The Routledge Companion To Literature And Human Rights

The Particular, the Generalizable, the Political

Domna C. Stanton

The past 20 years have witnessed marked efforts to redefine and redeploy the universal, a turn that signals the rejection of postmodernism’s own rejection of an Enlightenment master narrative, and its own privileging of the micronarratives of the local, propounded in Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1984). The local or the particular (which I use predominantly here), in its traditional binary opposition to the universal, has been criticized as an idealized notion that denies its constitutive plurality, for example, the competing claims in any concrete situation. Bruce Robbins (1993) questioned the local’s associations with uniqueness, presence, immediate experience, and accessible subjectivity. Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1995) underscored the local’s limitations in closing dialogue and relational possibilities, thereby promoting political apathy. Ernesto Laclau inveighed against particularism for blocking the movement toward those with different aspirations, and thus toward a politics of transformation (1992: 87). Not surprisingly, then, Amanda Anderson heralded the potential of a “new universalism [that] focuses on those ideals and practices that propel individuals and groups beyond the confines of restricted or circumscribed identities” (1998: 266).

However, what defines the new universal, how “new” it effectively is or can become, remains contested. Since “the universal” has many sedimented meanings, rooted in the historical and present dynamics of power/knowledge, it is, as Edward Said observed, “very difficult to construct another universality alongside this one” (1994: 198). Arguably, it may be impossible to do without the universal; or, as Laclau put it, the concept is both impossible and necessary (Butler et al. 2000: 58). The only alternative may then be to subject it to critique and resignify it by conjoining the universal to the particular and the political, though the promise of this project, as Judith Butler et al. note (2000: 38), remains unclear.

Whereas the new universal rejects such qualifiers as classical, ancient, static, immutable, eternal, essentialist – in a word, Hegelian (Laclau 1992: 84–89; Balibar 1995: 48; Zerilli 1998; Anderson 1998: 282; Butler et al. 2000: 4ff.) – it foregrounds the historical, contingent, concrete, multiple, and plural to permeate the notion with constitutive particularity, turning the universal into a catachresis (rhetorically, a misuse of terms that constructs a paradox). For Alessandro Ferrara, the “establishment of a credible form of universalism … a new ‘concrete universalism’” will have to incorporate “the contextuality of knowledge” and “a genuine acceptance of … pluralism” (1996: 243ff.). However, this interpenetration of the particular and the universal (Geertz 1973) does not resolve problematic tensions within the catachrestic. As Linda Zerilli cautions, reviewing Laclau’s Emancipations (1996), fragile, shifting, incomplete particulars that make up significations must not be effaced in the universal (Zerilli 1998: 7–16). And Laclau’s equivalence among particulars conceals power differentials that make some particulars more central to the new universal, relegating others to the margins; thus, the new universal could simply become more of the same.

Butler has grappled with the imperative of the universal’s resignification since 1996, insisting that it has not only shifted meanings over time and in different places – the particular in one site can be universal in another – but that its significance devolves from the cultural conditions of its articulation (1996: 48, 50; 2000: 33, 41; Benhabib et al. 1995: 129–30). She examines definitions of the universal for their particular exclusions, and, in a move that evokes the abject in Bodies that Matter, observes that what is excluded is precisely what constitutes the universal (1993a: x, 3, 16), even as the excluded, in their struggles to be included, advocate for their own identificatory concepts that challenge the universal. As “universalization,” this ongoing contestational process has the capacity to sustain differences within (1996: 48–50; 2000: 164, 168) and, more optimistically, to remain permanently open-ended. Since it is impossible to know what the universal will include in the future, its ultimate form, writes Butler, is never realizable (Benhabib et al. 1995: 40–41, 130–31; Butler 1996: 46–49; 2004b: 189–91).

