The Routledge Companion To Literature And Human Rights

Belinda Walzer

The discourse of rights has been heralded as exhausted, a discourse at its end, too western, too utopian, too normative, not normative enough, hypocritical, and an enablement necessary of critique. If rights discourse is all these, then it seems important to turn to the discursive foundations that underwrite the language of rights as a way to move it beyond such seemingly intractable assessments and paradoxes. And yet, thus far, comparatively little critique has been done on the ways the discourse of rights “comes to terms with (its own) language” (Doxtader 2010: 355). In fact, apart from a few notable exceptions, the field of rhetoric has arrived surprisingly late on the scene of human rights critique in the humanities. This despite the fact that the critique is, at least historically, underpinned by discourse analysis and despite the fact that human rights, as Erik Doxtader argues, “begins – historically and conceptually – with a question that asks after the potentiality of (its) rhetoric” (Doxtader 2010: 354). Therefore, this chapter provides a descriptive analysis of the discursive, disciplinary, and historical relationship of human rights and rhetoric in order to point out the complex foundational and potentially problematic role that rhetorical theory has played and continues to play in the enablement and critique of human rights discourse since the UDHR and to suggest that a rhetorical approach is ultimately necessary to parse the normativity that underlies and forms the discourse of rights.

Human rights in the field of rhetoric

Although the scholarship on human rights and rhetoric has lagged significantly behind the resurgence of interest in human rights in the larger field of humanities, it has proliferated exponentially over the past decade. Scholars such as Erik Doxtader have been engaged in rhetorical inquiry surrounding human rights discourse for the better part of a decade, and more recently, the conversation has produced essays, collections, and monographs dedicated explicitly to the relationship between rhetoric and rights. For example, Gerard Hauser’s essay “The Moral Vernacular of Human Rights Discourse” (2008); Doxtader’s work, including his article “The Rhetorical Question of Human Rights – A Preface” (2010); and Arabella Lyon and Lester Olson’s coedited collection in RSQ, subsequently published as an essay collection, called Human Rights Rhetoric: Traditions of Testifying and Witnessing (2011), reinvigorated the twenty-first-century conversations surrounding human rights and rhetoric that Richard McKeon initiated over 60 years ago. Similarly, monographs such as Wendy Hesford’s Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (2011), a gendered analysis of the ways human rights is recognized and perpetuated through rhetoric predicated on spectacle; Gerard Hauser’s extended work on moral vernaculars, Prisoners of Conscience: Moral Vernaculars of Political Agency (2012); and Arabella Lyon’s Declarative Acts: Democracy, Rhetoric, and Rights (2013), a rethinking of deliberation as becoming as a foundation for human rights rhetoric, contributed to the renewed interest in the relationship of rhetoric and human rights.

Erik Doxtader (2010) suggests that rhetoric lags behind other conversations in the humanities on human rights because human rights forecloses and elides its own impossibility of “express-ability.” This rhetorical paradox presumes a sovereign subject even as it constructs that subjectivity; it presumes humanity, even as it constructs that humanity; it presumes a speaking subject, even as it gives that subject a voice, and it articulates rights even as those rights expose every human’s vulnerability. As such, this rhetorical paradox underlies most others in human rights discourse because it exposes the foundational ontological relationship of the subject to language. Due to the vulnerability of this relationship, the discourse must mask its own language. This is a fundamental problem for a rhetorical approach to human rights since it underlies the disconnect between the necessary impossibility of cultural forms of postviolation representation and the supposed falsity of rhetoric. This problem leads to “a rift in which there is no ‘acceptable’ language to define, interpret, or justify human rights” (Doxtader 2010: 357). It is this rhetorical paradox that conceals its own foundations in discourse that makes a rhetorical approach to human rights both difficult yet necessary.

