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SPECTACULAR RHETORICS
HUMAN RIGHTS VISIONS, RECOGNITIONS, FEMINISMS
By WENDY S. HESFORD
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4951-8
Chapter One
Human Rights Visions and Recognitions
Human rights defenders fight for international recognition and visibility in a global marketplace that tends to recast structural inequalities, social injustices, and state violence as scenes of individual trauma and victimization. Yet human rights advocates and scholars have not sufficiently considered what the status of visibility is in human rights advocacy, or how the moral vision of human rights internationalism becomes entangled with global capitalism and hierarchical structures of recognition and visual technologies to produce and regulate human rights subjects. Although visualism is implicated in the debates that have long occupied human rights scholars, such as debates over universality and cultural relativism, the field's embrace of an ocular epistemology (the seeing-is-believing paradigm) that heightens the salience of normative scenes of social and civic recognition (or misrecognition) warrants greater scrutiny. To gauge the political and ethical quandaries that shape human rights appeals and the entangled discourses of humanitarianism, global capitalism, and human rights, we need to investigate the underlying faith in vision and a dialectical politics of recognition, a faith manifested in our engagement with human rights subjects and the discourse about them.
The goals of this chapter are fourfold: (1) to interrogate the cultural and ideological work of spectacular rhetorics in perpetuating a dialectical politics of recognition, underwritten by trauma and subjection, in the history of human rights and its professedly egalitarian imaginary; (2) to explore the tension between humanitarian sensibilities and the enactment of human rights as a form of social criticism, particularly as that tension is manifested in scenes of suffering; (3) to complicate the ocular epistemology and seeing-is-believing paradigm of human rights advocacy by approaching spectatorship and witnessing as historically contingent rhetorical acts; and (4) to deliberate the potential of a differentiated politics of recognition or models of ethical exchange that move beyond recognition. Together these critical forays provide a new vantage point from which to engage the human rights paradox of an exclusive universality, as well as the rhetorical force of the visual field in the perpetuation of the normative assumptions to which human rights internationalism is tethered.
Human Rights Struggles for Recognition
It is ... an ongoing task of human rights to reconceive the human when it finds that its putative universality does not have universal reach. — Judith Butler, Precarious Life
The history of human rights can be told as a history of selective and differential visibility, which has positioned certain bodies, populations, and nations as objects of recognition and granted others the power and means to look and to confer recognition. As this history suggests, struggles for recognition are also struggles for visibility. Kelly Oliver, a philosopher and social theorist, argues that "recognition is a matter of seeing. The stakes are precisely the unseen in vision— the process through which something is seen or not seen" (2001, 158). Invoking visual metaphors to characterize empowerment (as visibility) and disempowerment (as invisibility), Upendra Baxi, a legal scholar, points out that, in effect, "the hegemonic function of rights language, in the service of governance ... consisted of making whole groups of people socially and politically invisible" (2006, 46). Here Baxi refers to the "modern" human rights paradigm and European modernity, which were characterized by the logic of exclusion, and the tradition of rights talk and the philosophy of natural law that emerged from the American and French revolutions (42). Both the European liberal tradition of thought and the criteria of individuation associated with Enlightenment rationality privileged the capacity to reason as the criterion for what it meant to be "human" (44). Only those viewed as possessing the "capacity for reason and autonomous moral will" were accorded the status of "fully" human beings; slaves, colonized peoples, indigenous peoples, women, children, and the "insane," marked as other and therefore as not fully human, were by definition not "considered worthy of being bearers of human rights" (ibid.). At the same time that the capacity to reason was differentially applied, so too was the dispersal of compassion. Western liberal philosophy of the late eighteenth century linked modern moral identity to the capacity to sympathize with distant others across boundaries of race, class, religion, gender, and nation—an attribute associated with the development of humanitarianism, and the secular universalism of liberal humanism (Hunt 2007; Nussbaum 1998; and Rorty 1993). Although humanitarianism emphasizes the alleviation of suffering and human rights focuses on the legal defense of violated rights, the two movements are not easily disentangled. Both share intellectual origins in liberal political philosophy and natural law thinking of the eighteenth century. In recent years, human rights and humanitarian law have again converged, both in their shift away from the state as the bearer of rights and toward individual victims and in their representation of distant scenes of suffering characterized by the projection of a hierarchy of victimhood, recognition, and action (Wilson and Brown 2009, 5–6).
