implicated in an especially horrible crime. Two white supremacists on Long Island had picked up a pair of unsuspecting Mexican day laborers, lured them into an abandoned warehouse, and then clubbed them with a crowbar and stabbed them repeatedly. The day laborers managed to escape, and when they recovered from their injuries, they sued the National Alliance and other hate groups, alleging that they had inspired the attackers. Greenwald described the suit as a dangerous attempt to suppress free speech by making holders of “unconventional” views liable for the actions of others... most of [Greenwald's] writings, his critique of America abroad was congenial both to the isolationist paleo-Right and to post–New Left anti-imperialists... Along those lines, Greenwald found common ground with the upper echelons of right-wing free-market libertarianism... When bloggers confronted Greenwald about his associations with libertarians, the darling of the netroots and MSNBC left angrily batted the claims away as distortions. He need not have reacted so forcefully. Accused of working for Cato, for example, he might simply have said that he believed in addressing any organization that wanted to hear from him and left it at that. Instead, Greenwald attacked his critics as “McCarthyite” purveyors of “falsehoods, fabrications, and lies”... In 2010, Greenwald began attacking the Obama administration from the left on a variety of domestic issues, attacking Wall Street corruption, opposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and decrying inequality. Yet even as he insisted on his left liberalism, he remained a steadfast promoter of Ron Paul—“far and away the most anti-war, anti-Surveillance-State, anti-crony-capitalism, and anti-drug-war presidential candidate in either party.” (After Paul’s son, then senatorial candidate Rand Paul, questioned the Civil Rights Act, Greenwald agreed with criticism that the remark was “wacky,” but insisted that the real “crazies” in American politics were mainstream Democrats and Republicans.)... During his political pilgrimage, Greenwald became consumed: For him, the national security apparatus is not just an important issue; it is the great burning issue of our time... In the wake of the WikiLeaks frenzy, Assange often tried to clarify where he stood politically. His simultaneous embrace of leftist icons such as Noam Chomsky and right-wing libertarians seemed to indicate that he was open to ideas from either end of the political spectrum, so long as they were directed against authoritarianism. Finally, in 2013, Assange proclaimed, “The only hope as far as electoral politics presently ... is the libertarian section of the Republican Party”... Yet even that declaration was misleading. In practice, Assange has a history of working closely with forces far more radical than the Republican Liberty Caucus. Late in 2012, Assange announced the formation of the WikiLeaks Party in Australia. It had been expected that WikiLeaks would ultimately throw its support to the Green Party—especially after the party’s National Council voted in favor of such a move. Instead, WikiLeaks aligned with a collection of far-right parties. One was the nativist Australia First, whose most prominent figure was a former neo-Nazi previously convicted of coordinating a shotgun attack on the home of an Australian representative of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. Members of the WikiLeaks Party blamed the flap on an “administrative error”; mass resignations from the party’s leadership followed. Those who quit cited a lack of transparency in the party’s operations, and some pointed to remarks Assange had made blasting a Green Party proposal to reform Australia’s harsh treatment of asylum seekers... Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange have largely set the terms in the debate over transparency and privacy in America. But the value of some of their revelations does not mean that they deserve the prestige and influence that has been accorded to them," "Would You Feel Differently About Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange If You Knew What They Really Thought" (Sean Wilentz, The New Republic, 19/01/2014);

***Ultimate piece on Snowden and his ring (written by a woman):
"[In five years since Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance], we’ve learned much more about how Big Tech was not only sharing data with the NSA but collecting vast troves of information about us for its own purposes. And we’ve started to see the strategic ends to which Big Data can be put. In that sense, we’re only beginning to comprehend the full significance of Snowden’s disclosures... This is not to say that we know more today about Snowden’s motivations or aims than we did in 2013. The question of whether or not Snowden was a Russian asset all along has been raised and debated... [NSA's PRISM, whose documents were leaked by Snowden and disclosed by Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman] secured cooperation between the Internet companies and the NSA at the point when an individual suspected of involvement in terrorism had been targeted and the NSA wished to retrieve that suspect’s messages from the companies’ servers. Many Americans will still feel that this program constituted an unwarranted breach of privacy, but what PRISM does not do is vindicate the idea of a “deep state” operating entirely independently of the rule of law. Although this might seem like a fine distinction to some, it is an extremely significant one. But the narrative of deep-state lawlessness was too appealing... Assange’s allies, Milne included, have made clear that their allegiance doesn’t lie with liberal democracies and their values. They have taken sides with authoritarianism in their fight against the hypocrisy of liberal democracies... Assange, a former libertarian, has called Russia under Putin “a bulwark against Western imperialism”... For his part, Greenwald has repeatedly, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, decried as Russophobia the findings that Putin ordered interference in the 2016 US presidential election—even appearing on Fox News to do so. The very term “Russophobia” obfuscates the distinction between Vladimir Putin’s regime and Russia; the two clearly can’t be identified with one another... The distinction between left and right, he argues, will increasingly be replaced by the opposition between people who are pro-establishment and anti-establishment. But being anti-establishment is not a politics. It defends no clear set of values or principles. And it permits prevarication about the essential choice between criticizing and helping to reform liberal democracy from within or assisting in its demise. It encourages its partisans to take sides with a smaller, authoritarian state in order to check the power of the one whose establishment it opposes... In their book Red Web: The Kremlin’s War on the Internet, the Russian investigative journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan recounted the experiences of human rights activists who were summoned via an email purportedly from Snowden himself, to a meeting with him at Moscow airport when he surfaced there with Sarah Harrison, to find they were joining the heads of various pro-Kremlin “human rights” groups, Vladimir Lukin, the Putin-appointed Human Rights Commissioner of Russia, and the lawyers Anatoly Kucherena and Henri Reznik. It was clear to the independent activists that Kucherena had organized the meeting... So whether we trust [Snowden] matters. It matters whether we view him as a bad actor, or as a well-intentioned whistleblower who has shown bad judgment, or as someone who has allowed himself to become an unwitting pawn of the Russians... In a 2016 lecture by video-link at Fusion’s Real Future Fair, Snowden discouraged his audience from pursuing the legal and political remedies that liberal democracies offer... If there’s one thing Greenwald, Assange, and their followers got right, it’s that the United States became a tremendous economic and military power over the last seven decades. When it blunders in its foreign or domestic policy, the US has the capacity to do swift and unparalleled damage. The question then is whether this awesome power is better wielded by a liberal-democratic state in an arguably hypocritical way but with some restraint, or by an authoritarian one in a nakedly avowed way and with no restraint. In the five years since Snowden’s revelations, we have seen changes, particularly the election of Donald Trump with his undisguised admiration for strongmen, that compel us to imagine a possible authoritarian future for the United States," "Edward Snowden Reconsidered" (Tamsin Shaw, The New York Review of Books, 09/13/2018);
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Encryption


Whatever the future may bring, as the encryption debate evolves, societies should resist jumping into opposing trenches. Instead, it is important to break the debate down into its component parts and, ideally, focus on data at rest—the most promising area for a more constructive debate, "Out of the Political Trenches:  Next Steps For Encryption Policies" (Tim Maurer, Arthur Nelson/Carnegie Europe);