Rhetoric in the discourse of human rights

Through the figure of Richard McKeon, rhetorical theory was foundational to the emergence of rights in the post–World War II drafting of the UDHR. McKeon was a twentieth-century scholar, philosopher, and public intellectual best known in his capacity as professor at the University of Chicago in Greek and classical languages, philosophy, and history. His capacious scholarly contributions include translations of medieval texts and historical comparisons of Plato and Aristotle (Ruttenberg 1990: xiv–xv). However, most interesting to this argument is his work as the American representative and rapporteur to UNESCO’s Committee on the Theoretical Bases of Human Rights, more commonly called the Philosopher’s Committee. The committee was comprised of scholars from the United States, United Kingdom, France, China, and Belgium and was tasked with surveying the world’s leading scholars and public intellectuals on philosophical, religious, cultural, and economic beliefs in the form of a questionnaire that solicited responses on the fundamental bases of the rights of man (UNESCO 1947b). The committee received contributions from some 44 leading thinkers from around the world including Mahatma Gandhi, Aldous Huxley, and Quincy Wright on topics ranging from “Human Rights in the Chinese Tradition,” “The Rights of Man and the Islamic Tradition,” and “Human Freedoms and the Hindu Thinking” (UNESCO 1949). Based on these letters and arguments, submitted a report on the philosophical underpinnings of universal human rights to the drafters of the UDHR.

The Philosopher’s Committee found that the common denominator that underlies both variations over natural rights and the paradoxes that surround the ways in which political rights are distributed is that of disagreement itself. McKeon argues that the fundamental problem of rights is not in listing what constitutes the rights themselves. Instead, McKeon claims the problem of universality, not surprisingly, lies in the basic assumptions underlying economic and social concepts of human rights. Therefore, McKeon argues that the efficacy of a declaration of rights depends upon the clarity of social, cultural, and economic rights and the ways in which those rights, what came to be called “second generation rights,” could be adapted to the ever-changing present and implemented tangibly in social and political agencies (1947: 24). If these conditions are not met, then rights are liable to be coopted to “advance special interests rather than establishing universal truths or promoting general welfare” (McKeon 1947: 25). Unfortunately, in this prediction McKeon was all too accurate. It led him to conclude that the problem of a philosophical preface to human rights could not be resolved by coming to consensus about those philosophical underpinnings but rather that “the resolution of practical problems involves philosophic commitments but agreement concerning actions to be taken need not presuppose philosophic agreement” (McKeon 1947: 23). In other words, the universality of rights is predicated not upon agreement about their underlying philosophies, but instead upon agreement about their existence and upon the discursive relationship between interlocutors. Said differently, human rights are ultimately less about the rights themselves, and more about a grounding for the relationality between people as an opening to discourse.

Human rights are conditioned by the moment in which they are established and enacted, and conversely, they help establish our understanding of the historical moment in which they are developed, and it is this enabling relationship with history that permits rights to constantly become. As McKeon says, “The history of human rights must be rewritten, at each stage of its progress, from the point of view of ideas and values, the philosophy, of that period” (McKeon 1990: 38). Human rights and its normativity must be continuously reformulated. This process of rewriting, I argue, occurs through a pedagogical underpinning of rights discourse that stems from the UDHR (and UNESCO), which is taken up and recapitulated by the discourse and texts surrounding human rights, including those emerging out of the grassroots and NGO community, the legal discourse, the UN, fictional and nonfictional publications, and the academic community. In other words, human rights discourse is, to borrow from Homi Bhabha (1994), both pedagogical and performative of a normativity that is at once productive and problematic, and yet is simultaneously undercut by a rhetorical paradox that elides precisely that very formulation of normativity, rendering rhetorical critique vital. This essay builds on Doxtader’s contention that a rhetorical approach to human rights in the humanities is both difficult yet necessary by considering the ways in which an understanding of kairos, or the opportune moment, can deconstruct the normative conventions inherent in the discourse of human rights.

