Rubenstein indicates, decision is fractured by opposing demands: to know everything of a situation and to
act regardless. As Rubenstein glosses in the penultimate sections of the book: ‘every decision must begin
by accumulating as much knowledge as possible’,
but ‘justice … must not wait’. If this describes the
heteronomy of archive and action, reason and decision, history and the present, it also pushes towards
the instant of decision as madness. Rubenstein’s
separation from the argument of Derrida’s The Gift
of Death occurs precisely over this point: ‘Derrida
flattens Kierkegaard’s Abraham into a subject in this
text by resolving his undecidability, installing him and
God as discrete and sovereign subjects, and converting faith in the absurd into “faith” in the economy
of heaven.’ However, this is, it seems to me, not, as
Rubenstein argues, a denial of thaumazein, but a
refusal of the equation of the incalculable with the
transcendental, and an opening for a reorientation of
wonder’s locations in the ‘mediate’: something like
‘the archive’, say, cannot be, for Derrida, a site of pure
ratiocination – it too is differential, and thus also of
the incalculable.
Rubenstein’s traditionally philosophical attachment
to thought as against mnemotechnics also characterizes, as indicated, both McCance’s and Shakespeare’s
books. In this sense, these texts tend to reinscribe
the privileges of philosophical idealism, which are,
for Derrida, attached historically to phonocentrism.
Derrida’s practice, however, from the ‘early’ to the
‘late’ work, is always characterized not only by a
deconstruction of thought per se, but by an attention to various ways in which ‘materiality’ might be
implicated in such a deconstruction. In contradistinction to that association of deconstruction with endless
deferral, it might be in that very institutional form
associated with such delay – the archive, and its
engagement, broadly thought – that its counter might
be sought. If this is, for the Derrida of Archive Fever
and of Echographies, for example, to plunge into the
texts denied by the Book, the archive is not only of
the past, but of the current – and, in its différance,
concerns not just the archiving of the event, or the
event of this archiving, but potentiates the event of
the future: the possibility of thought, difference and
decision. For, if différance differs and defers, it must
differ from deferral. The failure to think this aspect of
différance, in this context, is perhaps one of the great
failures not only of deconstruction’s detractors but of
many of its adherents to date. It is thus still one of its
great possible futures.
Sas Mays
Speak to me
Nick Couldry, Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics
after Neoliberalism, Sage, London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi, 2010. 184 pp., £60.00 hb., £19.99 pb.,
978 1 84860 661 6 hb., 978 1 84860 662 3 pb.
The issue of voice – who is allowed to speak and
what weight their account carries – is clearly crucial
to politics, and has been brought into sharp focus once
more by the student militancy at the end of 2010. I
write this review in the wake of a furious online debate
triggered by the Labour Party’s promise to ‘give a
voice’ to student protestors.
Nick Couldry’s central claim in Why Voice Matters
is that neoliberalism can be defined by its suppression
of voice, which he characterizes as a ‘reflexive form
of agency’. The book draws upon a dizzying range of
references, but Couldry’s theory of voice is built from
four main sources: Judith Butler, whose Giving An
Account of Oneself is echoed in Couldry’s definition
of voice as ‘the process of giving an account of one’s
life and its conditions’; Paul Ricoeur’s theories of narrative; the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen’s
account of freedom; and political theorist Axel Honneth’s neo-Hegelian concept of recognition. Couldry
maintains that, under neoliberalism, the market has
trumped all other narratives. Indeed, it has replaced
narrative itself with what is presented as an inexorable
and unanswerable ‘logic’: in the UK and the USA neoliberalism has been ‘embedded as the “new politics”,
the “way things are”, “the modern”’. In these conditions, the idea of ‘neoliberal democracy’ can only be
oxymoronic, since it aims at the foreclosing of politics
as such. Neoliberal ideologue Richard Posner makes
this explicit, disdaining what he calls ‘jawing in the
agora’, and celebrating political ‘apathy’ because it
signals a broad acceptance of the ‘system that we have’.
