Procedures

There is a sensibility, a mindset or orientation, committed to the view that matters of power can be handled fairly through the proper procedures. Getting the process right, carefully establishing the rules of the game, is what really matters.

An example from academia might be found in establishing clear expectations for tenure cases and a transparent, fair process for determining whether these expectations have been met. Proper procedures are supposed to replace the "old boys network" wherein privileged white men tenured their own. To be sure, promotion based on merit enforces capitalist preoccupations with output: is the scholar productive? does she efficiently use her time? is she contributing to her college or university as a brand that will attract 17 and 18 year olds? is she enabling students to identify with the college or university such that they will be generous donors in the future? At any rate, clear and fair tenure standards are, for academics, a crucial concern.

Establishing standards is something else entirely: it requires oscillating between different positions, positions of acceptance, tolerance, and curiosity, on the one hand, and of suspicion and skepticism, on the other. The first often appears as "we all know what good scholarship is." But the supplement of this kind of claim is the  well-justified suspicion that the notions of we, good, and scholarship are exclusionary and contentious--if one's field is stodgy and key sites of battle involve transforming what counts as scholarship within the field, then the expectation that a candidate for tenure will publish in one or two top journals discounts alternative approaches from the beginning. Differently put, the old boy network--often but not always in new incarnations--lurks underneath the standards: what we really want are rules that won't exclude the people we want to tenure and that will exclude those whom we don't. Battles that try to rule out criteria of "collegiality" because it serves as a barely veiled substitute for personality are another instance of struggling with the letter of the law in order to eliminate the effects of its supplement.

Of course, academia is but one site of struggles between standards and their supplements. In criminal law, the "tough on crime" right uses the fear many have of violence to alter standards that may have previously sought to protect the rights of the accused (fortunately, there has been movement in a better direction on this front this week with respect to changes in sentencing practices for those convicted in offenses involving crack cocaine; having not looked much into the law on this, my one worry is that allowances for increased judicial discretion could instate patterns of thinking, of legal reasoning, that ultimately support notions of a unitary executive).

In political theory, liberalism emphasizes procedures as the location of fairness, as the arena within which to address problems of power. Struggles over suffrage have been historically crucial as previously excluded groups (non property owners, women, racial minorities, immigrants, those of different language groups) have been vital in efforts to construct the political as a domain in which rational standards determine outcomes and allocations. These struggles seek primarily to enlarge the category of the citizen and operate within states. In domains both within and traversing states, claims for human rights have sought to install a set of procedural suppositions into the political, suppositions attached to the category of the human as opposed to the citizen. For some thinkers and activists, human rights "trump" or supercede citizen rights. Human rights thus provide a locus for criticizing, and even invading, states insofar as their violation constitute crimes against humanity.

For other thinkers and activists, citizenship is primary, the vehicle or means (passports) through which human rights are instantiated. Although Arendt is more complex this than this, I would put her in this category because of her insight that human rights are what remains after a person has been stripped of everything else. I read this statement as saying that human rights are not worth very much on their own; they are sort of a last ditch humanist effort to obscure material realities of violence, degradation, displacement, and despair with illusions of dignity and respect.

But, why would one need to assert or claim dignity and respect if it were already there, an attribute of the category or one's recognition of the category? To say "respect me!" is to acknowledge a lack, that respect is missing. If it were there, one would not need to call for it. To say, "I have my dignity" usually means one does not.

The category of the human is paradoxical: it expresses what is missing; it presents a fantasy of dignity, equality, creativity, and volition that must be respected. These should be understood as aspects of different kinds, kinds descriptive/aspirational as well as commanding/normative/injunctive; dignity must be respected. Appeals to humanity or the human tend to deny the immediate circumstances giving rise to claims made in its behalf. But, precisely because the context of appeals to human rights is the absence of human/humane conditions, these appeals are made on behalf of victims.

So, the human is a locus wherein those whose circumstances are considered inhumane, monstrous, undignified, whose rights are missing, are said to be human, nonetheless. Their circumstances disrupt the category to which they are claimed to belong. Claiming their membership thus shores up the category, rendering it operative and enhancing its fantastic appeal. Rather than demonstrating the monstrosities enacted in the name of the human, humanity, human rights, and human dignity (and enhance the failure of the category to protect or even establish what is announced in its name), appeals to an underlying humanity foreclose such a demonstration, channeling efforts into an over-simplified proceduralism.