Kairos and normativity in human rights

Since the ratification of the UDHR, the declaration and instruments of human rights have perpetuated a normative discourse, what Inderpal Grewal (2005) calls a human rights “regime,” based on first generation or civil and political rights. This normalizing impulse has had both productive and dangerous ramifications. The benefits of a normative language and practice of human rights hardly seems worth mentioning: this normativity surrounding the discourse of rights promotes the foundations of human dignity, the respect for the rights of individuals, and the basic principles of the UDHR, and it provides a platform from which individuals and groups can advocate. However, it is precisely because this normativity is so important that it deserves closer attention. For example, in promoting foundations of human dignity, the UDHR also promotes notions of individuality and a subject of rights who is predicated upon an Enlightenment notion of liberal subjectivity. Additionally, this normative discourse often flattens the complexity of the issues the discourse attempts to solve while often reinforcing global structures of power and inequalities embedded in globalization. As Wendy Hesford, Wendy Kozol, and others (including McKeon, well ahead of his time) point out, rights discourse can become coopted in insidious ways as an alibi for military and political intervention. For example, First Lady Laura Bush, in a 2001 radio address to the nation, used the plight of Afghan women to garner support for the Bush administration’s war on terrorism (Hesford and Kozol 2005: 3). The language of rights has also been coopted in seemingly innocuous ways, for example by social media and armchair activism (Invisible Children, Inc. 2012) and feel-good marketing (Tom’s shoes). Finally, this normativity does not extend evenly across global populations; for example, despite great advancements in the last 30 years, the struggle for women’s rights to be considered human rights continues. Although this normative discourse of rights, particularly as it is predicated upon first generation rights, can be problematic, one must not forget that it has also contributed to vital and unparalleled advances for subjects of rights throughout the world. As Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore note, “[w]hether or not the language of human ‘rights,’ with its nationalist and juridical parameters and moral idealism, is the most efficacious and ethical framework for the work of securing dignity for all peoples remains in question. Still, striving toward such a condition is never not urgent” (Goldberg and Moore 2012: 1). Thus, the language of human rights and its normativity requires analyzing so as to consider the ways human rights can be constantly broadened to accommodate new subjects and forms of claims.

I argue elsewhere that the discourse of rights is underwritten by a pedagogical imperative that emerges and ripples outward from the UDHR and subsequent instruments via UNESCO and, increasingly so, higher education (Walzer 2015). I use pedagogical here as a double term to mean both the responsibility to teach about human rights, and, following Bhabha, as constantly constructed and constitutive (Bhabha 1994). Where Bhabha understands the discourse of the nation to be productive of citizens as both objects and subjects through a pedagogical and performative “teleology of progress” (Bhabha 1994: 204), I consider human rights discourses to be similarly epistemologically and ontologically productive. Understanding human rights as pedagogical and performative in this way enables a recognition of the ways in which human rights texts, from legal, to literary, to advocacy, emerge from that discourse as cultural productions that both legitimate and potentially destabilize or remake a normative understanding of human rights and thus subjects of rights. In this way, human rights texts are both pedagogical and performative of the human rights “regime,” in that they both inscribe the concept of human rights as well as perform it in recursive ways. Thus, a rhetorical perspective on rights can examine the relationship between the ontological notion of rights as subject producing and the epistemological notion of rights as a set of normative axioms. In so doing, it provides a way to think through the workings of not just what is normative, but how that normativity is constituted and potentially broadened through the distribution, deliberation, and proliferation of human rights texts.

I turn to the rhetorical concept of kairos and, ultimately, to its converse akairos as a rhetorical methodology that tests the limits of normativity in order to further understand this normativity and how it constantly shifts in its engagement with various interlocutors as it comes into being. Kairos has a long history of recovery that traces from the Greeks, to the Romans, to today. Most often, contemporary understandings of kairos borrow from the Roman definition of the right moment, coupled with the right measure, for persuasion or action that can disrupt the status quo (Harker 2007: 84). This defines kairos temporally as the right moment in time (in terms of divine or critical moments) as opposed to the chronological march of everyday time. Given this, if one considers the “status quo” the normative conventions of rights, then kairos would seem a useful concept to consider the ways that capitalizing on the appropriate, or kairotic, rhetorical moment can draw attention to and disrupt this normativity. This interpretation juxtaposes kairos with chronos (progressing time) such that “kairos is resolutely temporal, and it designates both a specific moment of ruptural crisis and a period of opportune, revolutionary time” (Boer 2013: 121) and, as Wendy Brown reminds us via Benjamin, “Great revolutions … always introduce new calendars, thereby marking both the interruption of one trajectory of history and the inauguration of another” (Brown 2001: 156).

