HUMANISTIC TACTICS: HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE HUMANITIES
Jonathan Lear alerts us to the importance of listening to others, sitting with others, and reading together—the interpretive moments of humanistic activity. He calls our attention to recognition, dignity, and human rights. Paul Kahn reminds us of the way that law as an interpretive and text-based enterprise stands between State power and its effects. He calls our attention to interpretation, evasion, confrontation, and the complexity of tradition and human rights. Fundamentally, I agree with both of their essays. Both give us a window into how the humanities can enlarge our conception of human rights.
Human rights aim at ensuring that all people, taken one by one and in conjunction with each other, have the possibility of self-authorship. For it is not just freedom from torture, or the right to liberty or freedom of speech, or the right to vote that are at stake in ensuring human rights. All of these things aim at ensuring the dignity of individuals, and hence enlarging their capacity and possibility for self-authorship.
To show what I mean by self-authorship, and in the spirit of telling stories (something that can be understood as a humanistic method), I want to look at the tactics people deploy when their dignity is infringed, when their human rights are limited. These are examples of the way the humanities create possibilities for resistance in repressive regimes.
In regimes that infringe on human rights, we can see the centrality of what I will call humanistic tactics among those who resist. Resisters use irony, mimesis, and multivalence. They stand in the interpretive space between the power of the State and its effects. Resisters often comply with repression but with an asterisk or an ellipsis, a message that reads differently in different interpretive communities. Knowledge of literature—of strategies of reading, of cultures of interpretation—are crucial to self-authorship in this context, particularly when other resources are unavailable. In general, but especially in regimes where human rights are scarce on the ground, humanistic tactics may be the last refuge of dignity.
Let me illustrate with some examples of this kind of resistance during the Soviet era, because it provides perhaps the clearest case. Serguei Oushakine has pointed out that in the Soviet Union, resisters often engaged in what he calls “mimetic resistance.”1 In a regime of censorship, precisely where it was very difficult to criticize the State openly, people quoted the law of the State back at it. Dissidents would wear signs around their necks that said “Respect the Constitution,” or they would quote article 2 of the Soviet Constitution: “All power in the USSR belongs to the people.” They would stand on street corners wearing these signs, and the question became what could the State do? How could it be illegal to quote the language of the State back at it? But because the words were spoken in a different voice, they of course meant something else. A legal system cannot figure out what to do with this. The law has no sense of irony; the law is not amused.
In Poland in that era, people put on public dramatic readings of Jaroslav Hašek’s novel, The Good Soldier Švejk.2 Written after World War I, the novel features the hapless Švejk who is, as he frequently reminds readers, a certified idiot. When the war breaks out, Švejk enlists in the Habsburg army, proclaiming his loyalty to the empire. But Švejk is, as he told us, a certified idiot. And so every time he undertakes to be useful, he gums up the works, he gets in the way of what the army is actually doing, he winds up being the person who brings the State to its knees. But he does so while proclaiming his loyalty to State. Had Švejk intended to disable the Habsburg army, he could not have done a better job. He says one thing and does another over and over. So, for example, at the beginning of the book when he is rounded up with others at the beginning of the war and put in jail, while others worry out loud, Švejk says,
“We’re all of us in a nasty jam.… You’re not right when you say that nothing can happen to you or any of us. What have we got the police for except to punish us for talking out of turn?”3
When one of his cellmates protests that he is innocent, Švejk responds:
“Jesus Christ was innocent too … and all the same they crucified him. No one anywhere has ever worried about a man being innocent. Maul halten und weiter dienen [Grin and bear it, and get on with the job]—as they used to tell us in the army. That’s the best and finest thing of all.”4
In the context of a repressive regime, what would people mean when they quoted this, as the dissidents known as “Švejkologists” did in Poland? In the Hašek novel, you actually never really know whether Švejk is a certifiable idiot or a resister.
In the Czech Republic—Czechoslovakia at the time—there was a feminist rock group named Zuby Nehty, which means “tooth and nail.”5 They were in fact the only women’s rock group in Czechoslovakia at the time. They complied with the rules of the State, which required that artists who wrote songs that they wanted to publish or perform to submit their lyrics to the regime for approval. At first Zuby Nehty wrote dark, resisting lyrics, and of course the censors threw them out. The group quickly learned the limitations of the censorship system, and tried something else. They offered a song called “Let Us Rejoice” with the chorus:
Let us rejoice and let us make merry.
