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At the invitation of my publisher I have been working on the production of a comprehensive commentary of the United Nations Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights. This is a humbling task. It follows the production of both an official commentary, written by those responsible for the UNGPs themselves, and more recently by a magisterial effort, written in the form of a Talmudic ‘Gemara’ (גמרא), originally a mastery and transmission of existing tradition, to the primary text of its ‘Mishnah’ (מִשְׁנָה), oral traditions reduced to text, undertaken by a collective of some of the most distinguished students of other fields of human rights, business, and its related fields of academic study ( The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: A Commentary (Barnali Choudhury (ed); Edward Elgar, 2023).
In this and subsequent posts, will provide a window on that process. The hope s that it might be of interest and more importantly that it might produce some input.
This first part introduces the basic questions: What can one add to these commentaries? And how does one attempt an all around approach to commentary sensitive to the ecologies of context in which such commentary will be received, contested, embraced, or rejected (each of which is a useful object of commentary)? To answer that, it is perhaps useful to start with first principles. These touch on the nature of commentary, its deep embedding in the cultural life of societies all over the globe, and the application of these sensibilities to the task undertaken.
As is my habit, and as a foreshadowing of the focus of the commentaries that follow, I start with a brief consideration of the the idea of a commentary. To that end a good starting point may be the textual representation of the central task itself—the commentary especially as it has come to be understood through a very long history. Three words provide insight here: comment, gloss, and commentary.
The first is the core word-concept of “comment.”[1] Since the 14th century in English, the word has acquired both a passive and active meaning. One the one hand, comment signifies an object: an explanation, interpretation, a contrivance or fabrication (that is the signification) of another object—the thing explained, object, process, condition, state of being, etc. Its foundational derivation from its PIE root—an intensified product of thinking. On the other hand, comment also signifies the act of commenting. Here its focus is on the acts of considering, thinking, discussing, and disseminating (writing in the pre-digital eras). It acquires a twofold character—the first is internal (the acts of thinking and considering) as well as of a very public and external focus (discussing and disseminating). Beside it lies another—the term gloss.[2] It’s etymology is interesting. On the one hand it references the explanation, translation, or definition of an object otherwise potentially obscure. On the other there is within it a sense of something that is, on its surface smooth and lustrous, something that can shine in the light. That underscores the word in its active sense—to gloss—to make lustrous, smooth over, or sometimes to veil or shift the meaning of its object.
The second is the object of the work to be attempted—commentary.[3] Like its own building blocks, comments, a commentary is understood in two senses. The first as the collection of an integrated or associated group of comments—the Talmudic Gemarra, but also the glosses of Roman Law produced by medieval Law Schools,[4] or more generally European scholia or glossators, or Mesopotamian commentators on key tests of their era.[5] Indeed, there is a sense that the great cultural marker of civilization is the deep interlinking between literati culture (文人文化wenren wenhua) and the commentary they produced around great cultural objects.[6] In the second, it is the descriptor of the commentary itself as object that may be worthy of comment. In contemporary English that is embedded in the sense that it is the difficult and or obscure rather than what appears to be in “plain English” that is worthy of comment or gloss. To comment is to judge, and to judge is to guide, confine, and orient approaches to the text, tradition, or object that is the focus of comment in specific ways. That is, the commentary itself shapes its object not from the inside but from the outside. That introduces the dynamic element of commentary—the dialogue between text (comment object), commentator, and what the commentator brings to the task of commentary.
It is here that commentary becomes much more sensitive, when it moves from the tasks of thinking, to that of discussing and disseminating. It at this critical nexus point between commentary, the commentator, culture, politics, ideology, and the conscious management of meaning through the instrumentalization of hermeneutics toward specific objectives. This is an ancient issue—though one that was unproblematic until this, critical, age.[7] The problem is magnified where the “ownership” of the object to be commented upon is itself a valuable prize in cultural-political battles for the control of meaning, and meaning making structures among leading social and cultural groups.
