Deliberative Acts: Democracy, Rhetoric, and Rights
2015; Penn State University Press; Volume: 48; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/philrhet.48.1.0107
ISSN1527-2079
Autores ResumoArabella Lyon's Deliberative Acts begins with a rhetorical question: “Shall we speak of Abu Ghraib and torture; shall we educate the children of illegal immigrants; shall we guarantee health care for all or for most; shall we intervene in the governance of other nations; shall we ban the hijab (head scarf), medical marijuana, and prayer in the schools; shall we find one hundred million missing women, the lost boys of Africa, and los desaparecidos (the disappeared)?” (1) With this list of violations framed as a question, Lyon suggests that through the media, popular culture, and politics, we are constantly confronted with and compelled to deliberate on issues of rights, so much so that human rights have become the grounding for the work of democracy. Thus, Lyon's major intervention is located at this intersection of human rights discourse and the political deliberation necessary in democracies. She seeks to advance a theory of “performative deliberation” (3) that conceives of deliberation within theories of performance and performativity as an activity that refocuses on the present and the constitutive moment of recognition within the specific context of each speech act. In order to do so, Lyon turns to human rights case studies as represented in the media and life stories because they, by nature, attend to radical difference and because they “require examinations of both being and situated knowledge for the many coming to action, an action potentially transformative of being and knowledge” (4).Rhetorical studies has been surprisingly late in taking up a human rights critique. Although many have been engaged in critiquing human rights from a rhetorical perspective for years, and even more have been engaged in critiquing human rights through discourse analysis and literary analysis, the lack of conversation in rhetoric prompts Erik Doxtader to question whether rhetoric should have a role in human rights discourse in the first place.1 Despite his question, the past several years has seen a renewed interest in rhetorical approaches to human rights. In fact, a special issue of RSQ coedited by Arabella Lyon and Lester Olson in 2011 (subsequently published as a book in 2012) and Wendy Hesford's book Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (2011) were among the first in this new wave of rhetorical studies to focus directly on human rights as such. Lyon's Deliberative Acts is situated within this relatively recent rhetorical turn to human rights and provides a useful and necessary theoretical grounding on rhetorical concepts and deliberation across difference as they relate to human rights case studies on which others can build. Additionally, for scholars engaged in conversations surrounding deliberative rhetorics, Lyon offers a convincing model of performative deliberation that accounts for the fluidity of poststructuralist notions of agency and subjectivity through an overdue rethinking of rhetorical concepts including identification, recognition, and performance/performativity in persuasion. However, for scholars participating in the conversation and critique directly surrounding human rights discourse, a critique that is predominantly located in the humanities and rapidly expanding out from its literary foundations, Lyon's book may be controversial, as it does not necessarily critique the discourse of rights itself, nor the amorphous “we” constructed in her first sentence. Rather, she is interested in critiquing how that “we” employs, deploys, and deliberates over human rights cases, including the claims made by Libyan woman Eman al-Obeidi's to Western journalists that she was raped and abused by Gaddafi's military, the Chinese one-child policy, Rigoberta Menchú's testimony, and women's suffrage in the United States.Lyon's introduction locates her intervention in the conversation surrounding deliberation and deliberative democracy in a global and transnational era. To begin, Lyon distinguishes deliberative democracy (a way for states to legitimize decisions) from deliberation (a rhetorical practice), a distinction that suggests that the problem with deliberative democracy is that “it finds difference disruptive rather than productively diverse” (11). This is problematic because “in responding to rights conflicts” Lyon claims, “citizens are asked to deliberate, to recognize interlocutors, to comprehend their competing claims, and weigh definitions of the issue and the consequences of their decisions on people whom they have never seen” (4). Lyon's introduction articulates three major critiques that scholars of deliberative theory might find very useful. First, she critiques its origins in procedural democracy, which engages in forensic rhetoric, rather than deliberative politics, which engages in deliberative rhetoric. Stated differently, deliberative democracy is future oriented and focuses on action and procedure rather than present context. Second, in its privileging of reason, deliberative democracy values Western notions of speech-action that delegitimize alternative and embodied strategies of persuasion. Thus, deliberative democracy ignores the contextual forces that constitute reason in the first place. Third, Lyon argues that deliberative democracy values consensus, which “creates problems for theorizing radical deliberation, because it is hard to imagine even basic norms of justice achieving practical consensus” (19).The first chapter, “Defining Deliberative Space: Rethinking Persuasion, Position, and Identification” theoretically situates the book and redefines some foundational rhetorical concepts including identification, recognition and persuasion. Lyon suggests that instead of deliberative rhetoric being a futurist discourse, it can instead be constitutive of the present, “a doing based in speech and act and not in persuasion and identification” (30). For example, identification predicated on recognition, argues Lyon, will always subsume difference and is thus inadequate for discourse