Let our joy be eternal.
Let our joy be forever.
The State had no problem with these lyrics, and the song sailed through the censors without trouble. Then, when the song actually appeared, it was set to funereal music, written in a dark and minor key. Censors could do little about it, but it clearly meant—in that context—something other than what it literally said.
In Hungary, István Őrkény was famous for his very short, one-minute stories, especially one entitled “Public Opinion Poll.” How could you get in trouble for the following?
Public Opinion Poll
What is your opinion of the current system?
A) Good.
B) Bad.
C) Neither good nor bad, but it could be a little better.
D) I want to go to Vienna.
Your philosophical training tends toward?
A) Marxist.
B) Anti-Marxist.
C) Pulp Fiction.
D) Alcoholic.6
All Őrkény did in the story was pose the questions. Nothing is stated explicitly against the State, and yet.…
What you see in these humanistic tactics is the creativity, dignity, humor, and humanity of those who engage with each other in a space that the State seeks to close. In thinking about the conditions of possibility for human rights, we can think about this contribution of the humanities, which is to give us an empowering family of techniques of reading, thinking, working together, building interpretive communities, and understanding that what we say to each other may not have only the meaning that the State can find in those utterances. These are powerful tactics, especially when a State seeks to foreclose the possibility of self-authorship.
FIVE COUNTERPOINTS ON HUMANITIES AND HUMAN RIGHTS
The title of this session is composed of two terms: “humanities” and “human rights.” My reading of the two papers presented is that Paul Kahn’s provides a suggestive discussion of the first term, humanities, whereas Jonathan Lear’s opens an illuminating reflection on the second, human rights. My brief comment is an endeavor to articulate the two and then engage our conversation a little further.
On the one hand, coming from a distinct intellectual and institutional tradition (the national committee I chaired in France was “for the human and social sciences,” and, more generally, the social sciences there have a critical humanities-friendly foundation, where Foucault meets Bourdieu), I find interesting Paul Kahn’s description of what he calls the “disciplinary divide between the social sciences and the humanities,” the positivist and formalist perspective of the former versus the interpretive and reflexive approach of the latter. It is ironic, though. Considering the relative marginality characterizing these two academic worlds in the public sphere, one has certainly to interrogate the damaging consequences for both of their mutual ignorance or delegitimization.
On the other hand, whereas human rights discourse is usually about general principles defended in the public sphere (this is what my time as vice president of Doctors without Borders has taught me, and more generally, it is what historians of human rights suggest, from Lynn Hunt to Samuel Moyn), it is remarkable that Jonathan Lear’s compelling evocation concerns a personal and intimate encounter with the Crow Indians, initially through a text, later on their reservation, and eventually within archives. But rather than these so-called others, what his search and research mean is what he phrases as “the process of crystallization that occurred in me.” This is indeed a stimulating invitation to think about efforts to bring human rights to the world as a move that tells much about “us” and little about “them,” when one usually supposes the opposite.
So how can the social sciences contribute to bringing together these two series of issues—the tense links between the humanities and the social sciences, and the ambiguous relationships involved in the provision of human rights? If critique is to be understood, in Judith Butler’s terms, as thinking against the obvious, I suggest formulating the critical contribution of the social sciences to the humanities in human rights on five points—or rather, five counterpoints to the obvious.
First, although the two terms are often used interchangeably, including in the presentation of this panel, it may be helpful to differentiate analytically between human rights and humanitarianism. Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the end of the former in Imperialism and of an embryonic expression of the latter in On Revolution, as well as the distinct legal and institutional settings of human rights and humanitarian right, suggest that, whatever overlap there is, human rights are about the defense of dignity while humanitarianism is about the saving of lives. This difference, which traces a fine line between reason and emotion, has political and ethical implications.
Second, whereas the reconstitution of the two parallel moral movements usually goes back far in time to the Enlightenment, the Scottish moral philosophy, the French revolution, the British abolitionist movement, the Greek war of independence, and sometimes even farther, one should certainly think in terms of dual temporality: one of long duration, which provides a genealogy of ideas and sentiments starting in the eighteenth century; and one of short term, which accounts for the increasing invocation of human rights and humanitarianism to justify social, political, military, and of course moral causes and actions during the past two or three decades. This periodization should help apprehend more cogently the recent transformation of the global public sphere and its paradoxical consequences, when wars are qualified as humanitarian and human rights are invoked to stigmatize ethnic minorities or religious groups.
