SA2 "Moving" Rhetoric: Living Language in the Arena of Human Rights (Harris, Foucault and Lyon & Olson)
SA2 "Moving" Rhetoric: Living Language in the Arena of Human Rights (Harris, Foucault and Lyon & Olson)
Human rights rhetoric has become a central focus topic as we ask questions about how ideas and discourses are expressed, established, modified, and understood in the context of social, political, and religious relationships in the world. In "What Is An Author?", Michel Foucault argues that "today's writing has freed itself from the dimension of expression." (Foucault, 905) Its self-referential nature, "without being restricted to the confines of its interiority" (or the structure of itself), is "identified with its own unfolded exteriority," which means that what the language or content signifies within the writing is given identity by that outside influence that the writer intends to write about. "This means that it is an interplay of signs arranged less according to its signified content," writes Foucault, "than according to the very nature of the signifier." Foucault suggests that it is not the philological and lingual constructive elements that gives significance to a work and what it means to say, but how those philological relationships are arranged and presented by the signifier (that is, the Author, as Foucault postulates).
What power there is in the role of the signifier comes from that particular author's ability to "do things with texts," (Harris, 3) as Joe Harris puts it in the introduction of Rewriting. "To shift our talk about writing away from the fixed and static language of thesis and structure and toward a dynamic vocabulary of action, gesture, and response" (3) is the goal of the author. Without succeeding in establishing a proper "author-function" (Foucault, 908) the author is unable to establish discourse by which communication can be made. Lacking this, it is not possible to "move" (Harris, 4) as Joe Harris understands it in its dynamic and ineffable form. In the case of human rights rhetoric, the risks that are associated with this are clear: "A focus on the representations and 'human' in general combine to risk obscuring the effect of differential treatment, bodily experiences, and histories of diverse groups through such social mechanisms as legislation, religious codes, and legal decisions, as well as bodily performances and social habits" (Lyon and Olson, 206). Without a dimension of expression that can transcend the lingual and symbolic barriers of cross-cultural interaction, human rights rhetoric lacks "rhetorical processes, forms, and concepts [that] represent or portray human rights concerns--exemplified by double-binds, performatives, enactment, narrative and myth, rhetorical appeals such as character (ethos), emotions (pathos) and reasoning (logos), argument, expert and lay testimony, as well as the nature of embodiment and otherness." (205)
The rhetoric and its signifier does not "move" culturally, and there is no "relationship of homogeneity, filiation, authentification of some texts by the use of others, reciprocal explication, or concomitant utilization." (Foucault, 907) The traditional modes of discovery for discourses, "circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation of discourses vary with each culture and are modified within each." (913) Therefore, Foucault is supported by Lyon and Olson's claim that "human rights can be declared, advocated, and debated only through symbolic representations, however much these vary among cultures." (Lyon and Olson, 205) This barrier of translingual, transcultural, transhumanist nature is what makes "the risks and limits of of a rhetorical approach to human rights" tricky to overcome or even identify due to its wide range of impact and far-reaching, broad scale. This double-binding is most clearly examined in Lyon and Olson: "The attention to double binds accompanies even so basic a rhetorical focus as the scrutiny of language itself (Jamieson), as in Adrienne Rich's insight, 'This is the oppressor's language, but I need it to speak to you" (364). Rich joins other twentieth-century activist-scholars... in underscoring how the very means of communication can work against advocates' endeavors to actualize social justice." (205) Double-binds and other "rhetorical appeals (ethos, pathos, logos)" (205) demonstrates the living problem within human rights rhetoric: that the barrier between cultures is a functioning organism that is not inherently contained within rhetoric and, in some cases, punishes and condemns groups that do not lie within the boundaries or limitations that are established or advocated for. This joins well with Rich's point, and how "the very means of communication" is as much the tool of the oppressor as the oppressed. This is representative of Foucault's thoughts about the signifier (or Author), whose signified content is not understood by itself but as the product of an Author's intent to communicate or support an idea or rhetoric.
