bruno cuconato claro - entry no. 5 (on taussig / snowden / greenwald / poitras, et al.)

How atrocities committed by a rubber company in the deep colombian part of the amazonian forest in the beginning of the twentieth century relate to the revelations of digital surveillance by the american government one hundred year later is not easy to perceive.

Taussig's article is an inquiry into the power of storytelling as a tool to create “magical reality,” thus forming the necessary conditions to justify the perpetration of atrocities. Taussig also analyses the possibilities of countering a narrative discourse, specifically detailing where counterdiscourses can fail.

The guardian was the main medium through which Snowden's revelations about the NSA spread. This was done by means of Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists which Snowden most trusted (along with Laura Poitras.) Now Greenwald has created his own organisation, Snowden is exiled in Russia (a country which has a no cleaner file than the american one, when it concerns internet freedom,) but the NSA revelations are far from reaching an end. The US congress is turmoiled, and american relationship with several countries has been damaged. The consequences will probably affect internet governance, a subject which doesn't attract as much attention as it should.

After more careful consideration, relations between the Putumayo atrocities and the NSA revelations start to emerge. The surveillance and the terror don't share the same trigger (fight against terrorism and profit, respectively,) but they are similar in the fact that their initial objective was lost in a self-reinforcing mechanism contained in the narrative that validated the questionable means by which those objectives were to be attained. In the Putumayo case, profit could only be obtained by the means of cheap labour; as the natives did not have the capitalist culture and institutions that would make them work as they were required to, they had to be forced to work; as beginning-of-the-twentieth-century morality did not easily allow maltreatment of human beings, even if 'uncivilised' natives, they could only be abused if a justification to this moral breach existed; narratives already existent about cannibalism and native ruthlessness became more and more important to the perpetrators, justifying their own barbaric deeds; soon the narrative forces impelled torture from the “status of a means to that of the mode if not, finally, the very aim of production.”

Something very similar happened to the american war on terror, and not only in relation to the NSA. Stories about terrorists, imminent dangers, and religious radicalism rapidly drifted away from their basis in reality, and started being used as a means of political persuasion and moral justification, consciously or unconsciously – it does not matter, – and the power of the storytelling created a culture of terror that made torture, assassinations of innocents, and violations of individual privacy commonplace. It is interesting to notice that the latter, though arguably the minor problem, was probably the one which attracted more public and international outrage. As the guardian's article puts it, “what the revelations mean to you (my emphasis)” is what matters. Who cares about drones killing innocent people at a wedding in Yemen, or the systematic torture of untried suspects at legal no-man's-lands? Those realities are too far from the average western person reality to really cause a concern, or enough empathy.

In the end of his article, Taussig underlines the challenges that may trap counterdiscourses when trying to dismantle a culture of terror. A culture of terror is created and sustained by narratives, a form of “magical realism.” Taussig noticed that the Putumayo report and other counterdiscourses created an inverted version of the same fictionalized version of reality that the narratives sustaining the very culture they fought did. To put an end to this embroglio, Taussig recommends not falling into the dialectics of the manicheism characteristic of this fictionalized reality, but disrupting its “good-and-evil” logic. To disrupt the idealized fiction that humans employ as proxies of reality, or at least to make these proxies better approximations of reality, it is useful to consider the multiplicity of history as Tolstoy and Latour urge us, but also to understand the foucauldian gears that shape society, part of the microrelations of power being the stories humans tell each other.