The critical project to articulate “a new universal,” not to rescue or revitalize the old, must undergird any examination of human rights universalism, not only its ambiguous and ambivalent meanings and reach, but also the degree to which it is, always already was, or has become through ongoing contest inflected by plural claims. Such an analysis assumes particular urgency after 9/11, a period that has witnessed radical setbacks to the ideals and practices of the human rights regime (HRR) – led by the US imperial “War on Terror,” which empowered other states to defy international conventions and to deploy rights rhetoric to mask widespread suppression of dissidence. This conjunction has made ever more visible the complicity of the HRR – including civil society – with global, capitalist formations (Cheah 2000; Hopgood 2013). Writing in this context, my chapter examines with ambivalence the status of th universal in the human rights regime and the possibilities for a new universal. I look briefly at the semantics of the “universal” in human rights documents, whose proliferation since 1948 pluralizes the regime, and its multipronged structure (regional, national, and transnational organizations, as well as civil society). Even though the universal seems to become multiversal in the HRR, I grapple with the thorny issue of mediation among competing particulars in rearticulating the universal, a horizontal process of contestation that Butler terms “cultural translation,” or a bottom-up process I call generalizability. I consider the concrete work that invoking universal rights can achieve, but finally, I insist that the new universal cannot be an alibi for humanitarian neutrality. Human rights must be actively committed to progressive political struggles around the globe or sink into ever-greater irrelevance.

On the universal in the HRR: limited meanings, proliferating documents, plural structures

Although the Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) affirms “the promotion of universal respect and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,” as well as the goal of securing “their universal and effective recognition and observance” (CSHR 1994: 6)¸ “universal” rarely appears in human rights declarations, and where it does, its meaning seems circumscribed to “comprehensive” or “global”; it certainly does not rise to an Aristotelian “necessary a priori.” Since 1948, a proliferation of documents has expanded the HRR, in response to new conditions and efforts to amend, even to negate, earlier formulations. Thus, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1969), which references the UDHR, justifies the need for a new convention, beyond the UN Declaration Granting Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (1960), because of “manifestations of racial discrimination still in evidence in some areas of the world and … governmental policies based on racial superiority or hatred, such as policies of apartheid, segregation or separation” (CSHR 1994: 39). And the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979) explains that “despite … various instruments,” resolutions, and declarations, “extensive discrimination against women continues to exist” (CSHR 1994: 48) that requires further means to combat it.

With its many added conventions, the HRR expanded beyond the first generation of civil and political rights, which dealt with liberty, to a second generation of affirmative or positive rights, focused on equality and defined notably in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1976), which includes the right to food, housing, work, and an adequate standard of health (CSHR 1994: 16–27). Although the means for ensuring these affirmative rights are still debated, a third generation of group rights has been enacted in response to the privileging of individual rights in earlier documents, such as the UDHR. Group rights, outlined in UN declarations, such as those of migrant workers and their families (1999) and of indigenous peoples (2007), feature economic and social development and sovereignty over natural resources. They have been promoted by “the Third World,” in contrast to first-generation rights, thought to reflect the interests of the West, and second-generation rights, those of the East, though Amartya Sen (2000) has questioned their embedded notion of “Asian values.”

The ongoing production of new texts to affirm rights for new contextual conditions undermines the idea of a fixed, timeless universalism in the HRR. Even the foundational UDHR is grounded as a response to Nazi Germany (CSHR 1994: 6), an attempt to recreate the postwar international order, and to empower individuals to disobey state laws. However, in one of its most problematic limitations, the UDHR also made UN member states the sole signatories, subjects, and actors of the HRR (CSHR 1994: 6). Thus the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) formulates political rights for citizens, not humans universally. Since the state constitutes the ultimate determinant of rights within its territory, almost every convention contains the caveat that “in time of public emergency … the State Parties to the present Covenant may take measures derogating from their obligations” (CSHR 1994: 18) – for example, when the covenant does not accord with state law, even when the law contravenes the UDHR on banning capital punishment (12–14, 18–19, 21–22). What was undoubtedly the price for gaining signatories to the UDHR also means, however, as Hannah Arendt argued in the Origins of Totalitarianism (1968: 147–82), that the “universal” human right to have rights does not exist for the stateless; 60 years later, this rightslessness still marks nonstate actors such as the Roma. In the case of too many “members of the human family” (CSHR 1994: 10), “the putative universality” of the HRR, says Butler, “does not have universal reach” (2004a: 91); to claim specific rights for women and other others is then to admit “‘the human’s constitutive outside and in a productive sense to destroy the universal” (2004b: 190–91). What Butler terms the “spectrally human,” and “the inhuman, the beyond the human, the less than human” (2004a: 89–90), perhaps best exemplified today by jihadists and terrorists, tests a state’s commitment to a “universal” inclusion of the human, and can become, argues Butler, the catalyst for expanding the human:

