Hesford: Spectacular Rhetoric Notes

Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics

4/6/2013
“A task that consists of not—of no longer—treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.  Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things.  It is this more that renders them irreducible to the language (langue) and to speech.  It is this ‘more’ that we must reveal and describe” (Foucault, 49).

Cintron, in his notes about Hesford's book, suggests that Foucault is more interested in power, especially how institutions manage to shape power on behalf of some and not others. Rhetoric, as the study of language in action, must always be about something more  -- the formation of political life whether or not the signifiers match up to anything real or even probable.

Hesford's emphasis is on recognition: "The history of human rights can be told as a history of selective and differential visibility, which has positioned certain bodies, populations, and nations as objects of recognition and granted others the power and means to look and to confer recognition.  As this history suggests, struggles for recognition are also struggles for visibility...The stakes are precisely the unseen in vision -- the process through which something is seen or not seen (30).

Her aim is to "integrate the visual into, rather than set it against, textual approaches and to scrutinize the objectivist model of visual evidence -- seeing is believing -- foundational to contemporary human rights politics" (8). Here I am reminded of one of my students who in response to the question "How do we imagine the unimaginable and speak of the unspeakable and know of the unknowable? " (with regard to trauma and atrocities) answered that she knew it because she visited a concentration camp -- as if seeing the camp today is knowing, understanding, and believing.

Cintron writes that the "very structure of the human rights claim is a kind of spectacle in which intersecting ideologies, visual technologies, rhetorics, and so on fuse to create a reality (or the representation of reality) that reinforces certain dilemmas regarding the dominated and the dominating.  In this sense, human rights discourses seem to contain the residue of colonialism, and in an ironic way continue neocolonialst thinking. So ekphrasis, then, (to bring before the eyes), which seems so foundational to rhetorical theory because it is bound up with notions of proof and persuasion, of certainty as opposed to contingency, becomes the rhetorical figure that is exploited in the human rights spectacle."

Hesfords working with Levinas: "To communicate is indeed to open oneself, but the openness is not complete if it is on the watch for recognition.  It is complete not in the opening to the spectacle of or the recognition of the other, but in becoming a responsibility for him" (198).

Introduction:

• How do human rights internationalism get translated into cultural forms that target American audiences-14 
• Consider the rescue narrative how human rights law is depoliticize into a humanitarian intervention discourse 
• Consider how the discourse of American nationalism produces subjects who see themselves as a free in comparison to developing worlds 
• The human rights spectacle or spectacular rhetorical is the appropriation of human suffering to deflect Nationalist issues
• This book considers Intercon textuality how arguments travel across contexts
• The book thinks in terms of transnational rather than global because of the national or nationstates that impact others--Nationstates are relevant in human rights context and in presenting images of issues
• Ranchers-16- Emancipation starts to distribution of the visible itself is part of the configuration of domination and subjection it starts when we realize that looking is also an action that confirms or monetize that distribution.... Interpreting the world is already means transforming it or reconfiguring it
• 17- I highlight the rhetorical intercurrent textuality of images and their meanings and approach the human rights spectacle as a rhetorical phenomenon through which differently empowered social constituencies negotiate the authority of representation. Furthermore I argued that spectacular X and the contradiction that they stage are emblematic of the political and ethical struggles with which human rights advocates and scholars are engaged.
• 19-I argue that instead of thinking about the spectacle as a narcotic we need to understand it as heterogeneous and as a rhetorically dialogic process that is nevertheless subsumed within repetitive forms. Truth telling genres are the most ardent hosts of human rights spectacle.
• How do deployments of the spectacular rhetoric advance political cultural and moral agendas? How do truth telling genres and the contexts they generate support the spectacular and increasingly panoptic culture of US internationalism and its regulation of human rights subjects?
• 20- I demonstrate that no genre is immune to the spectacular and that spectacle is at the core of human rights narratology.
• 21- The studies are intended not to represent an exhaustive survey but to highlight examples of how international Human rights law and cultural practices work together to create sites of political engagement and creative intervention. 
• 21- I seek to counter the common assumption that legal approaches are the only politically viable means of taking action against human rights violations by the states and nine state actors...******
• Attending to the intercontextuality, I will cultural and law based human rights discourses we are able to grasp how the suffering body becomes sutured to the spectacle and incorporated into the visual economy of human rights....issues of who has the power to represent home and which events are rendered visible or invisible are profoundly important...and examination of interventions or transformations of the spectacle that challenge hierarchical social relations and the fixity of identity categories and yet and down at the human rights subject with agency-22
• 23- How truth Telling achieves political effects and to manipulate affect
• 26- Convergence of human rights and humanitarian discourses and representing non-western women and their children as sympathetic I text unappealing and site for Western audiences... Children as symbolically appealing and as passive victims... How about spectacle of childhood innocence and the transformation of the child from object property to agent 

