Use and abuse of human rights

Boundary 2

Volumn 32, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 131-188

  Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33748485748     PISSN: 01903659     EISSN: 15272141     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-32-1-131     Document Type: Article

References (141)

1. George Shelton incidentally provides a gloss on the native English speaker's take on the word wrong in Morality and Sovereignty in the Philosophy of Hobbes (New York: St. Martin's, 1992), 128-29.
2. See also D. D. Raphael, "Hobbes on Justice," in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, ed. G. A. J. Rodgers and Alan Ryan (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 164-65.
3. Alex Callinicos gives other examples of social Darwinism in Social Theory: A Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).
4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 217 n. 33.
5. This is a much-revised version of earlier work. The initial thinking and writing of the piece took place in 1982-83. In other words, I have been thinking of the access to the European Enlightenment through colonization as an enablement for twenty-odd years. I am so often stereotyped as a rejecter of the Enlightenment that I feel obliged to make this clear at the outset. But I thought of this particular method of access to the Enlightenment as a violation as well. In 1992, I presented "Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-coloniality" in Cape Town, where I laid out the idea of ab-using the Enlightenment, in ways similar to, but not identical with, the present argument. (That essay is reprinted in Jane Huber, The Anthropology of Politics: A Reader in Ethnography, Theory, and Critique [Oxford: Blackwell, 2002], 452-59.)
6. The editor describes it as "prescient" about South Africa, because it was presented as early as 1992. She describes the piece as the "sting in the tail of her collection," because Spivak, contrary to her stereotype, recommends using the Enlightenment from below. This, then, was a decade ago. Indeed, this is one of the reasons why I hang in with Derrida, because here is one critic of ethnocentrism (Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak [Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976], 3)
7. who continues, as I remarked in "Responsibility," to indicate the danger and bad faith in a wholesale rejection of the Enlightenment (Spivak, "Responsibility," boundary 2 21, no. 3 [Fall 1994]: 38-46). My double-edged attitude to the European Enlightenment is thus not a sudden change of heart.
8. Mel James, "Country Mechanisms of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights," in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Fifty Years and Beyond, ed. Yael Danieli, Elsa Stamatopoulou, and Clarence J. Dias (Amityville, N.Y.: Baywood Publishing, Inc., 1999), 76-77.
9. Cited in Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1992), 79.
10. The identity of the nation and the state is generally associated with the Peace of Westphalia (1648), often thought of as one of the inaugurations of the Enlightenment. See, for example, R. Paul Churchill, "Hobbes and the Assumption of Power," in The Causes of Quarrel: Essays on Peace, War, and Thomas Hobbes, ed. Peter Caws (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), 17.
11. Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, eds., The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
12. I have written about this class in Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 392. They are not only involved in righting wrongs, of course. The head of the Space Vehicle Directorate's innovative concepts group, behind George W. Bush's new space war initiative, is a model minority diasporic; hardly righting wrongs!
13. I am not tendentious in being critical of this. Ian Martin, secretary general of Amnesty International from 1986 to 1992, is similarly critical. See Ian Martin, "Closer to the Victim: United Nations Human Rights Field Operations," in The Universal Declaration, 92.
14. Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink, The Power of Human Rights, 170. The next quoted passage is from 167.
15. Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), xi.
16. It is interesting that Mary Shelley calls imperial Rome "capital of the world, the crown of man's achievements" (The Last Man [London: Pickering, 1996], 356). I am grateful to Lecia Rosenthal for this reference.
17. Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000 (New York: Harper, 2000);
18. the sentiment about detention is on page 488. Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality," in On Human Rights, ed. Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 127.
19. Meanwhile, general pieces, such as Asbjørn Eide, "Historical Significance of the Universal Declaration," International Social Science Journal 50, no. 4 (December 1998): 475-96, share neither Rorty's wit nor the realism of the rest.
20. I think there is something like a relationship between these and the "tutored preferences" discussed in Philip Kitcher, Science, Truth, and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 118-19 and passim. Professor Kitcher is speaking of an ideal community of taxpaying citizens, and he is concerned about "well-ordered science," whereas I will be speaking of students in general, including the rural poor in the global South. Even with these differences, I would argue that "transmitting information" (118) would not necessarily lead to a tutoring of preferences. This is part of a more general interrogation of "consciousness raising" as a basis for social change.
21. I am so often asked to distinguish my position from Martha Nussbaum's that I feel compelled to write this note, somewhat unwillingly. In spite of her valiant efforts, Nussbaum's work seems to me to remain on the metropolitan side of the undergirding discontinuity of which I speak in my text. Her informants, even when seemingly subaltern, are mediated for her by the domestic "below," the descendants of the colonial subject, the morally outraged top-drawer activist. Although she certainly wants to understand the situation of poor women, her real project is to advance the best possible theory for that undertaking, on the way to public interest intervention, by the international "above," who is represented by the "us" in the following typical sentence: "understood at its best, the paternalism argument is not an argument against cross-cultural universals. For it is all about respect for the dignity of persons as choosers. This respect requires us to defend universally a wide range of liberties. . . ." (Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 59-60; hereafter cited as WHD).
