refusal, composition, and subjectivity

“Social composition and the formation of revolutionary subjectivity can be explained neither by the idealist hypostasis of a human nature to be realized through historical action nor by the analysis of the implicit contradiction in the structure of productive relations. Neither the presupposition of a humanity needing to be redeemed, nor the analysis of capital are sufficient to understand what happens on the scene of 20th century history, on the stage of working class struggles and capital’s restructuring.

We need to adopt the point of view of labor in its most advanced manifestations, it is necessary to assume the refusal to work, in order to understand the dynamics both of productive transformation and of political revolt. When we do that, we can finally see that social composition is in constant transformation, altering the productive, technological, economic, and political contexts. The motor of this constant transformation is the dynamic of subtraction of lived time from the wage-relation.”

Bifo, The Soul at Work, 59.

the politics of human migration: states, borders, enforcement practices exam reading list

Giorgio Agamben, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

———, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 2008).

———, trans. Kevin Attell, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

———, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Didier Bigo, “Immigration Controls and Free Movement in Europe,” International Review of the Red Cross 91(875), September 2009: 579-591.

———, “Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease,” Alternatives 27(Special Issue), 2002: 63-92.

———, “Ethnicity, State, and World-System: Comments on the Ways of Making History,” International Political Science Review 19(3), 1998: 305-310.

———, “Detention of Foreigners, States of Exception, and the Social Practices of Control of the Banopticon,” in Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007): 3-34.

Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild, Controlling Frontiers: Free Movement into and within Europe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2005).

Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010).

Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

Kitty Calavita, Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Howard Campbell and Josiah Heyman, “Slantwise: Beyond Domination and Resistance on the Border,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 36(1), 2007; 3-30.

Mathew Coleman, “Immigration Geopolitics Beyond the Mexico-US Border,” Antipode 39(1), 2007: 54-76.

———, “Between Public Policy and Foreign Policy: U.S. Immigration Law Reform and the Undocumented Migrant,” Urban Geography 29(1), 2008: 4-28.

Michael Collyer, “In-Between Places: Trans-Saharan Transit Migrants in Morocco and the Fragmented Journey to Europe,” Antipode 39(4), 2007: 668-690.

———, “Migrants, Migration and the Security Paradigm: Constraints and Opportunities,” Mediterranean Politics 11(2), 2006: 255-270.

———, “Secret Agents: Anarchists, Islamists and Responses to Political Active Refugees in London,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28(2), 2005: 278-303.

Galina Cornelisse, Immigration Detention and Human Rights: Rethinking Territorial Sovereignty. (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 2010).

Catherine Dauvergne, Making People Illegal: What Globalization Means for Migration Law (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Josiah Heyman, “Entrapment Processes and Immigrant Communities in a Time of Heightened Border Vigilance,” Human Organization 66(4), 2007: 354-360.

Jef Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU (New York: Routledge, 2006).

Jennifer Hyndman, Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

Alison Mountz, Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

Jennifer Ridgley, “Cities of Refuge: Immigration Enforcement, Police, and the Insurgent Genealogies of Citizenship in U.S. Sanctuary Cities,” Urban Geography 29(1), 2008: 53-77.

Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

Michael Samers, Migration (New York: Routledge, 2010).

Saskia Sassen, A Sociology of Globalization (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007).

———, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

Monica Varsanyi, “Immigration Policing Through the Backdoor: City Ordinances, The ‘Right to the City,’ and the Exclusion of Undocumented Day Laborers,” Urban Geography 29(1), 2008: 29-52.

William Walters, “Secure Borders, Safe Haven, Domopolitics,” Citizenship Studies 8(3), 2004: 237-260.

 

human rights as event

I gave this talk to about 60-70 second year students in the OSU Mount Scholars program yesterday, 3/2/11.

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Imagine:

Major world events beyond individual and small group control prompts an exodus of a minority population from one geographical location into continental Europe. This group is met with hostility – they are asked to give up their religion and culture. When they don’t respond by enthusiastically changing the things that make them a distinct people, small bands of organized thugs begin burning their homes and destroying their businesses. When things get really bad, the minority group engages in small-scale rioting, further  fueling the image of them as a criminal, outcast people infecting the social body. Eventually, they are rounded up and put in detention camps, some are deported, and others are imprisoned.

[Show of hands] How many of you might agree that I am describing Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s?

You are all correct. How many of you know that I am also describing France in 2010, or with the change of a few details, the United States or Australia? Clearly, there are differences between the way modern Western countries deal with problems of citizenship, immigration, and deportation and the Nazis. But the formal similarities are hard to ignore, and immediately bring us into the realm of ethics. What is the proper justification for imprisonment and deportation? Is it moral to single out an ethnic or cultural minority for such policies? When do national interests win out over concerns of human dignity, and when do questions of human rights triumph over national (or international) interests?