Third, while human rights and humanitarian worlds are often thought as homogeneously grounded on a shared sense of the common good defined by moral philosophers, the sociological study of discourses and institutions reveals disagreements, tensions, and conflicts, whether one considers the qualification of massacres as genocide in Darfur or the violations of rights in the Palestinian territories, the legitimacy of intervening in Libya or the relevance of the media campaign in the United States targeted at Joseph Kony of the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army. Rather than a consensual realm, the world of human rights and humanitarianism should be regarded as a social field, with harsh competition not only over limited resources from private donations and public aid, but also over the very definition of ends and means.
Fourth, despite the fact that human rights and humanitarianism as we know them have specific origins and are inscribed in a particular narrative, anthropology invites us to acknowledge non-Western traditions, the production of other moral economies and other ethical subjectivities, whether in African, Asian, or Middle Eastern societies. This assertion does not imply, though, that we should reopen the old debate on moral relativism and its declination in terms of clash of civilizations. Rather, it concerns the mere recognition of the intellectual and political problems posed by a representation of the world in which ethics would have only one geography.
Fifth, the imaginary of human rights and humanitarianism is saturated with the generous ambition of the good one can do for others by defending and assisting them. This is understandable and commendable. But we can rethink this moral question in political terms by asking not only what is gained when we use this language, but also what is lost. In particular, it is remarkable that the claim to human rights generally coincides with the decline of social justice in public discourse in the same way as the invocation of humanitarianism frequently corresponds to the disappearing of the voice of those who are only heard via their benevolent spokespersons. These political losses should be a concern, too.
To conclude, critical thinking, which is what we probably all endeavor to achieve, is all the more difficult when the obviousness concerns our very sense of morality and our ethical responsibility to the world—when it challenges Kurtz’s vision in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that “by the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded.”1 And precisely because of this difficulty, it is all the more necessary.
Discussion Session 3: The Humanities and Human Rights
CHARLES LARMORE: This is a question for Paul Kahn. As you might imagine, my attention was caught by your statement early in your essay that when you are engaged in interpretation you are not concerned with the author’s intent. I think that statement stands in considerable tension with your conclusion, where you talked about the productivity and creativity of interpretation, and compared it to a conversation.
What characterizes a good conversation generally, not just with a text? First, let’s look at two things emblematic of a bad conversation. One kind of bad conversation occurs when people simply announce back and forth what they already believe. There is nothing productive or creative in this. In another kind of bad conversation, each person spins his or her own wheels, and may in fact be creative and productive with himself or herself, but is not listening to what the other person is saying. Many real conversations fall into one of these categories.
A good conversation, it seems to me, occurs when each person listens and endeavors to hear what the other actually is saying, as opposed to what one expects the person to say. In making that effort, one may be startled into saying things about the subject that one would not have said or thought before. So the productivity of a conversation depends on listening attentively to what the other person is trying to say while doing one’s best to grasp the speaker’s intention. If that is the mark of a good conversation in general, why wouldn’t that be the same in textual interpretation, understood as a conversation?
PAUL KAHN: I don’t think we disagree on much here. What do I mean when I say that the point of an interpretation is not simply to articulate the author’s intent? I think you just said it as well—the point is mutual reciprocal engagement in which, together, something is created. You have to take the other person seriously, you have to think about what they are saying. But that is not the end point or ambition in itself—that is part of the process of reciprocally interacting. Your two examples of pathological conversation are exactly ones that don’t take that reciprocity seriously.
But your model of good conversation does not end or come to rest with one side saying, “Now I understand you.” The idea is to create a third, productive element between the two. So the model of interpretation I was offering encourages reciprocal discourse, and that is why I talk about risk and openness, about creating something together. This interaction is not bounded by authorial intent; that is not a limit or truth at which you are trying to get, but an element in the conversation that you are reciprocally having and creating.
EVERETT ZHANG: I have a question for Jonathan Lear. It seems to me that by your work with the Crows you were creating what I would call a kind of postpublication anthropological fieldwork, demonstrating a new form of engagement with the people. You are engaging in a poetic writing that can wake us up and extend the work, but that cannot happen without the anthropological engagement. This is an observation from the perspective of an anthropologist, and I wonder if you had a reflection on that?