22. It is not a coincidence that Nussbaum became aware of poor women by way of a stint at the educational wing of the UN (Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life [Boston: Beacon Press, 1995]: xv-xvi and 123 n. 4; hereafter cited as PJ).
23. She went to India "to learn as much as [she] could about women's development projects" and worked through interpreters in order to find both a philosophical justification for universalism and to draw conclusions about the pros and cons of public interest litigation. (Her book ends with three legal case studies.) The "cases" are exceptional subalterns prepared by the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), one of the most spectacular social experiments in the Third World. I have mentioned elsewhere that this organization is the invariable example cited when micro-credit lenders are questioned about their lack of social involvement (Spivak, "Claiming Transformations: Travel Notes with Pictures," in Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism, ed. Sara Ahmed et al. [London: Routledge, 2000], 119-30).
24. If Nussbaum's informants are urban radical leaders of the rural, her sources of inspiration - Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore - belong to national liberationist leadership from the progressive bourgeoisie. (She has an epigraph about women from Iswarchandra Vidyasagar [WHD, 242], whose activist intervention in rural education I cite later in this essay. His intervention on behalf of women engaged caste-Hindus, since widow remarriage was not unknown among the so-called tribals and lower castes. My great-great-grandfather, Biharilal Bhaduri, was an associate of Vidyasagar's and arranged a second marriage for his daughter Barahini, widowed in childhood. The repercussions of this bold step have been felt in my family. The point I'm trying to make is that, whereas Vidyasagar's literacy activism, aware of the detail of rural education, applies to the subaltern classes even today, his feminist activism applied to the metropolitan middle class, to which I belong.)
25. Nussbaum certainly believes in the "value" of "education" and "literacy," but these are contentless words for her. She also believes in the virtues of the literary imagination, but her idea of it is a sympathetic identification, a bringing of the other into the self (PJ, 31, 34, 38), a guarantee that literature "makes us acknowledge the equal humanity of members of social classes other than our own."
26. This is rather far from the dangerous self-renouncing "delusion," a risky othering of the self, that has to be toned down for the reader's benefit, which remains my Wordsworthian model (William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992], 751, 755).
27. It is not without significance that her models are social-realist novels and Walt Whitman read as expository prose. Wordsworth's project was pedagogic - to change public taste (Lyrical Ballads, 742-45).
28. There is not a word about pedagogy in Nussbaum's text. Like many academic liberals, she imagines that everyone feels the same complicated pleasures from a Dickens text. As a teacher of reading, my entire effort is to train students away from the sort of characterological plot-summary approach that she uses. In the brief compass of a note I am obliged to refer the reader to my reading of Woolf in "Deconstruction and Cultural Studies: Arguments for a Deconstructive Cultural Studies," in Deconstructions, ed. Nicholas Royle (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 14-43;
29. Jamaica Kincaid, "Thinking Cultural Questions in 'Pure' Literary Terms," in Without Guarantees: In Honor of Stuart Hall, ed. Paul Gilroy et al. (London: Verso, 2000), 335-57;
30. and Maryse Condé, "The Staging of Time in Maryse Condé's Heremakhonon" Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (January 2003): 85-97, for accounts of such teaching.
31. The only rhetorical reading Nussbaum performs is of Judge Posner's opinion on Carr v. Allison Gas Turbine Division (PJ, 104-11).
32. (The piece in Royle will also give a sense of my activist reading of the poiesis/istoria argument in Aristotle.) I have remarked that, in the context of "Indian women," "education" is a contentless good for Nussbaum. In the context of her own world, the "moral education" offered by literature is simply there (PJ, 84).
33. For me the task of teaching in the two worlds is related but different, in each case interruptive, supplementary. In the disenfranchised world, there is a call to suspend all the fine analytic machinery that gives Nussbaum the confidence to "claim that the standard of judgment constructed in [her] conception of 'poetic justice' passes . . . [the] tests" of Whitman's "general call for the poet-judge" (PJ, 120) and so on.
34. To attend to the unleashing of the ethical gives no guarantee that it will produce a "good" result - just that it will bring in a relation, perhaps. As the literary Melville and the literary Faulkner knew, the relationship between the hunter and the prey steps into the relational domain we will call "ethical." The dominant appropriation of the necessary and impossible aporia between the political and ethical into the convenience of a bridge named race-class-gender sensitivity is what we must constantly keep at bay, even as we cross and recross. Although Nussbaum knows the limitations of behaviorism (WHD, 119-35),
35. it is clear from her discussion of central capabilities and, especially, the value of religion - "something having to do with ideals and aspirations" (WHD, 198) - that she knows about cultural difference but cannot imagine it.
