poster

I pass this poster every Monday, in the building where I teach a class on Human Rights. Seeing it always induces a kind of cognitive dissonance, as my class is explicitly not a defence of human rights, but a critique. I happen to think that that’s the business of universities: critique, questioning, critical reflection.

Anyhow, the poster is an advert for UBC, featuring a solitary figure on a mountain top and with the slogan “Human Rights Defended… From here.” I have little idea what it’s supposed to mean, and there’s not a word of explanation either on the poster itself or anywhere on the UBC website. The image certainly doesn’t seem to have much to do either with the university or with human rights.

Any ideas?

charter

Rights are mainly a matter of declarations. They are, in short, the product of a speech act. Undeclared rights are not rights at all. Hence the history of human rights is also a history of their repeated enunciation and articulation, from the Magna Carta on. But a declaration also implies an audience, and a process of interpretation. Hence, alongside this history of speech acts is a parallel (parasitical?) history of interpretation and commentary. Often the modus operandi of that commentary is the laborious process by which an event is reconstituted and reimagined: What exactly did the framers mean?

And if a declaration is an event, an irruption onto the scene of political discourse (dated: 1789, 1948…), then usually interpretation is the province of an institution (a Supreme Court or similar), whose judgments may or may not come to be seen as events and so new declarations, that have in turn to be interpreted in subsequent institutional deliberations. Such is the temporality of rights discourse: the violent irruption of the event is followed by the (quite literally) stately progress of deliberation and interpretation.

But some events are less eventful than others. The “Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms” is, frankly, a bit of a damp squib. It comes late to the scene of rights declarations (which were piling up thick and fast by the middle of the twentieth century). Belatedness is not itself a curse: the more recent a declaration, the more likely it is to declare a new right, and thus to up the ante of the game of eventful articulation. The Canadian Charter, however, manages to be both almost entirely derivative and singularly Canadian at the same time.

The derivativeness is in the first instance linguistic. And I don’t merely mean the phrases (e.g. “the right not to be subjected to any cruel and unusual treatment or punishment”) clearly lifted from other, similar documents. More to the point, and despite being described as a document that articulates the values around which the Canadian people can unify, the Charter’s language is distinctly uninspiring.

It doesn’t help that the document’s very first clause is the famous “Limitations” clause that states that the rights that follow are “subject [. . .] to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” This may seem like an eminently sensible and pragmatic reminder that rights are mutually limiting: the right to free speech, for instance, is limited by the right to non-discrimination; hence bans on hate speech. But it sure takes the wind out of the Charter’s rhetorical sails.

Imagine the crowds that surged on Parliament Hill, urged on by the slogan “Fight for your Rights! Subject only to Such Reasonable Limits Prescribed by Law as Can Be Demonstrably Justified…” Actually, you can almost imagine an Ottawa crowd moved by such a slogan. Hence the distinctively Canadian tone of the Charter: so very sensible and self-limiting. Quite unlike the US Bill of Rights, for instance. And the Canadians not only begin with a “Limitations” clause; they also end with a “Notwithstanding” clause, which basically means that the Parliament or a provincial legislature can suspend almost any of the Charter’s provisions for (a renewable) five years.

In short, if every rights regime comes into being and operates between the twin pressures and temporalities of an insurgent event on the one hand, and that event’s institutional interpretation and assimilation on the other, it’s very clear to which of the two Canada’s Charter leans: it’s a tool of state management much more than it is the result of popular struggle. Its time is not that of revolution (still, by contrast, hard-wired into the US Bill of Rights or the French Declaration of the Rights of the Citizen) but of pacification.

And so no wonder that Harry Arthurs and Brent Arnold can conclude that the Charter is essentially useless:

Progress towards the vision of Canada inscribed in the Charter has generally been modest, halting, non-existent, and, in some cases, negative. What we claim is that the Charter does not much matter in the precise sense that it has not – for whatever reason – significantly altered the reality of life in Canada.

[. . .]

Canada’s political culture today is less vibrant, less democratic, than it was a generation ago.

[. . .]

