Arquivo para a ‘Social Network’ Categoria
The golden book
11
Mar
Written in 1962 and considered one of the great novels of the 20th century, the 
Golden Book (O Caderno Dourado in Spanish, in the photo), tells the story of Anna Wulf, a writer immersed in a personal crisis who decides to tell her story, from the black book for his literary life when he lived in South Africa, the red book on his left-wing political activism, the yellow his emotional life and the blue his daily life.
Doris Lessing, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature at the age of 85 (2007) when she expected nothing more, herself made a joke about it, but the recognition was deserved and little is known today of this consequent feminist and who refused to adhere to fashions and conjunctures followed his struggle.
Themes such as friendship, motherhood and sexuality have much deeper tones and outlines in this author, in novels such as “As grandmothers” (2007) where old age is seen in a different light, especially for women, or about politics in its book “The sweetest dream” that she suggests as an autobiographical one, and that reflects deeply on her humanitarian vision.
But if I had to highlight a novel by her, my favorite of the youth “Prisons we choose to live in” (1987), it attacks in a subtle and extraordinary way the question of political rhetoric (or what was decided to be politically correct) where it instigates individuals to come out of social constraints and build a better world, in fact and above everyday fashion.
He does not fail to attack in this novel ignorance and the lack of personal responsibility in the desire for applause and mere repetition of mottos, how current his speech would be, anticipating the times, because it was precisely because of the excess of rhetoric and the absence of concrete acts that we fell into pitfalls and we help contemporary ignorance and demagogy.
His sentence that seems to sum up his thinking was: “I cannot and will not hurt my conscience just to adhere to the fashion of the day”, and he said this not for conservatives, but for the apparently advanced positions of his time that were not directed towards attitudes concrete.
Doll´s house
10
Mar
Written in 1878 and built in 1879, the Norwegian novel by Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is one of the first manifestations of the exclusion of women
in a dualistic and macho society, made for the theater had its first staging in the Kongelige theater, Copenhagen, Denmark , already in 1879.
The romance caused quite a stir at the time, however Ibsen was from a wealthy and respected family in the city of Skien, Norway, and is considered one of the founders of modernism.
The setting is the Christmas season, and the couple Nora and Torvard Helmer are getting ready for the party, and he comments on the expenses of the woman, which she treats with nicknames that reduce her childishness: “lark”, “squirrel” and “ my little girl ”like a bad boy who still knows little about adult life.
In Picture two filme from the 70´s, Jane Fonda and Claire Bloom interpret Nora Helmer.
In the first act a widowed woman Cristina Linde and Dr. Rank arrive, who go to the office to talk to Holmer while Cristina who is a former colleague of Nora’s, talks about the death of the husband of Cristina, Holmer’s former colleague. While Holmer goes to the office with his friend, Nora and colleague Cristina talk about their personal lives.
Nora says that her husband will receive the position of manager in an investment bank and this will bring stability to the family, while Cristina also treats her as a “grown child”.
The doorbell rings again and the maid announces Mr. Krogstad, who comes to talk about business with the bank in Helmer’s new position, Cristina recognizes him as having “business of all kinds”, Dr. Rank leaves the office and comes to the room and also knows Mrs. Linde.
When Nora is alone with Mr. Krogstad who had made him a loan, and Mr. Holmer did not know, about the period when the family was in bad finances, Mr. Krogstad tells him that he knows that her father’s signature as guarantor it was falsified because it was 3 days after his death, and here the novel enters its plot.
Cristina actually had an affair with Mr. Krogstad and she can help Nora, resuming the relationship with Krogstad, he sends the promissory note to Holmer but had already sent a letter saying of the loan that his wife had made with him by forging her father’s signature.
The ending is surprising, Holmer opens Krogstad’s letter that tells the “secret of the loan”, then he receives the promissory note and tears it up, but reconciliation with Nora was already impossible because he had said harsh words about her loan.
And in the end Nora leaves, leaving them with her children, whom he said he had no capacity for and educating them, undoubtedly a shocking novel for the time, and which received harsh criticism.
Women and new media
09
Mar
The women’s day was yesterday, the prospect of a non-sexist society is very distant, even in European countries I contacted with sadness that sexism is still
a general culture, for example, harassment in France has high rates and in Portugal there are recent cases , where even a Supreme Court judge expressed his machismo in a case of domestic violence that he judged.