36. Her model of the human mind is wedded to the autonomous subject, a gift of the European Enlightenment broadly understood. The emotions are named. They are yoked to belief and thus led to reason. This trajectory produces Adam Smith's idea of the "literary judge." For better or for worse, my view of the mind is forever marked by the commonsense plausibility of Freud's "stricture" of repression - the mind feeling an unpleasure as pleasure to protect itself. Therefore my notion of political agency rests on a restricted and accountable model of the person that bears a discontinuous and fractured relationship with the subject. The most difficult part of the pedagogic effort outlined later in my essay may be precisely this: that in opening myself to be "othered" by the subaltern, it is this broader, more mysterious arena of the subject that the self hopes to enter; and then, through the task of teaching, rehearse the aporia between subjectship and the more tractable field of agency. For us, "politics" can never claim to "speak with a full and fully human voice" (PJ, 72).
37. Nussbaum's work is thus premised on the asymmetry in the series title. My modest efforts are a hands-on undertaking, with the subaltern, to undo this asymmetry someday. Without this effortful task of "doing" in the mode of "to come," rather than only "thinking" in the mode of "my way is the best," there is indeed a scary superficial similarity (PJ, 76, 86, 89-90) between the two of us, enough to mislead people. I admire her scholarship and her intelligence, but I can learn little from her. My teacher is the subaltern.
38. Anthony de Reuck comments on the discontinuity between subaltern and elite (using a "periphery/center" vocabulary) as "styles of perceptual incoherence . . . on the threshold of a cultural anthropology of philosophical controversy" and veers away from it: "that, as they say, is another story!" ("Culture in Conflict," in The Causes of Quarrel, 59-63).
39. My essay lays out the practical politics of that other story, if you like. The superiority of Northern epistemes, however, remains an implicit presupposition. Jonathan Glover analyzes the possibility of the Nazi mind-set in numbing detail and discusses Rwanda with no reference to a mental theater at all (Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century [London: Jonathan Cape, 1999]). Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink vary their definition of the domestic as "below" by considering freedom of expression only in the case of Eastern Europe and not in the cases of Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, Tunisia, Morocco, Indonesia, Philippines, Chile, and Guatemala. The luxury of an expressive or contaminable mind is implicitly not granted to the subaltern of the global South.
40. This forgetfulness is the condition and effect of the simple value judgment that rights thinking is superior - "fitter." Social psychology is now producing abundant retroactive "proof" that each separate "developing" culture is "collective," whereas "America" (synecdochically the US) and "Europe" (synecdochically Northwestern Europe and Scandinavia) are "individualistic. " This "collectivism" is a trivialization of the thinking of responsibility I shall discuss below. "Multiculturalism" (synecdochically "global" if we remember the important role of upward mobility among diasporics and the economically restructured New World) is now factored into this authoritative and scientific division, although all comparisons relating to actually "developing" countries is resolutely bilateral between one nation/state/culture and the (Euro-)US. The sampling techniques of such work is pathetic in their suggestive nudging of the informant groups to produce the required "evidence" (Susan M. Ervin-Tripp, John J. Gumperz, Dan I. Slobin, Jan Brukman, Keith Kernan, Claudia Mitchell, and Brian Stross, A Field Manual for Cross-Cultural Study of the Acquisition of Communicative Competence, Second Draft - July 1967 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967];
41. Geert H. Hofstede, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991];
42. Saburo Iwawaki, Yoshihisa Kashima, and Kwok Leung, eds., Innovations in Cross-Cultural Psychology [Amsterdam: Swets and Zeitlinger, 1992];
43. Gail McKoon and Roger Ratcliff, "The Minimalist Hypothesis: Directions for Research," in Discourse Comprehension: Essays in Honor of Walter Kintsch, ed. Charles A. Weaver et al. [Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum, 1995], 97-116;
44. Paul DiMaggio, "Culture and Cognition," Annual Review of Sociology 23 [1997]: 263-87;
45. Huong Nguyen, Lawrence Messe, and Gary Stollak, "Toward a More Complex Understanding of Acculturation and Adjustment: Cultural Involvements and Psychosocial Functioning in Vietnamese Youth," Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 30, no. 1 [January 1999]: 5-31;
46. Arie W. Kruglanski and Donna M. Webster, "Motivated Closing of the Mind: 'Seizing' and 'Freezing,'" in Motivational Science: Social and Personality Perspectives, ed. E. Tory Higgins and Arie W. Kruglanski [Philadelphia: Psychology Press, 2000], 354-75;
47. Hong Ying-yi, Michael W. Morris, Chiu Chi-yue, and Veronica Benet-Martinez, "Multicultural Minds: A Dynamic Constructivist Approach to Culture and Cognition," American Psychologist 55 [July 2000]: 709-20).