The plight of Aboriginal peoples has not been much ameliorated, if at all. The project of multiculturalism, which is mentioned but not given prominence in the Charter, has seemingly gone off the boil. Immigrants – despite new guarantees of their legal and equality rights – seem to be having a tougher time integrating into society and the economy. (“Does the Charter Matter?” [Review of Constitutional Studies 11.1 (2005)]: 38, 111-112)

And why exactly has it had so little impact, or has what impact it has had been mostly negative? Essentially because it substitutes fictive abstract equality for real material differences. This, after all, is the fundamental move of all rights discourse, from the founding conceit of moving from natural to civil rights. Again, as Arthurs and Arnold put it:

If one were to establish a gradient that descends from the most affluent to the least affluent members of society, one would find at each point on that gradient not only lower living standards, but lower levels of educational attainment, health, personal safety and security, civic participation, political influence, and respect from police and other state officials. Moreover, as one descended the gradient, one would almost certainly encounter members of Charter-protected groups in ever-increasing numbers. [. . .] The best prospects for greater progress towards the equality values of the Charter would therefore be to redistribute wealth.

[. . .]

Of course, the Charter was not designed to transform Canada’s political economy. On the contrary, when it was adopted, its architects took considerable care neither to protect property nor to redistribute wealth. (113-114)

But is this not what all rights declarations do? It’s not merely that the Canadian Charter happens to be one of the least interesting and least effective instances of such rights discourse. It also demonstrates to us something shared by all such discourse. For it always ultimately is a matter of replacing popular struggle with bureaucratic institutions.

inscription

To return to my first post in this series… There I suggested that rights could be seen as “surfaces of inscription, sites within which the current balance of forces in a given struggle is marked.” I suppose I mean by this that rights discourse produces a series of texts within which can be read (albeit in coded form, perhaps) a history of struggle and repression. Those texts would include both rights declarations (the UN Declaration and so on) and also the reports produced by rights organizations (such as Amnesty).

Two issues therefore arise:

First, the mechanisms of encoding. These are perhaps successive. For instance, what happens as pain is expressed or transmitted first affectively (paradigmatically, in the scream; see John Holloway on this), then narratively (say, in testimonio), and then as a legal plaint (taking rights discourse to be a version of juridical deliberation)? How, in other words, is the discourse of rights produced? Looking at this would involve understanding the ways in which struggle and repression become encoded, enter into various types of representation. I think it’s out of a concern with this process that Deleuze argues for the importance of jurisprudence:

Creation, in law, is jurisprudence, and that’s the only thing there is. So: fighting for jurisprudence. That’s what being on the left is about. It’s creating the right.

One would have therefore also to think further about the theory of representation at work here. Deleuze argues in terms of “creation” rather than a perhaps more customary emphasis on the dislocation between referent and sign.

One would also consider all the various groups, institutions, and (in short) agencies in all senses of that word that contribute to the mechanics of rights discourse: the role of human rights groups, for instance; or the relays between international bodies such as the OAS or the UN; or the part played by truth commissions and the like.

Second, however, why think of rights discourse as the final text, as an end product? Indeed, though rights as often presented as goal as they are assumed as origin–hence the notion of “fighting for” or seeking to gain rights–it’s surely best to see them as an instrument, as one more cog or chain in a much broader arrangement. After all, does anybody really care about the right to (say) shelter, privacy, or free speech? No, they care for the achievement of those goals. In rights discourse, this is finessed as the distinction between an exercised and an unexercised right; but an unexercised right is dead, useless.

What then (and here I’m inspired by some discussion at Serena’s blog) of rights discourse as one part of a broader mechanism of social justice? Rights here (as Peggy implies) would be the abstract moment bridging two concrete practices: crime and its punishment.

A few concerns:

First, all this sounds worryingly dialectical, as the abstract universal mediates concrete particulars.

Second, would the above not also apply to law tout court? (What difference is there between rights and law? Are rights not just a (fictitious) model for an entire legal constitution?)

Third, such talk of mechanisms seems to obscure the importance of interpretation.

Fourth, we shouldn’t forget the sovereign instance (state or divinity, or even the idea of the human) that ultimately guarantees the possibility of any such mediation.

OK, for a moment there I thought I might be on the road towards salvaging rights, now as mechanism rather than discourse. Perhaps not.

But it might be worth figuring out how the machine of rights discourse functions, and how it compares with the machine of state power or sovereignty.

Reading about the 1954 Guatemalan coup, I’m struck by how much what the CIA cobbled together was a Heath Robinson contraption (Rube Goldberg machine for North Americans) constantly in danger of breaking down, but finally anchored by US President Eisenhower’s say so.

