Disappointment

Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding

Jarrett Zigon

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780823278244, 9780823278237
• eBook ISBN: 9780823278251
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Increasingly, anthropologists, political theorists and philosophers are calling for imaginative and creative analyses and theories that might help us think and bring about an otherwise. Disappointment responds to this call by showing how collaboration between an anthropologist and a political movement of marginalized peoples can disclose new possibilities for being and acting politically. Drawing from nearly a decade of research with the global anti-drug war movement, Jarrett Zigon puts ethnography in dialogue with both political theory and continental philosophy to rethink some of the most fundamental ontological, political and ethical concepts. The result is to show that ontological starting points have real political implications, and thus, how an alternative ontological starting point can lead to new possibilities for building worlds more ethically attuned to their inhabitants.

CHAPTER 1

The Effective History of Rights

In this chapter I attempt to trace the historical emergence of the supposedly transcendental and a priori concept of rights, to disclose its grounding in the metaphysics of individualism, and metaphysical humanism in particular, and in so doing come to understand the limitations on political and moral possibilities this concept enframes. In other words, this chapter will trace what Gadamer calls the effective history¹ of the concept of rights. For Gadamer a central component of hermeneutic analysis is the recognition that “we are always already affected by history,” and therefore, we must begin with what he called a history of effect.² Such recognition entails a realization that we are always an effect of the tradition—I would say the ontological tradition—within which we find ourselves, and despite this recognition we continue to be affected by the tradition. And yet, the way we inhabit this continued affective tradition is a matter of import. From a hermeneutic perspective we must inhabit our tradition, as Gadamer puts it, not as “imprisoned, as if behind insurmountable barriers,”³ but rather in a modality of openness. This is so because hermeneutics is always a process of disclosing potentialities and opening possibilities. In other words, to do hermeneutics is at one and the same time to recognize the continued effect an ontological tradition has on limiting the contemporary possibilities for being and acting in worlds, and through this recognition to begin to find sites of potentiality from which new possibilities might emerge.

This modality of considering effective history is central to a critical hermeneutics of contemporary politics, for the analysis of the moral and ontological grounding of our currently available political possibilities reveals much about the way such politics are practiced and the kinds of consequences—intended and otherwise—we can expect from these practices. Furthermore, because the moral and ontological grounding of a politics is rarely consciously understood by its practitioners, and thus even more rarely explicitly acknowledged, critical hermeneutic analysis is vital for coming to understand the possibilities and limitations for being-in-the-world made available by a discursive practice. Thus, a guiding question of such analysis would be: what kinds of conditions and possibilities for being are enframed and enacted through a particular kind of discursive practice such as rights-based politics, and how can we understand this as a consequence of the effective history of its grounding ontological tradition?

In attempting to answer this question I begin with the assumption that critical hermeneutic analysis discloses the effective history and thus the limits of a particular politics, and in so doing also discloses that which this politics excludes. This would seem to be an important exercise for any form of politics. But perhaps this is even more urgent and necessary for rights-based politics considering its predominance today among the world’s political and social movements, and, perhaps more important, because of the primacy of place of human rights language in much of the public rhetoric of national and international governments. As will become clear, however, the concept of rights in its diverse historical manifestations has always been closely tied to and ultimately utilized to underwrite, stabilize, and support sovereign power, and usually conservative power at that, in the name of security and control. Now that human rights has become both the language of power and of those who seek to resist power, and as such the central political-moral concept of our day, the necessity of critically analyzing its ontological grounding and thus its political and moral assumptions, limitations, and exclusions should be clear.⁴

Human rights have only recently become an object of study by historians, and these studies tend to fall into one of two approaches. The first tends to give a triumphalist account that sees the present dominance of human rights as the result of a long history of progressive evolution into its contemporary manifestation (a history, it should be noted, that seemingly stretches to the very beginnings of human civilization in some accounts).⁵ The second approach tends to see the emergence of human rights as a globally dominant political-moral discourse as a very recent—usually starting in the 1970s—and historically contingent occurrence.⁶ As will be clear I am very sympathetic to the latter approach. But while agreeing that human rights as a dominant political-moral discourse is a very recent and historically contingent phenomenon, the critical hermeneutic analysis of this chapter reveals that, in fact, human rights can only be understood as part of a larger conceptual history of rights and, as such, as part of the dominant ontological tradition today.