48. The sophistication of the vocabulary and the poverty of the conclusions rest on an uncritical idea of the human mind. We cannot ask social psychology to become qualitative cognitive psychology or philosophical ontology. Yet these sorts of academic subdisciplinary endeavor, especially when confidently offered up by female diasporics (my last terrifying encounter with this type of scholarship came from a young, intelligent, innocent, confident, power-dressed Hong Kong Chinese woman trained in California), directly or indirectly sustain the asymmetrical division between Human Rights and Human Wrongs that inform the series title. The division that we are speaking of is a class division dissimulated as a cultural division in order to recode the unequal distribution of agency. It is in this context that I am suggesting that the begging of the question of human nature/freedom, much discussed when the question of Human Rights was confined to Europe, has been withheld from a seemingly culturally divided terrain not only by dominant political theorizing and policymaking but also by disciplinary tendencies. Alex Callinicos, whom no one would associate with deconstruction, places the nature/polity hesitation as the conflict at the very heart of the European Enlightenment, arguing its saliency for today on those grounds (Social Theory, 25, 26, 29, 31, 37, 67, 83, 178, 179, and passim).
49. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man; Common Sense (New York: Knopf, 1994), 38.
50. Jacques Derrida, "Force of Law," in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. David Gray Carlson, Drucilla Cornell, and Michel Rosenfeld (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3-67.
51. Walter Benjamin's essay is included in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), 277-300. Derrida shows how Benjamin attempts to solve the problem both on the "universal" register (the new state) and the "singular" register (his own signature). In terms of the text's relationship to the subsequent development of a full-fledged Nazism, Derrida offers an alternative reading.
52. Ernst Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity, trans. Dennis J. Schmidt (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986). The passage quoted is from page 263.
53. Michel Foucault, "The Masked Philosopher," in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 1988), 323-30;
54. Jacques Derrida, "My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies," in Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 1-32.
55. For the Nietzschean moment, see Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997), 79-80. It is of course silly to call Zeno and Epicurus "colonial subjects," or Aristotle - who never became an Athenian citizen - a "resident alien." The point I am trying to make is that the removal of the Austro-Asiatic Aboriginals from the Indo-European colonizing loop - the narrative behind Indian constitutional policy - was active when Epicurus the Athenian from Samos, hugging the coast of Turkey, whose parents emigrated from Athens as colonists, and Zeno the Phoenician from Syrian Cyprus - both places the object of constant imperial grab-shifts - came to Athens to be educated and subsequently to found their philosophies. As I will go on to elaborate, these Indian Aboriginals are among the disenfranchised groups whose contemporary educational situation seems crucial to the general argument of this essay. I discuss the resultant process of atrophy and stagnation at greater length below.
56. Gregory Elliott puts together two distanced assertions by Louis Althusser to sharpen the latter's sense of Machiavelli's uncanny engagement with this problematic: "Machiavelli's 'endeavour to think the conditions of possibility of an impossible task, to think the unthinkable' induces 'a strange vacillation in the traditional philosophical status of [his] theoretical propositions: as if they were undermined by another instance than the one that produces them - the instance of political practice'" (Elliott, "Introduction," in Machiavelli and Us, by Louis Althusser, trans. Gregory Elliott [London: Verso, 1999], xviii).
57. On pages 123-26 of this text, Althusser attempts to fix Machiavelli's place upon this chain of displacements. See also Adam D. Danel, A Case for Freedom: Machiavellian Humanism (New York: University Press of America, 1997).
58. For the Hobbes-Bramhill debate, see Vere Chappell, ed., Hobbes and Bramhill on Liberty and Necessity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
59. David Gauthier provides an interesting way of linking Hobbes and Paine (Gauthier, "Hobbes's Social Contract," in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, 126-27, 148).
60. George Shelton, Morality and Sovereignty, 20, 86-87, 175. "Fiction" and "reality" are Shelton's words. By indicating the slippage, Shelton makes room for my more radical position - that the fiction marks the begging of the question that produces the "real."
61. Patricia Springborg, "Hobbes on Religion," in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes, ed. Tom Sorell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 354-60;
62. see also Arrigo Pacchi, "Hobbes and the Problem of God," in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, 182-87. Balibar suggests a double Hobbes: one in whose writings the violence of original sin was always ready to burst forth, and another who saw law immanent in natural self-interest and competition (private communication), a version, perhaps, of the discontinuity I am speaking of.
63. In his reading of Rousseau in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 95-316, Derrida has indicated Rousseau's place on this chain.
64. Locke's view of natural rights is another well-known concatenation on this chain (see John Locke, Questions Concerning the Law of Nature, trans. Diskin Clay [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990] for how Locke taught the issue);
65. for a scholarly account, see A. John Simmons, The Lockean Theory of Rights (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992).
66. Balibar suggests that, by "privatizing nature on the one hand [as] he is also socializing it," Locke is able to reconcile natural society and artificial community ("'Possessive Individualism' Reversed: From Locke to Derrida," Constellations 9, no. 3 [September 2002]: 299-317).
67. For a contemporary discussion of the chain from at least Roman law, Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), remains indispensable. This is of course a layperson's checklist, not a specialist bibliography.
