From: ".: s0metim3s :." <s0metim3s-AT-optusnet.com.au>
Subject: RE: AUT: More on Fascism
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2004 15:35:31 +1000


Hey Nate,

: rights - certainly rights are only
: interesting from a strategic
: perspective, but can you say briefly why you
: think that rights are exhausted for
: strategic purposes?

Crudely, I think codified rights are a means to
bring something into the field of politics and law
which threatens to overtake them; a means of
managing a particular strategic encounters.  The
granting of rights by the state is a recognition
of force, a use of force. So, yes, I'd agree with
you that it's always foremost a strategic
question.

The area I'm most interested in is border
policing.  It's the area in which rights claims
are particularly ubiquitous, the area in which
rights claims are posited as 'human rights' and,
here's the rub, the area in which the whole notion
and ground of 'human rights' comes completely
undone.  The problem was always there: human
rights were always the rights of citizens because
the sphere of determination of rights was/is the
nation-state.  The historical exhaustion of this
as a discourse, let alone a strategy, arises
because nation-states are, since WWII, the global
form of political organisation, and what comes
into play isn't human rights but the ability of
nation-states to distinguish between citizens and
non-citizens, the granting *and denial* of rights.

There's a whole other parallel discussion about
the relationship between citizenship and
commodification, as well as a discussion about the
ways in which the persistence of human rights
claims invokes a global state; and the relation
between the two; but maybe I can gesture at that
in this way:

It's funny that you should mention the stuff about
codifying working time.  I'm in the middle of
writing something about Habeas Corpus (actually,
what will be a second article on that topic); and
I was keen to quote this: "In the place of the
pompus catalogue of the 'inalienable rights of
man' there steps the modest Magna Carta of the
legally limited working day, which at least makes
clear 'when the time which the worker sells is
ended, and when his own begins' (Marx 1867: 416
Capital, ch 10)."

I think there's an interesting connection to be
made between the suspension of Habeas Corpus (in
the camps on Nauru and Guantanamo Bay) and the
traversals of worktime (and dis-embodiments) that
occur in so-called immaterial work.

Angela
_______________

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