Whether or not we continue to enforce a universal conception of human rights at moments of outrage and incomprehension, precisely when we think that others have taken themselves out of the human community as we know it, is a test of our very humanity.

(2004a: 89–90)

The process of expanding the “human,” and the proliferation of documents that speak to the omissions/corrections of earlier texts, are all part of the HRR, whose dynamic structure is further pluralized by substructures, such as its system of regional and national organizations, as well as the transnational groups and networks of global civil society. While it is difficult to define the regional, to establish meaningful divisions, and to organize states into effective alliances (Stacey 2009: 143–54), regional rights organizations (RRO) began to expand in the 1950s and have continued to be formed – among the latest, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (2000). Initially viewed as a breakaway movement that would undermine human rights universality, RROs have achieved different levels of effective collaboration and activism, but they can foreground particular values that can inflect the HRR. Thus, the African Union has emphasized duties and responsibilities to the community, rather than rights, and the European Union’s court has highlighted such contested issues as blasphemy and gay rights. For Gayatri Spivak, the crosshatching of regional and subregional organizations in the Global South can “produce … a critical regionalism” that goes “under and over nationalisms but kee[ps] the abstract structures of something like a state that allows for constitutional redress … in the interest of a public that cannot act for itself” (Butler and Spivak 2007: 83, 91–94). This “critical regionalism” can reveal cases where rights utterances have dissimilar meanings, and can potentially generate fruitful contests of understanding.

That the HRR is bounded by the nation-state, which has also been the primary source of rights violations, accounts ambivalently for the creation of national human rights institutions (NHRIs), now numbering over 100. First formed in states making the transition from conflict, trying to consolidate certain protections, or responding to allegations of abuses, NHRIs are governed hypothetically by the Paris Principles, if not in actuality, for Anne Smith (2006) shows that pluralism in their composition, independence from government, and accountability to the population are difficult to achieve; thus NHRIs may represent nothing more than propaganda machines for those in power.

NHRIs are situated uncomfortably between national governments and civil society, notably as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), generally defined as a space other than governmental or commercial (Centre for Civil Society 2004). The exponential growth of NGOs (specifically BINGOS, Big International NGOs) with an international, professional, bureaucratized staff predicates ever-growing budgets that require corporate donors and that make civil society part and parcel of global capitalism, what Stephen Hopgood (2013: xiii, 3, 13) calls the handmaiden of neoliberal democracy. Inevitably, NGOs must accommodate the priorities of their donors and boards of directors, and indeed tailor projects to their sponsors’ priorities, but also to official policymakers at whose tables they want an influential seat. NGOs are so intricately intertwined with institutions of economic and governmental power that the notion of “nongovernmental” and noncommercial is increasingly false. And yet, it is also true that the activities of NGOs can support and enhance the campaigns of local groups – to combat the plight of homosexuals in Jamaica and honor killings in Jordan; to fight for water free of toxic industrial poisons in China. Thus NGOs can help bear witness to rights violations and make particular claims heard nationally and internationally through new social technologies. Ideally, NGOs can do “translocal connecting” (Robbins 1993: 196) that further inflects and pluralizes the HRR.