The fundamental problem that confronts us when discussing human rights is that it has become so ingrained in the way that we think that we often cannot imagine that Western countries are guilty of violating them all the time. It is something we tend to think happens “out there,” in places like Darfur, Burma, China, or Afghanistan. But our tendency to “Other” the violation of human rights is precisely what the very notion of human rights was designed to combat.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, however, so let me back up.

I’ll start with a story. Well, I’ll get to the story, but I should start instead with some history:

Around the year 1000, a group of people left an area of Northwest India and began to move Westward. By the middle of the millenium, this group was firmly established in what we know of today as the European Union – notably, the countries of Germany, France, Spain, and a little later, England. Due to their darker skin and strange cultural customs, they did not fit in well in Europe. Eventually a name developed for these people that we are all familiar with today: Gypsies. This title, a shortened version of an older mis-identification, a catch-all term for the entire Orient, comes from “Egyptian.” Some of this minority group self-identified as Gypsy, others called themselves Travelers, others didn’t have a term to describe themselves at all. Today we call Gypsies by their ethnic identifications – typically Roma or Romani, one distinct ethnic group, or another, the Sinti.

This group lived a tenuous existence in Europe for a very long time. England, for example, had laws against consorting with Gypsies and frequently deported anyone suspected of being a Gypsy – in the 1600s. [Mind you, this is a significant fact, since the notion of deportation didn’t really exist as such, because the notion of a stable territorial state was only just beginning to develop.] Gypsies lived on the margins of European life for centuries: they lived in mobile caravans, not necessarily by choice but because they were usually run out of wherever they tried to settle. [Interestingly, several cultural forms we tend to associate today with European cultures had their origins in Gypsy culture - most notably is flamenco, a dance we usually associate with Spain.]

Gypsies were seen as the first immigrants in Europe, and I use the term “immigrant” very consciously. “Immigrants” did not really exist the way we know them today until the beginnings of industrialized society, where mass exodus from one place to another began to be seen as unnatural, or driven by something other than fleeing war or famine (as a rule). With industrialization rose another phenomenon, the solidification of borders and the development of systems of  border control. Only then did we get “immigrants.” Gypsies, however, were always seen as outsiders who had no permission to be, well, just about everywhere.

Gypsies were blamed for all sorts of social ills, and were the sources of many legends. Gypsies were at times associated with the onset of plague or other epidemics. They were associated with criminality; worse, they were deemed incurable criminals, the very worst of the worst. These stereotypes persisted for centuries, culminating in the 1940s.

Everyone knows about the Holocaust, I assume, and the 6 million Jews killed in camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, and many other places. I wonder if you know that Gypsies were also the target of a genocidal campaign as well during the Final Solution. While it has been harder to document the disappearance of Gypsies during the Third Reich, it is estimated that at least 250,000 were killed. As a proportion of the population this was higher than any other targeted social or ethnic group in Europe except the Jews.

The Holocaust came to symbolize all that was wrong with the modern conceptions of rights based on citizenship or membership in a nation-state (which I will discuss a bit later). In the wake of this crisis of fantastic proportions, a series of international or supranational instruments were created to hopefully prevent the wholesale slaughter of ethnic minorities, political undesirables, or other targets of systematic marginalization and dehumanization.

I wanted to spend some time on this history because it should help us recognize the humanitarian and rights crisis that occurred last year in France.

So, finally, I get to my story:

In July of 2010 the French police shot a young Romani man to death. The French authorities claimed that the 22-year-old Luigi Duquenet did not stop his car at a police checkpoint, and in the process of running the barricade knocked over a gendarme. The gendarmes, a division of the French police services, opened fire and killed Duquenet. In response, dozens of Roma rioted in the small city of Saint Aignan, wielding hatchets and iron bars as they confronted authorities at a local police station.

The Roma who rioted in 2010 were not unjustified in their displeasure. Racial profiling by the police, draconian laws against the ability to gain lawful employment, and continued social and cultural alienation has made life hard for the Roma in Europe generally, France specifically. This shooting seemed to be the last straw. Like many Western states currently, however, the situation was not met with introspection or the affirmation of the post-war regime of human rights, economic liberalization, and multiculturalism. Instead, President Sarkozy’s government soon responded with a “crackdown on illegal camps,” claiming that the camps were “sources of illegal trafficking, of profoundly shocking living standards, of exploitation of children for begging, for prostitution and crime.” The crackdown was ostensibly aimed at all illegal encampments in France, but in practice and policy targeted the Roma specifically.