How different is that from (what would be more charitably described as) the network by means of which human rights abuses are charted, publicized, and acted against? I’m thinking here for instance of Amnesty’s decentralized collection of letter writers, assiduously (as I imagine them) sending postcards off to jailors and generals throughout the Third World. But again, does this network not also depend upon a sovereign instance as anchor?

aberrations

Marguerite Feitlowitz’s A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture examines the relation between language and state violence. In some ways it’s a companion piece to Diana Taylor’s Disappearing Acts, which analyzes a similar connection between performance and terror, also focussing on Argentina.

The New York Times has an online version of the book’s first chapter, whose title is likewise “A Lexicon of Terror”, and where we find her most sustained examination of the role of language under Argentina’s military regime of 1976 to 1983.

Since Orwell at least, we’ve been familiar with the concept that authoritarianism impacts language, bending it out of shape and introducing a whole series of figures and double meanings that violate common sense: war is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength. Doublespeak. And in “Politics and the English Language”, for instance, Orwell insists upon linguistic clarity as a remedy to political obfuscation: in so far as “the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language [. . .] one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy.”

But as Feitlowitz observes, while the Argentine junta made use of language’s slipperiness precisely in the service of something like Orwellian doublespeak (e.g., in a distortion of human rights discourse, “We Argentines are human, we Argentines are right”), they were also quite self-conscious and wary about the sign’s inherently arbitrary relation to its referent. In the words of Admiral Emilio Massera, with which Feitlowitz opens her chapter, “Unfaithful to their meanings, words perturb our powers of reason” (19).

So in that “the whole regime was intensely verbal,” as Feitlowitz contends, with its “constant torrent of speeches, proclamations, and interviews” such that “Argentinians lived in an echo chamber” (20), not only did the junta remake language, it also opened up the possibility that its own language could be turned against it. Indeed, this was (as Taylor argues) something that the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo realized: that they could take the regime’s rhetoric about the centrality of the family and women’s role as nurturers and guardians, and turn it against the practices that separated mother from child through kidnap and torture.

There are two possible positions: one insists on clarity and common sense against the obfuscations and euphemisms of overweening power; the other thrives on the fact that even the most powerful cannot fully control their language (or anybody else’s).

The problem is that Feitlowitz never fully chooses either one of these possibilities. And as such, she constantly falls prey to the worst of all worlds. Consider her chapter’s conclusion:

The repression lives on in [. . .] aberrations of the language, in the scars it left on the language. When a people’s very words have been wounded, the society cannot fully recover until the language has been healed. [. . .] When, like skin, the language is bruised, punctured, or mutilated, that boundary [between inner self and the outside world] breaks down. [. . .]

We must pay attention to this dis-ease, we must document its signs. We must make an artifact of this Lexicon of Terror, so that it will no longer be a living language. (62)

Here is a denunciation of language’s aberration expressed in the most aberrant of language. Is it not, after all, a form of “doublespeak” to use such a richly figural, metaphoric mode of expression as to refer to language’s “scars,” its bruises, punctures, and wounds? And while we’re at it, why does this linguistic cure depend upon killing a “living language”?

How far, after all, are we from the Argentine junta’s own metaphorical analogies, condemned by Feitlowitz, to the “cleanliness and health” that they propose to bring to an Argentina purged of political aberration (33)? If Massera is wrong to appropriate what Feitlowitz terms “Neo-Nazi ‘germ theory'” when he declares that “we must cleanse the country of subversion” (33), is it not equally problematic to portray language itself as a body whose sickness is to be cured or as a life that is to be euthanized . . . especially when it is metaphorical aberration that is to be purged, linguistic excess to be eliminated?

In other words, Feitlowitz uses metaphor to argue for de-metaphorization.

We should either use metaphor or denounce it. And if it turns out that we cannot rid our language of figures, then perhaps there’s a limit to the political blame we can pin on figuration per se. All the more so when we’ve borrowed our most powerful figures from those we claim to be condemning.

(Paul de Man’s “Semiology and Rhetoric” [JSTOR access required] has something to say about this, too.)

property

s0metim3s argues that

One has rights – or does not have them, as the case may be. One can be right, of course, but this particular formulation of the claim to legitimacy, this assertion of rightness, is not necessarily of the same register as an assumed, or claimed, legal or moral entitlement which might transform the circumstantial, concrete instance of being correct about this or that into having just claim or, more simpy put: of being right into having a right – which is to say, into a property. The language of rights is, in its grammar, the language of property.

