Sad stories in the international public sphere: Richard Rorty on culture and human rights

Public Culture

Volumn 9, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 209-232

  Robbins, Bruce ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0031483542     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9-2-209     Document Type: Review

References (52)

1. Richard Rorty, "The Unpatriotic Academy," New York Times, February 13, 1994, E15.
2. For a defense of cosmopolitanism inspired by Rorty and the many responses that defense has in turn received, see Martha Mussbaum, et al., "Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism" in For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 2-17.
3. The left would add: not just the defense, but the extension of the social welfare state.
4. Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). In "Solidarity or Objectivity?" Rorty expresses the fear that the pragmatist, viewed by a realist like Rawls, will seem "an ironic, sneering aesthete who refuses to take the choice between communities seriously." In John Rajchman and Cornel West, eds., Post-Analytic Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, 3-19), p. 30.
5. Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). In "Solidarity or Objectivity?" Rorty expresses the fear that the pragmatist, viewed by a realist like Rawls, will seem "an ironic, sneering aesthete who refuses to take the choice between communities seriously." In John Rajchman and Cornel West, eds., Post-Analytic Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, 3-19), p. 30.
6. Richard Rorty, "Intellectuals in Politics," Dissent 38 (Fall 1991): 483-490. The response by Andrew Ross, "On Intellectuals in Politics" and "Richard Rorty Replies" are in Dissent 39 (Spring 1992): 263-267. The quoted lines are from "Richard Rorty Replies," p. 265.
7. Richard Rorty, "Intellectuals in Politics," Dissent 38 (Fall 1991): 483-490. The response by Andrew Ross, "On Intellectuals in Politics" and "Richard Rorty Replies" are in Dissent 39 (Spring 1992): 263-267. The quoted lines are from "Richard Rorty Replies," p. 265.
8. Richard Rorty, "Intellectuals in Politics," Dissent 38 (Fall 1991): 483-490. The response by Andrew Ross, "On Intellectuals in Politics" and "Richard Rorty Replies" are in Dissent 39 (Spring 1992): 263-267. The quoted lines are from "Richard Rorty Replies," p. 265.
9. Richard Rorty, "On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Clifford Geertz," Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 203-210.
10. Rorty describes a form of ethnocentrism that is "inevitable and unobjectionable" as one that would "look forward, in a vague way, to a time when the Cashinahua, the Chinese, and (if such there be) the planets which form the Galactic Empire will all be part of the same cosmopolitan social democratic community" (Richard Rorty, "Cosmopolitanism without Emancipation: A Reply to Jean-Francois Lyotard," Philosophical Papers, I, 211-222), p. 212.
11. "Reply to Geertz," p. 209. For a related argument on the limited value of cultural politics, see Habermas on immigration in "Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State." In Charles Taylor et al., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, Amy Gutman, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 107-148.
12. "Reply to Geertz," p. 209. For a related argument on the limited value of cultural politics, see Habermas on immigration in "Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State." In Charles Taylor et al., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, Amy Gutman, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 107-148.
13. A recent, ill-tempered denunciation of the so-called "postmodern left" in the name of human rights is by Marshall Berman, "Modernism and Human Rights Near the Millenium," Dissent (Summer 1995): 333-341. Berman sets this postmodern left against Habermas, whom he describes as "the most serious theorist of human rights today" (p. 340).
14. Richard Rorty, "Philosophy and the Future," Rorty and Pragmatism, ed. Herman Saatkamp (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995).
15. Terry Eagleton, "Defending the Free World," Socialist Register, 1990, Ralph Miliband, Leo Panitch and John Saville, eds. (London: Merlin Press, 1990), 85-93.
16. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). We may pause to note above that if Europe, Asia, and Africa all have communities, only Europe appears to possess families and individuals.
17. Michael Billig ascribes Rorty's "admitted ethnocentrism (which simultaneously is a subtly denied ethnocentrism)" to "the nationalism of the Pax Americana. This nationalism, unlike some older forms, does not speak with narrow ferocity for the nation. Instead, it draws its moral force to lead the nations from its own proclaimed reasonableness. The global ambitions are to be presented as the voice of tolerance ('our' tolerance), even doubt ('our' doubt, 'our' modesty). All the while, 'we' are to keep a sense of 'ourselves.' And a sense of 'others': the mad and the bad, who cling to dangerous absolutes, opposing 'our' pragmatic, non-ideological politics. It should be noted how easily new enemies-the religious fundamentalists, particularly Islamic fundamentalists-can replace old Soviet demons in this ideological matrix" ("Nationalism and Richard Rorty: The Text as a Flag for the Pax Americana," New Left Review 202 [1993]:69-83), pp. 82-83.
18. Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality," in Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley, eds., On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993 (New York: BasicBooks, 1993), 111-134.