Wikipedia is the 5th.
The most accessed site in the world, it has more than 6 million entries, and despite having problems with editing and corruption in its entries, which is treated but can go online and cause confusion, its importance is undeniable, and denying it is not living the present reality.
New media is no different, Wikipedia the 5th. most read site in the world, it has recently been reported that the majority of women influential in scientific investigations are ignored by the site.
The article written by James Vicent in August 2018 in The Verge Magazine, says that 82% of the biographies are written about men, cites the example of Teresa Woodruff, a scientist who had no entry on Wikipedia (now has), and was named one of the most influential people in investigations and Artificial Intelligence by Time magazine in 2013.
Another influential researcher cited is Jessica Wade, a physicist at Imperial College London who wrote Pineau’s new entry, a system called QuickSilver, and spoke about Wikipedia:
“… it is incredibly biased and the under-representation of women in science is particularly bad”.
The article focused on AI research and also cited robotics researcher Joële Pineau.
However, new media have given women power and a voice too, it is undeniable that a number of excluded social groups, cultures almost disappeared, and many minorities now have a voice thanks to new media.
In social media media, facebook and instagram, there are countless cases of exposure of sexist images and content, which are not always denounced and punished for offensive practices
Powers and the Other
28
Feb
There is something beyond the will to power, yes there is a non-being, which does
not depersonalize or imply a loss of identity, but in dialogue with the Other, with the one who is not my mirror.
The affirmation, the empowerment of people and groups in logical closings of identity, are neither original in the sense of preserving the dialogue with cultural traditions, nor are they in fact power because it implies submitting the Other that is one to some identity that is not his.
Thus, the true ontological identity, contrary to the logic that is individualistic or closed in groups, we often criticize the individualism of the Other because we do not admit its original identity (that which comes from races, cultures and traditions) and ultimately we do not admit the your Being, and to admit it you need a non-Being, that is, to see the Other as he is.
The powers in modernity have grown because of the impositions that the laws of the State, the rules of conduct and what has historically been called “Contract” which is nothing but making the right to conscience something that is subject to the rules and laws of the State. It is not about anarchy, rules of social coexistence that existed since the primitive man who was already known originally lived in groups: in caves, nomads or established in territories.
What leads to violence is to always submit the Other to our own will, our cultures, looking at the Other as less, less cultured, less “evolved” or another justification for not understanding and respecting different cultures, beliefs and ethnicities, so violence arrives.
The cult of the State, Hegel went so far as to say that it was eternal and it is not, many have changed throughout history from the Greek City-State to modern democratic societies, now in a new turmoil.
The biblical passage that the “devil” offers Jesus earthly powers and he rejects is this (Mark 4: 8-10): “again the devil took Jesus to a very high mountain. He showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and said to him, “I would give you all this, if you kneel before me, to worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Go away, Satan, because it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and you will worship Him alone´”.
Coronavirus, euthanasia, media and power
27
Feb
We have already pointed out the power of new media, the concept of psychopower
was also explored by Byung Chull Han, we wrote a post about it, but now we are back to biopower.
As Foucault thought, biopower has two distinct forms: one called anatomical-politic of the body and another of population biopolitics, the first are disciplinary devices responsible for extracting the productive body from the human body, by controlling time and space, within institutions (see how many do this, including educational ones) and the second way is to regulate populations by making birth rates, migration flows, epidemics and increasing longevity useless.
See discussions of the corona virus, migrations in Europe and longevity problems in the social security of the elderly, but now the perverse case of “assisted death” that avoids spending on the elderly and allows them to die “assisted”, of course the electric chair also has assistance , but it is for criminals, at least supposedly, because there are mistakes.
The coronavirus threatens to get out of control and the power controllers are frightened, they might think a few, perhaps most of them poor, will die, but that is not the case, it affects everyone, in Iran even a deputy health minister is sick, and several events are threatened, some have already been canceled and tests for the Olympics are already threatened and may even be canceled.
Biopower, therefore, is out of control and power itself can suffer from it, stock markets fall, economies collapse, tourism and travel fall, in short, biopower also has limits, but both it and psychopolitics are still mostly in the state control.
Social networks, and not always their media form networks, these can lead new powers and empowerment of groups, cultures and ethnicities that are under the tutelage of the States.