As several scholars have pointed out over a number of years, most Roma in the European Union are citizens of the countries in which they reside, including France, and live in permanent housing, not in camps or caravans; however, a minority of Roma are recent arrivals from Romania and Bulgaria who do not always appear ‘normalized.’ In the twenty years or so following the destruction of the Berlin Wall, there was an influx of Romanian and Bulgarian Roma to France, Germany, and Great Britain; after Romania and Bulgaria’s entry into the European Union in 2007, this number increased even more.

Sarkozy has argued that the expulsions were to be “voluntary repatriations,” but as numerous media and non-governmental organization accounts have shown, many Roma have been ‘agreeing’ to leave France quite literally as their makeshift homes are bulldozed to the ground  or wheeled away by contracted companies . Voluntary expulsion has included a plane ticket to Romania or Bulgaria and 300 euro per adult and 100 euro per child. Part of this process included the identification of ethnic Roma by the state, their arrest, detention in camps, and for many, voluntary and involuntary deportation.

The controversy has raised numerous questions about human rights, citizenship, and immigration. The European Union is, literally, founded upon declarations of the free movement of goods, free movement and settlement of Member State citizens, and the protection of human rights at the expense of absolute sovereignty. The Roma, being citizens of a Member State and a minority ethnic group having experienced years of documented prejudice, expulsion, and genocide, were cast as immigrants in a place which, arguably, they had every right to be.

How do we understand this? What is going on between the levels of state and citizen, of international law and national law?

So, tonight, I would like to accomplish three things.

1) First, I want to briefly explore human rights through their historical development as a concept – plenty of documentation tracing the treaties, declarations, and other major developments exist,^⁠2 so it seems better to focus on the idea of human rights.

2) Second, I want to try to separate out the discourse of “rights” from the discourse of “human rights” as they appear to me to be distinct.

3) Third and finally, I want provide a view of human rights that is not based in the establishment of specific forms of government or through international human rights instruments, but instead a view of human rights as affirmed in events.

So, first, to fully understand what is going on in the illustrative story of the Roma expulsions, we need to explore the foundations of what we think of as “rights” and how “human rights” developed within, alongside, and separately from what we in America think of as “individual rights.”

The idea of human rights has roots in a legal tradition that reaches back deep into human history. A number of legal codes have granted “rights” to individuals, at least through the accepted practice of permitting what is not said to be prohibited. Early legal codes, such as the Hammurabi Code and the laws of Judaism, were largely based around the prohibition of specific actions; this kind of prohibition implied a permissiveness that can be interpreted as a positive endowment of rights as personal and collective freedoms. However, this notion of personal and collective freedom is a modern concept that we tend to place onto history, rather than being immanent to the early legal codes themselves. The Babylonians and early Jews had little conception of individual freedom, as the cultural expectations of what was permitted constrained human action through an extra-legal norm. They had even less tolerance for group deviation from such norms.

Early legal codes gave way to Medieval forms of governance where law granted rights upon the sovereign more than upon the individual. Natural law as derived from god served more as a normalization of hierarchy, beginning with the king and ending with some form of exclusion; this basic form did not change much, although the specifics have varied greatly over the course of the millennium. What was “natural” about these legal codes was that the king or sovereign was granted some form of unchallengeable authority; personal freedoms were “granted” largely through the sovereign’s ignorance of and indifference toward the everyday lives of his subjects.

Individual rights as we know them today have their roots in a series of events and documents developed between the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215 and the liberal revolutions in America and France in the late 1700s. Over this time period, coinciding shifts in art, philosophy, and what we would call today political science decentered the divinely inspired natural rights of the sovereign to include the rights of individuals, grounded in humanism.

Especially by the 16^th Century, the Enlightenment began to change our notions of the origins of law. Law was no longer a direct line from the will of god to the actions of people, but instead an aspect of the natural order, divine only inasmuch as god created the world and man, and set a natural progression in motion culminating in Rationalism. This is not a popular history, right now in the United States; but the history of Enlightenment Rationalism that birthed the Constitution was one in which the human was elevated and projected as the highest instance of the good. So we moved from a divine natural law to a rational natural law.

Enlightenment philosophers, such as Rousseau and Locke, developed the idea of the social contract, which established a necessary relation between government and individual. The social contract of the Magna Carta was implicit, largely by simply limiting the power of the king. The social contract of the US Constitution and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen drew a direct relation between the will of the people, or consent, and the right to govern. Consent implied dissent, and the first move to constitutionalize an enumerated set of rights natural to a people was established.

The US Constitution sets forth rights, but embeds them within the context of the new government created within the document. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence, an influential document but one largely considered to be unenforceable, went further to establish the rights of man as man. However, it is the French Declaration that serves, to this day, as the inspirational document of human rights philosophy, agreements, and enforcement. Note the differences in the preambles:

Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Notice, there is no mention of rights; rights are instead enumerated within and after the document, situating those rights as secondary to the form which guarantees them (i.e. the separation of powers, representation, then freedom of press, and so on).