Baxi highlights the contrast between the modern human rights paradigm, with its exclusionary criteria, and the contemporary paradigm, which, he contends, is based on principles of inclusion (2006, 46). The contemporary paradigm refers to rights specified in international law in the period following the Second World War. No longer exclusively at the service of imperial conquests, as Baxi claims, the contemporary human rights principle of radical self-determination took precedence in the recognition of the equal worth of all human beings (46). According to Baxi, the contemporary human rights paradigm should not be seen as separate from the struggles for self-determination and national independence among European colonies or the social movements of the post–cold war era, which included civil rights, women's rights, indigenous rights, gay rights, refugee rights, and, more recently, disability rights. Sociopolitical struggles and national liberation movements, however, as Reza Afshari (2007) maintains, have had only a modest impact on the evolution of the concept of human rights as interdependent and indivisible. 4 Single-cause movements contributed to the creation of a culture of public engagement, but they did not first and foremost draw attention to the interdependence of human rights. It was only when single-cause movements began to articulate interconnections among causes that the idea of universal human rights took hold (34–35). Yet like Afshari, Baxi is careful to point out the paradoxes of contemporary human rights, including their fragmented universality, which can be seen through the contradictory role of the capitalist state, a site that both "negotiate[s] conflicts between different factions of capital" and reconciles "antagonism[s] between labour and capital" (2006, 38). Baxi's efforts to pluralize the history of human rights are both celebratory and discerning. Though his inclusion/exclusion heuristic has limitations, Baxi rightly points out that the authorship of human rights expanded in the contemporary period— an authorship "marked by intense negotiation between the practitioners of human rights activism and of human repression" (47).
Aware of the political struggles against Western imperialism by excluded groups in both Western and non-Western contexts, postcolonial and feminist scholars have taken issue with the notion that human rights are inherently "Western values" (Narayan 1998, 97). Gayatri Spivak argues that the very notion of "human rights" implies a corresponding doer of "wrongs"—usually in the global south (2003, 169). She maintains that it is "disingenuous to call human rights Eurocentric. This is not only because, in the global South, the domestic human rights workers are, by and large, the descendants of the colonial subject, often culturally positioned against Eurocentrism. It is also because, internationally, the role of the new diasporic is strong, and the diasporic in the metropolis stands for 'diversity' 'against eurocentrism'" (171). Makau Mutua, a professor of law and the director of the Human Rights Center at the State University of New York, Buffalo, has been a strident critic of the Eurocentricity of the history of human rights and the contradictions that drive the international human rights project (2001, 203). Given that human rights norms are identified with political democracy, the rights that have been privileged are those "that strengthen, legitimize, and export the liberal democratic state to non-Western societies" (Mutua 2001, 215). Thus, despite the professed egalitarian imaginary of human rights, non-Western sociocultural practices have been its prime targets; the "messianic ethos" of human rights is pitched to "help those who cannot help themselves" (231). Preeminent among historical accounts of human rights are patrimonial narratives of human rights traditions as "gifts of the west to the rest" (Baxi 2006, xiii). The inability of the United States to recognize its own violations of human rights—American nationalist rhetoric often assumes that all violations take place elsewhere—is a classic example of this messianic ethos. The scene of recognition, wrapped in American internationalist gift-giving rhetoric, appears to enable mutual recognition, but this scene often does little more than consummate an unequal exchange. "Although the human rights movement is located within the historical continuum of Eurocentrism as a civilizing mission, and therefore as an attack on non-European cultures," Mutua argues, "it is critical to note that it was European, and not non-European, atrocities that gave rise to it" (2001, 210).
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was framed as a direct response to the incontrovertible evidence of Nazi atrocities—the witnessing of "barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind" (preamble). Echoing the sentiment of the UDHR, Michael Ignatieff, the present leader of the Liberal Party in Canada, argues that the "human rights instruments created after 1945 were not a triumphant expression of European imperial self-confidence but a war-weary generation's reflection on European nihilism and its consequences" (2001, 4). In Human Rights, Inc., the comparative studies scholar Joseph Slaughter similarly argues that the UDHR tacitly acknowledges the failures of the Enlightenment, which the spectacular horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust made evident, but that it also "recuperates from the natural law tradition ... the promise of Enlightenment still to come" (2007, 15). The UDHR unleashes a teleological narrative that converts the violence of genocide into "an instrument of historical reason"— the rationality of the law (Zizek 2005, 1).