68. Alan Gewirth, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 128.
69. I have argued this in Imperatives to Reimagine the Planet (Vienna: Passagen, 1999).
70. Gewirth, Human Rights, 45.
71. Derrida has discussed this with reference to Leibnitz in his "The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils," Diacritics 13, no. 3 (Fall 1983): 7-10.
72. Reason as "white mythology" is the informing argument of Derrida, "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy," in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 207-71.
73. In the fifties, C. Wright Mills wrote his famous Sociological Imagination to suggest that sociology was the discipline of disciplines for the times. He claimed imagination totally for reason. The sociological imagination was a "quality of mind that will help [us] to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves" (C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination [New York: Oxford University Press, 1959], 5; the next quotation is from page 17). Within a hitherto humanistic culture, reason and imagination, analysis and synthesis are ranked. That is how Shelley's Defence of Poetry starts, giving to imagination the primary place. Mills is writing a defense of sociology, which he thinks will reconcile the inner life and external career of contemporary man. Nussbaum feminizes this model. For the Humanities, the relationship between the two had been a site of conflict, a source of grounding paradoxes. Mills cannot find any comfort in such pursuits, because, in the fifties, the quality of education in the Humanities had become too ingrown, too formalist, too scientistic. It no longer nurtured the imagination, that inbuilt instrument of othering. Therefore, Mills wrote, revealingly, "It does not matter whether [the most important] qualities [of mind] are to be found [in literature]; what matters is that men do not often find them there," because, of course, they are no longer taught to read the world closely as they read closely.
74. "The ability to make fine-grained predictions indicates that the task is unlikely to be error-tolerant" (Kitcher, Science, Truth, and Democracy, 23-24). The effort I am speaking of must be error-tolerant, in teacher, trainer, trained, and taught, since we are speaking of cultural shift, and thus a shift in the definition of error.
75. Think, for example, of the constructive undermining of triumphalist "we must help because we are better" sentiments to the awareness at least that, to help undo the difference between "us helping" and "them being helped," if the excellent teaching tool "The Rohde to Srebernica: A Case Study of Human Rights Reporting," which "documents U.S. reporter David Rohde's journey through Bosnia" (http://www.columbia. edu/itc/journalism/nelson/rohde), were supplemented in the following way: in the long run, a literary-level entry into the nuance differences between Muslim and Serb Bosnian, and their relationship to the subaltern language Romani (which can also be accessed with deep focus), in order to tease out the compromised and disenfranchised elements of the local cultures before the most recent disasters, in their "normality," atrophied by waves of imperialisms. This note properly belongs to page 173, where I speak of learning subaltern languages and assure the reader that every human rights activist is not required to learn all languages at this depth. Here suffice it to notice that the difference between the existing teaching tool and its imagined supplementation is the difference between urgent decisions and long-term commitment. I refer the reader to the difference between "Doctors without Frontiers" and primary health care workers with which I began. The analogy: short-term commitment to righting wrongs versus long-term involvement to learn from below the persistent undoing of the reproduction of class apartheid and its attendant evils. The reason for avoiding this is its inconvenience, not a good reason when the goal is to establish the inalienable rights of all beings born human. For one case of the subalternization of the Romany
76. Spivak, Imperatives to Reimagine the Planet, 68.
77. Marshall Sahlins lays out the general characteristics of these defects in his Stone Age Economics (New York: de Gruyter, 1972). Sahlins also points at the obvious absence of a "public sphere" in such social formations. I am grateful to Henry Staten for bringing this book to my attention.
78. As I will mention later in connection with Anthony Giddens's Beyond Left and Right (see page 154), I am not extolling the virtues of poverty, not even the christian virtues of poverty, as does Sahlins by association (Stone Age Economics, 32-33).
79. I am interested only in bringing those virtues above and concurrently instilling the principles of a public sphere below; teaching at both ends of the spectrum. For, from the point of view of the asymmetry of what I am calling class apartheid in the global South, a responsibility-based disenfranchised stagnating culture left to itself can only be described, in its current status within the modern nation-state, as "a reversal of 'possessive individualism,'" the tragedy "of 'negative' individuality or individualism" (Etienne Balibar, "'Possessive Individualism' Revisited: [An Issue in Philosophical Individualism], unpublished manuscript).
80. Karl Marx, "Concerning Feuerbach," in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Vintage, 1975), 422; translation modified.
81. Karl Marx, "The Trinity Formula," in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Vintage, 1981), 3:953-70.
82. I will be developing this concept-metaphor of suturing as a description of practice. To situate this within Marxist thought, see Callinicos's gloss on Marx's discussion of religion: "Religious illusions . . . will survive any purely intellectual refutation so long as the social conditions which produced them continue to exist" (Callinicos, Social Theory, 83-84). I would not, of course, accept the illusion/truth binary and would therefore activate and undo/reweave from within the imaginative resources of the earlier cultural formation - often called "religious" - in order for any from-above change in social condition to last. This undo/reweave is "suture," the model of pedagogy "below." What must be kept in mind is that the same applies to consciousness-raising style radical teaching "above." The problem with "religious fundamentalism," the politicizing of elite religions, is not that they are religions but that they are elite in leadership.
