So when the photographer Allan Sekula claims, for instance, that “clearly archives are not neutral: they embody the power inherent in accumulation, collection, and hoarding,” he is really talking about our interpretations of archives. See Allan Sekula, “Reading an Archive: Photography between Labor and Capital,”in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (New York: Routledge, 2002), 446.
Of all documents and materials created in the course of business conducted by the United States Federal government, only 1%–3% are so important for legal or historical reasons that they are kept by us forever” →.
For example: “With its eminent scholars and world-renowned Library & Archives, the Hoover Institution seeks to improve the human condition by advancing ideas that promote economic opportunity and prosperity, while securing and safeguarding peace for America and all mankind” →.
Despite the wishes of the former dictator and his wife.
The “Great Firewall of China” is an all too obvious example of ideological bias, but at least the Chinese government is openly unapologetic about its comprehensive censorship program. Facebook claims in bad faith that “we as a company are neutral – we have not and will not use our products in a way that attempts to influence how people vote.” Quoted in Brandt Ranj, “Facebook promises not to use its product to influence the US presidential election,” Business Insider, April 15, 2016 →.
See, for example, the study “The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections” http://www.pnas.org/content/ 112/33/E4512.abstract. Facebook has recently been criticized for its ideological manipulation of “trending topics” and its blocking of WikiLeaks. See https://www.rt.com/news/3533 40-facebook-blocked-wikileak s-dnc/ and https://www.theguardian.com/ technology/2016/may/24/faceb ook-changes-trending-topicsanti-conservative-bias.
Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You (London: Penguin Books, 2011), 15.
Quoted in ibid., 8
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 194.
For the philosopher Thomas Nagel, objectivity as “objective ascent” is possible in stages, as some perspectives are obviously more objective than others. See Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Cristina Lafont, “Hermeneutics,” in A Companion to Heidegger,eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 265.
In Heideggerian patois: “Interpreting is a being which belongs to the being of factical life itself [Die Auslegung ist Seiendes vom Sein des faktischen Lebens selbst].” Heidegger, Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 12.
These prejudices are not only the ideas, beliefs, and reactions that we have learned, recited, and absorbed in and from the past. They are also informed by the future – how we understand things in the present is also influenced by our desires and aims for the future. As Heidegger puts it, “In interpretation, understanding does not become something different. It becomes itself … The latter does not arise from the former. Nor is interpretation the acquiring of information about what is understood; it is rather the working-out of possibilities projected in understanding.” Being and Time, 188–89.
Even those children who purportedly lived among animals learned a “way of doing things,” though for Heidegger, nonhuman animals lack an understanding of being (Sein), which is unique to humans.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, second revised ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004), 278, italics in original.
Being and Time, 213.
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 470.
Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 56.
Our conceptual vocabulary makes it possible for us to comprehend things in the world, but its limits (biases and preconceptions) can also restrict our understanding. A culture can be considered a linguistic interpretation of the world, and to grow up within this linguistic interpretation is to grow up in this world. Some cognitive scientists, such as Steven Pinker, argue that we do not actually think in different natural languages, but rather in a pre-cultural “mentalese” that is independent of words and spoken languages – some kind of syntax of brain states. See Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: William Morrow, 1994), chapter 3. Hermeneuticists focus on aspects of the cultural world; they do not claim that all thinking is performed in one’s native tongue, which is trivially false.
Being and Time, 194–95.
See Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
See Suely Rolnik, Archive Mania (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2012). Rolnik does not detail the prejudices, but instead only refers to such a “poetics.”
Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 32–36.
What was formerly despised as unholy, forbidden, contemptible, fateful – all these flowers grow today along the lovely paths of truth.” Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 252.
Alan Yuhas, “John Oliver presses Edward Snowden on whether he read all leaked NSA material,” Guardian, April 6 2015 →.
Luke Harding, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man, (New York: Random House, 2014), 127.
Stewart Baker, “As evidence mounts, it’s getting harder to defend Edward Snowden,” August 3, 2014, Washington Post →.
Joe Mullin, “In 2009, Ed Snowden said leakers ‘should be shot.’ Then he became one,” Ars Technica, June 26, 2013 →.
Harding, Snowden Files, 20.
Quoted in ibid., 104.
Quoted in Glenn Greenwald, “Email exchange between Edward Snowden and former GOP Senator Gordon Humphrey,” Guardian, July 16, 2013 →.
WikiLeaks homepage →.
Nick Davies, “Julian Assange profile: Wikileaks founder an uncompromising rebel,” Guardian, July 25, 2010 →.
Quoted in the documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, dir. Alex Gibney, Focus World, 2013.
So said a spokesperson for Sunshine Press, of which WikiLeaks is a project. Quoted in Akbar Shahid Ahmed and Dana Liebelson, “WikiLeaks’ Motivations Aren’t What You Think,” Huffington Post, August 3, 2016 →.
Sarah Harrison, “Exposing the secrets of unaccountable power,” Press Release for Deutsche Welle, July 2, 2014 →.
Evan Hansen, “Why WikiLeaks is Good for America,” Wired, December 6 2010 →.
Maximilian C. Forte, “On Secrecy, Power, and the Imperial State: Perspectives from WikiLeaks and Anthropology,” in Force Multipliers: The Instruments of Imperialism, ed. Maximilian C. Forte (Montreal: Alert Press, 2015), 213.
See Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 267.
All photos courtesy of the author, unless otherwise noted.