Humankind and Humaneness

In the chapter “Heart of Humaneness: The Moral Economy of Humanitarian Intervention,” from Contemporary States of Emergency, Didier Fassin writes about the two aspects of humanitarian government – humanitarian reason and emotion. Humanitarian reason, Fassin writes, is “the principle according to which humans share a condition that inspires solidarity with one another,” while humanitarian emotion is “the affect by virtue of which human beings feel personally concerned by the situation of others” (271). These two aspects, Fassin argues are what produce solidarity and compassion in humanitarian intervention. These elements serve a two point categorical imperative for humanitarianism that on the one hand, presents such shared experiences as an identification with humankind, with an affective relationship toward others, through sympathy or emotion, or what Fassin terms humaneness.  These identifications, with humankind and humaneness through affect are what provide the basis for a contemporary moral economy that stands alongside a political economy, forming what Fassin theorizes as the politics of life. This is what is so compelling in Didier Fassin’s work and what insights he offers most, particularly in the ways that such economies (moral and political) become standardized and regulated. Humanitarianism, then for Fassin, is what is most at stake in the relationship and apparent separation between the humanitarianism and politics. Drawing from Agamben, such separation between the two also represents the extreme phase of the separation of the rights of man from the rights of the citizen. In Fassin’s earlier work, “Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life,” Fassin argues that the world falls into two camps: politics, which sacrifices or has the authority to choose between life and death, and humanitarianism, whose imperative is to save as many lives as possible.

            What interests me in this discussion are the implications for the relationship of human aid and human rights within such a formation. Put differently, if humanitarian intervention rests on identification with humankind and the affective relationship toward others through humaneness, then how are individuals figured when there are clear human rights violations without the aide of humanitarian intervention? What can we say about these terms of humankind and humaneness if the vulnerabilities of certain groups are not recognized by such military humanitarian interventions? On the one hand, what does it say about whom is constituted as vulnerable enough to receive humanitarian intervention? Conversely, how does the lack of such intervention articulate such groups as non-human and/or disposable – as living outside humankind of do not qualified for humaneness?

Fassin writes,

 “The fundamental value that forms the basis for humanitarian government is human life. The highest justification of humanitarian government’s intervention in this context is saving life. It is in this framework that the military can call its intervention ‘humanitarian’” (275).

Returning to the point made by Agamben – the separation between humanitarianism and politics as the separation between the rights of man and the rights of citizen, what else is at stake for those who live in the interstices of humanitarianism and politics? On the one hand, how can we think of these groups as dwelling in the interstices between government and humanitarianism and what are the stakes of such a position in terms of the biopolitics of humanitarian intervention, when it becomes a matter of to live and let die? Secondly, what does it say in terms of how such groups are articulated, if such humanitarian interventions are absent? Are they at the level of bare life? Another level of (non)life? How are they constituted as (non)humans? Perhaps the week of Zones of Abandonment will further discuss these issues, but this is an issue that I would like to further discuss. 

A Look at La Frontera

In Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderland/La Frontera, Anzaldúa mixes autobiography, poetry, mythology, historical documentation and theoretical propositions as she draws upon issues of race, sexuality, gender and the nation. In Borderlands, the concept of mestizaje, a term originating from post-revolutionary Mexico and the construction of a “Mestizo identity” that would become the foundation for the modern Mexican national identity. Cultural synthesis, and the mixed bloodlines that were a process of colonization became a national project of creating identity based on the mixed nation. The “mixed nation” was attributed to a kind of pathology, whose history and origin were timeless and unchanging. Anzaldúa reappropriates the term in order to call for a new strategy of identity formation and politics. Mestizaje, for Anzaldúa, is based on the fluidity within identity rather than a singly subject position. Anzaldúa mobilizes this term in order to use it as a means of demystifying and producing resistances against social and territorial borders. It is in the interstitial places between cultures and nations that Anzaldúa focuses on in her discussion. These spaces, Anzaldúa argues, are what the individuals living alongside the border must negotiate. This new subject, la mestiza, is one that is “cradled in one culture, sandwiched between two cultures, straddling all three cultures and their value systems, la mestiza undergoes a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war” (78). This text becomes a production where she speaks on behalf of Chicanos or rather, a new kind of Chicano - one that is political and who "no longer feel [the] need to beg entrance” such as the translation from English to Spanish. The mixing of Spanish and English, the refusal for a complete accordance to one or the other reflects the multiple and mixed identity that she feels is part of a new “language of the Borderlands.”