This is not to say, as do the triumphalist histories, that this larger conceptual history necessarily led to the contemporary concept of human rights as if a kernel of an idea snowballed through history and emerged in 1948 in the form of an unavoidable avalanche. Far from it. But it is also not correct, I will show, that human rights be viewed as initiating a completely new discourse—or at least one significantly distinct from the natural rights tradition—as the contingent histories seem to argue at times. Rather, I argue that the very notion of human rights and the ways it is manifest today can only be understood against a larger effective and conceptual history⁷ of rights. This history reveals what I will call a conceptual proclivity that, despite changes and shifts in the meaning and social uses of the concept, tends to lead to conceptual manifestations that support certain kinds of social and power relationships, institutions, and practices over time. It is a view of conceptual history that acknowledges change and shifts, as well as similarities and tendencies. It is a view of the concept that at one and the same time recognizes its singular historical manifestation at any particular space-time as well as the fact that this particular singularity always exceeds itself in its reference to, and thus its inescapability from, its unique effective history. It is, finally, a view of the concept that emphasizes that because a concept always exceeds its singular historical manifestation, it also exceeds the intentions of those who use it at any particular historical moment.⁸

This is so because, as Gadamer puts it, our contemporary understanding and use of concepts are but “the furthering of an event that goes far back. Hence [we are not able to use our] concepts unquestioningly, but will have to take over whatever features of the original meaning of [our] concepts have come down to [us].”⁹ The critical hermeneutic analysis of this chapter reveals that this conceptual proclivity of rights is best understood in terms of how this concept emerged as a key concept of the incipient metaphysics of individualism taking shape in the high and late medieval periods. While it may be the case that this metaphysics did not become manifest until the mathematical and natural scientific grounding of Descartes and Newton,¹⁰ in this chapter we will see that the moral and political aspect of this metaphysics began much earlier than its mathematico-scientific ones.¹¹ Indeed, this order of conceptualization is not surprising since before the mathematicians and natural philosophers could ground the objectivity of “the world” on the subjectivity of the subject, an individualized subject needed to come into being. As will become clear, the concept of rights, and most specifically the idea of an individual with a priori inherent rights inextricably linked to an institution of power, was a necessary political-moral conceptual move for the emergence of and eventual establishment of the ontological tradition of metaphysical humanism. It is no surprise, then, that this key political-moral conceptual foundation—rights—has today become the dominant conceptual expression for legitimate political-moral ways of being and acting in our worlds, and as such, doesn’t so much express a political or moral aim as much as repeats and reaffirms the dominant ontological tradition of our age.

What this critical hermeneutics of the effective and conceptual history of rights will disclose, then, is that concepts emerge along with a particular ontological tradition. Furthermore, the ongoing enactment of these concepts—by means of such things as everyday practices, governmental policies, laws, narratives, architecture, design, and technology, to name only a few—is also the ongoing enactment, repetition, maintenance, and perpetuation of the ontological tradition of which the concepts are a part. What becomes particularly clear in this chapter, then, is that the concept of rights has accumulated a conceptual proclivity to become manifest as a political-moral foundation of a metaphysical humanist ontological tradition that today has its most significant consequence as the foundation for state sovereignty primarily concerned with security, control, and the disciplining of life. In what follows, I hope to make clear how this has unfolded historically, and why political agonists such as those in the anti–drug war movement, about whom I write in the rest of this book, can only conceive and articulate their political activity in terms of the rights-dignity-responsibility triad.

A Critical Hermeneutics of Rights

In the beginning there was already property and ownership. Or at least that is how John XXII saw it in his papal bull Quia vir reprobus, in which he effectively put an end to the long-standing debate over poverty and property within the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Church.¹² This consequential debate centered on the Franciscan doctrine of apostolic poverty, which made the claim that members of the order could use the commodities necessary for daily life without having property rights in them. From the Franciscan point of view this doctrine was necessary to maintain fidelity to the ideals of the order’s founder, as well as to remain an organized order within the institutional setting of the Church.¹³ The position of the Franciscans can be articulated as follows: because property only comes about through civil law—that is, it is socially and humanly created—it is not characteristic of humans as such and their natural relationship with one another and the world. Therefore, because usus simplex facti (simple use) or mere consumption¹⁴ does not entail ownership, the ability to consume some thing or place does not entail that one must own it and therefore exercise property rights. This argument, then, was essentially opposed to rights in that it took the position that property rights, which in the late medieval period were quickly coming to be considered the quintessential right,¹⁵ only existed within the temporal order of civil law.¹⁶ The 1279 papal bull Exiit qui seminat by Nicholas III supported and protected this Franciscan claim.¹⁷