This kind of bullish confidence might have taken a
serious knock with the financial crises and bail-outs
of 2008, Couldry argues, but neoliberalism is very far
from disappearing. Governments, workplaces and the
media are still controlled by neoliberal thinking, and
as such the philosophical struggle against neoliberal
ideology remains as urgent as ever.
Couldry gives a succinct and persuasive history of
neoliberalism. The worry, though, is that he ends up
opposing neoliberalism with a new form of liberalism:
one in which, instead of being suppressed, ‘voices’
are allowed to speak. Yet this approach tends to
underemphasise the ways in which ideology and the
class structure not only stop people from speaking but
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deny them the conditions for developing an ‘account
of themselves’ in the first place. The very manner
in which neoliberalism has naturalized its own programme means that it disappears as an object of experience and becomes the frame within which experience
takes place. Couldry refers to the work of Richard
Sennett, but it is not clear that the political value of
a book like The Corrosion of Character consists in
the way that it ‘gives a voice’ to those whom Sennett
interviews. Instead, the narratives that Sennett records
point to structural conditions of which they might only
be vaguely aware.
Couldry goes out of his way to say that ‘voice
requires a material form which may be individual, collective or distributed’ (stress in the original), arguing
that ‘“voice” as a value does not involve individualism’.
Despite this – and perhaps inevitably given the way
that Couldry constructs ‘voice’ as a concept – the book
is unable to distance itself decisively from such individualism. Couldry wants to disassociate himself from
the post-structuralist attack on interiority and agency,
but it could be argued that, if anything, the poststructuralist assault on interiority didn’t go far enough
in the context of a neoliberalism that, as Couldry
himself demonstrates, has colonized the ‘private’ realm
of emotions. Throughout the book, Couldry is forced
to keep distinguishing his version of ‘voice’ from
the voices that neoliberal culture continually solicits.
After all, isn’t neoliberal corporate culture endlessly
inviting us to participate, to ‘join the debate’, to make
ourselves heard?
The most convincing and compelling section of
Why Voice Matters – the chapter on media and reality
television – reflects upon neoliberal culture’s insistence
on participation. Here, Couldry traces the ‘overlaps
between performance norms of contemporary work
cultures and those of reality TV’. Drawing upon the
research of the journalist Madeleine Bunting, Couldry
shows how work increasingly involves the performance
of a certain kind of emotion. Ann-Marie Stagg, chair
of the UK Call Centre Managers Association, told
Bunting that ‘service sector employers are increasingly demanding that their employees deep act, work
on and change their feelings to match the display
required by the labour process.’ Or, as the head of
Human Resources at supermarket chain Asda more
demotically put it,
We do have the sense that people in the Asda family
live the values – it’s gregarious, off the wall, a bit
wacky, flexible, family-minded, genuinely interested in people, respect for the individual, informal.
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That’s what makes the business go – we’ve gone into
personality, a family and a community feel.
Couldry draws parallels between these kind of demands
and those imposed on participants in the reality-TV
‘gamedoc’ subgenre that includes shows such as Big
Brother. Like workers in neoliberalized institutions,
gamedoc contestants are subject to an absolute external
authority; they are forced into paradoxical forms of
performance which demand that they ‘reveal their
real selves’; they must always be ‘positive’; and they
are simultaneously required both to display ‘team
conformity’ and to compete against one another.
For all the merits of this kind of analysis, Couldry
didn’t persuade me that his concept of ‘voice’ was
crucial to the struggle against neoliberalism. That
is partly because there is always a slightly strained
quality to his account of voice itself. The synthesis of
Sen, Honneth, Butler and Ricœur never quite achieves
a crisp conceptual consistency. Another major problem
is that Couldry uses the word ‘voice’ in an essentially
metaphorical way. Despite the book’s title being a play
on Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter, Couldry pays
little attention to the materiality of voice: to how voices
actually sound. In the UK, the charismatic power of
both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair – the ways
in which they persuaded and irritated people – was
bound up with accent and voice. Couldry’s approach,
however, continually collapses voice into narrative. In
line with those orthodoxies in contemporary theory
which Alain Badiou has labelled ‘democratic materialism’, Couldry nevertheless insists on the importance of
‘embodiment’, with Descartes positioned in his familiar role as the master villain of Western philosophy.