Gloria Anzaldúa has become an influential writer in the concept of mestizage and on the possibilities of Chicano politics, which makes her somewhat sacrosanct texts, according to many people actively engaged in Chicano politics, so difficult to position. On the one hand, it is important to note the contribution to identity politics that this book produced historically to the identity and political engagement of what could be called Chicano-ness.  Furthermore, Anzaldúa’s contributions to the discussions of racial and cultural marginalization, but also a marginalization based on gender and sexuality, Anzaldúa herself a lesbian. Her theory of mestizaje as one that opposes stationary subject positions and one based on fluidity becomes the battle cry of Chicano studies, a text that avoided essentialism or reductiveness. Perhaps we could compare it to a kind of theorizing that Bhabha seems to construct in The Location of Culture:

“It is the space of intervention emerging in the cultural interstices that introduces creative invention into existence…there is a return to the performance of identity as iteration, the re-creation of the self in the world of travel, the resettlement of the borderline community of migration” (12).

Using Bhabha theory, then, we could say that in certain regards Anzaldúa’s text is an intervention into the politics of recognition as she attempts to create a new kind of identity based around the multiple and mixed traditions, culture and languages that the subjects of migration and borderlands experience. This analysis, however, is written with a certain amount of apprehension. My apprehension stems from the artifacts from which she uses to construct this new kind of identity. For example, throughout Borderlands, feelings of resistance are positioned as intrinsic or instinctual. Concerning the existential nature of her struggle, she writes:

"This book, then, speaks of my existence. My preoccupations with the inner life of the Self, and with the struggle of that Self amidst adversity and violation; with the confluence of primordial images; with the unique positioning consciousness takes at these confluent streams; and with my almost instinctive urge to communicate, to speak, to write about life on the borders, life in the shadows" (7)

Or concerning the choice to challenge dominant ideological constructions:

"I had to leave home so I could find myself, find my own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on me" (16). 

The ways in which it has been regarded as a way of living or a standard of attributes that define Chicano-ness. Even if this identity is one “based on difference and hybridity,” in what ways does it still create a very defined representation of identity? Rather, in what ways has this text been used as a means to identify and define what it means to be Chicano? How does it still become folded over into an essentialist identity – one that is always politicized and as necessarily positioned as resistant to the State and “White Culture” as well as “Mexican Culture”?

What is also cause for some hesitation on my part is her use of history, or rather, the mythic historico-cultural symbols of Mexican and more specifically, indigenous identity. For example,

"My Chicana identity is grounded in the Indian woman's history of resistance. The Aztec female rites of mourning were rites of defiance protesting the cultural changes which disrupted the equality and balance between female and male...I fear no betrayal on my part because, unlike Chicanas and other women of color who grew up white or who have only recently returned to their native cultural roots, I was totally immersed in mine...in leaving home I did not lose touch with my origins because lo mexicano is in my system. I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry 'home' on my back" (21).

This declaration brings up a series of questions. How does such a relation to symbols of a somewhat ancient and arguably, origin history, serve as a means for authentication as a Chicana? How can a break from patriarchal and machismo mindsets, as Anzaldúa argues be made through the mythic constructions of Aztec social structures and the roots from which she must return and constantly desires? How does this idea of origins, in many ways, contradict the very mestiza, that she argues for? What are the political stakes for using history and even moreso, indigenous history? What does it mean to reading meaning with the myths of Mexican national symbols and Aztec culture, even if it is, in some ways, a rereading? 

The Non-Places of Recognition - Augé

 In Marc Augé’s Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, the role of recognition is formulated through the role and effects of recognition as it shifts from the anthropological place to the non-place. The role of recognition is important for Augé in that the places that are created, symbolic universes that are closed and total, are existences that rest upon an organization of space. What kind of recognition is Augé referring to? Is it similar to the kind of recognition that Bhabha and other postcolonial theorists are concerned with? Augé’s theory of recognition is concerned with the recognition of self within totalizing systems where individuals and groups are simply expressions inside such systems. Augé argues that the symbolic universes that the anthropological subject inhabits is constituted by recognition, rather than knowledge? What does he mean by this and could a postcolonial theory of recognition speak to this kind of recognition in any way?  This passage initially sparked my interest and perplexity in the politics of recognition in Augé’s text:

"The indigenous fantasy is that of a closed world founded once and for all long ago; one which, strictly speaking, does not have to be understood. Everything there is to know about it is already known...All the inhabitants have to do is recognize themselves in it when the occasion arises...Every unexpected even, even one that is wholly predictable and recurrent from the ritual point of view...demands to be interpreted not, really, in order to be known, but in order to be recognized: to be made accessible to a discourse, a diagnosis, in terms that are already established (my emphasis)” (44-45).