19. My own argument here remains Rortian in the sense that, rather than seeking a universal philosophical foundation for human rights, I take as my point of departure the existence of a provisional transnational consensus about human rights, legitimized in my view by the increasing participation of NGOs, especially non-Western ones, and the existence of continuing dialogue about the limits and unequal applications of human rights instruments.
20. Richard Rorty, "On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Geertz," Philosophical Papers, I.
21. Richard Rorty, "Who Are We? Moral Universalism and Economic Triage," forthcoming in Dissent and in a volume of UNESCO essays.
22. Norman Geras, Solidarity in the Conversation of Mankind: The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty (London: Verso, 1995), p, 99.
23. The speech is excerpted in Harper's (June 1996), 15-18.
24. Rorty, "Who Are We?".
25. Sec James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), ch. 10. For an argument that, like Livingston's, sees hope for global redistribution less in a cultural politics of asceticism than in the extension of Western freedom, creativity, and pleasure, see Andrew Ross, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Society (London: Verso, 1994), Introduction.
26. Sec James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), ch. 10. For an argument that, like Livingston's, sees hope for global redistribution less in a cultural politics of asceticism than in the extension of Western freedom, creativity, and pleasure, see Andrew Ross, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Society (London: Verso, 1994), Introduction.
27. For a nuanced and wide-ranging discussion of the mutual entanglements of cultural and redistributive politics, see in particular Nancy Fraser, "From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a 'Post-Socialist' Age," New Left Review 212 (1995): 68-93. Fraser, who registers some serious doubts about the liberal program of defending the social welfare state, notes that redistributive policies like social-insurance programs and public-assistance programs tend paradoxically to produce intensified cultural identities, and with them new and perhaps troublesome hostilities. "Far from abol" ishing class differentiation per se, these affirmative remedies support and shape it. Their general effect is to shift attention from the class division between workers and capitalists to the division between employed and unemployed fractions of the working class. Public-assistance programs target' the poor, not only for aid but for hostility. Such remedies, to be sure, provide needed material aid. But they also create strongly cathected, antagonistic group differentiations" (p. 85). Fraser contrasts affirmative with transformative methods of distribution; the latter, such as steeply progressive taxation, a large non-market sector, and public/collective ownership, undermine class identity without "creating stigmatized classes of vulnerable people perceived as beneficiaries of special largesse" (p. 85). "For both gender and 'race,' the scenario that best finesses the redistribution-recognition dilemma is socialism in the economy plus deconstruction in the culture" (p. 91).
28. I develop this argument in "Some Versions of U.S. Internationalism," Social Text 45 (Winter 1995): 97-123.
29. This is the sort of human rights culture that shows its power when, say, Amnesty International investigates the New York Police Department, or when Randall Robinson and the African-American organization TransAfrica Forum, which spearheaded the boycott of South Africa under apartheid, now call for sanctions against the government of Nigeria. Steven A. Holmes, "U.S. Blacks Battle Nigeria Over Rights Issue," New York Times, June 15, 1995, A6.
30. "During the global contest between the nuclear giants, the UN passed its most exacting test. It survived, and so did the human race." "The United Nations at 50," New York Times, June 26, 1995, editorial page.
31. Barbara Crossette, "U.N. Finds Skepticism Is Eroding the Hope that Is Its Foundation," New York Times, June 25, 1995, A1.
32. The editorial of the Nation's fortieth birthday special issue in 1985 presented the UN as a "Global Talk Show." Describing the Nairobi conference that capped off the UN Decade for Women, the Nation said, "The conference brought together people who do not normally talk to one another" ("Reflections on a Glass House: The U.N. at 40," Nation 241 (September 21, 1985), p. 228.
33. Richard Falk, "The United Nations After 40 Years," Nation 241 (September 21, 1985), p. 8.
34. Fateh Azzam, "Non-Governmental Organizations and the UN World Conference on Human Rights," Review of the International Commission of Jurists 50 (1993): 89-100. "Southern human rights NGOs have come of age and will be a force to be reckoned with in the human rights debate in the future" (p. 99).
35. Upandra Baxi, "The Spirit of Our Age, the Realities of Our Time': The Vienna Declaration on Human Rights," Mambrino's Helmet: Human Rights for a Changing World (New Delhi: Har Anand, 1994).
36. ISHR, Human Rights Monitor 21 (May 1993): 21. Note that as Azzam says, NGOs themselves declared the Vienna Declaration a "Flawed Document" for its failure to commit governments to concrete measures (p. 98).
37. The NGOs could function as well as they did because, like culture, they and their rights discourse were seen as not being fully or explicitly political. They were not states, but units of "interational civil society"-something between the powerlessness of culture and the power of the state. Indeed, Azzam sees the very success of the NGOs in Vienna as dangerous, for it crossed "the very thin line between human rights advocacy, populist advocacy, and political advocacy" (p. 99).