Let's examine a specific case: To refresh the concept of double-binding, remember "that for Nietzsche and other intellectuals a preoccupation with ethics has sometimes been considered a form of delusion covering terms for relations of power" (Lyon & Olson, 206) Keeping this in mind, we quickly see in Lyon and Olson's argument a pattern suggesting that these aspect of rhetoric creates a hypocrisy that makes it difficult, and in some ways even impossible, to properly be representative of the ideals that human rights is intended to extol and do for marginalized groups of who human rights is focused for.
"First, a focus on the representations and 'human' in general combine to risk obscuring the effect of differential treatment, bodily experiences, and histories of diverse groups through such social mechanisms as legislation, religious codes, and legal decisions, as well as bodily performances and social habits" (Lyon and Olson, 206) The exclusion of peoples based on any of these attributes goes against the aim of human rights, but in the rhetorical approach to establishing the doctrine of human rights, this may become normalized as an action. "By focusing on legislation, judicial codes and legal decisions, as well as bodily performances and symbolic artifacts, rhetoric may fail to acknowledge the corporeal body and the rights to material conditions for human survival." (206)
Lyon and Olson provide a real-world example: "Although the United States has often portrayed itself as the 'protector' of human rights around the world, in recent years the United States has been condemned internationally for alleged human-rights violations... all in the name of human security--a fundamental human right declared by the UN." (L&O, 207) Lyon and Olson do a great job of pointing out how this hypocrisy has translated into the active, "moving" (to restate Harris) body of real world events and processes being made into policy fallibly. In summary, Lyon and Olson examine this double-edged sword.
"Declarations of rights, such as the UN's Universal Declaration, tend to affirm in public life the aspirations, ideals, or standards that members of communities expect reciprocally of themselves and each other. At times these guidelines are translated, however fallibly, into national and international laws, whose enforcement depends on political will and commitments of material resources (Whalen). Viewed narrowly as legal obligations or frameworks, human rights discourses, at times, are viewed skeptically as tools by which elites manage or control otherwise already disenfranchised or marginalized, ostensibly 'autonomous' individuals and other communities--oftentimes behind a persona or mask of beneficence. However, at the same time, board-based, grassroots organizers, advocates, and educators from within disenfranchised communities, at times, find human rights vocabularies to be powerful resources for revealing hypocrisy, making radical claims on elites for recognition, inclusion, and justice within communities, and affirming their stature as fully human within dehumanizing and oppressive cultures." (L&O, 206)
The autonomization of a group of individuals by these frameworks of human rights discourses by a powerful group, even for instance the United Nations (which is the main proponent of the proliferation of human rights and its rhetoric), can codify or normalize marginalization, disenfranchisement, and even dehumanization in the interest of one political agenda or one signifier's intents over others, thus discounting the modes of experience and reducing or revising the overall narrative that human rights espouses.
It should not be assumed that this signifies that human rights rhetoric should be abandoned. Instead, we are acknowledging in Lyon and Olson's argument a pervasive truth that can be analyzed with the help of Foucault's rhetorical approaches to signifier, signified, and significance. "Rhetorical inquiry into human rights discourses examines the politics of representation in establishing, maintaining, and transforming hierarchies in social, political, legal, and economic forums." (Lyon and Olson, 205) By seeing the facets of this approach that work against the intention of human rights, work can be done to identify these issues and, by acknowledging what issues are prevalent and how they occur in human rights rhetoric, risks can be reduced and people can become represented through the forum of human rights without oppression or exclusion.
Ultimately, these rhetorical processes can and should work for both groups. "Concerned with how language is adapted to circumstance, rhetorical inquiry examines how audiences identify with both rights themselves and the individuals or communities whose rights have been violated." (Lyon and Olson, 205) It is up to us through the evolution and understanding of human rights issues how best to approach rhetoric and how this influences the pursuit of human rights for all.