Negotiating claims: cultural translation and the generalizable

The dynamic expanding structure of the HRR also highlights the problematics of negotiating particular claims and ensuring they enter the space where they can help to resignify the universal. Describing the “necessarily difficult task of forging a universal consensus from various locations of culture,” Butler promotes the “practice of translation among the various languages in which universality makes its varied and contending appearances” (1996: 49) – a notion that she takes from Homi Bhabha (1994) and that can be extended to the problematics of negotiation at every level of the HRR. This practice does not spell “the simple entry of the deauthorized into the authorized, whereby … the latter domain simply makes room for what it has unwittingly failed to accommodate,” argues Butler (1996: 50); rather, it constitutes labor “in which the terms made to stand for one another are transformed in the process” (1996: 50), an “unanticipated transformation that establishe[s] the universal as that which is yet to be achieved” (2004b: 38). Such a process contains risks, Butler recognizes, since translation can simply transpose “dominant values” into the language of the subordinated (Butler et al. 2000: 35) and impose “a universal claim on a culture that resists it … domesticat[ing] the challenge posed by alterity” (1996: 51–52). And yet, this process seems to move top-down; moreover, it does not underscore, in my view, differences in power/knowledge between the “dominant” and the “subordinated.” And as Moya Lloyd (2007: 151) points out, Butler nowhere highlights, as Bhabha and Walter Benjamin do, what always remains “untranslatable” between two languages, and thus what cannot be transformed in a translational encounter. In Bhabha’s example, the migrant experience operating between cultures does not eliminate the agonistic effort to exclude the other, but “dramatizes the activity of culture’s untranslatability,” which undermines the possibility of a shared language (1994: 224–28).

Butler exemplifies the difficulties of negotiating differences in the contest of meanings to transform the universal in the HRR. As with the new universal, it is easier to say what this negotiation must reject: the idea(l) of consensus, based on an Enlightenment top-down model or a neo-Kantian notion of communicative reason, predicated on reciprocity and equality, which Jürgen Habermas has expounded, but which Lyotard attacked (Lyotard 1984: 65–66, 72–73) and Butler dubbed prelapsarian for lacking sensitivity to context, particularity, and multiplicity (1996: 49). The idea also denies differences of power/knowledge among human subjects who come to the “public space” – if they are even allowed to speak. For Clifford Geertz, the notion of a consensus to ascertain what is universal is impossible to achieve, since core elements are outweighed by particularities (1973: 38–40). “Generalizations about man as man [sic] are not to be discovered through [ … the search for] a consensus gentium that does not in fact exist,” he states; “the only generalization that can be made is that [man] is a most various animal,” and that this variousness is best garnered by studying the particular, the circumstantial, the concrete (Geertz 1973: 40, 51–53).

That the “road to the general … lies through a concern with the particular” (Geertz 1973: 51–53) can be applied heuristically, in my view, to the problematics of transaction and negotiation in the HRR, for it delineates a bottom-up approach marked by contest for resignifying the universal. But instead of “the general,” I prefer “the generalizable,” not as a form of proceduralism that subscribes to an impartial, abstracting generality (Ingram 2013: 16), but as a process without end – generalizabilization – for forging commonalities. This notion can evoke Marcus Singer’s “generalization argument,” though his claim that it holds for all moral judgments (1961: 31) makes it too “universal” for my argument. And yet, Singer’s schema valorizes “the empirically ascertained fact that there are a great many different and even conflicting rules and practices prevailing at different times and in different places” (1961: 328). And his emphasis on the generalizable, contextual “condition of restricted universality” (Singer 1961: 68) seems potentially useful for imagining intersubjective negotiations between particulars and “the universal” in the HRR. That process of contestation for working toward the generalizable can build on the pragmatic principles of John Dewey (1982: 257, 260, 269–70), but can find a poststructural analogue in the predicament of Michel Foucault’s specific intellectual whose “pressing demands [may be] restricted to particular sectors … unable to develop these struggles” for lack of more general support (1977: 130). Foucault’s method involves an “ascending analysis,” starting from infinitesimal local mechanisms and seeing how they are invested and extended by “ever more general mechanisms” (1977: 99), in other words, reversing top-down deductions from the universal to the particular and, instead, starting “with concrete practices and … pass[ing] universals through the grid of these practices” (2008: 3; 2007: 358) to achieve what he terms “a singular generality” (2007: 389).

