ABSTRACT
In our digital age very few of the globalised images seem to have much in the way of a presence. The age of information overload has delivered a mass culture where we scan our phones on the way to work or quickly skim news websites. The development of new media technology has done a great deal not only to insist on a global cosmopolitan culture of the present, but equally to reduce images, phrases and everyday media chatter to a fleeting presence. As Frederick Jameson (1998: 111) so memorably argued, ‘social space is now completely saturated with the image’. In an age of globalisation, violence and commodification, what amounts to critical politics? Our shared sense of global interconnectedness and mobility points towards a radical politics beyond the nation. What do we mean by freedom and emancipatory politics, in this age of ever restless consumption and postmodern recycling of the past? Here we should stop to consider the deeply cynical horizons of the present where there is seemingly nothing beyond the market and its rationality. The 2008 financial crisis has been met less by a search for alternatives than it has by the attempt to recover and resurrect the current system. In contrast, what kind of politics might offer a principle of hope and imagination for our own time? Whereas postmodernism offered a politics of the image and deconstruction, we might find more critical ideas associated with human rights and cosmopolitan currents. If all we have is a sense of freedom generated by the endless consumption of goods and upward mobility, then critical politics is nullified. Could human rights then offer a more inspiring, principled and hopeful vision in our increasingly anxious and consumer-orientated society? Despite the problems and evasions of a politics of human rights (of which there are many), the idea of ‘humane rights’ acts as a modern utopia in a globally interconnected world. The cosmopolitan task of our time is the cultural conversion of human rights into the rights of the citizen. As Ulrich Beck (2007) argues, human rights and associated ideas of human compassion provide a thin moral consensus within the world today. Such an argument has many detractors ranging from conservatives who argue that the state should organically evolve over time to radicals who argue such rights are unlikely to foster the levels of resistance necessary to slow down the neoliberal project. Indeed, many on the contemporary Left have given up on the idea of human rights given the role they
currently play in legitimising the global dominance of the United States. It is not hard to understand some of the cynicism here. David Kennedy (2004) has argued that, even within the reformulated terms that I have offered, the so-called humanitarian arguments for human rights are often caught up with a modernisation project from above that dismisses local and traditional practices, thereby helping to install a version of capitalist modernity. The so-called ‘dark side’ of human rights is evident in a discourse whose political ‘neutrality’ ends up displacing more grass-roots groups in favour of a view of development that mostly benefits social elites. Human rights in this reading is less a pragmatic response to injustice, but more a way of justifying certain views of development that tend to favour the West and wealthy elites. Indeed it is by its very nature a form of politics that ends up ‘speaking for others’ (Kennedy 2004: 29). The global nature of human rights can also end up promoting ideas of Western superiority, offering easy targets for blame such as ‘corrupt elites’ or ‘evil individuals’ while allowing those that promote these norms to have the appearance of clean hands and moral virtue. Human rights should clearly not be seen as a universal panacea to be utilised irrespective of understandings of the social and cultural context. Others, perhaps more cynically, view human rights as a postmodern utopia where we maintain a gap between the ideal of human rights and a more deformed present (Douzinas 2000). The work of the historian Samuel Moyn (2010) is significant here, pointing to how human rights have only taken on a utopian significance after the failures of nationalist liberation movements. Human rights during the Enlightenment period meant not so much rights for all humans, but rather the realisation of citizenship rights in relation to the national state. It is only after the collapse of faith in socialism, after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and murder of Chilean leader Salvador Allende in 1973, that the idea of human rights became a genuinely international movement. According to this assessment, human rights (as they are often understood) did not so much come of age after the Holocaust, but after the defeat of socialism and national liberation movements. It is not that human rights do not have possibilities but they are perhaps relatively ‘thin’ when compared to more substantial forms of critique. Elsewhere human rights have been more pragmatically addressed as ‘instruments for alleviating human misery’ (Woodiwiss 2012: 967). While these arguments have much to commend them, from the point of view of cultural sociology they are either too dismissive or too pragmatic. Darren O’Byrne (2012) has argued that a sociological approach to human rights needs to move beyond viewing them as the abstract commands of the legal system, and instead look at how they work both within institutional contexts as well as locations of meaning. This is less about justifying human rights, and more about understanding how claims to human rights become mobilised within specific contexts, thereby avoiding a universalistic discourse that is simply applied irrespective of problems of context. However, the problem with this view is that it tends to leave out questions of morality and humanity. Bryan S. Turner (2006), on the other hand, seeks to legitimate ideas of human rights through a discussion of vulnerability arguing that it is due to the precariousness of the body that we require the