That is the case with the UNGPs. Its great importance is as the urtext of the language of business and human rights, and now of business, human rights, sustainability and climate change. The normative power of urtext ought not to be underestimated. The concept of urtext, translated from the music field, [8] centers on the privileging of unglossed text, that is of text as originally transmitted in written form. It is the transposition of a concept taken from the field of music in which the purity of original text is offered—over and over—as a base from which one can comment or gloss without the distraction or pull of other glosses.
Yet the UNGP urtext becomes a temptation too irresistible to present without a gloss—an authoritative, or a coercive, gloss. That makes it a prize for anyone (person or collective) seeking to manage not just its language, but to invest that language with a meaning that provides the basis for instrumentalizing their particular world views, principles, strategic agendas, and sensibilities. Commentary, then, sometimes finds it irresistible to stray far from the orientation of the glossator. It represents an embellishment that fundamentally guides urtext toward an altered state. That is fair. But that is politics clothed in meaning making. It comes closer in concept to what students of semiotics sometimes refer to a 21st century phenomenon of discursive fluidity—of conversion (of text and meaning) that resonates with the flow of social patterns.[9] Whatever one thinks of this natural impulse to control sources of language and perception over an aspect of human life, the impulse itself suggests both the importance of the task of commentary, and the sensitivity one ought to bring to its production.
Nonetheless , the overlayment of glossing produces either a tendency to bury text in its glosses, so that the urtext is lost or becomes irrelevant—this is the fate of documents like the U.S. Constitution, whose urtext has now been buried in the living constitution of centuries of judicial gloss. Conversely, commentary can sometimes reshape either the way that text is approached or shape the principles and perceptions through which it can be read. This is inevitable and unavoidable as a matter of the linearity of time and the mortality of those who draw from text. Commentary provides a link to perception—cognition—that has floated downstream in time from the present.
This commentary is written with these structural, discursive, ideological, and political foundations of comment well in mind. The structure will be developed along the following lines.
(1) One starts with the object itself—the UNGP. That object, in turn, can be understood in two senses, each with significant consequences for the form and character of comment. First, the UNGP can be understood as an embodiment of an idea or perspective. The UNGP as idea is detached from the specifics of its text. Rather the focus is on the UNGP as a singulatory that stands for something else. It is, in this sense, a sign that signifies a way of thinking about the relationship of economic activity to human rights in specific ways—in this sense one extracts generalized principles, ideologies, agendas, practices, and customs from the UNGP as a whole. Second, the UNGP can itself be understood as its text. In this sense higher order values might be extracted from its text, rather than, as in the case of starting with the UNGP as idea, reading text from higher order values derived from the production of the UNGP as a whole. Commentary here requires close reading of text. But that itself poses an initial problem—what is text? This is the long standing conundrum of memorialization: the relationship between text and text producers or adopters. Textualists at one end would detach text from its creators or users and start form the proposition that text alone is authoritative, detached from the context in which it was created. AT the other, text is understood merely as the recording of context, instructions for preserving and applying the intent and sensibilities of its creators or of those, later, who use it (within the scope of its authority and extent). The gulf between these three starting points for commentary then produce the sometimes large space within which there exists a range of plausible construction, readings, interpretations, or “play at the joints” for the instrument.
(2) Consideration of these manifestations of the UNGP—as object, as sign signifying meaning, and as the means for interpreting, guiding, and judging the actions of others in systems of economic activity—might benefit from a closer connection with its origins. These suggest both the unifying vision that produced the UNGP (and which may still survive within its text or in its form), as well as those points of fracture within the core ecologies of those meant to receive and apply it. The object is not to tie the meaning of the UNGP to its origins or to the outsize personalities that shaped it, but rather to be sensitive to the clues these processes might provide in shaping the contours and limits of plausibility in approaching interpretation, applications, and thus useful commentary on the object itself and within its intended context.