The relations that  individual have with non-places, by contrast, is the mediation of space between the self and others could be seen as an intervention in the politics of recognition which I what I think he is arguing. Supermodernity, characterized by the spatial overabundance and the individualization of references for which Augé argues overwhelms and relatives an idea of anthropological place. The politics of recognition also become the politics of space. Such a recognition is the recognition of the self within systems of consumption and global circulation. The recognition of place, such as the logo of a multinational corporation in an unfamiliar space, within the non-place of consumer space, the recognition of place becomes a recognition of the globalized, consumer self. The individual is called upon or addressed as an individual consumer in non-places. His argument that the space of supermodernity overwhelms and relativizes such spaces and the paradoxical relation that the ­­non-place produces is interesting in relation to the desire of recognition and Bhabha’s theory of cultural presence through creation. The role of desire in Bhabha work, particularly in relation to the desire for recognition of cultural presence, a desire that he sees as taking “the experience of history beyond the instrumental hypothesis” sparked my interest in the relation between the two, although Bhabha’s discussion of the politics of recognition becomes more in-depth later in his text (9).

Mobility and Travel - Ong & Clifford

In Aiwha Ong’s Flexible Citizenship, the flexibility that certain modern subject are forced to posess as a result of new geographical and social positioning can be related to the “flexibility” that is attributed to modern capitalist accumulation. Rather, the idea of flexible citizenship allows subjects to respond fluidly to changing political and economic activity (6). Even though Ong articulates a fluidity tied to flexible citizenship, Ong makes clear that these practices and exchanges are within structures of meaning surrounding class, nationality, gender, etc., a different grounding than Bhabha acts of production “in the beyond.” Aiwha Ong focus on the relation between the identity production of such flexible citizens and their role within capitalist systems of exchange and circulation offer a different way to think about the space of negotiation, not simply at the “level of culture”. Rather, Ong pushes the construction of narratives and the study of such relations, such as migration studies in relation to the nation and looks at the ways in which “hybrid subject” becomes mobilized. For example, Ong argues that the efforts of poor exploited immigrants of exported labor become racialized proletarian others, participating in the “nation-building” project of the United States.

"Poor immigrants are thus converted from being minorities to be assimilated into the host society into being some kind of universalized lower-class subjects who attain subaltern vindication both from struggling against racism in the United States and from transcending class and political barriers in their home countries" (9).

In the case of the United States, Ong notes that such mobilizations of the migrant figure not only produce an new idea of subjectivity for migrant groups, but also positions them in a very different way from other constructions of race based on mobility (9). This argument is provocative in that it brings to light the relationship between the migrant and other marginalized races in United States culture and the role of mobility in such constructions. How does flexibility work for or against the figure of the migrant in nationalist discourse? If, as Ong argues, their mobility is converted to a universalized proletarian in the field of migration studies, then in what ways does it work in the opposite way, the immigration seen as a threat because of their very mobility? Ong’s model at a more fundamental level, allows for an engagement with the ways in which such individuals accumulate, move and are displaced.  At another level, Ong’s analysis of the flexible subject under late capitalism allows for an account the power systems of class stratification and other societal barriers that affect mobile and non-mobile subjects. What allows some to cross and others not? How do certain societal structures prevent the movement and migration of individuals? This point is important not only as a way to think about the (im)permeability of borders based on societal stratification based on race, class, gender and sexuality, but also in relation to those who frequently cross borders for travel and leisure. The border, as such, becomes articulated and means vastly different things.  Although the positioning of the flexible subject within systems of capital and circulation, the ways in which laborers are articulated within society and the national discourse also becomes important in thinking about these subjects at the level of representation and rights.

            James Clifford takes this complex negotiation between cultures and their global histories of colonization, capitalist expansion, immigration, exploration and tourism in his book, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, and looks at the mobility of such subjects. Adding to Ong’s discussion of the power of mobile and non-mobile subjects, Clifford further argues that it is also a matter of travelers’ movement under strong cultural, political and economic conditions, confronting these issues as an anthropological problematic. For Clifford, culture lies at the sites of dwelling and travel, or more broadly, in the relationship between movement and stasis. The relationship between movement and stasis, both physically, in terms of literal displacement and migration, as well as culturally produced  (the ways in which subjects are stuck within a representational essentialism or anthropological space), is one of tension. The relation and subsequent tension between movement and stasis are what’s most at stake in “borderzones” or lands, as conditions allowing/disallowing such movement and the ways in which subjects negotiate those zones.

