This is the first post under the new category "Reading Notes." As I move toward my Qualifying Exams and narrow my focus, creating these brief precis of important or thought provoking arguments will be a standard intellectual exercise. I will post them as I complete them, although many will not be in the full prose form that follows below. (I also have to do this for one of my final classes; the timming could not be better!)
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Cheah, Pheng. “Posit(ion)ing Human Rights in the Current Global Conjuncture. Transnational Asia Pacific: Gender, Culture, and The Public Sphere. Eds. Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Larry E. Smith, Wimal Dissanayake. Illionois UP: 1999: 11—42
Cheah argues against Human Rights normativity based on a Kantian transcendental “regulative idea” or the Hegelian notion of the state as the concrete embodiment of the universal. The former is rejected as blind to the historical forces shaping and transforming “norms,” and as operating at such a level of abstraction as to have no valuable effects on the “cultural, institutional context in which meaningful action can take place (14). Such a philosophy, moreover, is ostensibly backed by the presence of an international public sphere that acts something like humanity’s conscience. Cheah argues that claims for a “transnational political morality are implausible because they are grounded in a rationalist conception of normativity that the actually existing capitalist world-system renders untenable" (16).
Neo-Hegelian bases for Human Rights, meanwhile, miss the real normative force international human rights discourse has. This philosophy, like Kant’s, is predicated on the presence of rational actors behaving according to rational obligations (15). Again, Cheah argues that the current world-capitalist system renders such faith in rationality naïve because based on a transcendental human subjectivity (32). Cheah points to Asian governments, especially those NIEs (Newly Industrializing Economies), as deploying the Hegelian-statist model for Human Rights, justifying their authoritarian rule as necessary for national economic development, which in turn will provide the material grounds for human rights.
“Rather, the task is to rethink the normativity of human rights claims within the original contamination and violence of global capitalism, that is, within ineluctable historicity” (32). To this end, Cheah uses Derrida to call for a justice that “must be immanent and transcendent at the same time” (34). “Justice ought not to be exhausted by rational action in the present. But at the same time, it must have an effect on the present through rational action” (34). That is, the norms and ideals we use to defend human rights are born from the “shifting field of historical forces” that makes up a given present. Simultaneously, the possibility, “the ineradicable promise of ethical transformation” remains open precisely because these forces are always in flux, “and cannot be captured by the hegemonic forces of a given historical present” (34). So, pace Kant, norms rise out of concrete historical situations, not absolute human rationality. And, pace Hegel, the nation-state is not the sole manifestation of Geist (Spirit) because it is located in and accountable to a greater field of forces (global capitalism) that may radically alter its duties.
I find this to be a brilliant attempt to think through the need for both historical materialism and transnational normative ideals. I would push this project by prodding further the source of human rights’ normative power. Although Cheah locates norms as being produced out of particular historical-material contexts, there does seem to be a world public opinion based on an implicit Kantian idealism. Witness, for example, the popularity of various (and admittedly problematic) “Save Africa” campaigns. Explaining the presence of such movements does not need recourse to a transhistorical human subjectivity, but a renewed sensitivity to historical residue. To borrow and deform Benjamin, there may be futures we have not yet forgotten. That is, the normative force of human rights claims may not reside totally in either the present’s play of forces or a transhistorical idealism. Rather, we are carrying the debt of previous generations whose ideals––themselves arising out particular historical moments––are with us as regulative norms. These norms seem transhistorical because they have become internalized in institutional discourse, literally taught in schools. This may all seem rather obvious, but it is a useful reminder and perhaps a complication of Cheah’s ‘ethical transformation to come’ move borrowed from Derrida.
No proper historicist would argue that the “field of forces,” especially economic forces, have not significantly (radically?) transformed since Kant, Hegel, Marx and the French Revolution. Yet, as the normative power of human rights attests, their revolutionary ideals linger in the very language we use to prosecute our world. The presence of these traces seems to severely undercut the hope implied in the claim that “contextual conditions are subject to radical mutability” (35). Radical changes have emerged, become dominant and left as residue their norms. Perhaps there is no transhistorical subjectivity, but neither is there a subject made up entirely in the present.