An incomplete ontology: the affirmation of Being
21
Feb
The Wheel of Fortune is chance because the logic of laissez faire, chance brought to
the economy, is also the logic of the affirmation of Being, in the classic sense; Being is and Non-Being is not, there is no becoming.
Non-Being is also Being, the affirmation, the will to Power, takes with it the logic of war, dualism, Manichaeism and its destiny is war, the difficulty of understanding the Other, the dialogue made as a form of hypocrisy , because in the end, it is the negation of the Other and the affirmation of Being, in the logic “we have the truth”, even if it is said in a religious way, it is its negation.
The impossibility of coexistence, from where physical violence arises, even psychological and moral violence, the unconscious desire to demoralize and undermine the Other, which is in this non-Being logic, and thus the moment that passes is lived in a false way, as fleeting and with the sense of maximum affirmation of the Being.
It seems crazy to say that non-Being is also, but it is precisely in its exercise that we deny war, we deny conflict as necessary, we make dualism become sincere dialogue and we can enter the logic of the Other and discover a complement of Being, while not-Being.
To affirm that the Non-Being is destroys the logic of power, exclusion, conflict, because it allows the Other to exist, denies psychopolitics because there is no need for the “psychic” oppression of the Other, to affirm the Same, the mirror, even which exercised collectively, is a selfish knot and tied exclusively to its own power and pleasure.
So say contemporary speeches about philosophy, which fill audiences and praise philosophers and eloquent religious: “you came to win, assert yourself, say you are the best”, etc.
The complete ontology is also opposed to religious fundamentalism and the Pharisaic, because it is also exercised as a non-Being, says the evangelist Mateus on the Master’s teaching to his disciples (Mt 5.38): “You have heard what has been said (yet the it is in our day): I look for another and tooth for tooth !, But I say to you: “do not face that it is evil” On the contrary, if someone slaps you on the right face, it also offers you the left! ”, here it is the “hidden” logic of non-Being.
Happiness and idealism, between subjects and objects
18
Feb
The development of idealistic thinking, the strongest and most profound of
modernity, gave man a sense of dominance not only over nature, but also over his own possibilities and the reach of his will.
So the exploitation of natural resources, now with signs of exhaustion, also the exploitation of peoples and labor forces made human undertakings take off and now intending to conquer planets and the universe, but we discovered the human limits: desires, powers and wars.
The first and the main one is the finitude of life, even the oldest cultures always elaborated some eschatology about the previous and future life of humanity, modernity meanwhile tried to exploit its finitude to the fullest, what counts is the maximum happiness in short life for all of us, exploring it to the fullest is enough.
But idealism pointed out limits, if it is an unfinished project or if we have already plunged into another project, late modernity or postmodernity does not matter, the essence of this project was finitude, and what was called enlightenment, happiness, will and freedom it showed not only finitude, but also the monstrous aspects of this conception: absence of imagination (the subjectivity said of this way of thinking), the human and natural unbalance of forces, and the absence of peace.
The idealistic building built a society full of objectivity, of wonderful constructions, from the reach of the productive forces almost until their exhaustion, but war and cultural, religious and mainly ideological hatred, a fundamental part of this building.
Separating the human into two pieces, to later search him, subjectivity and objectivity, was nothing but a monumental building that disregarded the human essential: the absence of forms of happiness that contemplate everyone and the search for solidary means of power.
It is not that God died, but that we killed him, if there is no divine bond between men, he can never exist transcendently, in fact, idealistic transcendence is nothing other than the separation between subject and objects, unified by this fallacy of objectivity.
Without recovering real dreams, real happiness, and the social means for this, we sleepwalk in the dark, as stated by Edgar Morin.
The importance of Droysen’s legacy
17
Feb
We stated last week that both the perspective of Droysen’s Hellenism (he coined the term) and the perspective of the true meaning of his story were broader,
long before Gadamer’s criticisms of “romantic” historicism, this author who was a student of Hegel , had already done so and with much property because in addition to being a student, he entered the concept that Hegel is for modern philosophy its founder.
Johann Gustav Droysen (1808-1884) questioned the principle of historicity, and, long before his time, questioned historians about the “scientific” foundations of a certain perspective and relativism, as well as indirectly questioning Dilthey in an attempt to use history to support the Sciences of the Spirit.
Droysen in his Compendium on History (Grundriss der Historik) that was not suitable for History, since it pretends to be science, to borrow without a method from another perspective of knowledge, which is natural science, even if as an “example”.