across difference. Lyon critiques deliberation as a persuasive discourse on three grounds. It is inadequate for human rights and cross-cultural engagement since it is predicated upon an unequal relationship between speaker and audience (rather than an equal relationship between interlocutors); it is future rather than present oriented; and it assumes certain sets of communal knowledges that will always “seek to remove otherness” (31). In order to remedy these problems Lyon turns to “alternative rhetorics,” including feminist rhetorics and Confucian notions of remonstration, that can help scholars conceive of deliberation “as a dramatic event or a series of enactments” and as “the discursive acts responsible for altering the subjectivity of the participants, their discourses, and their beliefs” (36–37). Ultimately, Lyon proposes a conception of deliberation as a continuum of political perspectives, suggesting that if each interlocutor values the other over the outcome, then deliberation can occur. If we understand deliberation as a “regularly occurring human act” (49), she claims, then recognition does not have to occur prior to deliberation; the act of deliberation is itself an act of recognition and thus humanizing.Understanding recognition as occurring in the moment of engagement with the other seems to solve the poststructuralist problem of the fixed individual of rights, but it gets more challenging when the subject of rights is not a subject who can engage in deliberation at all, such as third generation rights of/to the environment. However, in critiquing Aristotle's notion of persuasion so as to redefine deliberation not as a discourse oriented toward the future bent on persuasion but rather as one constitutive of the present bent on recognition, Lyon opens the possibility of deliberation across difference that does not reproduce the hegemonic structures always present in discourses of persuasive deliberation.The second chapter, “Performative Deliberation and the Narratable Who,” begins with the story of Eman al-Obeidi, the Libyan woman who, according to Lyon, became a symbol of defiance against Gaddafi when she entered the Rixos Hotel in 2011 (a hotel where Western journalists covering the uprising gathered) and claimed that she had been gang-raped by Gaddafi's military. During this telling of her rape, Gaddafi's military entered the hotel and again abducted al-Obeidi despite the journalists' attempts to protect her. Lyon uses the story of al-Obeidi throughout the chapter to argue for a theory of performative deliberation as a way to account for the complexities of agency, recognition, and narratability in deliberative discourse. The chapter offers a further critique of identification and recognition through a close reading of J. L. Austin's notion of the performative, Kenneth Burke's concept of performance, and Judith Butler's notions of performativity as “a continuum of form and forming” (25) that scales outward from the individual to the structural. In an attempt to locate individual agency within structural notions of subjectivity, Lyon then provides a close reading of issues pertaining to narration and agency that she traces through Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood, and Adriana Cavarero. Through these theories and the story of al-Obeidi, Lyon proposes to extend speech act theory in four main ways. First, by analyzing “tensions between conforming and forming within speech act theories to reveal the agency inherent in discourse” (69), Lyon shows how al-Obeidi shifted the focus of her speech act from an individual act of rape when she was talking with the journalists in the restaurant of the Rixos Hotel to a violation within the normative and structural discourse of human rights when she was interviewed much later by Anderson Cooper on CNN. According to Lyon, this intentional slippage shifts blame “from the shame of the woman to the shame of the patriarchal state” (69). Second, because speech acts do not just conform to normative conventions but also maintain space for agency and can be inaugural sites themselves, then “the nature of the cultural change is visible in abnormal or infelicitous performances” (69). Therefore, she reads al-Obeidi's decision to burst in on the breakfast of Western journalists covering the war in Libya as an example of an infelicitous speech act that was able to redefine the norms of testimony. Third, Lyon seeks to find agency in the embodied performance of the speech act (69), and fourth, the chapter claims that agency is found in navigating existing norms by “using both felicitous and infelicitous acts to widen possibilities” (69), exemplified in al-Obeidi's navigation of the Western media. This chapter is one of the more compelling chapters because of its thorough critique of identification and recognition.The third chapter critiques U.S. media representations of what Lyon calls “the most major human rights crisis in the world today: missing women” (108) in Asia and China due to the one-child policy. The chapter, titled “Narrating Rights, Creating Agents: Missing Women in the U.S. Media” with an intended pun on “missing women,” suggests that if the media, like literature, could work to foster compassion, then it could initiate the kind of relationships necessary for performative deliberation. