Abstract
Deliberations on human rights are pervasive features of democracies in an increasingly globalized world. These include deliberations within a nation or culture – such as gay rights debates in the United States or the United Kingdom – or those made in a nation or culture about another – such as discussions in the ‘West’ about the treatment of women in Afghanistan or India. In either case, theorizing the scope and import of such deliberations is a troublesome issue. Should the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) be treated as an unchallengeable standard, or are local norms to be valued? Do these deliberations reflect broader ideologies of liberalism versus conservatism, or simply cultural or traditional misunderstandings? Lyon boldly undertakes such a theorization; she offers a refreshing insight into human rights deliberations – and, by extension, on human rights – by treating them as performative deliberations in which knowing agents engage within specific contexts to effect change. In offering such a view, Lyon challenges extant theories on deliberative democracy and politics. Her theory of deliberation places performative aspects of discourse, situated accounts of rhetoric and a discerning agency at the core of the process, joining in a wider move towards more performative forms of social science.
For Lyon, theories of deliberative democracy are idealistic and prescriptive in that they focus on deliberation as a reasoned argument designed to persuade the majority into consensus. Such theories are problematic in that reasoned argument or persuasion do not seem to empirically work in that way. More problematically, those theories value ideological dominance by stressing consensus, and as a result, silencing dissent, devaluing diversity and monopolizing political debate. Lyon sees human rights issues at the cusp of deliberations between different cultures, ideologies and practices. Deliberations across such gulfs deserve particular attention, for these create new discourses, new ways of acting and of citizenship. For example, the historical lack of voting rights for women directly restricted their say in government and more broadly their citizenship. Lyon shows how the acts that led to claiming women’s rights altered and enhanced their citizen status. At the same time, she points to the importance of attending to the conditions prior to claiming such rights, the sorts of things that enable and constitute a genuine human rights deliberation. Her discussions on rhetoric, recognition and agency attend to this concern.
Lyon conceives rhetoric as a human practice aimed at continuous deliberation, as remonstration rather than as a tool aimed at persuasion and affecting the actions of others. Such a conception shifts the focus from assuming others to have an explicit agenda or treating others as malleable objects who are to be manipulated, to treating others as interlocutors to have a continuous conversation with. This also resonates in her version of recognition, which gives priority to treating the other as an equal interlocutor sharing a similar social space, rather than as someone who is far removed from local concerns and can only be identified with. The case study on the misrepresentations of women in China in the American shows that presenting these women as helpless offers little scope for a genuine deliberation. Lyon criticizes the idea of identification for its superficial, trope-like quality, as it is indeed impossible to actually identify with some ‘other’. This has political effects, in that Lyon implicitly argues for a position where there are no givers or receivers of rights, but rather equal interlocutors in deliberation. The break with modernism in this position is directly felt in a conception of agency that is not only norm-formed, but also norm-navigating.
The core of the theory is a crystallization of these notions into three interrelated concepts, best illustrated with one of Lyon’s own examples. Libyan lawyer Eman al-Obeidi was abducted by Gaddafi’s soldiers, held in captivity, gang raped and tortured two separate times, the last after a press conference she held to report the first time. Performatives are the actual utterances made and the actions resulting from those utterances, that is, what al-Obeidi actually said in her press conference and the effect of such. Performance is al-Obeidi’s act of doing such a press conference in ways that constitute the actions of herself, audiences and the perpetrators or Gaddafi himself as resistance, showmanship or brutality. Performativity is what made this possible: how a victim of extreme violence and humiliation did come to take a stand and expose these events to an international audience. Did she reproduce discourses of a Middle East woman, a victim of a patriarchal society, a helpless subject of an autocratic ruler or a woman in need appealing for help? Lyon claims that al-Obeidi acted as an agent who could navigate a range of such performativities. Al-Obeidi’s statements to audiences worldwide come to be seen as representative statements on behalf of all Libyan citizens for a recognition of their dignity and rights. So, the question then is, how does this bear upon human rights deliberations? Lyon’s theory broadens the range of ways in which deliberations can be understood. It is not just specific forms of discourses or ideologies that speak through agents; rather, agents can shift and move in between these.
Deliberative Acts… opens a way to examine human rights deliberations in performative terms, offering a thorough critique of the imperialist and colonialist agenda that has characterized certain approaches to political action, democracy and human rights. Performative deliberation, as conceived here, seeks to redress the problematic aspects of these approaches and – for discourse analysts – provides further evidence that political behaviour is also open to a close examination of situated utterances. Nevertheless, the approach is not without its issues. From a theoretical point of view, the dependence on traditional speech act theory is problematic, in that it favours an a priori definition of acts and a rigid conception of the felicity conditions required for the accomplishment of the same. Problems with this view, however, become apparent in the book’s explicit focus on cross-cultural communication. One of Lyon’s targets is the argument that treats human rights as textual truths included in the UDHR. She argues that it is not the case, because not all conditions for the use of these rights would be felicitous, thus invalidating the universality of the declaration. However, such an argument could well be reversed, arguing that making the conditions felicitous would be a precondition for the universality and validity of human rights deliberations. Such arguments have been used to justify actions against nation or cultures judged unfavourably. A lesser problem is a tendency to latch on relatively unsurprising conclusions – for example, that women in China are misrepresented by American media outlets – rather than fully developing the argument to show that representations constitute, construct and conceal ideologies in ways to effect specific actions. This may be because the text is clearly intended for an American audience – Lyon takes knowledge of the American milieu for granted, failing, for example, to introduce the US-based media sources she analyses – and occasionally ethnocentric, containing evaluations such as equating arranged marriage with the mother’s suicide (p. 124), or assumptions such as that the ideal Chinese family is one that embraces Confucian values.
A sharper focus on the applications of the theory, a more robust approach to analysis of language use and an acknowledgement of international readership would have definitely helped Deliberative Acts… in lucidly realizing its aims. Although these issues dent its power, the text remains highly relevant to the understanding of many current events and offers useful tools to academics, social commentators and activists in combating hegemonic forces.