| Pix credit here ("Harley Quinn tells the story of how psychiatrist-turned-villain
Harleen Quinzel breaks up with her long-time romantic interest, the
Joker, and sets out to find her place among Gotham City’s villains and
heroes. In the first season, we followed Harley as she formed her own
crew of villains and tried to join the Legion of Doom.") |
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| pix Credit here--Obatala Ceremony |
For the last several years, and with no particular purpose other than a desire to meander through reflection, I have taken the period between Christmas and New Years Eve to produce a s summary of the slice of the year to which I paid attention through epigrams and aphorisms. It follows an end of year tradition I started in 2016 (for those see here), 2017 (for these see here), 2018 (for those see here), 2019 (for those see here); 2020 (for those see here); 2022 (for those see here).
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| Pix Credit here |
And 2022 did not disappoint. It
was a year when the firmer the pull toward rationality, toward
authoritative structures, toward management and control the more exposed
its irrationality and failures. Obatala speaks of the simultaneous
apotheosis and rotting of the ideologies around which rational science
is constructed, constrained, instrumentalist, and corrupted. Indeed if
2021 was the year in which what appeared to be new forms of collective
management were undertaken (and the rage it was meant to contain), 2022
exposed its corruption--manipulation of social media in the US in the
service of elections, abuse of discretion of the sort that exploded even
the fig leaf of rule based containment; the corruption of religion by
its ministers against its own devout communities. 2022 was the year that
just as everything looked like it was going right, it went wrong. And
it was a year of violence; of seeking to recreate a 19th century
imperial state even as post global empires are forming. It was the year
of doing and undoing.
And it is in that spirit, the spirit of 2022, that the epigrams and aphorisms that follow are offered. Each aphorism links to a essay written during the year. The theme of this fifth set focuses on good intentions gone bad. This is irresponsibility of the responsible entity. These are individuals and states that point in multiple directions simultaneously. At some point they will snap or be snapped. . . or become irrelevant except to the tabloid press. More likely they will remain instruments of others--internally or externally. Links to the 2022 Year End Ruminations here:
Part 2, War, huh, yeah; what is it Good For?
Part 3: Words, huh, yeah; what are they good for?
Part 4:"de Sade's Theater as Performed by the Inmates of the Global Asylum"
Part 5: Good intentions gone bad; bad intentions made farce
1. It is necessary to wrap one tightly in the shrouds of principle to undertake the tasks of pragmatism.
Brief Thoughts on "Sustainable Global Supply Chains: G7 Leadership on UNGP Implementation Report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights for the 2022 German Presidency of the G7"."Sustainable Global Supply Chains is especially important for what it tells us about the governmentalization of markets, and the transformation of economic actors into a privatized administrative apparatus of public policy grounded in the sensibilities of compliance and accountability directed toward a values based productivity, the articulation and assessment of which will become a matter of policy set by superior vanguards in liberal democratic and Marxist-Leninist states rather than by the (uninformed but to be reformed) masses expressed in the form of consumption and production based decisions. Not that this is necessarily bad or good--but either way it appears to be coming and in the process will transform the concept and operation of markets. In this case that is undertaken in the service of important substantive objectives--human rights and sustainability. Yet its principal expression--as due diligence based systematization of human activity undertaken in collective form--can be as easily applied to any aspect of human activity. Most interesting of all is the way that these efforts are built on a foundation of the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights, which in the process are transformed a driver to a means of legitimating policy., a useful vessel into which to pour objectives for the consumption of others. "
