War Culture and the Contest of Images

Conclusion: On Human Rights

232 CONCLUSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS While images are easily framed to serve the interests of the state, contemporary documentary images are also used to construct counterhegemonic narratives and to call into place public spheres, based on shared ways of seeing, that are critical of and outside the control of the state. In addition , critical documentary practices have merged with artistic genres such as video, reenactment, performance, and conceptual art in powerful and dynamic ways. Such practices make visible the state violence that often remains invisible, either because it is normalized by the institutions and discourses of the state, or because it has been left outside the official frames of vision. These documentary practices support democratic ideals and transformative social struggle by calling attention to those who might otherwise remain invisible were it not for the public sphere that is called into place and constituted by these documentary practices. These are the rightless, the people who have lost the right to have rights. Let us then return to the question of “human rights.” The liberal defense of “the human” through a universalist defense of human rights shifts emphasis away from the role of the liberal state to that of democratic reform , despite the fact that the inherent violence of the paternalistic state is the underlying cause of human rights abuses. The problem with humanitarian organizations is that they unwittingly support “a secret solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight,” as Agamben argues. Put differently, the urgent concern for the immediate amelioration of suffering displaces the long-term concern with the political structures that produce that suffering.1 As a result, human rights organizations rely on bare life as the object of their aid and protection by separating human rights from politics. “A humanitarianism separated from politics ,” writes Agamben, “cannot fail to reproduce the isolation of sacred life as the basis of sovereignty, and the camp—which is to say, the space of exception —is the biopolitical paradigm that it cannot master.”2 Human rights and the state are intrinsically related such that a state that cannot support human rights is a state that cannot be politically supported. Yet the capitalist state, premised on the concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny minority which depends on the exploitation and impoverishment of the many to maintain an expanding rate of profit, is supported by nationalist ideologies that are racist, sexist, and xenophobic and inevitably produces the conditions of bare life and the corresponding indifference to “human rights,” whether foreign or domestic. As Slavoj Žižek puts it, those who combat subjective violence are effectively hypocrites CONCLUSION 233 who support or even produce, in the case of philanthropists such as Bill Gates and George Soros, the systemic violence that generates “the very phenomena they abhor.”3 Law scholar John Parry also argues that the difficulty with the idea of “the universal rights of humanity in general” is that “these claims lead directly to violence, both discursive and physical.”4 Parry points out that only the state can create the conditions, that is, citizenship, in which rights can be successfully claimed and that these rights are as much about restricting the individual as liberating him or her; at the same time, they create an “abstract autonomous individual or citizen” who is defined as equal in formal terms, but this condition of abstract equality depends on participation in a particular set of social structures and conventions. Those who do not share these structures and conventions are excluded from the group of equalrights holders. The state, in an effort to provide equal rights, may perforce create “sustained domination or violence for the purpose of turning those people into the abstract individuals who will eventually have rights that are recognizable within a liberal order.”5 Such logic underwrote colonial rule and continues to support the open-ended domination of peoples by state powers, as we have seen. Thus liberal theory assumes a paternalistic stance toward those it deems incapable of having or insufficiently prepared to have equal rights; indeed, Parry argues that the very idea of rights developed in conjunction with colonialism, imperialism, and modern systems of production and trade, depends on them, and serves the interests of the modern state.6 Those who have fewer rights are defined either as not ready for rights, that is, implicitly or explicitly less than human, or as having rights when in practice they do not. What is terrifying is the...