The Universal Declaration and the Paradoxes of Recognition
The UDHR and its formation of the universal human body articulate the theories of recognition and personhood at the root of these paradoxes, and the separation between the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) demonstrates the gap between the economic and political dimensions of justice that continues to afflict human rights advocacy. With the ICCPR and the ICESCR, both of which were adopted by the UN in 1966 and entered into force in 1976, the UDHR, adopted by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948, constitutes the core of international human rights law. The three documents are collectively referred to as the International Bill of Human Rights. Representatives from industrialized Western nations and Eastern/emerging economic nations were involved in drafting parts of the UDHR. While the discursive construct of a single "conscience of mankind" may have erased the differences—ideological, cultural, religious, and so on—that marked the creation and signing of the declaration, many of the participants from non-Western countries, like Charles Malik of Lebanon and P. C. Chang of the Republic of China, had been educated in the West and were well versed in Western philosophical traditions.
Notwithstanding a UN General Assembly declaration that the two groups of rights should remain "interconnected and interdependent," the covenants were split in response to pressures from the West. The conflicts over the framing of the UDHR and the two covenants illuminate the tensions among the leading powers and their competing national interests. Whereas Western members sought a nonbinding resolution that emphasized civil and political rights, third world and Eastern bloc members fought for the inclusion of economic, social, and cultural rights. The debates stretched over two decades, amid cold war antagonisms, decolonization movements, and shifting power balances in the UN, including on the UN Human Rights Commission, which was dominated by Western members well into the 1960s. After the inclusion of newly independent third world countries (sixteen African countries joined the UN in 1960) and the formation of the nonaligned movement, however, the Human Rights Commission shifted its focus to issues of racism and colonialism, as illustrated by the passage of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples in 1960 and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in 1965 (Koshy 1999, 6–7). These developments responded to the insufficiency of the UDHR and put into play a differentiated politics of recognition in human rights arguments that moved beyond philosophical universalism and its transcendence of the particularistic. A provisional universalism emerged, which was framed through the identity-based discourse of cultural difference.
Prior to the Second World War, only states, not individuals, had rights in international law. However, the UDHR recognized the rights of individuals regardless of status: "Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status" (article 2). Although the declaration has no binding juridical power, its emphasis on universal individuality empowers citizens to protest against state abuse (Cubilié 2005, 29). Foundational to the UDHR is the idea that all members of the "human family" have a "natural" tendency toward nonviolence (33). Article 1 states: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood." But, as the scholar and UN consultant Anne Cubilié points out, the declaration "erases struggles over what, if anything differentiates one person from another from the moment they are born" (2005, 33), as well as the repressive cultural and state structures and state violence predicated on such differences and often justified on their basis (31). In other words, the universal body defined in the declaration renders certain bodies and scenes of subjection visible, and others invisible (30).
Cultural theorists of citizenship, the nation-state, and global civil society (Benhabib 2004 and 2006; Berlant 1997; Bernstein and Naples 2010; Grewal and Kaplan 1996, 2001; Lister 2003; Ong 1999; Puar 2007; and others) have argued that even as the universal body imagined in nationalism is abstracted, it refers to a specific kind of body (white, male, heterosexual, and propertied). The universal appeal of a human rights internationalism based on UN documents and treaties involves another paradoxical particularity: the distance between the articulation of universal rights and their sociopolitical recognition. For instance, although article 1 of the UDHR accords human rights to all human beings, these rights must be publicly claimed. The UDHR confers universal subjecthood upon every human being, but it implies that this identification—the incorporation of the subject into the regime of rights and citizenship—has yet to be attained. Indeed, the visualization of suffering, or the human rights spectacle, is often meant to trigger this sought-after incorporation. First, the declaration assumes an a priori universal subject that both preexists and comes into being—that, in Slaughter's words, "becom[es] what [it] already is by right" (2006, 1415). It is particularly important to consider this narrative of personhood because human rights law essentially makes its appeal through the recognition of person hood, which, as this study shows, is dependent on hierarchical structures of suffering and the visualization of social injustices as scenes of individual trauma and victimization—including the depiction of the nation as victim, as seen in the discourse surrounding the U.S. War on Terror.
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Excerpted from SPECTACULAR RHETORICS by WENDY S. HESFORD Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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