            Using a model of “dwelling in travel” and “travel in dwelling,” travel is foregrounded as a cultural practice, as transnational routes of travel and displacement produce different knowledge traditions, cultural expression and the emergence of diasporic and migrant cultures (35). Clifford takes this relationship and using it as a mean of looking at the inside/outside of such relations in terms of how anthropology can and should approach such situation. Fieldwork can no longer solely look at the centers, villages and intensive fieldwork when these societies are transnational and global connected in the negotiation of external relationships. Clifford calls for new representation means and strategies, writing,

 “ We need to think comparatively about the distinct routes/roots of tribes, barrios, favellas, immigrant neighborhoods --- embattled histories with crucial community “insides” and regulated traveling ‘outsides’ (Clifford 36).

Clifford offers the theory of shifting locations, allowing one to take into account the many ways in which borders are formed and imposed upon individuals, both physically and otherwise. Clifford uses Mary Louise Pratt’s idea of a “contact zone” as a means to think about the space of such encounters. The argument that locations are “multiple, conjunctural and cross-cutting,” avoids the traps of a guaranteed shared experience or collectivity, while simultaneously opening up sites of “alliance building”, or Bhabha ideas concerning “political negotiation” (Clifford 87).

            Returning to Flexible Citizenship, Ong brings the discussion of such spaces back to the still important role of the state. For in the ways that the tensions and disjuncture are present at the borders of culture and nation, oppressive structures and border-crossing flows, Ong argues that “the nation-state -- along with its juridical-legislative systems, bureaucratic apparatuses, economic entities, modes of governmentality, and war-making capacities – continues to define, discipline, control, and regulate all kinds of populations, whether in movement or in residence" (15). Even though the differences of stasis of movement are productive in the ways in which such oppressed groups are studied and articulated, Ong allows for a bridge to think about the ways that individuals are positioned and controlled within state apparatuses and capitalist structures.

            In a further engagement with Clifford, Aiwha Ong offers a reading Clifford’s project as one that “attempts to shape their own cosmopolitan intellectual commitment” (13). Ong draws on Clifford’s project in order to think critically about the relationship between the diasporan subject and the cosmopolitan intellectual. Because Clifford uses the idea of “traveling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in traveling,” which is a very compelling idea, he is able to take in diverse subjects with specific histories and a range of cultural practices. This grouping can also be seen in a variety of other work dealing with such spaces of cultural difference and mobility.  The kind of move made by Clifford can also be seen in other works such as Marc Augé’s Non-Places, where travelers, both cosmopolitan citizens and displaced people cohabit a space of transition and temporaneity or in Appadurai’s “Sovereignty without Territory: Notes for a Postnational Geography,” where the multiple identifications that communities possess form translocalities not rooted in the nation-state, a locality that both cosmopolitan citizens and marginalized subject inhabitants. What is the relation between the two figures and how do they affect one another? Put differently, if certain mechanisms of power enable or disable mobility, then how are the diverse populations within these transnational systems shaped by the relations of global inequality? As both the cosmopolitan citizen and marginalized mobile subject are articulated at both the global and local level, how can we think about the ways in which they engage in the production of one another? 

Negotiations - Bhabha, Ong, Pratt

            Many of the readings from this section deal with the ways in which culture is produced when marginalized members of society and the nation such as the diasporic subject, the im/migrant, the refugee, the exile, etc., live and engage in the spaces of cultural difference between dominant or hegemonic forms of culture their own positions within geopolitical structures.  From theories of the hybrid cultural space that subjects translate through performative acts of negotiation (Bhabha), to the conditions of places or the non-places in supermodernity that mobile subject confront (Augé), to the complex relations of movement and stasis (Clifford), the sites, zones and spaces of cultural difference that these subjects face, translate, negotiate, confront happen at the interstices and borders of nations and “culture”. 