The generalizable attempts to articulate a process for negotiating differences in the HRR and for moving in wider circles of agreement and commonality; from local NGOs to the national NHRIs to critical regional organizations, on to BINGOs and other parts of global civil society, and then throughout the ongoing proliferation of documents, conventions, and charters. In this open-ended process, unsupported generalizations would be rejected, and emergent generalizable claims would be subjected to constant reexamination and revision in striving to forge and to sustain intersubjective agreements that could effectuate transformations in the “new universal” HRR. Can the generalizable contribute to what Anne Phillips calls “a politics of greater generality and alliance” (1992: 27)?

The work of the universal: human rights as progressive politics

Efforts to think through the problematics of a “new universal” can be read as part of a critical strategy with “a scrupulously visible political interest,” to cite Spivak (1987: 205). Not only is the process of universalization fundamentally political, but the universal has proved its relevance in political struggles for rights in the HRR. As Upendra Baxi (1994: 5) has noted, in their struggle for self-determination against imperial powers, most decolonized nations asserted their universal rights; and whereas blacks and “coloreds” were excluded from South Africa’s definition of rights holders in 1948, a half-century later, they enlisted human rights universalism to claim their emancipation and inclusion in the human. For South Asians, and for indigenous peoples in general, Spivak acknowledges, UN “universalistic” declarations recognizing rights to self-determination constitute “an excellent tool for political maneuvering” (1993: 196). This holds true for the political/rights claims of women, gays, lesbians, queers, and other others, Butler concludes: “the rhetorical power of claiming universality for rights of sexual autonomy and related rights of sexual orientation within the international human rights domain appears indisputable” (2004b: 182).

No thinker exemplifies the “use” of human rights for concrete political goals better than Foucault. The “counter-conducts” (2007: 388–89) for better worker conditions, prison reforms, rights of asylum for the Vietnamese, Polish solidarity activists, Iranian revolutionaries (even as he later condemned their rights abuses) are part of the legacy of his human rights activism (2000: 374, 427, 439–42, 471–75). In his 1984 statement announcing the creation of an International Committee against Piracy, Foucault defined himself as part of an “international citizenship” with the obligation “to speak out against every abuse of power [ … with] the absolute right to stand up and speak to those who hold power” against suffering everywhere, a “new right … of private individuals to effectively intervene … in international policy and strategy” (2000: 474–75). As Ben Golder argues convincingly, this political and theoretical engagement with human rights was not a late, regressive embrace of liberal humanism on Foucault’s part, but rather a critical ethical affirmation of human possibilities, especially the new freedoms he championed for a self-in-perpetual-process (Golder 2010: 356–58, 368–74).

Instead of hiding behind a humanitarian, im-partisan neutrality, which is never one, the practices of the HRR must affirm their identification with progressive political claims and put concrete struggles at the center of human rights politics. The right to have rights is a political proposition, as Étienne Balibar has emphasized, when he asserted a universal right to politics (1994: 49–51). Rights are a generative principle for challenging the injustices and deficiencies of political orders everywhere, what Rancière terms dissensus, a dispute through public action to enact rights (2004: 304). Such a democratic egalitarian politics from below, which enhances the sense of practical possibilities (Butler 1993b: 10–11), is central to any process of generalization that moves outward toward an always incomplete, unrealizable universalization – for Laclau, the very proof of the universal’s political relevance (Ingram 2013: 325). To reject such a politics is to pronounce the last rights of human rights (Hopgood 2013: 171). To adopt them, act on them, embrace them everywhere humans make universalizing claims, does not mean heralding some future perfect. Like politics, the work of contest and resignification in the new universal knows no end. And that is as it should be, for the political stakes involved in affirming and fighting for our particular, our general, and our universal rights determine what we make of our inclusive human selves, and thus, of the world.