French Declaration: “The representatives of the French people, organized as a National Assembly, believing that the ignorance, neglect, or contempt of the rights of man are the sole cause of public calamities and of the corruption of governments, have determined to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, unalienable, and sacred rights of man, in order that this declaration, being constantly before all the members of the Social body, shall remind them continually of their rights and duties; in order that the acts of the legislative power, as well as those of the executive power, may be compared at any moment with the objects and purposes of all political institutions and may thus be more respected, and, lastly, in order that the grievances of the citizens, based hereafter upon simple and incontestable principles, shall tend to the maintenance of the constitution and redound to the happiness of all. Therefore the National Assembly recognizes and proclaims, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man and of the citizen:” Note here, the form is secondary to the notion of rights which gives rise to government. It works in the opposite direction than the US Constitution.

In practice, neither the US Constitution nor the French Declaration were immediately realized. Slavery, inequality, and war continue to afflict both countries, although the historical specificities of these may have changed.

The primary catalyst for the modern institution of what we know today as human rights was the experience of World War II. As I’ve already mentioned, Nazi Germany targeted millions of people the regime deemed undesirable. The Holocaust exposed the limits of our traditional notion of sovereignty, which limits outside interference into a country’s internal affairs. Other than a pre-emptive declaration of war, there were no institutions or mechanisms through which to intervene in Germany before 1939 when it invaded Poland. In the wake of WWII, the creation of the United Nations was meant to establish the institutions and mechanisms to balance national sovereignty with supranational norms.

The ascendant regime of human rights throws our discussion of rights so far into question. Rights, as they developed from the Magna Carta through World War II were guaranteed not by our humanity, but by our inclusion in a particular political community. Our membership in a specific nation-state guaranteed our access to rights, which is why “stateless people,” such as the pre-war Jews, the Roma and Sinti, and refugees today, so often have their human rights violated. Indeed, the perpetrators of human rights violations tend often to be nation-states themselves. Simply stated, the tradition of rights based on the social contract assumes an inside and an outside: those with access to rights, and those not protected by the rights of a specific polity.

Human rights, though, are grounded in the very fact of our being human, and as such are a universal demand. We can think about the difference between “rights” and “human rights” this way:

1) Rights discourses are circular. Circles are bordered, with a closed line forming an exterior and an interior. The constitution of the circle is not arbitrary, to be sure, and is only additive by increasing in diameter. Common sense would tell us, then, that if we just make the circle big enough then eventually it will be “big tent” enough to encompass all of humanity. But, for reasons I will return to in a moment, as the circle of rights gets ever larger, the circle gets weaker and weaker and eventually implodes upon itself. A global cosmopolitan regime of “rights” is impossible.

2) Human rights discourses are not circular, because the demand of “the human” in human rights prevents us from closing the circle. “Rights,” as a circular phenomenon, is an enclosure, a foreclosing of possibility because it sets off an outside, a “that which cannot be.” Human rights, though, will always confront us with the problem of the spectacular other who must be. The notion of grounding rights in our humanity means we must adapt human rights to difference, rather than adapting difference to fit our conception of rights. This is the great difference in the traditions inaugurated by the Constitution rather than the French Declaration. The United States has increased the global reach of “rights” – there is no doubt about that – but by molding the world in its image, which has generated many more human rights crises than it has solved, I think. The tradition more directly influenced by the French Declaration has been more open – and certainly more problematic in some ways. [The United Nations’ perceived weakness on some issues, such as during the lead up to the Iraq War, stems in part from its hesitancy in taking hard moral stances when different forms of life are put up against one another.]

Now, these are somewhat crude distinctions, and I do not intend to construct a hierarchy here where the US, UN, or France, or whatever ends up on top. I am trying to lay out a distinction between “rights” and “human rights.” A discourse of rights can solve disputes by ultimately coming to a concrete solution based on the norms, laws, and cultures within a closed community. A discourse of human rights, however, cannot solve problems, because any time a norm is settled upon, we will be confronted with a new person or group that challenges our notion of what humanity IS, and the grounding of rights in the human body means we MUST respond with openness.

So to review for a moment: Rights discourses are easily historicized, and we do this all the time when we teach American history versus world history, or have a public debate about gay marriage, and so on. Human rights also have a history, but they appear timeless, since the human body appears timeless. Grounding a notion of rights in the very idea of humanity, in the very bodily existence of the person, human rights, then, puts its own history under erasure. The immediate “cause” of human rights in international law was the experience of the Holocaust in World War II. Coming out of the first fully modern war, where not only Nazi archives opened up the possibility of imagining the Holocaust but the presence of the image of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor and Ravensbruek burned it into our memories, it was a natural (if not uncontested) development to try to move the sanctity of human life into the center of a new international politics.