- Jacob Godwin
jkg13b@my.fsu.edu
Human rights rhetoric has become a central focus topic as we ask questions about how ideas and discourses are expressed, established, modified, and understood in the context of social, political, and religious relationships in the world. In "What Is An Author?", Michel Foucault argues that "today's writing has freed itself from the dimension of expression." (Foucault, 905) Its self-referential nature, "without being restricted to the confines of its interiority" (or the structure of itself), is "identified with its own unfolded exteriority," which means that what the language or content signifies within the writing is given identity by that outside influence that the writer intends to write about. "This means that it is an interplay of signs arranged less according to its signified content," writes Foucault, "than according to the very nature of the signifier." Foucault suggests that it is not the philological and lingual constructive elements that gives significance to a work and what it means to say, but how those philological relationships are arranged and presented by the signifier (that is, the Author, as Foucault postulates).
What power there is in the role of the signifier comes from that particular author's ability to "do things with texts," (Harris, 3) as Joe Harris puts it in the introduction of Rewriting. "To shift our talk about writing away from the fixed and static language of thesis and structure and toward a dynamic vocabulary of action, gesture, and response" (3) is the goal of the author. Without succeeding in establishing a proper "author-function" (Foucault, 908) the author is unable to establish discourse by which communication can be made. Lacking this, it is not possible to "move" (Harris, 4) as Joe Harris understands it in its dynamic and ineffable form. In the case of human rights rhetoric, the risks that are associated with this are clear: "A focus on the representations and 'human' in general combine to risk obscuring the effect of differential treatment, bodily experiences, and histories of diverse groups through such social mechanisms as legislation, religious codes, and legal decisions, as well as bodily performances and social habits" (Lyon and Olson, 206). Without a dimension of expression that can transcend the lingual and symbolic barriers of cross-cultural interaction, human rights rhetoric lacks "rhetorical processes, forms, and concepts [that] represent or portray human rights concerns--exemplified by double-binds, performatives, enactment, narrative and myth, rhetorical appeals such as character (ethos), emotions (pathos) and reasoning (logos), argument, expert and lay testimony, as well as the nature of embodiment and otherness." (205)
The rhetoric and its signifier does not "move" culturally, and there is no "relationship of homogeneity, filiation, authentification of some texts by the use of others, reciprocal explication, or concomitant utilization." (Foucault, 907) The traditional modes of discovery for discourses, "circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation of discourses vary with each culture and are modified within each." (913) Therefore, Foucault is supported by Lyon and Olson's claim that "human rights can be declared, advocated, and debated only through symbolic representations, however much these vary among cultures." (Lyon and Olson, 205) This barrier of translingual, transcultural, transhumanist nature is what makes "the risks and limits of of a rhetorical approach to human rights" tricky to overcome or even identify due to its wide range of impact and far-reaching, broad scale. This double-binding is most clearly examined in Lyon and Olson: "The attention to double binds accompanies even so basic a rhetorical focus as the scrutiny of language itself (Jamieson), as in Adrienne Rich's insight, 'This is the oppressor's language, but I need it to speak to you" (364). Rich joins other twentieth-century activist-scholars... in underscoring how the very means of communication can work against advocates' endeavors to actualize social justice." (205) Double-binds and other "rhetorical appeals (ethos, pathos, logos)" (205) demonstrates the living problem within human rights rhetoric: that the barrier between cultures is a functioning organism that is not inherently contained within rhetoric and, in some cases, punishes and condemns groups that do not lie within the boundaries or limitations that are established or advocated for. This joins well with Rich's point, and how "the very means of communication" is as much the tool of the oppressor as the oppressed. This is representative of Foucault's thoughts about the signifier (or Author), whose signified content is not understood by itself but as the product of an Author's intent to communicate or support an idea or rhetoric.
Let's examine a specific case: To refresh the concept of double-binding, remember "that for Nietzsche and other intellectuals a preoccupation with ethics has sometimes been considered a form of delusion covering terms for relations of power" (Lyon & Olson, 206) Keeping this in mind, we quickly see in Lyon and Olson's argument a pattern suggesting that these aspect of rhetoric creates a hypocrisy that makes it difficult, and in some ways even impossible, to properly be representative of the ideals that human rights is intended to extol and do for marginalized groups of who human rights is focused for.
