Democracy is not an ethnocentric universal, it's an arithmetic one - one person, one vote - and before you have democracy you have to have the rule of law. There was no law that we recognized as valid in Iraq, first and foremost because our democratically elected leaders made that US policy since the Clinton administration, second, because there weren't any democratic structures in Iraq giving the laws there legitimacy. Saddam Hussein was entirely reasonable, even unexceptionally so - just a run-of-the-mill gangster turned dictator. So no Arabs existed outside the realm of reason. Again, that is just nonsensical right-wing rhetoric.
America did not "abrogate the democratic principles of political sovereignty and free speech". We went to war. This is perfectly legal under our constitution and we did it according to process of law with any number of votes and all powers of the legislature intact. No suppression of free speech was necessary to get the authority to go to war and no significant source of free speech was closed off by any means of government action. Intimidating rhetoric is not unconstitutional. I certainly don't defend it, but let's get grounded here.
Finally, the very idea that some "universal" justifies this action or that is nothing short of neo-religion and is not the product of serious legal thinking. Constitutions and laws are not made of universals. They are agreements built upon agreements built upon agreements and they are knowable and analyzable in detail if one is not, as Butler seems to be, too lazy to be bothered with it.
Of course any "universal" is "a site of permanent political contest". That is the fundamental idea of the Anglo-American legal system. "Permanent political contest" is the Enlightenment principle the American system operates on. All Butler is doing is removing us from the real terms of the political contest with this horseshit.
Most governments lack the huge set of agreements (on terms, standards, definitions, principles of procedure) that the American and British systems are based on. Certainly there are no Arab governments that have such a rich, modern legal history, hence the many references back to Sharia law. It's reasonable to assume that they, and all nations, will build up a set of laws that accomplishes what our system does and it is also nearly certain that those laws will refer to ours. There is no particular need to re-invent Common Law because it's "Western". It reflects the work of generations of reasonable people trying to find reasonable bases for resolving disputes and it works. It's an open, changeable, adaptable system. It's not a "hegemony". It's a bunch of books.
Are Roberts' Rules of Order a "hegemony" An "absolute"? No, of course not. They are a reasonable way to conduct a meeting or deliberation.
peace
boddi
On 12/13/05, Rotating Bitch <info at pulpculture.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> <begin quote>
>
> How is it that we might ground a theory or politics in a speech situation
> or subject position which is "universal," when the very category of the
> universal has only begun to be exposed for its own highly ethnocentric
> biases? How many "universalities" are there and to what extent is cultural
> conflict understandable as the clashing of a set of presumed and
> intransigent "universalities," a conflict which cannot be negotiated
> through recourse to a culturally imperialist notion of the "universal" or,
> rather, which will only be solved through such recourse at the cost of
> violence? We have, I think, witnessed the conceptual and material violence
> of this practice in the United States's war against Iraq, in which the Arab
> "other" is understood to be radically "outside" the universal structures of
> reason and democracy and,
> hence, calls to be brought forcibly within. Significantly, the US had to
> abrogate the democratic principles of political sovereignty and free
> speech, among others, to effect this forcible return of Iraq to the
> "democratic" fold, and this violent move reveals, among other things, that
> such notions of universality are installed through the abrogation of the
> very universal principles to be implemented. Within the political context
> of contemporary postcoloniality more generally, it is perhaps especially
> urgent to underscore the very category of the "universal" as a site of
> insistent contest and resignification Given the contested character of the
> term, to assume from the start a procedural or substantive notion of the
> universal is of necessity to impose a culturally hegemonic notion on the
> social field. To herald that notion then as the philosophical instrument
> that will negotiate between conflicts of power is precisely to safeguard
> ind reproduce a position of hegemonic power by
> installing it in the metapolitical site of ultimate normativity.
>
> It may at first seem that I am simply calling for a more concrete and
> internally diverse "universality," a more synthetic and inclusive notion of
> the universal, and in that way committed to the very foundational notion
> that I seek to undermine. But my task is, I think, significantly different
> from that which would articulate a comprehensive universality. In the first
> place, such a totalizing notion could only be achieved at the cost of
> producing new
> and further exclusions. The term "universality" would have to be left
> permanently open, permanently contested, permanently contingent, in order
> not to foreclose in advance future claims for inclusion. Indeed, from my
> position and from any historically constrained perspective, any totalizing
> concept of the universal will shut down rather than authorize the
> unanticipated and unanticipatable claims that will be made under the sign
> of "the universal." In this sense, I am not doing away with the category,
> but trying to relieve the category of its foundationalist weight in order
> to render it as a site of permanent political contest.
>
> </quote>
>
> http://blog.pulpculture.org/contingent-foundations/
>
> Of course, by the horrid, horrid Butler who writes incomprehensibly.
>
> @@
>
> "You know how it is, come for the animal porn,
> stay for the cultural analysis." -- Michael Berube
>
> Bitch | Lab
> http://blog.pulpculture.org
>
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>