However, according to the Greek definition, kairos is most accurately defined not only temporally, as in the “right time,” but also as the “opportune” time, which carries with it a spatial component that more directly translates as striking a balance or harmony between opposing poles, or “that which is in the right and proper place and time” (Boer 2013: 117). This older interpretation of kairos understands its roots in decorum and, thus, the very normativity that it purports to interrupt. According to this definition, the opposite of kairos is not chronological time but akairos or the “untimely and out-of-place” (Boer 2013: 117). This shift in understanding exposes the roots of the term even more explicitly in decorum. When translated this way, kairos is no longer the agonistic interruption that designates the “right time” for revolution or the “opportune time” to pose an argument that disrupts the status quo (Boer 2013).

Given this revised definition, I posit that instead of considering kairos in rights discourse, or the opportune moment to stake a claim, we should pay attention to those moments of dissonance, of poor timing, and of disorder and chaos in staking rights claims. Considering akairos disrupts the idea of a telos of progress as interrupted by critical moments and shifts the focus to the catastrophe as continuing in real time. The point is, the scholarship surrounding human rights and rhetoric has to pay more attention to what is disruptive: the moments of invention that stand out as inappropriate, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and that disrupt decorum and go against the norm. An example of this includes illegible testimony such as that of Mrs. Konile during the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (detailed in There Was This Goat by Antjie Krog et al. and discussed in Chapter 29 of this volume), literary texts that push the boundaries of form including Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, and films including The Act of Killing (2012; also discussed in this volume, Chapter 46) that leave the viewer with a profound sense of discomfort.

Paying attention to these moments of dissonance can also highlight another paradox: that in order to achieve legibility in rights discourse, the rights claim must be legible within a normative discourse and is thus often stripped of not only the specific context of its politico-temporal moment, but also the specificity and potential power of its claim. For example, Arabella Lyon, in her recent book Deliberative Acts (2013) argues that Rigoberta Menchú employs lies as a rhetorical and political strategy for social good in I, Rigoberta Menchú in order to negotiate the norms of the human rights discourse in which she was attempting to be legible for a social good. This is an example, I argue, of the effective use of kairos in order to successfully navigate the normative conventions of not only testimonio but also witness of genocide in Guatemala and other South American nations. Although it is subversive and can draw attention to normative conventions, it is not disruptive of the status quo of normativity, as such. In fact, Lyon suggests that “to break the regime’s framework and to be recognized, one must distort or destroy the regime of truth; that is, telling the truth is also problematic if it does not recognize subjects as worthy interlocutors” (2013: 150). Thus, if the regime is what dictates not only what counts as the truth, but also who can tell it, then operating outside of that normativity, akairos, runs the risk of not being recognized at all. In other words, can the rights claim be heard if it is disruptive of the very normativity that renders (il)legibility?

Disciplining prepositions

I began this essay with the problem that human rights both begins and ends with the potentials of its rhetoric (Doxtader 2010: 355). However, in the same way that literary studies has struggled with defining its relationship to human rights, rhetorical studies struggles even more so with disciplining its relationship to human rights. Are they conjunctive (human rights and rhetoric)? Or is rhetoric a lens through which to view and critique human rights (rhetorical approaches to human rights) and, if so, is rhetoric a lens through which to view human rights, or are human rights a lens through which to view rhetoric? Or does human rights have (a) rhetoric (the rhetoric of or in human rights)? And vice versa, does rhetoric have an ethical or disciplinary foundation that presupposes or is predicated upon human rights (human rights in rhetoric)? Or is the relationship not predicated upon a preposition or adposition at all and is instead appositional (simply, human rights rhetoric)? These are the rhetorical questions that undergird the ambivalence in the disciplinary relationship of rhetoric to the discourse of rights and that ultimately give way to the rhetorical paradox. This essay does not attempt to solve these questions, but rather provides an overview of the complexity of the relationship between the two conversations as a way to think through their productivity when brought together and offers a rhetorical methodology in akairos that can potentially expose the normativity of human rights discourse. If the end goal is to critique human rights discourse while supporting its process of becoming normative, then a rhetorical approach might well be what is necessary, despite the fact that human rights could ultimately, as Doxtader claims, question the foundations of the discipline of rhetoric itself (Doxtader 2014: 127).