JONATHAN LEAR: This brings up the issue of how lines of demarcation are drawn between the humanities and social sciences. What is the line between the two, or how much is that line an ideological construct? This is something that has come up in this symposium, and also for me in the past. I remember when I was at a dinner at Trinity College in Dublin, and a very well-meaning scientist, who was going to be making decisions about the college budget, asked me—and his question was entirely earnest—how can we measure what you are doing in the humanities? What can you show us? It was clear to me then that university budgets were going to be affected by a certain conception of the measurable, and that the issue of whether certain phenomena are measurable has become the place to draw a line. The impact studies and research assessment exercises that have had such a detrimental effect on intellectual life and the humanities in Britain are one manifestation of this. There are debates within anthropology as well as interdisciplinary struggles around these issues.
Now, my work is in an important sense anecdotal. One of the ironies of my engagement with the Crow was that, whatever value there was in this engagement, it would have been much harder if I had come there as an anthropologist. They do not want to be studied. My Crow friends do not want anthropologists there, no matter how much the field has transformed itself over the years. They still see anthropology as a manifestation of the dominant culture’s longstanding attempt to subjugate them and other native peoples. How fair or unfair that perception is can be discussed, but I do think that the conversation could not have happened if I had come to the reservation as an anthropologist. I have been adopted into a Crow family, and I had no idea how life-changing that would be for me. It was crucial that I had nothing to measure, nothing to study. I told them that I was there to talk to them about a book I wrote because Plenty Coups’s words resonated with me, and if they wanted to keep talking then I would be there to keep talking. I don’t know exactly how to theorize or thematize that, but it is a salient cultural fact that I don’t think it could have happened any other way.
ERIC GREGORY: I am from religious studies, a discipline where, through critical readings that my students have done in, say, Agamben and Foucault, both human rights and humanitarianism have come to be considered extremely dangerous practices and discourses that further complicity with injustice. Any expression of support for them by me is met with deep skepticism. And I think there is a kind of despair there. I wonder whether, in the humanities, the culture of ideology critique has become so consuming of how we train graduate students and how we talk to each other that any moment of generativity or even poetic response just does not happen. Is there something we can do differently in the way we teach, in the way we read, in the way we are masters of suspicion?
PK: It is interesting to hear that for me because I teach in a law school where students are not at all skeptical in this regard. This is their moment of relief—they want to do the work of human rights and humanitarianism. Some of them have read Agamben and are a little worried, but on the whole this kind of critique is a positive discourse against which they can measure the other things they are doing, like corporate law. So the problem is not framed in the same way. The problem does come in a kind of second order, where they worry about whether some of these interventions—laws and forms of actions—have assumptions about the failure of agency on the part of those for whose benefit they intend to act. But this is a critical self-reflection that should be encouraged in the law school because of the easy assumptions about the positive moral role of intervention in this area. I think we may be on opposite sides of the university, and we should get our students together.
DIDIER FASSIN: Eric, maybe your students are not reading the right Foucault, because much of his later work is very different from the impression that they seem to have. You can tell them that he signed a petition with Doctors without Borders in favor of a humanitarian intervention to save the boat people in the China Sea. I think there is perhaps an oversimplification here of what critique means. For Foucault, reinterpreting Kant’s answer to the question “What is enlightenment?,” critique means not taking the world as it is for granted. It means to consider that what is could have been different, that it is in part arbitrary, that another state of affairs could have been possible. In the case of humanitarianism, as I have tried to do in my own work, it implies to think of humanitarianism not in normative terms (eulogistic or disparaging) but of historical developments, the signification and consequences of which must be examined.
WILL EVANS: I thought Kim Scheppele made a powerful point that the law constitutively can’t recognize irony and irony’s power to resist forms of meaning-making that are repressive or tyrannous. That would differentiate it from allegory, for example. I wonder if the panel could address ways in which irony is useful not just for unmaking a community that is not working, but also for reconstituting a community?
JL: I was thinking, in relation to Kim’s essay, of an example of Crow humor that goes like this: There is one thing about which the white man has kept his word. They said they were going to put us back on our feet, and they kept their word—they shot all our horses. That is an example of containing a pain in the form of humor and irony, trying to find ways of facing up to and metabolizing loss without sinking into melancholia and depression.
KIM LANE SCHEPPELE: In the Soviet era, irony served to create a community of solidarity against the state. We had Slavoj Žižek here at Princeton recently, and he reminded us of the Soviet era joke in which a guy goes into a café and asks for coffee without cream, to which the server replies, “I can’t give you coffee without cream; I can only give you coffee without milk.” Those kinds of jokes reflect a shared experience.