"First, a focus on the representations and 'human' in general combine to risk obscuring the effect of differential treatment, bodily experiences, and histories of diverse groups through such social mechanisms as legislation, religious codes, and legal decisions, as well as bodily performances and social habits" (Lyon and Olson, 206) The exclusion of peoples based on any of these attributes goes against the aim of human rights, but in the rhetorical approach to establishing the doctrine of human rights, this may become normalized as an action. "By focusing on legislation, judicial codes and legal decisions, as well as bodily performances and symbolic artifacts, rhetoric may fail to acknowledge the corporeal body and the rights to material conditions for human survival." (206)
Lyon and Olson provide a real-world example: "Although the United States has often portrayed itself as the 'protector' of human rights around the world, in recent years the United States has been condemned internationally for alleged human-rights violations... all in the name of human security--a fundamental human right declared by the UN." (L&O, 207) Lyon and Olson do a great job of pointing out how this hypocrisy has translated into the active, "moving" (to restate Harris) body of real world events and processes being made into policy fallibly. In summary, Lyon and Olson examine this double-edged sword.
"Declarations of rights, such as the UN's Universal Declaration, tend to affirm in public life the aspirations, ideals, or standards that members of communities expect reciprocally of themselves and each other. At times these guidelines are translated, however fallibly, into national and international laws, whose enforcement depends on political will and commitments of material resources (Whalen). Viewed narrowly as legal obligations or frameworks, human rights discourses, at times, are viewed skeptically as tools by which elites manage or control otherwise already disenfranchised or marginalized, ostensibly 'autonomous' individuals and other communities--oftentimes behind a persona or mask of beneficence. However, at the same time, board-based, grassroots organizers, advocates, and educators from within disenfranchised communities, at times, find human rights vocabularies to be powerful resources for revealing hypocrisy, making radical claims on elites for recognition, inclusion, and justice within communities, and affirming their stature as fully human within dehumanizing and oppressive cultures." (L&O, 206)
The autonomization of a group of individuals by these frameworks of human rights discourses by a powerful group, even for instance the United Nations (which is the main proponent of the proliferation of human rights and its rhetoric), can codify or normalize marginalization, disenfranchisement, and even dehumanization in the interest of one political agenda or one signifier's intents over others, thus discounting the modes of experience and reducing or revising the overall narrative that human rights espouses.
It should not be assumed that this signifies that human rights rhetoric should be abandoned. Instead, we are acknowledging in Lyon and Olson's argument a pervasive truth that can be analyzed with the help of Foucault's rhetorical approaches to signifier, signified, and significance. "Rhetorical inquiry into human rights discourses examines the politics of representation in establishing, maintaining, and transforming hierarchies in social, political, legal, and economic forums." (Lyon and Olson, 205) By seeing the facets of this approach that work against the intention of human rights, work can be done to identify these issues and, by acknowledging what issues are prevalent and how they occur in human rights rhetoric, risks can be reduced and people can become represented through the forum of human rights without oppression or exclusion.
Ultimately, these rhetorical processes can and should work for both groups. "Concerned with how language is adapted to circumstance, rhetorical inquiry examines how audiences identify with both rights themselves and the individuals or communities whose rights have been violated." (Lyon and Olson, 205) It is up to us through the evolution and understanding of human rights issues how best to approach rhetoric and how this influences the pursuit of human rights for all.
- Jacob Godwin
jkg13b@my.fsu.edu
Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. "What Is an Author?" The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, Third Edition. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins, 2007. 904-914.
Lyon, Arabella, and Lester C. Olson. "Human Rights Rhetoric: Traditions of Testifying and Witnessing." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 41.3 (2011): 203-212.
Harris, Joe. "Introduction." Rewriting: How to Do Things With Texts, Second Edition. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2017. 4.
( N. B. Posted finally to the course blog from my Blogger profile after some technical difficulty. )
( N. B. Posted finally to the course blog from my Blogger profile after some technical difficulty. )
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