It’s certainly true that the language of rights and the language of property overlap. But I’m not entirely sure that the two can be conflated so quickly. Or rather, it might be worth unpicking the differences that someone such as Locke (whom s0metim3s quotes) obscures.

So, yes, property discourse infiltrates rights discourse at almost every turn. The UN Universal Declaration, for instance, delcares in its first article that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towoard one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” And for “endow,” the OED gives “1 a. To give a dowry to (a woman) [. . .]; 2. To enrich with property; to provide (by bequest or gift) a permanent income for (a person, society, or institution).”

(Let’s hold off for a moment on the familial language of “brotherhood” and the innate connection between rights and reason.)

On the other hand, rights constitute a peculiar kind of property, if property they are.

First, in that (some?) rights are held to be, as the US Declaration of Independence puts it, “unalienable.” They are not to be bought and sold; they are innate, whether that innateness stems from the fact that they are natural, or from some legal or constitutional framework. Human, natural, and civil rights can all be considered “unalienable” from this perspective. They may be abrogated or abused, but they can never be taken away.

Yet, second, rights discourse also sometimes indulges in the language of alienability. Some rights can be won or lost; they are precarious or (again, from the US Declaration) need to be “secure[d].” In so far as we can be deprived of our rights, then it is simply not true for instance that (as the UN Declaration has it), “everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.”

So rights are at turns almost ontological, in that they are coterminous with existence: I am, therefore I have rights. And at other turns, they are a precious commodity, all too easily forfeited (if we do not act upon them) or lost (if we are deprived of them).

To what extent then can rights be exchanged? Social contract theory seems to suggest precisely such an operation, as natural rights are given up in favour of civil rights. But Spinoza (for instance) implies that in fact such rights can never be surrendered; indeed, that it is pure ideology to suggest so.

Do we have the right not to have rights? I suspect that this is what’s at issue when the state steps in to criminalize suicide or euthanasia, for instance. But then suicide, or self-harm of any sort, is rather a tricky issue for Spinoza, too.

Meanwhile, as to the slippage between “being right” and “having rights”: Marguerite Feitlowitz points out that the Argentine junta played out precisely such a game of words in the context of other games at the time:

This war of words culminated in a dramatic display in 1978, when the World Soccer Championships were held in Argentina. Taking advantage of their access, foreign journalists pressed the regime for information on reported disappearances, torture, and secret concentration camps. “What do you mean, ‘human rights’? the commanders fumed. “We Argentines are human, we Argentines are right.” The message was writ large on a huge banner in the reception area of Ezeiza, the international airport. Shiny decals with this slogan appeared in shop windows and offices, on private cars and taxi cabs. Employees at the Ministry of the Interior–who routinely shredded writs of habeas corpus–wore the decals and demonstrated in Plaza de Mayo. This group came face to face with another demonstration–parents, spouses, and children of desaparecidos who marched silently, wearing pictures of their loved ones and signs that asked ¿Dónde están? “Where are they?” The official reply? “We Argentines are human, we Argentines are right.” (A Lexicon of Terror 35-36)

Clarín has an article on this same campaign, “”Somos derechos y humanos”: cómo se armó la campaña”, and see also Rubén Morales’s “Somos derechos y humanos”. Morales also bears out Feitlowitz’s contention that public relations (PR) functioned for the Argentine military in the way that radio served the Nazis (41).

balls

The Secret Policeman’s Ball is back. After a hiatus of over fifteen years, the comic fundraiser for Amnesty International is returning.

The event was first organized in 1976, as human rights were high on the international agenda, thanks in large part to a series of military takeovers in the Southern Cone (Chile, 1973; Uruguay, 1973; Argentina, 1976).

In “Chase Heads Policeman’s Ball Bill”, the BBC quotes Amnesty’s UK director Kate Allen as saying “The reason we brought back The Secret Policeman’s Ball is that it’s never been more important to stand up for human rights. They are coming under threat in ways that we hadn’t anticipated.”

I take the return of this event as yet another sign both of a new era of rights discourse, and also of the distance between this era and the previous one.

We’re no longer, in fact, in an era of secret policemen, the leaden-footed apparatchiks of the Eastern Bloc or the national security state that could be so easily parodied by Monty Python et al. (A parody that no doubt drew on second world war folk memory, in which the dictator’s genitalia are offered up for derision.)

But what era are we in? And why did the previous rights discourse fail, it seems, so disastrously to anticipate it?