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's account of the narratable self, Lyon modifies Arendt's view of compassion as an emotion that demands action rather than the slow movement of deliberation in order to develop a theory of deliberation that employs compassion from a distance. Her theory of compassion is the rhetorical equivalent of theories of literary witness articulated by Anne Cubilié in Women Witnessing Terror (2005) and Wendy Kozol (2011) in her essay “Complicities of Witnessing in Joe Sacco's Palestine.” All three scholars articulate a notion of witness that demands action rather than spectatorship, the latter implying passivity and consumption. Lyon argues that the media representation of China's missing women revives Cold War sentiments and the fear of China surpassing the United States as an economic and global superpower. Negating any form of cross-cultural recognition, family planning gets mapped onto the United States' own political fears and Chinese women become allegorical figures for the nation-state. The U.S. media thus misses the missing women because they are not seen as a human rights violation but rather a symptom of family planning or abject suffering, made the subject of narratives, argues Lyon, that foreclose deliberation across difference. To counteract this, Lyon calls for a kind of “global citizen” who is located in the United States but who is educated and informed and who can advocate for women's rights in other cultures. Lyon argues that literature can offer this kind of compassionate education that underwrites performative deliberations and turns to Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club as an example, thus contributing to the wealth of scholarship that suggest literature does human rights work. However, Lyon ends her chapter by backing away from the work literature can do, suggesting that “storytelling becomes a means of recognition, but not of political action” (126).Chapter 4, “The Beauty of Arendt's Lies: Menchú's Political Strategy,” analyzes the reception of Rigoberta Menchú's I, Rigoberta Menchú and U.S. scholars' attempt to explain away the inconsistencies of the controversial testimonio. In so doing, the chapter “reconceives the ethics of lies, arguing that they are examples of imaginative, performative acts in the service of (potentially new) political regimes” (27). Returning once again to Arendt, Lyon furthers Arendt's sanction of lies for diplomatic political use, particularly those told to enemies, and legitimates Menchú's inconsistencies as an expression of her political agency by which she negotiates norms. Suggesting that Menchú's lies facilitate human rights deliberation, this chapter more deeply examines issues of recognition within normative conventions of the genre of testimonio. Thus, Lyon not only provides a helpful reading of the normative conventions of the testimonio in this chapter but also critiques the ways in which narratives are frequently recognized based on their adherence to normative conventions of testimonial veracity. The chapter ends with an apologia of sorts that explains why Lyon advocates the political tactic of lying, claiming that “the state's legitimacy relies on its truthful adherence to its laws, but citizen agents must speak back to dishonest states, even with lies” (149).The final chapter of Deliberative Acts, titled “Voting like a Girl: Declarations, Paradoxes of Deliberation, and Embodied Citizens as a Difference In Kind,” moves the discussion of rights onto U.S. soil and into the past in an examination of the deliberations over women's suffrage. One of the chapter's most interesting interventions is Lyon's claim that paradoxes are generative of deliberation because they counteract consensus and because they disrupt the stability of answers. This reframing of paradox is incredibly useful for human rights because of the inherently paradoxical nature of human rights, but it should be noted that Lyon articulates a particular definition of the paradox as “indicating a set of radical claims about women that challenge traditional beliefs and doxa” rather than “an irresolvable proposition” (154). Lyon examines four particular paradoxes: the tension between old and new ideas (exemplified by competing interpretations over time of the First Amendment and free speech), the tension between the normativity of rights and the inherent (de)limitations of those norms, the chicken-or-egg dilemma regarding the political origins of rights as they relate to the formation of the citizen, and finally, the irresolvable tension between language as describing rights and constituting them as such. The chapter examines these paradoxes through a detailed reading of deliberation surrounding the First Amendment, suggesting that Susan B. Anthony's illegal performance of citizenship and the Seneca Falls Convention's rewriting of the Declaration of Independence, like al-Obeidi's testimony and Rigoberta Menchú's testimonio, are infelicitous performances that serve to negotiate and expand what was and is considered normative and thus expand the notion of “what it means to embody citizenship and rights” (172). Lyon ends her book by reiterating the performative, constitutive, and (re)forming nature of “deliberation without end” (181).Lyon's contribution to the academic conversation surrounding rights discourse is fundamentally ontological in that she articulates how deliberation over human rights can potentially construct a subject of rights. In the introduction, Lyon takes pains to articulate a definition of rights, and thus a subject of rights, that is contingent and relational: “Rights are seen as relationships defined through speech acts and practices, concerned with the contingencies of being and situated (epistemic) discourses”; they are conceived as “acts of participation formed in conversations among community members and carried out in repeated behaviors or actions which re-enforce them as norms” and as “culturally sanctioned through historically based translation, negotiation, and deliberation, formed and performed in dialogue” (6–7). However, there seems to be a tension throughout the book between, on the one hand, an understanding of rights in their philosophical or discursive sense as an ontological framework produced by a set of interrelated normative conventions (legal and discursive) that get interpreted and reinterpreted constantly and, on the other, an understanding of them as political and legal doctrine actionable by international law wherein the interlocutors under critique are U.S. citizens and the victims of rights abuses are “people whom they have never seen” (4).Lyon argues, particularly in her early chapters, that “performative deliberation must extend the concept of recognition from one of making people politically visible to one of enacting the human; it would have us understand recognition as a matter of being and becoming rather than one of seeing and representing or witnessing” (49). However, relying on recognition rather than persuasion and