Human Rights, liberal economy, and the ruthlessness of capital

A short article by Khaled Saghyeh made the parallel between two ‘minor’ events, the kind that usually occupies, if anything at all, a corner in the ‘other news’ section. The first one is about a certain Khalil Zwein, an elderly man who had been the barber and the newspaper salesman of Gemeyzeh for decades. His shop was evicted by the forces of development, the ambitious Lebanese State who is trying to keep up with the world progress. He shot himself in the head with a 9mm gun.

The second event takes place in Egypt, in a town called Kom Hamadeh. The forces of the State were on one of these missions to liberate occupied territories. In other words the police was going to evict a family which had constructed a house 20 years ago on a land that was owned by the State. The tools by which this act of progress will be carried out are the famous bulldozers. One cannot fail to see the parallel between the Egyptian State’s use of bulldozers to destroy their citizens’ homes and the same famous tradition in Israel. Certainly, those who wrote the Arab Peace Initiative were smiling when – and if – they saw this incident. A family stood in the way of the bulldozer pleading and crying. The bulldozer wiped out the house taking with it a mother and her child. If it wasn’t for the headline saying this story takes place in Egypt, anyone would have thought it was in Israel.

Who said progress is humane? Progress is merely human. The common confusion of two shifts in human life is erroneous. On one hand we have the abstract notion of moral progress that many like to believe achieved its highest goal with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and on the other we have liberal economy and the power of capital. The problem is that the two are in fact linked. If anything the human rights declaration gives the very justification of its violation. It is not a defense of human rights as much as a new system of values that is directly linked with the new system of power. One has to separate the ideal notions of morality that can be found in any text (religious for instance) and the structures of power relations that these notions entail. In other words, one can look at Christianity either as an innocent and virtuous message that pushes people to love each other or as the foundation of the Church which would be the representation of how such ideal notions are applied in terms of domination and power. The same goes for any system of values, from religious texts to political utopias. This is in short the inverted – real – meaning of Human Rights; it is not the right of those who have none, but the right of those who already have them, to control those who don’t.

The very idea of progress has been a haunting one for human civilization and thought. It might be more characteristic of that era called “Modernity” expressed more clearly in the discourse of “Enlightenment” where we clearly see a claim of progress accompanied by pretences of a universality of values, morality, and truth. The apex of these claims was its application in the context of colonialism, what the French – one of the leading centers of Enlightenment thought – called “Mission Civilisatrice”. The Dynamics of power and economy were equally playing a central role in this process of universalizing the Other. However, it was at the same time that the European Enlightenment model collapsed – when the Second World War broke – that another universal framework had to be put in place: The Universal (sic) Declaration of Human Rights.

Whether liberal economy and the Universal Rights of Capital are now the substitute of those of the Human, is a debatable assertion. However, when we look at events such as those described at the beginning of this text, the issue becomes more lucid. The conception of human rights which as Hanna Arendt so pertinently remarks is “based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships – except that they were still human.” (The Origins of Totalitarianism p.297). In other words human rights once met by those who were only human – who had lost all other means of existence, the refugees – collapsed. These humans, stripped to their “bare life”, or as Agamben calls them Homo sacer were precisely those who were not treated as humans.

As Zizek puts it, in his Parallax View (341):

“So, to put it in Leninist terms: what the “Human Rights of suffering Third World victims” actually means today, in the predominant Western discourse, is the right of Western powers themselves to intervene – politically, economically, culturally, militarily – in Third World countries of their choice on behalf of the defense of Human Rights. A reference to Lacan’s formula of communication (in which the sender gets back from the receiver – addressee his own message in its inverted – that is, true – form) is absolutely relevant: in the reigning discourse of humanitarian interventionism, the developed West is, in effect, getting back from the victimized Third World its own message in its true form. And the moment Human Rights are depoliticized in this way, the discourse about them has to resort to ethics: reference to the prepolitical opposition of Good and Evil has to be mobilized. Today’s “new reign of Ethics”, clearly discernible in, for example, Michael Ignatieff’s work, thus relies on a violent gesture of depoliticization, of denying the victimized other any political subjectivization. And, as Rancière pointed out, liberal humanitarianism à la Ignatieff unexpectedly meets the “radical” position of Foucault or Agamben on this depoliticization: the Foucauldian-Agambenian notion of “biopolitics” as the culmination of the whole Western thought ends up getting caught in a kind of “ontological trap” in which concentration camps appear as a kind of “ontological destiny: each of us would be in the situation of the refugee in a camp. Any difference grows faint between democracy and totalitarianism and any political practice proves to be already ensnared in the biopolitical trap.” (Jacques Rancière, Who is the Subject of the Right of Man)”

History and Interpretation

“All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation. (…) Such disagreements are the stuff out of which historical writing is made and from which historical knowledge derives. For interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is in interpreting, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place. In this sense, all interpretations are what might be called situational: they always occur in a situation whose bearing on the interpretation is affiliative. It is related to what other interpreters have said, either by confirming them, or by disputing them, or by continuing them. No interpretation is without precedents or without some connection to other interpretations.” Edward Said, Covering Islam, (154-5)

The study of history, as a methodology and not as a discipline, is a constant effort of representation. What Said describes as the inevitable interpretation, is this act of representing facts or data. To avoid any misunderstanding of this provoking sentence, it might be of use to articulate it differently.