protection of rights. It is precisely because of our shared human condition that we require the virtues of human rights. This is indeed an interesting argument. However, by shifting the concern to the human body he then has little to say about how, globally, human rights have become associated with questions of freedom connected to philosophical liberalism and beyond. Instead, my view is that human rights continues both to require philosophical justification and that the Kantian tradition remains central in this respect. Associated ideas of human dignity are important to understanding the widespread appeal of human rights as they are to their justification. Following Jeffrey Alexander (2010), we need to study how powerful moral ideas like human rights become imagined, performed and represented in modern societies. In doing so we need to avoid more sociologically reductive arguments that fail to address some of the cultural complexity that surround human rights in the modern context. While human rights are indeed part of the dominant hegemonic language of the United States, they can also offer radical possibilities. Makau Mutua (2004) argues for a view of the human rights movement that neither conforms to the idea of a Western conspiracy, nor that they should be seen as simply a form of humanitarianism benefiting everyone. Within the Western script it is often the Third World which is seen as requiring civilisation and development. The key metaphor that comes into play might be described as the notion of victimhood, offering simplistic assumptions about good and evil (Mutua 2004). This narrative is often utilised in a specifically racist manner that promotes Euro-centric understandings of Western civility as opposed to the barbarity of so-called less developed nations. Within this framework, human rights abuse is rarely connected to the role of global corporations, the arms trade or Western military intervention. The West in this set of simplistic understandings is seen as free and emancipated whereas as the global South is understood to be under the sign of tradition and state-led barbarism. The people of the global South are seen as ‘victims’ requiring ‘saving’ from ‘savages’ by Western humanitarians. Further, if the discourses that surround human rights are built upon racist binaries they are then drawn upon by states to legitimate a set of policies that serve the rule of elites and the normality of capitalism, thereby adding another set of exclusions into the argument. This does not, however, mean that Mutua (2004) wishes to dismiss the idea of human rights; rather he carefully argues that they need to be linked to social movements and campaigns from below that offer a deeper appreciation of local conditions which can then explore the possibilities for emancipation in detail. The complexity of this critique both refuses relativism while pointing to some of the pitfalls of human rights arguments within specific contexts. Human rights can offer an important set of norms reinforcing a sense of rights and entitlement and yet can also become a way of promoting Western forms of superiority. Similarly Susanne Buck-Morss (2003) argues that we need to maintain a ‘double-vision’ in respect of human rights in order to reconstruct the global public sphere. If the West likes to see itself as the global conscience of human rights, this also sets up standards and justifications through which it can be judged. In an increasingly complex global and
information culture, it is a myth to claim that the world’s dominant superpower can easily control the flow of information and perception. While human rights are at once part of the global hegemony of the dominant super power, they also offer critical standards and judgments that may embarrass and question power. Here I shall argue that, despite its pitfalls, the utopian nature of human rights is at least suggestive of an alternative political project that has emerged in the context of a relentlessly fast moving and increasingly global society. If the downside of a commodified and fragmented world is a fracturing of memory and a disappearing sense of history then perhaps more optimistically we can point to the popularity of new normative standards. The politics of human rights in this setting offers a critical culture of border-crossing not only problematising national borders, but also ideas of friends and enemies. The global culture of human rights will undoubtedly perform cultural mutations in different settings dependent upon how a shared language of norms becomes operationalised and performed. This project, however, needs to proceed through a rubric that is careful not to offer simplistic understandings around questions of development and civilisation which we found earlier. However, to push the argument further, I shall suggest that for human rights to be effective they need to be reimagined as the rights to a ‘dignified’ life. It is what we might describe as the ‘humanity’ of human rights that concerns me. How this becomes defined will clearly vary, dependent upon the context, but such a concern attempts to move the debate about human rights beyond some of its more recent formulations. The demand for human rights can be connected to the needs for a humane and decent life rather than simply being about the setting of important limits to the polity. However, if human rights are to offer this more critical set of understandings then they need to be de-coupled from Western ideas of development as economic growth, consumerism and capitalism. As Ivan Illich (2009) argued, the normalised development discourse of endless capitalistic growth and development of sophisticated weapons systems while pushing the planet beyond its ecological limits needs to recognise a sense of limits. This would suggest, as we shall see in later chapters, that the idea of human rights can be linked to the idea of self-management and the idea of the commons.