2. Whatever isn't broken can be fixed; whatever can't be fixed can be reconcieved.
Marxist Dialectics and the Synthesis of a Sustainable Development Model 'For' and 'From' China. "Chinese Marxist dialectics has sought to produce a union of development and of sustainability as the synthesis of the oppositions of (1) development and modernization (the thesis of the Reform and Opening Up Era) on the one hand, and (2) environmental sensitivity and sustainability (the antithesis at the core of the current principal contradiction of the New Era. . . To that end, Mr. Xi proposes now a five prong approach that is to serve as the framework for the conceptualization of the synthesis and the guide to the construction and implementation of specific policies at the national, provincial, local. . . and international levels). Whether it works or not remains to be seen--either as a conceptual model or in practice; yet this is the very challenge facing the equally vigorous efforts being undertaken within liberal democratic collectives which also remain to be fully elaborated and tested "
3. It is better to mediate for Hell than to appear dependent on Heaven
"« une puissance médiatrice » The Semiotics of Humiliating Russia." "Wars need their distractions. Recently French President Macron provided a nice, if brief, respite from the drudgery of a war now in a phase of consuming substantial numbers of humans on an alter to ther vanity of a national leader. Reuters (among others) reported: ""We must not humiliate Russia so that the day when the fighting stops we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means," Macron said in an interview with regional newspapers published on Saturday. "I am convinced that it is France's role to be a mediating power." . . . From a 19th century perspective, there is certainly some sense in seeking to feed a great territorial power: through partitioning 2nd order states and producing formally constituted neutral zones. Likewise the rules of inter-national politesse require that traditional ethno-territorial empires be treated respectfully, even when their actions are vile by contemporary standards. Humiliating empires always appeared to go bad, right through the humiliation of the 2nd Reich in 1918. . . . But it is not the 19th century; and the Ukrainians are not anyone but themselves. They are much less likely to humiliate themselves to make the current leadership structure of the Russian Federation feel better about the shape of the Russian adventure in Ukrainian territory. And despite the sensibilities of the past--this war is not a war game; it is not played out on tan environmental simulator (holodeck) of some future space craft. Mr. Macron, then, deployed 19th century discursive tools powerfully. But those who might have been affected in an acceptable way are long dead. Today, Mr. Macron might have considered instead worrying about the consequences of the humiliation of Ukraine for the future of Franco-Ukrainian relations within the EU (eventually) or in NATO (maybe), or even the road to peace negotiations with Russia."
4. The human person is a platform signified by its own production and more tragically by the way it is consumed by others.
Former Pope Benedict, hero to Catholic conservatives, dies. "For nearly 25 years, as Cardinal Ratzinger, Benedict was the powerful head of the Vatican's doctrinal office, then known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) and considered one of the Church's greatest theologians. In that role, he crushed dissent by Liberation Theologians, saying they were mixing Marxist thought and Christianity. . . Child abuse scandals hounded most of his papacy but he is credited with jump-starting the process to discipline or defrock predator priests after a more lax attitude under his predecessor. But Benedict himself acknowledged that he was a weak administrator, saying he showed a "lack of resolve in governing and decision taking" during his eight-year papacy which was marked by missteps, particularly in relations with Islam and Judaism. . . He announced he was resigning in Latin at a routine meeting of cardinals. . . Although he said he would remain "hidden from the world" in his retirement, Benedict sometimes caused controversy and spread confusion through his writings and interviews. Although he rarely appeared in public, Catholic conservatives looked to the former pope as their standard bearer and some ultra-traditionalists even refused to acknowledge Francis as a legitimate pontiff. . . Despite the difficulties that emerged from having two men wearing white in the Vatican, Francis developed a warm relationship with Benedict, and said it was like having a grandfather living in the house." Also Self-Presentation of His Eminence Card. Joseph Ratzinger as member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
5. To speak to inflection points is to signify a particular object as a gateway--and to resignify the context in which the gateway appears.
Part 1Reflections on Völkerrechtsblog Online Symposium: "Framing Business & Human Rights?": Introducing the Symposium. "The introduction starts off with a premise, the the young field of business and human rights is at an inflection point. That premise is itself worth interrogation for for its underlying premises and the direction to which one need not be necessarily pointed except as a matter of ideology, and politics. One starts with the imagery of inflection points--commonly defined, when it is not used discursively, as "points where the graph of a function changes concavity (from ∪\cup∪\cup to ∩\cap∩\cap or vice versa)." The intent is clear enough--a trajectory going in one direction is now bent to another. That bending is conscious; it is deliberate; it is not a natural occurrence. It is, in effect, the efforts of a "leading forces" vanguard to wrest from "natural" processes the control of the direction of collective consensus and to shift it (for all the best reasons of course) from one direction to another. We start, then, from a Leninist origin point--that leading social forces can or must tale control of the trajectories of the movement of historical processes and help guide them from one historical era to another with the purpose of ultimately realizing a very specific objective."
6. States will do virtually anything, and employ anyone, in the great task of acquiring power and shrugging off duty.
Part 2 Reflections on Völkerrechtsblog Online Symposium: "Framing Business & Human Rights?": Giulia Botta, 'Unpacking the Potentials of a Framework Agreement on Business and Human Rights' "Nonetheless, that rationalization--like that of the vanguard pushing a substantive, classical, and old fashioned normative treaty--is less helpful in understanding why the Treaty project starts with the 2nd Pillar corporate responsibility to respect human rights, rather than with the more classically legalized structures of the state duty to protect human rights. The state duty is itself the essence of the project of legalization, at the national and international level. The state duty ought to serve as the ultimate source and reflection of conventionally legitimate power expressed through law as well as the exemplar of rule of law at the domestic and international level. That, at any rate is suggested by the UNGP themselves. And yet legal rationalization, much less coherent legalization, around the state duty is nowhere to be found in the terrains of treaty ambitions. Nor might it be found elsewhere, as states appear eager to distract from the failures of coordinated legalization of their own 1st Pillar duties, for example through a treaty mechanism. Instead stakeholders are meant to be satisfied with the wholly unsatisfying process of "National Action Plans" while legalization (all for the excellent reasons set out in the essay) are focused not on the state but beyond it. It is in this sense that the essay makes a powerful case for the legal hardening process in business and human rights. Yet, though the rational for hardening might be plausibly applied to the 2nd Pillar corporate responsibility; the essay makes a more compelling case for a treaty process that hardens the 1st Pillar state duty to protect human rights."