(3) With that in mind, commentary can then focus more precisely on the UNGP as urtext—in this case pristinely preserved in the form of the text of the 2011 UNGP as endorsed by the Human Rights Council. That serves as the hub. Commentary will radiate form that hub in waves that take one further and further from its core—but consciously so. It will start as a guide to the text in which the UNGP as understood and approached as a self-referencing system from which it is possible to deduce answers to any consideration within its ambit. This is not meant as another variation of the impulse to hermeneutics--but rather a close engagement with the signification of text in and as text as endorse and thus made authoritative. At the same time, it is meant to expose ideology supporting plausibility and this to provide an extra-textual context for textual meaning.
(4) It then shifts to interpretation—and here deviates from traditional commentary. Where in the usual course a commentary will advance a particular vision—this commentary will describe the universe of plausible interpretive ecologies that might be interpreted form out of the UNGP. More specifically, it will comment on the borderlands of the plausible. In the process it will identify the ideologies, strategies, and objectives from which different interpretive schools might be built to nudge the rationalization of the UNG or any part of it in pre-determined directions.
(5) The identification of borderlands of plausibility then introduces the societal flows in which those are recognized, and with which the UNGPs communicate. This is the commentary on the patterns and possibilities of structural coupling with meaning making communities in which the UNGP are embedded or into which it is received.
(6) Lastly, the commentary will shift the focus from UNGP to the key actors (and some marginal ones) whose instrumentalization of the UNGP also serve to define and suggest its meaning. Here one enters the pragmatics of meaning making—by states, enterprises, civil society, and academics, each of which reshapes the UNGP from itself to an instrument or pathway elsewhere.
(7) And then the commentary will return to text within these ecologies of meaning making, but from out of which text emerges to survive continue to serve as the urtext for successive waves of commentary, ideology, and instrumentalization, ready, in its original text, for commentary—not a commentary of commentaries. But again a source commentary.
(8) To this one adds a final element of gloss—the effects of the turn toward the digital, to the quantitative and analytics. The turn toward the datafication of cognition, of interpretation, and of meaning, also has a gloss of its own, and may fundamentally alter both the forms of commentary and the meaning of its text. That is likely the case in this field and to this text.
[1] Etymology Online, Comment; available [https://www.etymonline.com/word/comment]
[2] Etymology Online, gloss; available [].
[3] Etymology Online (Commentary); available [https://www.etymonline.com/word/commentary].
[4] Josiah C. Russell, “Gratian, Irnerius, and the Early Schools of Bologna,” Mississippi Quarterly 12(4) (1959), 168-188.
[5] Eckart Frahm, Babylonian and Assyrian Text Commentaries: Origins of Interpretation (Guides to the Mesopotamian Textual Record 5; Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2011).
[6] In the context of philology, see, e.g., Sheldon Pollack, “Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009) 931-961.
[7] Cf., Paolo Grossi, “Ideologia e Técnica em uma Definição Jurídica (a Definição Obertina de Feudo dos Glosadores a Cujas)
Ideology and Technique in a Legal Definition (the Obertine Definition of Feudo from the Glossators to Cujas,” Seqüência ; Estudos Jurídicos e Políticos (Marjorie Carvalho de Souza (trans.) 39 (2018): 220-256.
[8] G. Henle Verlag, “What is Urtext” (nd); available []. “The idea behind it is simple and easy to understand. The musician is offered a musical text which reflects the composer’s intentions. The text is undistorted, meaning that neither the editor nor the publishing house have undertaken changes that might misrepresent it. . . This might appear self-evident. However, well into the twentieth century the great performers of the day were absolutely convinced that musical texts – especially those of works from the eighteenth century – were incomplete or had suffered from faulty transmission, in particular concerning “how” they were to be performed.”
[9] Umberto Eco, Chronicles of a Liquid Society (Richard Dixon (trans); NY: Houghton Mifflin 2017); Jan M. Broekman, Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversion (Springer, 2023).
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