Just two generations later the radical implications of this doctrine became clear to the Church hierarchy and the new pope, John XXII; as Richard Tuck expresses the concern, “If it was possible for some men to live in an innocent way, then it should be possible for all men to do so.”¹⁸ The Church as the most powerful and richest institution in medieval Europe simply could not accept this potentially revolutionary doctrine from one of its own orders. The response, therefore, necessitated the articulation of an alternative view of human life under God’s law or the law of nature; it necessitated a view that individuals could have property naturally, outside of any social order.¹⁹ The answer finally came in John XXII’s Quia vir reprobus. Claiming that a human’s dominium over his possessions is conceptually the same as God’s dominium over the earth, John XXII went on to argue that Adam, before Eve, had “by himself dominium over temporal things.”²⁰ The “by himself” is essential to John XXII’s argument, for even in this state of innocence when Adam had no one with whom to exchange commodities he still had dominium or ownership over these. In other words, John’s argument essentially made the claim that Adam—all alone and existing only as a human as such and not in any relation to any society because none existed—had property rights by his very nature as a human.

For the very first time the notion that individual human beings—humans outside of any relationship to institutions, states, or human sociality—had by the very fact of being human certain natural rights, or what we might call today inherent rights.²¹ Thus was born the idea that has become the keystone of the modern human rights industry²²—that all humans are naturally endowed with particular rights—within the context of the medieval Catholic Church defending its institutional position of power against a perceived heretical and potentially revolutionary doctrine which claimed that individuals could consume what they need to live outside relationships of property. As Leff puts it, John’s Quia vir reprobus had “comprehensively supplanted poverty by dominion [property/ownership/control] not only in the life of Christ but in the designs of God. Lordship not renunciation was the badge of apostolic life.” In the defense of property rights and the Church as an institution of power, then, John XXII created a conservative and profoundly individualistic conception of rights founded on property and control that can be understood as an essential conceptual move in the emergence of an incipient metaphysics of individualism. This conception of individual rights founded on property and control was the ground from which, in only a few centuries and with only a few modifications, the classic natural rights theories sprang—for example, Locke’s notion of property of the self—and, in turn, gave way to today’s conception of human rights.²³

It is important to note that the Latin terms dominium and ius are the keywords in this textual debate. Dominium is often translated as “property,” but it does not quite match with the modern notion of that concept. Rather, in addition to ownership, dominium is perhaps best translated as “control” or “sovereignty,” as in the English “dominion.” Therefore in these medieval Church debates over property or dominium the debate is not over simple ownership but about control and sovereignty and whether rights could be exercised without being one who possesses control and sovereignty.²⁴ It is here that we see the truly significant nature of John XXII’s argument, for in defending the institutional power of the Church, John endows individuals with an inherent nature characterized by control and sovereignty. This is significant because it signals a conceptual shift from the notion of passive rights—which since the time of imperial Rome had been the most dominant institutional articulation of rights—to that of active rights.²⁵ In other words, John’s argument entailed that rights could only be exercised by morally sovereign individuals. This is language that already gets us quite close to many of the assumptions of the modern human rights industry.

Indeed, the centrality of dominium in this conceptual shift also mirrors a broader conceptual shift in the midst of what could be described as the incipient moment of the ontological tradition of metaphysical humanism. This is so because John XXII’s argument for the dominium of Adam in the defense of inherent rights can be understood as just one move in what Schürmann describes as a shift in the history of metaphysics. According to Schürmann, in the Middle Ages—and particularly in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Effective History of Rights
• 2. Progress; or, The Repetition of Differential Sameness
• 3. Worlds and Situations
• 4. An Ethics of Dwelling
• 5. Worldbuilding and Attunement
• Epilogue: Critical Hermeneutics
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index