Abstract
The paper extends the critique in earlier research of human rights as exclusive of otherness and difference by introducing the work of Adriana Cavarero (2000) on a narratable self. Hence, the formation of human rights is thus about the relations between different narratable selves, not just Western ones. A narrative learning, drawing on Cavarero (2000), shifts the focus in human rights learning from learning about the other to exposing one’s life story narrative through relationality.
Introduction
Human rights as a universalistic concept has been criticized in post-modern research as a modern notion that disregards diversity. Seyla Benhabib (1992) states that postmodernism is committed to ‘the death of man understood as the death of the autonomous, self-reflective subject, capable of acting on principle’ (Benhabib, 1992: 229). It is imperative for an exploration of conceptualizations of a human rights subject not to adhere to a dominant modern notion of the subject as male-centred or white-centred, but as a subject caught between conflicting identity belongings that have not been recognized historically in more precise terms than as ‘otherness’. Difference is seen to be a problem in need of a remedy since it threatens to undermine the universal quality of what counts as a ‘human right’, and therefore what counts as subjectivity. (Todd, 2010: 61)
Why is it important to explore conceptualizations of a human rights subject in ways that reconcile, disrupts or questions both universal and particular notions of subjectivity in studies of HRE? Because HRE needs to be faithful both to the very essence of ‘human rights’ as an appeal to universality and equality, and to the articulations of particularity that is to be found in national curriculum and state-driven education. As Todd argues, a failure to recognize that the state’s role in safeguarding personal freedoms is one that undermines the power of the state itself, ‘from an educational point of view runs the risk of depoliticizing [and] dehistoricizing human rights’ (Todd, 2010: 60). What counts as subjectivity in this concern has educational and jurisdictional implications.
Todd questions the validity of human rights in a world of nation states, where rights are only a reality for citizens, and also questions the credibility of the vision of universal human rights in a diverse world, where cultural and political systems are in opposition. The world was already fragmented and diverse when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was signed in 1948. Cultural and ideological conflicts over the meaning of human rights were prolonging the process of reaching a common proclamation on human rights. As I have argued elsewhere (Adami, 2012), human rights were agreed upon on conflicting grounds. The debates within the United Nations Commission on Human Rights were centred, not on consensus and sameness in fundamental philosophical thoughts on the origin of human rights, but on conflict and agonism, keeping the dialogue open (Adami, 2013).
If human rights are not to be seen as a common, universal ideology based on shared philosophical principles, but rather as practical principles to be interpreted within any ideological framework, then who is the subject of human rights when universality is not conflated with a demand for sameness?
When Todd (2010) responds to Hannah Arendt’s question, ‘who is the subject of human rights?’, she focuses the assumptions underlying a Western conception of ‘humanity’ as inclusive, pointing out that such a universalism excludes particularities or cultural belongings other than Western ones. Todd (2010) makes transparent the discrepancy between the wording of ‘all human beings’ and the actual silencing of counter voices and narratives of human rights. The critique of a universal subject is met in the paper with the notion of a narratable self, as developed by Adriana Cavarero (2000) in exploring what such a notion can offer identity-shaping in human rights learning. Even though one can learn about human rights, to learn human rights through one’s life story may point to its transformative potential.
A critique of a permanent subject of rights
The first great damage done to the nation-states as a result of the arrival of hundreds of thousands of stateless people was that the right of asylum, the only right that had ever figured as a symbol of the Rights of Man in the sphere of international relationships, was being abolished. (Arendt, 1973: 280) It is only if you presuppose that the rights belong to definite or permanent subjects that you must state, as Arendt did, that the only real rights are the rights given to the citizens of a nation by their belonging to that nation, and guaranteed by the protection of their state. (Ranciére, 2004: 306) […] the Rights of Man are the rights of those who make something of that inscription, who decide not only to ‘use’ their rights but also to build such and such a case for the verification of the power of the inscription. It is not only a matter of checking whether the reality confirms or denies the rights. (Ranciére, 2004: 303)
Following Ranciére on this notion, the subject of human rights is not limited by the exclusionary definition of a citizen, already acknowledged as legal subjects before the law in different countries, but the subject of human rights is anyone who makes something of that inscription.
This idea of enacting human rights, a political consequence of people’s awareness of such rights and the deprivation of their human rights, was echoed by some of the drafters of the UDHR in 1948; that people would learn about rights that they were denied, and from this awareness they would start claiming their rights legally from within states.