So, in 1948, the new United Nations declared:

“Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if a man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

Whereas member states have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,

Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,

Now therefore, the General Assembly proclaims This Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.”^⁠

If we return to the opening story, of the Roma in France, we can now see some distinct questions opened up by our tracing of the history of human rights. First, who guarantees basic human rights when a group is largely considered stateless? France didn’t want the Roma, nor did Romania or Bulgaria. Second, even if we accept the (largely undocumented) charges that Roma in France were engaged in criminal enterprises, how do we distinguish when their human rights might conflict with their citizenship rights, and which discourse of rights gets precedence?

Trying to negotiate between citizenship rights and human rights has been notoriously difficult. States have been slow to open up to supra-national agreements on human rights because they fear they will give up too much sovereignty. This has been the case for the United States’ refusal to join with the International Criminal Court, among other notable problems. It has also opened up the space for a paradox, the notion of humanitarian intervention. The United States’ intervention in Somalia in the early 1990s demonstrates the problems here: the US goes in with the goal of stopping a genocide; in the process, a battle ensues where 19 Americans lose their lives and hundreds of Somalis are killed. The act of going to war in order to prevent killing is paradoxical, and this cannot be overcome by reasoning our way out of it (even if there were times we could get clear mandates from the international community).

The paradox of humanitarian intervention highlights the problem of using human rights as a normative ethic around which we could construct some sort of international order grounded in human dignity. It is certainly a wonderful goal; but it can only ever be a goal, and no notion of progress will ever get us there.

Instead of this normative order of human rights, I propose that human rights cannot be a system through which we govern. It must be a performative order, wherein human rights are demonstrated and affirmed in EVENTS.

A final example will suffice, and then I will close:

The current revolutions sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East have largely not been articulated through the discourses of rights or human rights. In Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Bahrain, Jordan, Palestine, and elsewhere since December, people have been rejecting dictatorial/monarchical rule. It is clear that they are rebelling over the lack of jobs, the rise in food costs, and the historical theft of common wealth by rulers. The debates in the US about whether we can credit President Bush’s “freedom agenda” or President Obama’s speech or Wikileaks for the uprisings misses the point entirely. It was not the promotion of human rights discourses or the pressure felt from new media – although these things no doubt amplified the situations – it is the everyday demonstration of the affirmation of human dignity through revolt that is significant here. Articulating human rights as an a priori formula for years produced a discourse of Arab apathy and lack; therefore, when the Arab world rises up in revolt we need a causal explanation: “it was Bush, no it was Obama, no it was wikileaks/twitter/facebook!”

Changing the way we think about human rights is necessary. They are not universal in the sense of being innate to some thing called humanity, because closing that circle will always produce an outside, thereby replicating the very logic upon which genocides are built. Human rights cannot be a normative stance for politics, because then we play into the paradox of humanitarian intervention of killing in order to save lives. Nor can human rights be an ethical standard, because then we assume a solution exists for competing claims as to what human rights actually are. Instead, human rights are universal in the event, when the community of beings we call humanity can look and say “yes, human rights are being violated here.”

Reframing human rights through the event allows us to name human rights crises and justify a response immanent to the conflict at hand. For example, in Libya, it seems that an armed struggle against Gaddafi is justified for the moment; whereas the humanitarian crises in France in 2010 or the ongoing crisis in the United States – where we jail a greater proportion of our population than China – do not seem to warrant armed intervention. Inverting human rights from ethical and political norm to the affirmation of an event removes the paradox of humanitarian intervention, because we are no longer in the realm of moral absolutes, which are so easily nullified.

To conclude this evening, I would like to pose a few questions.

1) When we imagine the world as we want it, what is it that we see?

2) What does justice look like?

3) What order of law rules?

4) How do individuals live together in community, and how do communities co-exist?

These are not questions that can be answered by appeals to universal human rights. These are questions that can only be answered in the demonstration of universality that the struggle over defining human rights opens up.

 

hardt and negri on Arab revolutions

Arabs are democracy’s new pioneers

Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, The Guardian

One challenge facing observers of the uprisings spreading across north Africa and the Middle East is to read them as not so many repetitions of the past but as original experiments that open new political possibilities, relevant well beyond the region, for freedom and democracy. Indeed, our hope is that through this cycle of struggles the Arab world becomes for the next decade what Latin America was for the last – that is, a laboratory of political experimentation between powerful social movements and progressive governments from Argentina to Venezuela, and from Brazil to Bolivia.