Persistent proceduralism in turn may (but does not always) protect the obscene supplement of power. Indeed, it may even function as its extension and thereby as a demonstration of proceduralism's limits--even the best process cannot prevent bad outcomes. A fair tenure process can end up denying tenure to someone who is qualified; a fair legal process can convict innocent people; a fair election can bring racists, elitists, imperialists, and warmongers to power. Under these circumstances, to continue to emphasize process, fails to address the issue or substance in whose behalf they are functioning (this has been a persistent theme in my critical ruminations--some might say whining--about contemporary appeals to democracy).

Similarly, claims to human rights and humanity can empower militarism and aggressive war. In the name of humanity, strong leaders can--and do--present themselves as having the will to undertake the violence necessary for security and protection. They have the will to look a person in the eye before slitting his throat. They have the ability to focus on the cause (and a good thing, too, sense the cause is often what enables their perverse relation to power, their ability to justify their actions as service). They don't have to dehumanize the person, to pretend or delude themselves into thinking that such a person is just an animal (although they may need to indulge in rhetorics and images of dehumanization in order to win popular support for their acts, support from those who lack the 'right stuff,' support from the weak). Rather, they see their strength as consisting in the capacity to do what lesser men cannot.

It's striking how frequently such a mentality occurs, despite the efforts of proponents of human rights to pretend that recognition of humanity, of respect for human dignity, is all that is necessary for addressing power's obscenity. Some free market extremists view the market as battle, a struggle where some will lose. They abhor social welfare programs precisely because these programs protect people and thus prevent them from fighting with all they have (this is the underlying message of the attack on welfare dependency). Religious fundamentalism and conviction comes in here as well: the resolute must be ordained by God, authorized to fight in his name, precisely because they have to engage in acts that would make many of us flinch or hesitate. Religious conviction gives them the strength to kill and torture people.

The contemporary political context of a so-called 'war on terror' relies on the law and on its violations, on procedures and their obscene supplement. The Bush administration's will to power manifests itself as a relentless will to take what it wants. If it can change the law, it will. If it cannot, it will violate it. If it chooses to torture and to kill, it will and it does.

Comments

[Dejan]

Jodi, what exactly is the argument against Hanna Arendt? I´ve been hearing a lot of criticism but unable to pin it down.

I always remember what she wrote in ´´The Origins of Totalitarianism´´ about the fact that the introduction of human rights enabled the emergence of the stateless person, and how the ´´animal symbolicum´´ was thereby stripped to ´´pure animal´´. I think the emergence of humanitarian military interventions proved her totally right in this regard, whatever other complaints were extended to her work, this book for me remains the ultimate guide on Nazism and Stalinism.

[Paul Mihai Pavel]

I wonder what do you think about the anti-romanian policy of the nazi italian government...

Mussolini is not dead...

[Jodi]

I'm not disagreeing with Arendt here but glossing on her critique of human rights. So if by 'the argument against' you meant mine in this post, there is not one. Others have all sorts of different arguments with her. So, where you agree with her account totalitarianism, I do not.

[Dejan]

Others have all sorts of different arguments with her.

I noticed in the leftist blogosphere that she gets a lot of rap, but I don't know exactly for what. With what do you not agree in her account of totalitarianism?

[Jodi]

the concept

[Dejan]

Your blog doesn't have a search function so I can't see what you said about totalitarianism as a concept as expounded by Arendt, but I was referring specifically to her discussion of human rights, which I find convincing and true, and which you apply in this post. Maybe in search for parody material I will soon read some of your old books, like Aliens in America, to look at your own political thinking, which interests me far more than your intellectual serfdom to the Slovenian psychoanalytic genius. I hate his guts even more having just read that Slovenlia already announced the coming of a new independent state in 2008, Kosovo.

I think Lacan's understanding of the Law is equivalent to the Christian one, which makes for an uncomfortable marriage because Marxism doesn't really talk to Christianity. In Serbia this has always been a source of deep disputes and divisions: Marxists couldn't really live with ''turn the other cheek'' and became vengeful. But the two factions did ultimately understand each other, not on the point of the Law, as dr. Zizek stupidly suggests, but on the point of survival. Marxism latched itself onto a very Serbian and Christian-Orthodox culture of collectivity and Slavic suffering. If it wasn't for this particular ethos, Russia would have never sacrificed so many of their own souls to end the Second War.

Now the Roman Empire will try to attack Russia again, but will encounter that same ethos, still triumphant despite years of humiliation!