But some theorists of the voice, such as Mladen Dolar
and Michel Chion, have argued that reflecting on the
voice actually entails a form of dualism. (Dolar argues
that, instead of being reducible to the body, the voice
actually functions much like the pineal gland did for
Descartes, as the means by which mind and body are
related to one another.)
Couldry has some worthwhile suggestions about
what a post-neoliberal politics might look like and
how we might get there. He puts the emphasis on
institutional change, but does not underestimate how
difficult and prolonged the struggle to wrest media
and political institutions from neoliberal control would
have to be. As he puts it, ‘Such institutional structures
cannot … be changed overnight by will or imagination.
But this should not discourage us from considering
the “small acts” and new “habits” from which, even
within those structures, a different form of political
life can be built.’
Mark Fisher
No such thing
Randall Williams, The Divided World: Human Rights
and Its Violence, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2010. 192 pp., £45.00 hb., £15.00 pb., 978 0
81666 541 9 hb., 978 0 81666 542 6 pb.
It is hard to imagine how even the most ardent supporter of a human rights framework could fail to be
challenged by Randall Williams’s erudite portrayal of
the epistemic violence of liberal international human
rights discourse. The Divided World shows how human
rights discourse is embedded in neocolonial relations
that not only privilege interpretations of justice and
injustice that derive from the global North, but also
reinforce racial and class-based inequalities that underwrite the expansion of global capital. In doing so, the
book fluidly connects a range of different examples
from NGO practice to film and literature in order to
capture the varied techniques of liberal ideological
production, and while Williams mounts what is in
many ways a radical critique, he does so with a clarity
that will engage readers both sympathetic and not.
Williams begins by asking whether human rights
can provide the basis for a progressive politics that can
weigh in against the vagaries of global capitalism. His
answer is a resounding ‘no’, arguing by contrast that
the postwar institutions of international law, and the
human rights framework they promulgate, are ‘part
and parcel of an imperialist directed reorganization of
relations within and between contemporary state and
social formations: the colonial, the neocolonial, and
the neoimperial’. The Divided World thus claims that
we need to be far more critical of the ways in which
human rights frameworks generate and perpetuate
injustice, and that we need new conceptual tools to
map violence on a global scale and evolve strategies to
resist it. The situation calls for what he terms a ‘nonjuridical reckoning’ – that is, extra-legal strategies for
acknowledging, naming and counteracting the complicity of international law and human rights discourse in
grave injustices at the local and global levels.
Williams presents his most compelling case study
in the first chapter, which recounts Nelson Mandela’s
disqualification from Amnesty International’s list of
prisoners of conscience. Mandela’s disqualification was
based on his refusal to disavow the use of violence as
a legitimate tool against the South African apartheid
regime. Amnesty International was determined to
maintain its own credibility by only backing prisoners
of conscience who were unambiguously non-violent.
Williams mounts a convincing argument that the international NGO’s apparent political neutrality was hence
based on the necessity of historical decontextualization, and, more specifically, a decontextualization that
obscured the specific experience of colonial oppression, whereby no platforms for non-violent negotiation
existed. The effect was to depict Mandela (and, by
extension, anti-colonial struggles more broadly) as
open to violence in general, rather than to accept
Mandela’s more nuanced explication of the legitimacy
of violence as a last resort. Williams effectively depicts
the discrepancy between international normative orders
that sanction state violence but disallow the taking
up of arms in popular uprisings, regardless of how
just the cause might be. He shows, moreover, how
Amnesty’s actions instituted the ‘prisoner of conscience’ as a subject category built on a normative
order that is deeply tied to the racist and ongoing
legacy of colonialism.
Other chapters carry his argument into a range of
contexts, from the advocacy of a Northern-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission
(Chapter 2) to narratives built around liberal internationalism and colonial subjects in the films Hotel
Rwanda and Caché (Chapter 3), to the extra-legal
reckonings of injustice as depicted in the chronicle of
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