A political subject is, according to Ranciére, the ‘capacity for staging such scenes of dissensus’ and he therefore sees the subject of human rights not equivalent to citizens, but that anyone, regardless of whether they are seen as qualified to be part of political life or not, can bring about dissent in a process of subjectification. So, the strength of human rights, according to Ranciére, ‘lies in the back-and forth movement between the first inscription of the right and the dissensual stage on which it is put to test’ (2004: 305). The crucial point here in regard to the subject of human rights, as I see it, is Ranciére’s argument that Arendt’s critique of human rights is based on a notion of rights bearers as citizens in relation to the state, whereas he is proposing a notion of a subject of human rights beyond the current ‘letter of the law’. It is only if you presuppose that the rights belong to definite or permanent subjects that you must state, as Arendt did, that the only real rights are the rights given to the citizens of a nation by their belonging to that nation, and guaranteed by the protection of their state. If you do this, of course, you must deny the reality of the struggles led outside of the frame of the national constitutional state and assume that the situation of the ‘merely’ human person deprived of national rights is the implementation of the abstractedness of those rights. (Ranciére, 2004: 306)
Ranciére illustrates the process of subjectification as becoming a rights subject by the famous statement of Olympe de Gouges, who, after the French Revolution, argued that since French women were treated as political subjects in front of the court, in cases where they were sentenced to death as enemies of the revolution, they should hence be seen as political subjects in the assembly too. Ranciére’s notion of the subject of rights is a political subject in relation to others, who, in collective action, can bring about political change and hence the realization of rights, as more than mere written words. As subjects of rights, people can demonstrate that they are deprived of the rights that they have, thanks to the declaration 1 (Ranciére, 2004: 304).
Ranciére offers an empowering understanding of people’s agency in noting that the subject of rights is the one who makes something of that inscription. This points back to the explicit and implicit aims of the UDHR. The declaration was aimed at ordinary women and men who would learn about human rights in order to claim them legally. It was thought that if people learnt that they were entitled to something called ‘human rights’, they would demand the legal implementation of these rights. The critique against the notion of a definable, universal human rights subject is valuable for furthering the learning of human rights as a shift from a critique of human rights for not realizing the expectations such a notion may contain, towards an acceptance of the notion of human rights as a political imaginary, which can only be realized through politics of dissonance. A notion of human rights as political imaginary is essential for how I develop a narrative turn to human rights learning in the following, where the life story narrative of human beings is seen as a lived translation of the concept of human rights.
A narrative turn to the subject of human rights
The critique of a universal subject is met here with the notion of a narratable self and what such a notion can offer identity-shaping in human rights learning. In the following, I leave the implicit legal aim of the UDHR and turn to the explicit educational aim of the declaration. I consequently continue exploring the question that Ranciére (2004) raised of ‘who is the subject of human rights?’ by addressing the connected question of ‘who feels addressed by human rights?’.
Demanding rights and political freedom from a position that is at the same time a social critique of the present neglect of rights for some is an ethical challenge. Judith Butler, inspired by the work of Adriana Cavarero, has pondered on the limits placed upon the subject in giving an account of herself through narration that is bound by a language that precedes the subject. The subject is dependent on a predefined language that creates essentializing social categories to which the subject needs to relate and without which she cannot position herself as a political subject. Narrating one’s place in this world becomes a tool for political subjectification while it simultaneously poses an ethical demand on the narrator. ‘It will be necessary to reconsider the relationship of ethics to social critique, since part of what I find so hard to narrate are the norms – social in character – that bring me into being’ (Butler, 2005: 82). This critical recognition of the limits that language poses need not inhibit individual efforts to question the prevailing social boundaries of subjectification. As Butler concludes on this challenge of ethics and social critique, ‘this does not mean that I cannot speak of such matters, but only that when I do, I must be careful to understand the limits of what I can do, the limits that condition any and all such doing. In this sense, I must become critical’ (Butler, 2005: 82).
In order to make a ‘narrative turn’ in HRE, I focus especially on the part in Cavarero’s work (2000) on the role of memory for the feeling of self in order to make a philosophical shift from negotiating human rights through particular narratives to seeing human rights learning as making sense not only through relating life stories to familiar particular narratives, however dynamic and changeable they may be, but also through emphasizing the uniqueness in our experiences (carried in our memories) of feeling respected or violated in one’s dignity, or when the dignity of the other has not been recognized.
Even though one can learn about human rights, to learn human rights through one’s life story is pointing to the transformative potential in human rights learning. The first notion of learning emphasizes epistemology – what can we learn about – the second involves ontology – who do we become in the process of subjectification?