            In Homi Bhabha’s text, The Location of Culture, Bhabha is concerned with the types of cultural negotiation that happen at the sites “in-between” cultures, or the hybrid cultural space that emerges in “" the overlap and displacement of domains of difference” (7). Experiences of nationness or collectivity, for Bhabha are formed in the “beyond” or in excess of, the sum of the parts of difference. The space as theorized by Bhabha is one of intervention, where the translation of such cultural differences is refigured through performative identity production. However, what is somewhat questionable in Bhabha’s theory of translation through performative negotiation is the ways in which such “negotiations” are taken up and the “parts” of difference that are used and mobilized in such translations. For example, Bhabha praises the reappropriation of the past for the refiguring into the present as an intervention, or “a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation” (7). Bhabha further argues that it is not only a cultural negotiation of the self through identity performance that happens within these interstitial places, but also the political negotiations of collectivity and belonging. Moving to group identity politics, Bhabha points to a similar kind of hybridity that is necessary for collective action versus theories concerning the possibilities of collective will. The heterogeneous and fragmentary ways in which subjects identify and act upon become a “struggle of identifications”, calling for a rethinking of political struggle as “political negotiation” (29). However, while Bhabha’s insistence on the necessary relationship and engagement between theory and practice offers a helpful critique of the time and place distance that the theorist places against their object, a critique similarly made by Augé and Clifford, the performative hybridity that Bhabha proposes as a means for the re-creation of the self seems haphazard in its acknowledgement of the asymmetrical power relations functioning in such translations of cultural difference.

I think the historical genealogy of travel writing and its roots in the European project of Empire during the 19^th century that Mary Louise Pratt brings up in her book, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, prove particularly productive in thinking about the conditions of such cultural negotiations. Because Pratt focuses on the space of cultural negotiation as the same space of colonial encounters, or as she terms, the “contact zone”, these relation are historically wrought with a colonialist past and are produced within asymmetrical power relations. According to Pratt, contact zones are the "social space where disparate culture meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination -- like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived across the globe today" (4).  Whereas Bhabha seems to present a performative hybridity that finds oppositional or binary relations between oppressor/oppressed or national/ethnic separation as unimportant or irrelevant, Pratt theorizes a space where encounters with different cultures are still lingering with colonialist pasts and power relations. The location for the postcolonial subject who contests the interstitial spaces of culture, can be seen, for Bhabha through readings of literature and art, where "being in the 'beyond', then, is to inhabit an intervening space… to be part of a revisionary time, a return to the present to redescribe our cultural contemporaneity; to reinscribe our human, historic commonality; to touch the future on its hither side. In that sense, then, the intervening space 'beyond', becomes a space of intervention in the here and now" (7).

However, these celebrations of hybridity through performance hold the danger of becoming trapped within their own valorization. How does Bhabha cling to this idea of hybridity through performative acts of translation? Put differently, the diasporan subject’s “insurgent act of cultural translation” that, in some ways, necessitates the appropriation of the past, the subject standing in-between tradition and modernity. In such exchanges and negotiations, Bhabha elides similar exchanges of culture in systems of capital. How does Bhabha’s performativity play out in modes of consumption and commodity and what does that mean for acts of translation?

Aiwha Ong, in her work Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, critques valorizations of hybridity for the diasporan subject taken up in postcolonial discourses. Ong writes,

"American studies of diasporan cultures have tended to uphold a more innocent concept of the essential diasporan subject, one that celebrates hybridity, "cultural" border crossing, and the production of difference… who write about displacements in "borderland" areas, emphasize subjects who struggle against adversity and violation by affirming their cultural hybridity and shifting positions in society. The unified moralism attached to subaltern subjects now also clings to diasporan ones, who are invariable assumed to be members of oppressed classes and therefore constitutionally opposed to capitalism and state power. Furthermore, because of the exclusive focus on texts, narrative and subjectivities, we are often left wondering what are the particular local-global structural articulations that materially and symbolically shape these dynamics of victimhood and ferment" (13).

Ong’s critique nicely articulates what is at stake in such theories. If performative acts of identity production from oppressed subjects become inherently tied to a resistance against the state then such politics run the danger of such essentialist constructions of identity and identity politics. The role of such a performativity will be particularly relevant to Chicano politics and the ways in which identity politics are performed and reproduces, both since its theoretical beginnings in the late 1960s and 1970s and the relevance of Chicano politics today concerning border identities. Ironically, in the above quote, Ong’s references Gloria Anzaldúa’s seminal Chicano text, Borderlands/La Frontera, as an example of the valorization of cultural crossings and hybridity.  Following Ong’s line of thought we might ask, what are the means of production of such a politics of identity and how do such politics fit into systems of capitalist exchange and circulation? For the ways in which identity production and performance could be seen and liberating and resistant, in what ways has it been reinscribed within a kind of liberal multiculturalism, where the status of the immigrant or the Chicano becomes one that is always resistant, or that is called upon to always resist or perform resistance? How do such production become framed as existing outside of capital and current systems of geopolitics? Importantly, how do they become mobilized as representative as the figures for resistance?