7. One likes to speak to victims of rights abuse; but rarely about hpw these are victimized twice, once by the deprivation and the other by the constitution of rights.
Part 3 Reflections on Völkerrechtsblog Online Symposium: "Framing Business & Human Rights?": Jonathan Klaaren, 'The Short Arm of the Law and the Long Arm of Economics'. "The essay is profoundly interesting, especially for its refocusing of the narratives of business and human rights from that of those who weave it to those who must wear what is woven. The African lens moves from the centrality of the individual in the universe of human rights, to the centering of development as the gateway to the realization and framing of such rights (in this case with an eye toward African competition regulation). That itself is an important task--and one that aligns not just with the narratives of policy priorities from developing and mostly former colonial spaces, but it also aligns with a variant of Marxist Leninist approaches to the structuring of human rights discourse. It is a reminder as well that the African effort centers human and peoples' rights--not merely those of individuals (whether or not guided or managed by vanguard elites), but that also recognizes "that the reality and respect of peoples' rights should necessarily guarantee human rights." (African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, Preamble). This is a foundational principle that is sometimes lost on states and non governmental organizations more comfortable in Berlin, Geneva, New York, or Brasilia, than in Lagos or Kampala."
8. One ought to be able to measure the radical for the similarities of its amplitude to the ossified radicalism it seeks to displace.
Part 4 Reflections on Völkerrechtsblog Online Symposium: "Framing Business & Human Rights?": Lucas Roorda, "Caught between Principles and Perfectionism: Private International Law in the Proposed Binding Instrument on Business and Human Rights" . "And yet, the failures the essay thoughtfully describes point to a larger issue--and a fatal one for the current shape of the normative treaty project--the way it attempts transformation through international law, but then fails in the effort. Put simply--in both its normative and remedial objectives, the treaty projects effectively transforms fundamental legal principles with respect to its subject, but also challenges more generally widely held national (and transnational) jurisprudential principles that would undermine or transform some of the basic fabric of contemporary jurisprudence. It does so without any apparent effort either to recognize the power of its spillover effects, or to more effectively align its jurisprudential objectives within a consequentially transformed legal and constitutional framework. More interesting still are the consequences for a number of international instruments that touch on core matters of trans-national process, which the treaty would challenge, undo, or reject."
9. The great semiotic joke on law--try as one might, one just cannot legislate a moment in time.
Part 5 Reflections on Völkerrechtsblog Online Symposium: "Framing Business & Human Rights?": Claire Methven O'Brien, 'Bounded Rationality, Metonymy, Humility:Further Arguments for a Framework-Style Business and Human Rights Treaty' "The core insight of the essay is as powerful, as it is tragic, for that enormous expenditure of time and good will driven by the vanguard's legions of good faith cadres all seeking a mandatory expression of duty, respect, and remedy for human rights wrongs in economic activity within an international instrument. The insight--that one cannot legalize a moment in time--has significant ramifications for the scope and rationalizing foundation of the current treaty project. More importantly, it suggests the value of a flexible framework instrument for the project of embedding human rights into the ordinary process of economic production. . . This last point bears emphasis: the Third OEIWG Draft has and will fail, even if it stubbornly pursued to finalization, because its minders never appeared to be open to the lessons of supra-national treaty-based regulation in general--and more specifically to the experiences of the European Union in that regard. Ideologies of regulatory solidarity matter in the construction of technically complex webs of regulation that are meant to have cultural, societal, economic, political, and legal effect. This essay is a reminder of the consequences of that failure, and a quite conscious call to a return to an EU style approach to regulatory convergence in legal form.
10. It is sometimes said that two objects cannot occupy the same space; that s true except where the object is meaning and the space is signification--one moves here from significs through politics to power.