The solution presented by him, similar to that of Gadamer, synthesized in the methodological notion of Investigative Understanding (forschendes Verstehen), aimed to give History the possibility of an autonomous science, so for him there is something that precedes the explanation x understanding dualism, which is the history, what we called last week the “form” of thinking.
His 1857/1858 compendium of history (Grundiss der Historik) is available in Spanish (1983) and Italian (1989) versions, still in Portuguese.
Of particular interest, at least for me, was Chapter 3, which deals with the hermeneutical problem of understanding, which gives a sense of the applicability of its method.
The link that we can and should make with the moral question, from the previous topic, can be found on page 386 of her work Teologia dela Storia (Italian translation):
“… we need a Kant, who critically examines not the historical matter, but the theoretical and practical movement before and within history, and who demonstrates, like anything similar to the moral law, an imperative category of history, the living source from which the historical life of humanity flows. ”(DROYSEN, 1966, p. 386)
Droysen observes in what he calls “Systematics” three types of ethical communities: “the natural communities”, “the ideal communities” and “the practical communities” (figure above), and relates to them from history, said thus: “ours systematic resulted from the notion that the historical world is the ethical world, but while conceived from a certain point of view; because the ethical world can be considered under other points of view … ”(Droysen, 1994, p. 413).
Its becoming, therefore, is far from the Hegelian dialectic, but at the same time it dialogues with it.
DROYSEN, J. G. (1966) Teologia dela Storia. Prefazione ala Storia dell´Ellenismo II – 1843. In: Istorica. Lezioni sula Encilopedia e Metodologia dela storia. Trad.: I. Milano – Napoli: Emery.
_______. (1994) Istorica. Lezioni di enciclopédia e metodologia dela storia. Trad. Silvia Caianiello. Napoli: Guida.
In-formation and modern state
12
Feb
It is impossible to think about the modern state, without thinking about its laws and the social contract that is established from them, and it is not by chance that they arise after the Gutenberg press (and the book).
One can think in an equally naive way that this is just theory, it is easy to demonstrate 
that it is not the form of action of the polis, it is impossible to think without the Greek polis, and the thoughts ranging from the pre-Socratic to the modern contractualists : Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and the Swiss (he was not French) Jean Jacques Rousseau.
The in-formation of the modern state comes from the basic idea of these thinkers is that the relationship between rulers and governments must be established in the form of a contract, and that they argue in the background is that man is the wolf of man Thomas Hobbes, man is determined by the social relationship John Locke, this is born good and the environment shapes it, and man is a good savage that the environment has corrupted, Rousseau’s thought.
What some contemporary authors will say is that these forms, or these rules of social domination, have collapsed, whether due to the emancipation of the spectator as advocated by Jacques Rancière, or due to the failure of the rules of the human park as explored by Peter Sloterdijk, of course there are others possible interpretations, like the conservative in fashion, resume the solid state.
The Oscar of the Parasite
10
Feb
I was convinced that the Academy would give this year the Oscar to the Joker, although
it never admits for political reasons, it seems that some foundation (or several) lost has made us return to nationalist and authoritarian values that generally lead to autocracies and dictatorships .
Differentiating autocracy differs from dictatorship, when power (Kratos) is exercise by itself (self) means power by power, while dictatorship is the denial of democracy, and what emerged in the contemporary world is a mixture of the two people, in free elections .
The award-winning Joker is a good image, it is reasonable to give the Oscar for best actor, although the character is a pathological mixture of mean ingredients, with the nomination of 14 categories was already a sign of a certain “veneration” for the film, that not is to resulted.
I remember that The Wicked (1950) and Titanic, in addition to the recent La la Land had 14 nominations.
Two awards given, either by exclusively artistic criterion (forgetting ethics and politics), would be only an actor but also won more 2 categories.
I had decided not to comment, but the nomination of Dois Papas (by Brazilian Fernando Meirelles) and the controversial documentary Democracy in vertigo, about what I say here, went from the opposite hand of the Joker, Two Popes received the consolation prize for adapted script.
I leave my protest, no doubt 1917 (3 figurines) has great qualities, who watched Parasite (won 4) the film almost hypnotizes us and Once upon a time in Hollywood (3 figurines) deserved more, I am surprise for better actress Renée Zellweger.
Last as animation the statuette went to Toy Stories which I think is deserved.