These revolts have immediately performed a kind of ideological house-cleaning, sweeping away the racist conceptions of a clash of civilisations that consign Arab politics to the past. The multitudes in Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi shatter the political stereotypes that Arabs are constrained to the choice between secular dictatorships and fanatical theocracies, or that Muslims are somehow incapable of freedom and democracy. Even calling these struggles “revolutions” seems to mislead commentators who assume the progression of events must obey the logic of 1789 or 1917, or some other past European rebellion against kings and czars.

These Arab revolts ignited around the issue of unemployment, and at their centre have been highly educated youth with frustrated ambitions – a population that has much in common with protesting students in London and Rome. Although the primary demand throughout the Arab world focuses on the end to tyranny and authoritarian governments, behind this single cry stands a series of social demands about work and life not only to end dependency and poverty but to give power and autonomy to an intelligent, highly capable population. That Zine al-Avidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak or Muammar Gaddafi leave power is only the first step.

The organisation of the revolts resembles what we have seen for more than a decade in other parts of the world, from Seattle to Buenos Aires and Genoa and Cochabamba, Bolivia: a horizontal network that has no single, central leader. Traditional opposition bodies can participate in this network but cannot direct it. Outside observers have tried to designate a leader for the Egyptian revolts since their inception: maybe it’s Mohamed ElBaradei, maybe Google’s head of marketing, Wael Ghonim. They fear that the Muslim Brotherhood or some other body will take control of events. What they don’t understand is that the multitude is able to organise itself without a centre – that the imposition of a leader or being co-opted by a traditional organisation would undermine its power. The prevalence in the revolts of social network tools, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, are symptoms, not causes, of this organisational structure. These are the modes of expression of an intelligent population capable of using the instruments at hand to organise autonomously.

Although these organised network movements refuse central leadership, they must nonetheless consolidate their demands in a new constituent process that links the most active segments of the rebellion to the needs of the population at large. The insurrections of Arab youth are certainly not aimed at a traditional liberal constitution that merely guarantees the division of powers and a regular electoral dynamic, but rather at a form of democracy adequate to the new forms of expression and needs of the multitude. This must include, firstly, constitutional recognition of the freedom of expression – not in the form typical of the dominant media, which is constantly subject to the corruption of governments and economic elites, but one that is represented by the common experiences of network relations.

And given that these uprisings were sparked by not only widespread unemployment and poverty but also a generalised sense of by frustrated productive and expressive capacities, especially among young people, a radical constitutional response must invent a common plan to manage natural resources and social production. This is a threshold through which neoliberalism cannot pass and capitalism is put to question. And Islamic rule is completely inadequate to meet these needs. Here insurrection touches on not only the equilibriums of north Africa and the Middle East but also the global system of economic governance.

Hence our hope for the cycle of struggles spreading in the Arab world to become like Latin America, to inspire political movements and raise aspirations for freedom and democracy beyond the region. Each revolt, of course, may fail: tyrants may unleash bloody repression; military juntas may try to remain in power; traditional opposition groups may attempt to hijack movements; and religious hierarchies may jockey to take control. But what will not die are the political demands and desires that have been unleashed, the expressions of an intelligent young generation for a different life in which they can put their capacities to use.

As long as those demands and desires live, the cycle of struggles will continue. The question is what these new experiments in freedom and democracy will teach the world over the next decade.

Egypt links

Tariq Ali on Egypt

NYTimes 1

NYTimes 2

The Cairo Commune

Resonance and the Egyptian Revolution

Egypt: The crisis of modernity all over again?

Zizek (again) on Egypt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

a few theses on biopolitics

• Foucault did not invent biopolitics; he highlighted a particular assemblage of biopolitics, historicized it in a few ways, and linked it to a neologism: “governmentality.”

This is more an observation than a thesis, stemming from reading Roberto Esposito’s Bios. But it needs to be said, given that so much of the writing and thinking on biopolitics not only exclusively addresses Foucault’s writing on it, but also credits him with the concept’s invention. Even as more people are engaging with Agamben, Hardt and Negri, and others on biopolitics, it remains a Foucaultian concept, therefore limiting, I think, the potentiality of the concept.

• Biopolitics is worldlessness. It is the absence of meaningful human relations and their replacement with the pure administration of bare life.

Reading Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition I was struck by her mobilization of biopolitics, without using the term, of course. For example, she notes, “Since the rise of society, since the admission of household and housekeeping activities to the public realm, an irresistible tendency to grow, to devour the older realms of the political and private as well as the more recently established sphere of intimacy, has been one of the outstanding characteristics of the new realm. This constant growth, whose no less constant acceleration we can observe over the last three centuries, derives its strength from the fact that through society it is the life process itself which in one form or another has been channeled into the public realm” (45). For Arendt, the “world” (of worldlessness, above) is the space of the political, or the realm of human action. Biopolitics reduces the realm of “action” to the notion of mere survival and erases the “world” of humanity. A paradigm of biopolitics prevents us from having real human relations; biopolitics is the world’s negation.