83. Interestingly enough, this very passage was used in a speech entitled "Responsibility: The Price of Greatness," by Anthony F. Earley Jr., Detroit Edison chairman and chief executive officer, at a conference entitled "Business Ethics, Integrity, and Values: A Global Perspective," on March 23, 1999. Churchill's own speech, made at Harvard on Monday, September 6, 1943, was precisely about the United States as the savior of the world: "one cannot rise to be in many ways the leading community in the civilised world without being involved in its problems, without being convulsed by its agonies and inspired by its causes." I am grateful to Lecia Rosenthal for bringing these connections to my attention. The point of my humble experiment is that the textural imperatives of such responsibility, acknowledged in the national political and corporate sphere, the internalized reflex "to save the environment," for example, do not follow automatically.
84. Amnesty International, "Muddying the Waters: The Draft 'Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities': No Complement to Human Rights," http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/ENGIOR400021998; my emphasis.
85. For a discussion of the contradiction between individualism (rights) and communality (obligations) when they are seen in a linear way, see Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, 82.
86. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 255-66.
87. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 70-72.
88. Indeed, that sentiment is implicit in the very last line of Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: ". . . The scholarship on Derrida's ethical turn . . ., when in the rare case it risks setting itself to work by breaking its frame, is still not identical with the setting to work of deconstruction outside the formalizing calculus specific to the academic institution" (431). It must, however, be said, that in European from-above discussions, it is the so-called poststructuralists who are insistent not only on questioning a blind faith in the rational abstractions of democracy but also on recognizing that top-down human rights enforcement is not "democratic" even by these terms. See, for example, the strong objections raised by Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida after Claude Lefort's claim that "[a] politics of human rights and a democratic politics are thus two ways of responding to the same need" (Claude Lefort, "Politics of Human Rights," in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, trans. Alan Sheridan [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986], 272.
89. The discussion is in "La question de la démocratie," in Le Retrait du politique, ed. Denis Kambouchner [Paris: Galilée, 1983], 71-88).
90. I have recently read Jacques Derrida, "Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German," where Derrida traces, with uncanny clarity, the genealogy of the Euro-US subject who dispenses Human Rights (in Acts of Religion, trans. Gil Anidjar [New York: Routledge, 2002], 135-88).
91. Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994).
92. The passages quoted are from pages 165, 247, 184, 185, 190, 194. "Third Way" was, I believe, coined in a Fabian Society pamphlet (Tony Blair, New Politics for the New Century [London: College Hill Press, 1998]) confined to policies of a European Britain. (I am grateful to Susan M. Brook for getting me this pamphlet.) It was used by Bill Clinton in a round-table discussion sponsored by the Democratic Leadership Council in Washington, D.C., on April 25, 1999.
93. Giddens, Beyond Left and Right, 197.
94. I have discussed the role of teaching in the formation of collectivities in "Schmitt and Post-structuralism: A Response," Cardozo Law Review 21, no. 5-6 (May 2000): 1723-37. Necessary but impossible tasks - like taking care of health although it is impossible to be immortal; or continuing to listen, read, write, talk, and teach although it is impossible that everything be communicated - lead to renewed and persistent effort. I use this formula because this is the only justification for humanities pedagogy. This is distinct from the "utopian mode," which allows us to figure the impossible.
95. John Rawls, "The Law of Peoples," in On Human Rights, 56.
96. I have a pervasive objection to Rawls's discipline-bound philosophical style of treating political problems but felt nervous about stating it. I feel some relief in Shelton, Morality and Sovereignty, 171, where the author expresses similar objections.
97. Marx, Capital, 3:1015-16, puts it in a paragraph, in the mode of "to come."
98. I gave an account of this so-called post-state world in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 371-94.
99. Daniel M. Farrell, "Hobbes and International Relations," in The Causes of Quarrel, 77.
100. For an idea of the best in the cultural studies account of globalization, see Public Culture 12, no. 1 (Winter 2000).
101. j is cultural difference of the jth country from the United States" (Bruce Kogut and Harinder Singh, "The Effect of National Culture on the Choice of Entry Mode," Journal of International Business Studies 19 [1988]: 422).
102. Pat Smith and Lynn Roney, Wow the Dow! The Complete Guide to Teaching Your Kids How to Invest in the Stock Market (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 18.
103. Some other books are Robert T. Kiyosaki with Sharon L. Lechter, Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids about Money - That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! (New York: Warner Books, 2000);
104. Gail Karlitz et al., Growing Money: A Complete Investing Guide for Kids (New York: Price Stern Sloan, 1999);
105. Diane Mayr, The Everything Kids' Money Book: From Saving to Spending to Investing - Learn All about Money! (Holbrook, Mass.: Adams Media Corp., 2000);
106. Emmanuel Modu and Andrea Walker, Teenvestor.Com: The Practical Investment Guide for Teens and Their Parents (Newark, N.J.: Gateway, 2000);
107. Willard S. and William S. Stawski, Kids, Parents, and Money: Teaching Personal Finance from Piggy Bank to Prom (New York: John Wiley, 2000);
108. and Janet Bamford, Street Wise: A Guide for Teen Investors (New York: Bloomberg, 2000).