The inevitable act of interpretation, as the only possible knowledge about human society, does not refute the existence of facts or data. On the contrary, one should assume that as long as there is interpretation there must be facts and data to interpret – these are the objects of interpretation. However, it is also deducible that these facts cannot be articulated as facts; they cannot be assimilated into our system of knowledge as mere facts. These facts take place outside the realm of language, and the act of interpretation is, precisely, their translation (with the obvious loss and gain) into a symbolic structure which can be either written language, images, sounds or any other system. In the lacanian structure, these facts are the unattainable object of desire whose specter is overwhelming but impossible to take form within the symbolic structure of our consciousness. In order to “see” this specter, we try the best we can to give it a form by using the symbolic structure of our language – this is the act of interpretation – but we are never able to “see” it. The best we can achieve is a poor compensation that nourishes the unending strive to fulfill the desire to attain this lost specter of the real.

In his book, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx writes about the small-holding peasants, a mass of people who live in similar conditions without, however, entering into manifold relations with each other. This group of people whose very mode of production – their raison d’être, without which they would not form the group in the first place – isolates them from one another. Therefore, Marx writes, “they are incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name. (…) They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above.” (Emphasis added)

If we look at this relation of power and representation as a metaphor that can apply to the relations of power in the context of knowledge and interpretation, the small-holding peasants, by definition unable to represent themselves, are the facts which by definition are unable to appear to us as facts, and thus unable to represent themselves. The representative, the one who must represent them, is the interpreter, the authority that can provide a meaning, an articulation, and visibility to these interpreted facts. In this case it is not the facts that are presented to us; rather, it is the interpretation which is the only accessible knowledge we have of the unattainable facts, an interpretation which is in a constant movement: a mobile structure that pertains to the dynamics of translation as described by Derrida in his concept of Différance (See Jacque Derrida, Difference in Translation, and, What is a relevant translation), where the meaning is constantly differed and multiple without at any moment being a copy of the original which itself does not have a meaning in itself, but a series of meanings that appear by a similar act of interpretation which makes historical knowledge as described by Said both necessary and impossible.

(to be continued)

Privatizing Death: on the new paradigms of war

In our consumerist and post-capitalist world it is easy to see violence becoming a service provided by private companies and no longer part of the public sector only (think about the monopoly on violence as described by Max Webber in Politics as a Vocation). War had become a commodity for quite a while now. This issue has been widely discussed by scholars and journalists alike, tracing its roots in the history of modernity and often seeing it as an outcome of the revolution in military industry in the 19^th and 20^th century. War is an investment; it provides new markets not only for military goods, but also for re-construction services. Moreover, it can be argued that a war, if well fought, can also provide domination and further resources that can in turn expand the industry and the market. These paradigms are connected to modernity and have been widely acknowledged by modern thinkers as early as Machiavelli. War in these terms concerns the economical sector of industry and the trade of physical goods.

The paradigm shift occurs in the post-colonial age. Post-colonialism refers to the end of the paradigm of European domination over what will come to be known as the third world. The end of this era and its specific strategies of representation and control of the other brought forth another dominant power rather than the empowerment of the other. The bourgeoning power had to replace the dying discourse of European colonialism. It must be noted however that the “educational” or “civilizing” aspect of French colonialism is lately being reformulated by the American model of imperial domination using the term “democratization” or “liberation”. This new paradigm of imperialism was in part a product of a new mode of global economical relations. The era of thought and politics that came to be known as postmodern, can be seen as denoting some of these new economical dimensions of the world and the representation of reality. Non-Physical goods dominate over modernity’s industrial goods; Marx’s commodities take a whole new dimension. It is useful to recall the objet-petit-a that Lacan talks about as that unnamable aspect of the thing that triggers desire, this illusory excess in the object or the other that transforms it into an object of desire and gives it a value beyond its useless appearance – objet-petit-a is what is left of the Real after the transition to the Symbolic; objet petit a is a surplus meaning, a surplus of jouissance; it is the object of desire which we seek in the other. In the postmodern age the desire often looses its object and becomes itself the object of its own desire.

The translation of these terms in the specific case of postmodern colonial wars and the shift from the paradigms of European colonialism is simple. While during the age of colonialism war was an industrial goods that was still within the State’s monopoly on the violence exercised outside of its territory (and certainly within it), during the current colonial paradigm war is no longer an industrial goods, rather it is a commodity, it is no longer an item (military products) but a service. This transition reflects the economical transition from economies based on industry to economies based on services. Iraq provides a relevant example. The war investment in Iraq concerns at least four layers of economical interest: 1. The military industry’s trade of military goods 2. The contractors investments in reconstruction 3. The oil supply and control over strategic geographical outposts and 4. The private security companies providing their protection services to those in charge of the three other layers of interest. The role of private security companies is to protect strategic and vital structures and among others the United States Embassy in Baghdad.

These companies provide one thing: services. The service in this case is killing, or in better marketing terms, protection. The exercise of violence is no longer solely related to the State’s monopoly over it (the army) but is, like all the other sectors of economy, privatized. Among the news from Iraq was an “incident” which will never be called “terrorist” when the Blackwater private security company in charge of the protection of the United States Embassy in Baghdad opened fire on civilians and killed a debatable number of them. The sanction was a threat by the Iraqi government to revoke the company’s license. This license in crude terms is simply a license to kill.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/09/17/iraq.main/index.html

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/checkpointbaghdad/archive/2007/09/17/are-contractors-above-the-law.aspx