 Chapter Five -- Spectacular Childhoods: Sentimentality and the Poltiics of (In)visibility

• Rights bearing subject deflect attention from or draw it to the social and economic conditions that shape children's lives
• Questions depoliticizing the victim of children's human rights law
• There is a subversive element of children's agency when the substance of that Universalism is not innocence for children sense of familial and social responsibility-- and this is evident in so e genocude literature .. It resists victimizing demonstrating agency in the child... What is the mediator's role-- a call for greater collaboration between human rights activists artists and scholars in investigating how the axes of ethical engagement are regulated through the often conversion discourses of humanitarianism and human rights internationalism
• Educating as rescue narrative--159--This was in part a narrative in tree girl and was a narrative in my unit of about tree girl ; It is also a narrative at my melody school
• A humanitarian narrative of self actualization with an imperialist history emerge as a virtuous reporter and advocate whose value and agency are affirmed by the lacking other--160
• Teaching about international or transnational atrocities is dangerous for the teacher because the spectacular figure of the exploited child is most often depicted as foreign racially or ethnically different and non autonomous and innocent being betrayed by familial and cultural traditions
• Do the books and try that out western intervention the characters cannot be saved? Is there no agency? 
• Is there a larger transformation narrative which moves from pain and trauma to personal expression and growth
• 162-The literacy math graff -- The universalizing Idea that you respective of the particularities of any given context literacy correlates with social standing and economic advancement
• The taxpayers witness to a journey through their creation of a rhetorical space of transnational intimacy between children and an imagined western audience-163
• 174- The challenge is not to reproduce the colonial legacy of anthologizing societies as uncivil and repressing the agency of both children and adults then re-creating the spectacle of salvation through such interventions
• 174- Developmental narrative.. It plots a story of socio-civil incorporation by which the human rights personality becomes legible to the self and others
• 175-Cosmopolitan aesthetic... Redemption as subjects of a heroic narrative in which they and the imagined Westernview were triumphant over the deficient moral aesthetic boundaries of the brothel
• This transformation narrative distracts attention from the severe poverty and exploitation to which the children are subjected in favor of the expertise of the cosmopolitan arch critic which the children are encouraged to emulate and new forms of neoliberalism and its regulation of social difference subjectivity and public morality
• Darker side .. What is needed is a multidimensional analysis of children's agency that considers that interdependency of human rights including how poor labor conditions for adults inadequate wages lack of health for disability benefits unsafe working conditions contribute to the family's dependency on child labor176
• This confronts modernity 
• Be skeptical of the dualisms forced versus chosen moral versus immoral to terminate representations of women and children
• Account for the transnational national and cultural forces and narratives that define our alignments with children and those that limit children's agency has moral and political subjects
• The process that children are cultural actors the documentary reformulate what it means to see children as complex subjects who subjectivity is not grounded in a struggle for recognition but in their ability to respond to impoverished, social and economic circumstances.--182
• By focusing on the children's daily struggles and resilience the film counters the spectacle of children as passive victims that is common to human rights and humanitarian campaigns specifically those that target Western audiences--183
• The film does not have a transformation or rescue narrative there are no heroes or villains the film documents to children struggles the lack of choices and resources and the generational cycle of poverty and it exposes the contradictions of advocacy work 184
• Moments that kid viewers an opportunity to think about their role as witness a small dessert and otherwise continuous observation page and the potential pedagogical role of the film in the context of its making
• 185- ranciere- The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible the sayable and ithe thinkable.
• a refusal to construing the children as mere victims or to infantilize their families or the society in which they live
• 186-The film persuades by enabling a relationship built on the recognition of children as cultural actors and moral agents and by not translating the children's experiences in terms of idealized western models of development...reimagining the discourse of childhood dependence***
• Tensions between individual capacity and vulnerability in between protection and empowerment are not easily resolved
• See child agency as a matter of social and economic rights and not solely civil and political rights as a matter of both political recognition and the rest redistribution of resources. ... In order that the issue of children's human rights to be ethically grounded 