109. This information is taken from my "Other Things Are Never Equal: A Speech," Rethinking Marxism 12, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 37-45.
110. Here are passages from one of many undergraduate textbooks. This is standard cultural studies stuff, but the reminder remains necessary. The banality of these excerpts reminds us not to be absurdly out of touch when a Giddens counsels "antiproductivism": "In a study, Campbell's Soup found that the men who are most likely to shop view themselves as liberated, considerate, achievement-oriented individuals. These are the types of males who do not feel the need to conform to a 'macho' image. As a result, a second change has occurred in male purchasing roles: Males are beginning to buy products that at one time might have been dismissed as too feminine - jewelry, skin care products, moisturizers, and cosmetics. In marketing these products, advertisers have had to depict males in a way that is very different from the traditional strong, masculine image of the Marlboro Cowboy or in the typical beer commercial. A new concept of masculinity has emerged - the sensitive male who is as vulnerable in many ways as his female counterpart. As a result, a growing number of advertisers have begun telling males that being sensitive and caring does not conflict with masculinity. "Psychoanalytic theory stresses the unconscious nature of consumer motives as determined in childhood by the conflicting demands of the id and the superego. Marketers have applied psychoanalytic theory by using depth and focus group interviews and projective techniques to uncover deep-seated purchasing motives. These applications are known as motivation research. "The broadest environmental factor affecting consumer behavior is culture, as reflected by the values and norms society emphasizes. Products and services such as Levi jeans, Coca-Cola, and McDonald's fast-food outlets have come to symbolize the individuality inherent in American values. This is one reason why East Germans quickly accepted Coke after the fall of the Berlin Wall" (Henry Assael, Consumer Behavior and Marketing Action [Cincinnati, Ohio: South-Western College Publishing, 1995], 386, 404, 451).
111. This is the dominant general global cultural formation, appropriating the emergent - feminism, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, now environmentalism (remember the humble experiment in the Columbia gym case study, and take a look at Ruth La Ferla, "Fashionistas, Ecofriendly and All-Natural" [New York Times, July 15, 2001]). The Derrida-Levinas line, if it were understood as a cultural formation rather than an ethical phenomenology, is an altogether minor enclave compared to this and will show up transmogrified on the dominant register any day now.
112. John P. Clark, "Going with the (Cash) Flow: Taoism and the New Managerial Wisdom," New York Times, August 4, 2000;
113. and Thomas V. Morris, If Aristotle Ran General Motors: The New Soul of Business (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1997). Examples can be multiplied.
114. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Continuum, 1981), 29-31.
115. "Our Voice," Bangkok NGO Declaration, available at http://www.nativenet.uthscsa.edu/archive/nl/9307/0013.html.
116. Because these small disenfranchised responsibility-based cultures have not been allowed entry into the progressive legitimation of the colony, they have remained "economies organized by domestic groups and kinship relations" and yet been recoded as voting citizens of parliamentary democracies without imaginative access to a "public sphere." For them, without the caring pedagogy that I will be outlining, the "distance between poles of reciprocity . . . has remained [an anachronistic] social distance," without imaginative access to the commonality of citizenship. The quoted phrases are from Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, 41, 191. If this seems too fast, blame the postcolonial state and please remember (a) that the model here is not Australia, Latin America, Africa; this is a "precolonial settler colony"; and (b) that I am not there to study them but to learn from the children how to be their teacher. In the United States, too, I can talk about teaching but cannot write for American studies.
117. Justine Burley, ed., The Genetic Revolution and Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
118. I am no philosopher, but this is undoubtedly why the later Wittgenstein was interested in children's acquisition of language (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe [1953; New York: Macmillan, 1972], §1-32, page 200, 208). To mention the part of the mind that dreams would be to muddy the waters with arguments for and against Freud.
119. Luce Irigaray, "The Fecundity of the Caress," in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 231-56.
120. This case has been discussed in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "The New Subaltern: A Silent Interview," in Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, ed. Vinayak Chaturvedi (London: Verso, 2000), 335-36;
121. and in Spivak, "Discussion: An Afterword on the New Subaltern," in Community, Gender, and Violence: Subaltern Studies XI, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Pradeep Jeganathan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 324-40.
122. I say "supposedly" because the Hindu population of India, somewhere between 700 million and 850 million (the 2001 census figures were not available), is of course not represented by the poor rural Hindus, although they themselves think of Hinduism generally as a unified set of codes. They are generally prejudiced against SCSTs in their rural poverty, but they are not therefore in the cultural dominant. This is why Raymond Williams, who introduced the powerful instrument of seeing a culture as a dance of archaic-residual- dominant-emergent, proposed it as a solution to the habit of seeing cultures as a "system" rather than a process (Williams, Marxism and Literature [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 121-27).
123. Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in Surveys from Exile, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Vintage, 1973), 147; translation modified.
124. Catharine A. MacKinnon, "Crimes-War, Crimes-Peace," in On Human Rights, 84.
125. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), x; the next passage quoted is on page 60. I am not, of course, speaking of the provenance of social contract theories but rather of historical variations on something like actual social contracts.
126. Paine, Rights of Man, 79.
127. William Sacksteder, "Mutually Acceptable Glory," in The Causes of Quarrel, 103.
128. For an uncritical summary of this cultural formation as universal history, see Ronald Reagan, "Free Enterprise," radio essay (April 16, 1979), available at http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a521b332c47.htm.
129. Thomas Babington Macaulay, "Minute on Indian Education," in Speeches by Lord Macaulay with His Minute on Indian Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 349. When Khushwant Singh, an Indian writer in English, opined last year that you could say "blue sky" a million different ways in English, whereas in Hindi you could only say "neela asman," I realized the failure of Vidyasagar's experiment. The problem, then as now, is the one I have already indicated: one English, the superb and supple, technologically adroit language of the victor; the many languages of the vanquished; restricted permeability. Going down is easy; coming up is hard. The Ford Foundation can run a program called "Crossing Borders." But the literatures in the domestic languages are dying. And even this is a middle-class matter. Let us go back to the rural poor.
130. Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, Barnaparichaya (Calcutta: Benimadhab Sheel, n.d.).
131. Binaybhushan Ray, "'Shikkhashar' theke 'Barnaparichaya' - Shomajer Shange Shishu-Patthyer Paribartan," Akadami Patrika 6 (May 1994): 12-62, makes no mention of the experimental pedagogy of the text, and the Xeroxes seem to have been obtained from the India Office Library in London.
132. For self-ethnography, see Rosalind Morris, In the Place of Origins: Modernity and Its Mediums in Northern Thailand (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000).
133. The message reads as follows: Sir, give us a tube well. We will drink water. Give it now. We are thirsty. - 1. Abani Sabar 2. Kalomoni Sabar 3. Bharat Sabar 4. Shaymoli Sabar [Serially ordered in Bengali alphabet] - Sabar hamlet vill: P.O: Police Station: Manbajar District: Purulia - [name of officer] Kolkata
134. I have explained this phenomenon in "Megacity," Grey Room 1 (Fall 2000): 8-25.
135. W. E. B. Du Bois, "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others," in The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Signet, 1995), 78-95.
136. Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of Children, trans. Marjorie Gabain (New York: Free Press, 1965), 406.
137. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History (1953; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986).
138. This point cannot be developed here. Please see Spivak, "From Haverstock Hill Flat to US Classroom, What's Left of Theory?" in What's Left of Theory? New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory, ed. Judith Butler et al. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 1-40.
139. Please notice this earlier repetition of points made in the current essay. The piece itself was not about Human Rights and the Humanities but about what I have learned from the oral formulaic as practiced by the women in Manbhum: "I'm a modernist literary scholar. Acknowledged research methods in my field would be to follow the life-detail of the author or authors beyond the definitive biography, follow through on pertinent items indicated in the correspondence and in interviews, check the relationship between the critical and creative materials, and of course, consult the critical tradition exhaustively. There is no requirement that the method of connecting these details go beyond the simplest cause-effect structure. "No such research method has been followed in this afternoon's paper. "My sources of speculation are some women in Manbhum and a man from Birbhum. It occurs to me that an alternative research method could have been followed here. I could have consulted what anthropological and historical literature is available on the Kheriyas and the Dhekaros, the groups to which these people belong. With the latter, it is the very question of belonging that is being negotiated. There is nothing of that in this paper either. "To tell you the truth, the paper is hopelessly anecdotal. I have tried to encourage myself by saying that the anecdotes have something of the evidentiary contingence of the literary. Depth rather than breadth of evidence? Who knows? I place the facts in place of footnotes: I have been training teachers in Manbhum for the last ten years. My method is simple: to see how the students are learning and not learning, on the basis of these, to give simple practical instructions to the teacher. . . . "Because I work hard to change this state of affairs, because I feed the children a hot meal a day, and because I live with them when I do this work a certain acceptance has come from the men and women on the basis of which a mutual accountability has grown. My justification is this. The examples I offer may seem simple. But it has taken all this work to earn the right to be a person with whom these examples could be produced; and the right to claim a reading that's in the place of library work, detective work, fieldwork. "For the first few years, talk about this work in progress seemed forbidden, because it
140. Marx, Capital 3:959; translation modified.
141. For an example of involving the children of exploitation in intense matha khatano on the other side, see John Tierney, "Here Come the Alpha Pups," New York Times Magazine, August 5, 2001, 38-43.