Part 6 Reflections on Völkerrechtsblog Online Symposium: "Framing Business & Human Rights?": Tara Van Ho, "Oops! They Did It Again: The USA’s Counter-Diplomacy in Promoting the Framework Convention". "The core objective is sound, and with respect to which there is substantial consensus--the objective of ensuring that states advance human rights across the range of their authority and actions. The specific application in this instance is with respect to mandatory supra national measures respecting that objective in the context of economic activity. That application and the core objectives of the BHR Treaty project itself as considered in the essay, might be best unpacked in eight parts. FIRST, it rejects the contemporary system of international law, and all national law, to the extent that it may, in the language of the essay, "effectively insulate many corporate actors from human rights oversight or accountability. . . The SECOND is to reject the contemporary principles of mass economic organization in favor of a legalization of contemporary understandings of the economic constitution of production. That is also fair. And it may be necessary. But it is hardly to be undertaken indirectly through the mechanism of embedding human rights in economic transactions. . . The THIRD touches on the issue of agency. On the one hand the BHR Treaty strips individuals of agency--and perhaps of humanity. They are reduced to an essentialized status, the protection of which is delegated to superior forces--the state, well meaning non governmental collectives, and the like. I have been critical of this choice (one embraced both by traditionalist and progressive elites) since the start of this process. . . The FOURTH touches on the applied objectives of the BHR Treaty grounded in its transformative principle. . . The principal object, again, is a frontal assault on private profit driven economic activity. The indirect challenge is to globalization grounded in or driven by markets--effectively an effort to undo the contemporary global order and to substitute for it, through the lens of human rights, an ordering that might be meant to capture the spirit of the 1970s but now oriented through human rights rather than development. . . The FIFTH touches on the objectives of the BHR Treaty. There are at least two significant objectives that one might distill from this excellent essay. The first of these touches on the core critical objective of producing a perfect or perfectible TEXT. The TEXT itself is the object--the way the text of any HOLY WRIT is an object in itself. . . The second of these is a longer term project of socio-political transformation under the banner of the BHR Treaty draft TEXT.. . "
11. What is lost in implementing ideas, policies, rules and the like? One the one side there is the loss of the purity of the ideal, and on the other the realization that the ideal had little to do with its object.
Part 7 Reflections on Völkerrechtsblog Online Symposium: "Framing Business & Human Rights?": Nils-Hendrik Grohmann, 'How to Avoid Politicised Monitoring?: Treaty-Design Suggestions for a Business and Human Rights Framework Convention'. The notion of politicized monitoring is itself worthy of some substantial consideration. There are three reasons that come to mind, though there are likely many more. These touch on the nature of democracy and democratic theory within both liberal democratic and Marxist Leninist system. They also touch on the constitutional character of the principles of compliance, assessment, accountability, and correction as a methodology for the realization of the core role of the state to prevent, mitigate, and remedy (either directly or through its subsidiary organs, for example NGOs, enterprises, churches, and other collective organs) wrongs with respect to which states may or must have a duty. he FIRST touches on the semiotics (the fundamental understanding of the narrowing space of politics within liberal democratic orders. This suggests at first glance a contradiction between the objective to depoliticize the BHR Treaty monitoring process, on the one hand, and the essence of the state as the highest and most legitimate form of politics on the other. . . THE SECOND touches on the transformation of the semiotics of government from one that was centered on the state as the space for the articulation and practice of the popular will to that of the state as a great router for systems of compliance, assessment, accountability, and correction. . . THE THIRD touches on the application of the core principle of prevent, mitigate, and remedy as a principle beyond politics. Though states might have once thought that the semiotics (the collective meaning) of these terms and that principle might have been understood by reference to local context.
12. The state must be protected against itself; but then so must the people and its institutions; in that little morsel one finds the power to shape the world and all in it.
Part 8 Reflections on Völkerrechtsblog Online Symposium: "Framing Business & Human Rights?": Flávia do Amaral Vieira, 'Resisting Corporate Capture'.THE FIRST touches on the rationalizing premise of the "world under corporate governance." The premise is well known and understood for its evocative symbolism, and from that, its ideologically driven meaning. It suggests first that an object (corporations) and their operations (governance) are out of place. That in turn, suggests that the signification of both governance and corporation has become something other than it ought to be. Where the signification of these objects produces meaning--a "world under corporate governance"--then its meaning must be challenged by the rationalizing premises of another set of meanings. In this case, of course, that is provided by and the phrase serves as a marker of allegiance, to the Husserl style life world of the state system in which corporations ought to know their place--and that place is to be governed rather than to govern. . . THE FIFTH, the monarchs (states) must be protected against themselves, especially where the dissipation captures their apparatus. The essay notes that civil society plays a key role in protecting the state against its own weaknesses, the essence of which is measured against the extent of the capture of the monarchy by its degenerate noble houses (human rights avoiding enterprises in exploitative global production). The corruption required a rectification impossible under the UN Guiding Principles--stronger measures were required--and thus the BHR Treaty process as a roadmap for a return to an idealized structural state that could give effect to an idealized vision of the proper ordering of the global societal house now in disarray.
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