This philosophical shift, I argue, questions the static notion of particularity (as cultural-, religious-, gender-, national-, ethnic- and other group belongings) by relating a universal notion of human rights to the uniqueness of lived experience. With a narrative turn to identity, one does not learn human rights by dividing learners into different group categories to learn ‘about’ others through the characteristics groups have been ascribed throughout history. Rather, one learns about human rights through narrating one’s life story in relation to human rights. Consequently, one becomes partly known to oneself and to another through narration, not through outside labelling.
A narrative turn accordingly entails seeing ourselves as not merely belonging to different group categories, i.e. identifying ourselves for what we are. Not defining ourselves within national, cultural, political or religious borders demands alternative approaches to human rights learning, where learners may feel that the universal human rights concerns their daily lives.
This inability to fully understand who others are, should not be seen as taking away the ground for a common humanity. What is gained with re-thinking the subject as ‘a narratable self’ is a shift of focus from external characteristics of the plural other, that risk being based on mere assumptions, prejudice or projections of the self, to a relational process of becoming in revealing ourselves through the sharing of narratives.
A human rights subject as neither particular nor universal, but as unique
If we go beyond a notion of reading human rights through our different contexts, through different value systems of cultural, religious or economic imperatives, we find the individual giving meaning to human rights through her or his lived experiences. In other words, through a narrative turn in human rights learning, reading human rights is through one’s life story. Human rights learning through narration offer a political relationality between different and unique individuals.
Cavarero criticizes the tradition of ‘individualist thought’ for the way in which it flattens out the uniqueness of the individual in favour of a set of universal rights for the individual, which are equal, or equivalent. The unique existent in Cavarero’s sense – contrary to the individual invoked in modern and contemporary doctrines of ‘individual rights’ – is in a constitutive relation with the other, with others.
The concept of a narratable self, that Cavarero develops, is fluid rather than static in how different particular narratives operate simultaneously in the lives of people: traditional borders are crossed due to people migrating and psychological borders are changed by the influence of media and internet, entailing the encounters of a multitude of particular narratives. Human rights are prescribed meaning in the process of localizing and contextualizing them into the personal spheres of people’s life stories, but, in order to move ‘beyond’ the available particular narratives to reach the unique life story to which human rights experiences are attached, there is a need for re-thinking the subject as a narratable self.
Cavarero’s notion of a narratable self is an ontological understanding of narrativity. We are vulnerably exposed to each other in our singularity, where no one can truly understand another’s suffering. Through narratives, we share parts of our life stories, in which we relate parts of our own experiences to others’ voiced expressions. Cavarero puts forth a singular notion of the subject, that we are not the same, nor can we feel what another person feels, but we can transcend this singularity through narrativity. The vulnerability of narrativity is due to the premise that one does not exist in one’s singularity without the relationality of the singular other. Cavarero critiques the notion of identity as fixed through social categorizations. She emphasizes that, although individuals are unique, in that we all have unique life stories, the process of subjectification is not a process in isolation. Even though one does not know anything about another, one knows that the other carries a unique life story, although unknown or only partly known. Cavarero argues that relationality is a condition for subjectification through narration. This means, in my interpretation, that I learn about myself in relation to a singular you, either through listening to another’s story about me, or through telling you parts of my life story.
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To put it simply, everyone looks for that unity of their own identity in the story (narrated by others or by herself), which, far from having substantial reality, belongs only to desire. (Cavarero, 2000: 41)
In contrast, even though Martha Nussbaum’s (1998) emphasis is on questioning a static notion of culture and religion, she still seems to understand the other in terms of a plural ‘you’ and not a singular ‘you’ when she argues for learning about the other, their complex, ever changing, internal conflicting and negotiated cultural ‘you’. Cavarero presents the other, who is a concrete, bodily existence of an other whom I cannot grasp, but with whom I am intertwined through narratives.
Traditionally in HRE in the West, learners are confronted with ‘the plural other’s narrative-of-suffering’ through stories of children in non-Western countries who are violated in their right to schooling, food or to a home. Not only are these stories of the collective other misrepresentative of the diversity of stories of children, but they are also neglecting the uniqueness in a child’s narrative, estranging her from me through the distance of seeing her suffering through the faces of many. Her story is always unique, although it carries a political weight when received either with silence (which is an act in itself) or with attentive listening that calls us to act.
We see, through the child’s narrative, an embodied other who is a you and who addresses us with a specific and unique narrative. According to Cavarero, the other is not an absent protagonist, but a real human being with her unique life story to share. Through this narrative articulation of the other and myself as in constant relationality and reciprocity, one finds a relatedness beyond egocentrism (making the other myself) or exoticism (making the other everything else but me). Narrativity hence entails a relationality where one has already become part of the other’s story as it is shared. Instead of hiding behind a distant other’s suffering, in exposing stories of human rights violations in remote places, a narrative learning of human rights demands a courage to be present in the relation. The pedagogical relation demands a respective courage, where the subject and her story are ontologically intertwined.