What was so interesting and in some ways so tragic about the end of the Soviet world was that suddenly the world was opened up, people could travel, they could read things and say things that they could never read or say before. For some people this was an immense liberation and enlargement of their world, but for others it meant their world fell apart. A great many dissidents, and in particular comedians, had relied on a tight lexical community where irony could be produced because its members could understand that a surface meaning was not the meaning at play. When these worlds fell apart, there was a loss.
Sometimes the ends of repressive regimes are also simultaneously the ends of the resistance regimes that depended on them, and for some people it is difficult to find an alternative world of meaning once that happens. Some of that has to do with the nature of community that irony creates, and what happens when those communities are disrupted by political events.
ELAINE SCARRY: Just a postscript to this conversation: I saw in the paper recently that the Russian police declared it illegal for toys to hold a protest.1 People were taking tiny little toys and putting them in assembly in a public space holding protest signs. I think this example bears out your point about humanitarian or aesthetic solutions, especially if one thinks of Baudelaire’s essay on the philosophy of toys, that toys are our first experience of the aesthetic.2
KLS: To bring the regime to arrest toys—which they did in Barnaul, Siberia—is a kind of victory for the protestors. That is how these tactics work.
RICHARD SENNETT: Do you have a feeling now that the resources of the Web and social media are changing the kinds of protests in Eastern Europe, that they are using the kinds of tactics used in the Arab Spring?
KLS: In the work of irony, the Web both helps and doesn’t. It opens out the space to give protestors a larger audience and a larger community of support, but it also makes it hard to generate the common interpretive practices that these tactics rely on.
JUDITH BUTLER: I appreciate the discussion of tactics, and I like those tactics, even stand by them, but I am getting nervous about the idea that the humanities can be, or are, valuable as a set of techniques that can be mobilized. I want to suggest that the humanities or reading is not primarily a set of techniques that can be applied. I am always reminding my students of this. There is something about reading in the humanities, or the kind of reading practices that we try to teach or teach about, that is a different kind of practice than the application or use of a technique. Those latter operations would be instrumental understandings of value. I am not trying to be a complete deontologist, and I think I spoke against that in my paper.
In The Body in Pain, for example, Elaine Scarry described a certain idea of receptivity that is extremely important to an ethical practice.3 And Jonathan Lear today talked about being vulnerable to someone else’s words years after they were uttered. What is it for those words to affect you and make you inexplicably receptive? I think he said it was aesthetic, and I wonder if we can talk about that aesthetic as having ethical significance without understanding that as a causal relationship. That would be a mistaken way to think about this—to imagine that if only we were all good readers we would then be ethical citizens—although there is something about receptivity that can nevertheless make that result possible. Patricia Williams told us about the woman next to her at the airport, and a series of moments where you are not open to what the person next to you is saying, even trying to shut them out—but then something is spoken, and you start to open, and that receptivity emerges into responsiveness, if not responsibility.
I think of technique as presupposing a deliberate agent—I use this technique on this text to get at its meaning, or I use this technique on the street to find my way or defend myself. I think we want to avoid seeing the humanities as a set of tools that can be applied. I am concerned about that because it takes the focus away from this other domain in which the aesthetic actually can, on occasion, move us into ethical responsiveness in a different way.
KLS: I agree with what you are saying about technique, but I want to resist your resistance. When techniques of irony emerged, it was not because people had read theory and applied it. Irony became possible because people had constructed communities of meaning that could hide in plain sight. People learned, as a matter of hard practice, that they could say things that were meaningful to each other and yet totally disabling to the state. The state was disabled from intervening in the conversation because what the resisters said had a public meaning that was its first and obvious meaning, but that obvious meaning was not what bound people together. They were bound together by the alternative, ironic meaning. So I am struck by the way these tactics emerged not out of theory applied, but out of a political closure lived. Instead of being simply an application of theories we have, it is a validation, a further refinement, and a testament to the importance of the theory we have.
JB: I am also interested in the sphere of audibility. Under what conditions is the joke heard and registered? How does that work? Or laughter—under what conditions does laughter become subversive or produce new forms of relationships, new modes of valuation?
KLS: Yes, and if the condition of the possibility of that laughter is the repression that made the community possible, how funny is it? It is a fraught form.