dismantling hegemonic discursive power structures through “a shared agency arising in the present moment of engagement” (57) seems to presuppose that all parties are already at the table and that all parties are recognizable, when, as Arendt and subaltern studies has shown, it is precisely those who are not recognized as interlocutors who need rights the most. In other words, the “human” is only human precisely when she or he is “politically visible” (49) as a person before the law. Lyon acknowledges this problem in chapter 4 when she articulates the fourth paradox of rights as the chicken-or-egg scenario of what comes first—a citizen who advocates for rights or the rights to construct the citizen as such. In addition, Lyon's argument in chapter 2 that al-Obeidi's ability to shift the terms of the violation from the individual to citizens, from the guards to Gaddafi, changed the terms of the debate is also an important analysis of the rhetoric of staking rights claims. However, it could be interesting to build on Lyon's argument by more deeply examining if this actually changes the norms of testimony considering the fact that the primary reason al-Obeidi was able to stake her claim and give her testimony as a victim of rape was because she has a law degree, speaks English, and had an audience (in the Western journalists) who could, both literally and figuratively, hear that testimony and make sense of it as a violation. If the Western media had not been there to cover the war, al-Obeidi's abduction, rape, and beating would have proceeded as normal. In other words, it is worth considering more closely through which normative cultural frame, Libyan or Western, al-Obeidi's speech act(s) is (in)felicitous. Chapter 4, however, does provide a deeper account of the politics and problems of recognition, as in it Lyon offers a particularly astute reading of the norms surrounding Menchú's testimony and her use of lies for political gain within the normative discourse of testimonio.Through her useful critique of Nicholas Kristof's “China's Super Kids,” a 2001 Marie Claire magazine featuring an article titled “The Baby We Can't Ignore”, and many media texts, in chapter 3 Lyon points out the ways in which the popular media representations of women elsewhere “does not facilitate an in-between space where inter-ests may rise and initiate performance” (114). This chapter's critique of the popular media's (mis) representation across cultures of missing women is important to further ground Lyon's theories of performative deliberation in specific geopolitical spaces, but, interestingly, it blames the media for (the) missing women and takes a rather skeptical view of the capabilities of U.S. readers. Additionally, I wonder how Lyon's critique of the 2001 Marie Claire magazine article and other U.S. media as failing to offering a community of engaged activists who can then participate in deliberation (readers are encouraged by the magazine's photoessay on gendered infanticide in China under the one-child policy to write activist letters to Marie Claire that Marie Claire will then forward to politicians including the U.S. president and the Chinese ambassador) changes in the contemporary world of social media and Kony 2012, or what she would make of the recent turn to literature by human rights activists, given her argument that “storytelling becomes a means of recognition, but not of political action” (126).2The familiar tension between the ontological notion of normative rights as subject producing and the epistemological notion of rights as a set of legal axioms that need to be extended by a Western “we” lies at the heart of Lyon's text but does not detract from her valuable theoretical notion of performative deliberation as constitutive of human rights subjects. In fact, Lyon's reading of identification and the theoretical operations of deliberation, particularly in the first chapter, are very useful for scholars working at the intersections of human rights discourse and rhetorical studies, particularly those scholars interested in dynamics of global readership, transnational rhetorics, and deliberative democracy. If rights are distributed and made normative by narratives, whether fictional or nonfictional, Lyon's examination of deliberation provides a foundation for the workings of reading across difference, reading that is potentially subject producing. Although the first half of the book is principally theoretical and can come across as removed from the stakes of rights discourse and detached from the reality of rights claims (for example, what does it ask of victims of rights violations to suggest that they keep open the possibility of a relationship with their torturer or perpetrator of violations?), Lyon's astute critique of the discourse of deliberation as persuasion and her idea of performative deliberation across difference is explicated within more practical discourses in the second half of the book.Ultimately, Lyon's critique of deliberation in human rights discourse, particularly her departure from identification as a valid tool in persuasion across difference, is important and should be a foundational one for those of us working in rights discourse because it cuts to the very methodology on which rights claims, particularly within official channels like the UN, have historically been predicated. In one of the more resonant lines of the book, in chapter 4, Lyon follows Judith Butler in claiming that “if one does not qualify as a subject of recognition, to break the regime's framework and to be recognized, one must distort or destroy the regime of truth; that is, telling the truth is also problematic if it does not recognize subjects as worthy interlocutors” (150). For scholars working in human rights discourse seeking to expand the notions of what is normative, this is extremely useful advice as we seek out, assign, and critique texts that may or may or may not make sense—may or may not be recognized either as subjects or narratives—within existing normative frameworks of what constitutes human rights, rights narratives, rights claims, and subjects of rights.
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