38. Catherine MacKinnon, "Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace" in Shute and Hurley, 83-110; also Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper, eds., Women's Rights Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1995).
39. Catherine MacKinnon, "Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace" in Shute and Hurley, 83-110; also Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper, eds., Women's Rights Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1995).
40. It is possible that Rorty intended to distinguish, interestingly, between atrocity stories, whose effect he is rightly skeptical about, and the "sad and sentimental stories" he credits with developing human rights culture. But no such distinction appears in his text.
41. Laura Flanders, "Hard Cases and Human Rights: C. MacKinnon in the City of Freud," Nation, August 9, 1993, 174-177.
42. On human rights as a form of action necessary, if not sufficient, to economic redistribution, see for example Development Bulletin 34 (August 1995), a special issue devoted to human rights and development. Philip Alston, in "The Rights Framework and Development Assistance," argues that since the link was made, in the early 1990s, the human rights vocabulary has added a new and empowering immediacy to earlier talk of "basic needs" and "human well-being": "They are no longer a vague and undefined entitlement to a favour of some kind to be bestowed upon them by a benevolent government, if and when they can afford it" (p. 10).
43. Baxi: "While most 'obstacles' and 'challenges' emanate from unjust, and evil, forms of governance, the civil society, too, may provide a fertile soil for the growth of 'obstacles' and 'challenges' to human rights attainment. In so far as this is the case, the Declaration envisages a substantial interventionist role by the state and superstatal institutions" (p. 4).
44. C.J. Wan-ling Wee, "Re: Michael Fay," Commentary (journal of the National University of Singapore Society [NUSS]) 12:1 (1994), For apparently unrelated reasons, this issue was suppressed by the NUSS management society.
45. Leon Perera, "The Michael Fay Controversy: What Was at Stake?" in same issue of Com" mentary. Perera points out as well how Singaporean opinion tended not to object to foreign intervention as such: "Mainstream opinion here ... is generally supportive of US-led UN military intervention in the killing fields of Rwanda and Bosnia" (p. 122). Respect for sovereignty is not an absolute principle.
46. A Cuban resolution of 1985, opposed by the Western powers but finally passed in 1991, as serted the principle of nonselectivity, impartiality, and objectivity in dealing with human rights. It is unclear that this resolution has had any effect on human rights work.
47. Asad Latif, Straits Times, April 23, 1994.
48. According to the polls I saw, the U.S. public did not agree with its political leaders and editorialists who condemned the caning as an act of barbarism. A majority agreed that the American criminal justice system does not work and thought it might improve if the U.S. followed Singapore's example and caned vandals. In the months following the Fay case, several bills were presented in state legislatures around the country which, inspired by Singaporean policy, called for whipping as punishment for graffiti. Is this internationalism, or merely Americanocentrism of a different type, one that prefers to seize upon similarities to what it knows rather than assuming difference? In other words, is it just the recognition of sameness that Rorty's sad and sentimental stories are supposed to encourage? The incongruity once again between mass opinion (which tended to approve the caning) and the so-called educated elites (which condemned it) is worth following up.
49. See Amanda Anderson, "Cryptonormativism and Double Gestures: The Politics of Post-Structuralism," Cultural Critique (Spring 1992): 69-95.
50. Pheng Cheah, "Given Culture: Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom in Transnationalism," boundary 2 (forthcoming). Cheah also usefully defines the dilemma with which I began: "A metropolitan cultural politics which espouses a hands-off approach to a museumized cultural other leaves the neocolonial staging of that other-fundamentalism, ethnicism, patriarchal nationalism-untouched. Yet, if we intervene in those other spaces as self-proclaimed didacts of freedom, we forget that we too are part of the crisis because the problems of unequal development and the post-industrial feudalisation of the periphery are fundamental structures of our everyday." (See also Pheng Cheah's in this issue of Public Culture.)
51. Pheng Cheah, "Given Culture: Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom in Transnationalism," boundary 2 (forthcoming). Cheah also usefully defines the dilemma with which I began: "A metropolitan cultural politics which espouses a hands-off approach to a museumized cultural other leaves the neocolonial staging of that other-fundamentalism, ethnicism, patriarchal nationalism-untouched. Yet, if we intervene in those other spaces as self-proclaimed didacts of freedom, we forget that we too are part of the crisis because the problems of unequal development and the post-industrial feudalisation of the periphery are fundamental structures of our everyday." (See also Pheng Cheah's in this issue of Public Culture.)
52. Richard Rorty, "Two Cheers for the Cultural Left," in Darryl J. Gless and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, eds., The Politics of Liberal Education (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 223-240.