Instead of egocentrism and exoticism in human rights learning, we find here a sense of respect of an ungraspable who in ‘you’ and an ungraspable who in ‘me’. This shift from acknowledging particularity and otherness to respecting the uniqueness found in each and everyone’s life story narrative points towards a dissolution of a presumed dichotomy between a universality of human rights and contradicting interpretations of that universality in particular contexts.
What happens to this dichotomy between particularity and universality if we talk about learning human rights through narrating one’s life story narrative? Or about making sense of human rights through lived experience in relation with other unique beings? This criticism of the presumed dichotomy lies in the focus on unique life narratives rather than particular (and generally patriarchal) cultural narratives that are seen as static in relation to human rights as universal and practical principles that are under constant political negotiations.
As The Latina Feminist Group rightly points out in their collection of personal narratives of women of colour who oppose ‘masculinist or white feminist frameworks’ (2001: 9), through the act of relational narrativity their life stories ‘expand traditional notions of ethnicity and nationalism, question Eurocentric feminist frameworks, and situate’ the narrators in relation to activism and writings by other women of colour (2001, 2). As such, The Latina Feminist Group base their work on the notion, that a second feminist movement has also put forth, that ‘personal experience contains larger political meaning’ (The Latina Feminist Group, 2001: 3). I want to draw a connection here between the notion of narrating experiences of human rights and testimonios that The Latina Feminist Group use, since experiences of human rights violations when narrated can be read as testimonies, ‘a form of expression that comes out of intense repression or struggle’ (The Latina Feminist Group, 2001: 13). In narrativity, the prescribed identity of ‘woman’ is being questioned through the uniqueness of the life narrative. The fluidity of identity is also stressed by The Latina Feminist Group with the words of how they flesh out their ‘multiple geographies of origin’ and ‘various mixed inheritances’ through autobiographical narratives (2001: 6). Their contribution is important in that it values the politics of the relational process of narrativity, or of ‘collaborative testimonio’ (2001, 6), and how they stress that individuals are not reducible to social labelling or collective identities.
Human rights as narrated through life experiences are equally not reducible into existing articles in international documents, as these rights can be claimed in a multitude of ways that encompass experiences named and exposed through human rights discourses that carry potential for political change.
Anne Becker (2012: 83) develops ‘normative ontological explorations concerning identity and human rights’ in defending ‘equality of difference’ that I interpret as a critical response to universalistic notions of what it means to be human that excludes difference within discourses on human rights. Becker (2012) draws on Arendt in exploring ‘the ontological experience of belonging and sharing’ that, according to Becker, carries both a risk of reducing humans to what as well as a responsibility towards togetherness, of defining humans as who (2012: 84). Becker criticizes the assumption that human rights are based on a universality of sameness and defends the plurality in our ontological condition of plurality, drawing on Arendt. What Becker (2012) points to is that ‘equality of difference is as worthy of protection as equality through sameness’ (2012: 84). A narrative learning of human rights – where I share my experiences of human rights through parts of my life story, or listen to your life story narrative – is hence not about but with the unique singular other.
This shift from a collective other to a singular other has ethical implications. To contrast, we can see Nussbaum’s (1998) argument that learning about other cultures will simultaneously alter the understanding of ‘us’, the Western culture. Nussbaum argues that to see the complexity of the other is also to acknowledge the complexity of our own heritage. She emphasizes that an increased understanding of other ways of living will enhance our understanding (the American people) of the American society, since ‘they’ live amongst ‘us’. In the work of Cavarero, on the other hand, the ethical relation is not between the plural, but between a concrete singular other and a singular me, who are unique beings and therefore not captured within social categories –Afro-American, woman, Asian – as the social categories that Nussbaum, even though she aims at blurring static definitions, nevertheless emphasize as otherness.
Hence, any claim for a universal human being tends to become a stable category of identity, immune to the contextuality and relationality stressed in a narrative turn. The narrative turn outlined in the paper, following Cavarero, firmly rejects the notion of the subject as constant over time, defined through stable categories of identity and limited to collective and shared group identities. Rather, human rights address humans through the immediate political challenges of life narratives. The universality of human rights rests on a notion of equality through difference, where the uniqueness of singular subjects is revealed in narrations that depend on relationality.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.