 

• Biopolitics is a social phenomenon, not a political one. In this sense, it is improperly named.

Biopolitics emerges only after the traditional split between polis and oikos collapsed into the social. Traditionally, Greek (and Roman) thought held the sphere of human action, or politics (bios), above and separated from the realm that sustained life (oikos). The political, therefore, was only engaged once the struggle to sustain bare life (our existence as animals) was overcome. Biopolitics, as the administration of bare life, is a phenomenon of the social, not the political. Referring to a biopolitics is problematic because by definition there are no political relations, only economic relations.

• Governmentality is pre-political.

Given these observations, Foucault’s notion of governmentality, the administration of biopolitics, is pre-political. We do not yet know what a politics after biopolitics/governmentality looks like.

On Anarchism

It’s probably a bit odd that I haven’t really had any direct postings yet on my political leanings, which are only latent in some of the earlier ones. And since I’m not exactly a prolific poster, it may be difficult still to figure me out at all. So, on the suggestion of a classmate/friend/blogger, I’m posting some preliminary remarks on my vision of anarchism.

On Anarchism

“We, the revolutionary anarchists, are the advocates of education for all the people, of the emancipation and the widest possible expansion of social life. Therefore we are the enemies of the State and all forms of the statist principle.” ~Bakunin

“This fiction of a pseudorepresentative government serves to conceal the domination of the masses by a handful of privileged elite; an elite elected by hordes of people who are rounded up and do not know for whom or for what they vote. Upon this artificial and abstract expression of what they falsely imagine to be the will of the people and of which the real living people have not the least idea, they construct both the theory of statism as well as the theory of so-called revolutionary dictatorship.” ~Bakunin

Anarchism is most often (popularly, at least) identified with the term chaos. When one comes out of the anarchist closet, the first reaction always seems to be along the lines of “well, won’t everyone just kill one another?”. This reaction is true when speaking of local or global politics. For example, Neoconservative international relations is entirely predicated on the assumption of a “state of anarchy” in which nation-states cannot predict each others’ actions, and given this global state of affairs it only makes sense to arm your own country to the teeth, maintain strict boundaries wherein absolute sovereignty may be established, and wars are fought to maintain order ripped out of chaos. One need not look any farther than the U.S. invasion of Iraq to see this form of international relations at work. But, at best, this is a weak form of anarchism that is only anarchy as such due to an etymological definition, not due to a theoretical formation.

It is important to distinguish between the mere fact of “without rulers” – or a weak anarchism – and the highly developed line of thinking of anarchism as a social and political theory (more properly, theories) – a strong anarchism. So, what I will articulate here under the term “anarchism” will be an elaboration of a strong sense of theoretical anarchism; one that can form the basis of a form-of-life that is social and political, not merely the absence of “rulers” but also the presence of self-organization.

Anarchism at its most basic level is desire for and action towards the non-existence of the State combined with a constant movement away from the sedimentation of institutionalized power in other non-State forms. At this most basic level, it is merely the recognition of the idea that people can and will self-organize in myriad ways without the need for a State hierarchy, systems of domination, or processes of accumulation of wealth. That’s it. It is not (yet) an assertion of anything else. It is not utopian or dystopian, normative or ethical.

People often take this non-existence of the state to be simply the weak form of anarchism stated above: the total chaos of non-organization. But this cannot be true, for coextensive with the evolution of humanity are forms of self-organization. And since humans, unlike amoebas, are endowed with some level of higher order thinking that allows us to reflect on and critique our own self-organization, we get highly complex social forms developing rather early. As Deleuze and Guattari note, the State is not some evolutionary moment (especially one in which we believe that evolution and social forms have culminated in such a form), but is coeval with human social forms. The State, in fact, is the history of conquering one group and overlaying the conquerors’ form-of-life over the conquered. Archaeologically speaking, we continue to find evidence of older and older complex societies that resemble what, even today, we know as States. But we also find evidence of non-State organization (Deleuze and Guattari refer to nomads as the paradigmatic example). The State, really, is one form-of-life that has an uncanny ability to capture and transform many other forms within it (in the same way capitalism can and does).

It is exactly this history that opens up space to begin to speak of anarchism as a complex social system, rather than some prehistoric state in which the social contract became necessary to prevent us all from killing one another in perpetuity.