Chapter 3: Witnessing Rape Warfare: Suspending the Spectacle

• 95--Hesford critiques Mackinnon's anti-pornographic stance and causal argument that pornography created conditions whereby Serbian men raid Muslim and Croat women ... McKinnon is more interested in linking human rights violation to her anti-pornography stands then in exploring these women's testimonial for what they say about the complexities appointments victimization cultural location and agency.. Thus the text is in-service of her argument and not in service if the women.
• Pedagogically we need to be aware of how we use the tax and her classrooms are they in service of the conceptual idea or framework or in-service of complicating the subjectivity of the people
• 95- Consumption of great as spectacle exemplifies the pervasive visibility of women as rape victims and international news media and US public discourse and the emphasis and women's human rights campaigns and violence against women
• 96- If human rights images and testimonies aim to create a rhetorical space of intersubjectivity of bearing witness how can human rights activists and scholars account for ruptures and identification and crises and witnessing? 
• 98- Bearing witness--a critical stance of bearing witness wherein the witness listener reviewer does not take the place of the other... The original subjects themselves did not register the experience in the fullness of its meaning (Baer) There is a danger in responding to trauma that indulges in the illusion that we might somehow be able to assimilate atrocities fully into our understanding.
• 99- The process of documenting human rights violations is paradoxical in that violence is often represented in order for it to be resisted...." And for me this is a problem in the classroom because we are reading representations of violence in order to confront progress and development for its darker side, so we are reading violations and projecting narratives-- hero narrative, rescuer narrative-
• Hesford asks what forms of empathic engagement are constituted as solutions to violence and what are the limits of such forms? She talks about the crisis of witnessing referring to the risks of representing violence
• Life writing studies-- the mediated nature of the testimonial genre and the editorial process if collaboration and mediation 
• 100- She argues the need to recognize the interdependence of witnessing and listening... The paradoxes of representation involved in becoming a rhetorical witness of rape warfare as genocide and of the allegorical structure of human rights claims to this recognition. The paradox that such representations bring front and center of course this configuration of the individual has an embodiment of group identity and group vulnerability a sense of collective identity recognized by the genocide convention. 
• 103-- secondary witness- gets stuck in the gap between what is said in testimony in the way of speaking body or written text says it
• Cambodia 
• What assumptions about children contributed to Khmer rouges plan?
• What beliefs about progress and development?
• Can our research tell the truth? Can a memoir testify?
• How do they make sense of their experiences, how do they channel their pain into a struggle for justice, the process if recognizing themselves as human rights subjects -- not interested in what happened to the people(as victims).
• Works against western expectations that victims were all poor an uneducated 
• Memoir/ testimony- the individuals trauma is implicated in the social regardless if whether she chooses to speak -- live witness's speech act is a violation as it makes her live through it again; the witness and viewer recreate the spectacle of victimization as a scene if forced recognition.
• Can one testimony speak for a collective?
• Tensions between witnessing and spectacle 
• Inadequacy of representation - limits of narratability and public reproduction and exposure of the private
• Think about how the global economy and international politics including the United States have intervened is supposedly local conflicts, and how such are configured rhetorically-- how and why would it matter if accounts of systematic violence and its legacies were part if our memorial landscapes-- 122
• Hesford deliberates the potential if a differentiated politics of recognition that move beyond recognition