Liberalism begins with the Hobbesian state of nature, which is anarchistic in a weak sense, in which the natural state of human relations is the war of each against all. In other words, liberalism is predicated on the idea that the natural state of human existence is to kill everyone else (Outside of the family group or tribe? I need to review my Hobbes…). So, the social contract is theorized in order to “fix” the problem, and part of the “fix” is the establishment of some entity that governs human relations. But liberal political theory wants to posit that this contract is predicated on the rational, autonomous, humanist subject, which means that at some point in history, human beings actually spelled out and agreed upon such a contract, setting in motion thousands of years of linear history culminating in the modern nation-state. Or, if we buy into European and/or American exceptionalism, only those societies which were most civilized and most fully human established a social contract – because, of course, Africa, Asia, and the America of the First Nations were not capable of such a thing.

Liberals tend to dismiss the revolutionary claims of anarchism (or marxism, or whatever) based on the ideas that it isn’t practical, or that it’s utopic. What they tend to ignore, though, is the specific historicity of their own position, and the fact that liberalism is the product of a highly contentious process over several hundred years that is historically contingent not teleologically transcendent. In other words, they are so beholden to their own ideology that they can’t even see that another world is possible. More specifically, they can’t see the fact that at the time that the Enlightenment gave rise to the possibility of liberalism it was itself revolutionary, utopic, and relatively undeveloped. All of which are criticisms lobbed at anarchism today as to why it (supposedly) won’t or can’t work.

Others try to define anarchism (such as here) through recourse to notions of human nature, or an absolute libertarianism. The idea of, I do what I want, when I want, though, is just as weak as the fictional “state of nature” posited by Hobbes. There is no human nature other than the biological impulse to self organize along with other complex systems (see DeLanda’s book on complexity theory). And supporting an absolute libertarianism actually feeds back into the myth of the state of nature, rather than recognizing that humans are social beings, and that there must always already be some sort of norming procedure that coheres a given community together. Yes, there is a fine line between community norms and domination, and key to an anarchistic form-of-life is the constant evaluation and negotiation of those norms, but it is not an absence of norms nor a permissive anything goes. Communities WILL establish norms and people WILL transgress those norms which WILL provoke some sort of a response from the community. Libertarian anarchism, then, is deeply flawed in that by relying solely upon vague notions of absolute human freedom they neglect the very nature of complex human life, which is communal. And with communities come norms.

What separates an anarchist form-of-life from other forms of social organization, then, is that all community norms are the result of an immanence, rather than a transcendent Law or State.

[Anyway, I said I would put down some introductory comments, and these are exactly that. They are by no means complete or even coherent at this point.]

More healthcare absurdity

Ryan Sager wrote an Op/Ed piece in today’s New York Times called “Keep Off the Astroturf.” He’s arguing that “the ‘public option’ part of President Obama’s health care reform plan” looks “dead in the water” and that the opposition many Democrats are now voicing to the “town hells” and the corporate-sponsored healthcare opposition is misplaced. He writes,

““We call it ‘Astroturf,’ ” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said of the protesters at town-hall meetings. “It’s not really a grass-roots movement.””

His basic argument, though, is that this kind of activism is “basic politics” and that labeling it fake activism (astroturf) is unfair because “With voters split fairly evenly down the middle on health care reform, it seems presumptuous to label your side ‘real’ and the other synthetic.”

His entire argument is spurious, because it does matter if your activism is corporate-sponsored but sold to the general public as grassroots.

First, I question his assertion that voters are about evenly split 50/50 about healthcare reform. Aside from a vocal minority of conservative activists and the idiots in congress (progressives included), it seems that most Americans want some kind of reform, they just disagree as to what it should look like and how much it should cost. So, pointing out that one side is being artificially driven into a frenzy is an important aspect to this policy “debate.”

Second, he presents the fact that there are certainly people who have to engage in the activism, and even if they are being organized by corporations it does nothing to dilute the fact that there are actual people showing up at town halls and turning them into “town hells.” Granted. But pointing out the absolute vacuity of their arguments, by unburying the money trail that shows that the corporate sponsorship is pushing lies, distortions, and acting in the interests of profits over people is not being unfair. These people certainly have a right to voice their opinion, but the public, policy makers, and the media are not obligated to treat their opinions as valid, because they aren’t. Debating the estimated costs and sources of funding for reform is valid. Debating whether we should have reform at all is valid. Debating the role of government in providing a human right to health is valid. However, “debating” the “fact” that the government wants to kill grandma using death panels of government bureaucrats is not. It just has no basis in reality, so it completely undermines Sager’s argument that they should be engaged just like any other political organizing.

Politics, in the context of liberal democracies, necessitates certain assumptions about truthful dialogue.

Of course, as I said in an earlier post on conservative activism, this entire situation is revealing the absolute absurdity of liberal democratic politics. The illusion that the management of interests is actually somehow always already political simply because it happens in the realm of government is just silly. We’re deluded into thinking we’re having a policy debate when what we’re really revealing is that the state-form itself limits our ability to engage in politics from the outset.

This “debate” isn’t about politics, it’s about profit.