Ellen Feiss is an MA candidate at

Goldsmiths College, University of

London and was a 2011-2012 research
assistant at the Henry Moore Institute,
Leeds. Her critical writing has been
published in Variant and on Afterall
Online. She is a 2012 grant recipient for
the Steirischer Herbst festival in Graz
Austria.

[1] Thompson, Nato. Living as Form:

Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011.
New York, NY: Creative Time, 2012. 16.

[2] Bruguera, Tania. "Partido Del Pueblo

Migrante / Immigrant Movement
International."Partido Del Pueblo Migrante
/ Immigrant Movement International. Web.
27 July 2012. <http://immigrant-
Immigrant Movement International. Courtesy CreativeTime movement.us/>.

[3] Kennedy, Duncan. "The Critique of

What is Useful? The paradox of rights in Rights in Critical Legal Studies." Left
Legalism/left Critique. Durham: Duke UP,

Tania Bruguera’s ‘Useful Art’ 2002. 183. In this article, Kennedy gives
the theoretical and political background to
the emergence of the rights critique, in
Ellen Feiss particular the debates within legal studies
the critique was responding to. Kennedyʼs
overview is particularly good with regard
Print | Email Share this: Facebook | Twitter | to what the rights critique is not, namely,
how it differs from a Marxian or Frankfurt
School critique of rights.
If the question for socially engaged art, as the curator Nato Thompson has
recently argued, is no longer “Is it art?” but rather “is it useful?”[1] What is the [4] Ibid,. 183.
appropriate evaluative framework for art as a social ‘tool’? If we are asked to
[5] Ibid,. 184.
understand artist practice as undertaking progressive cause, are the traditional
analytics of art historians and critics effective in this endeavor? What does [6] Brown, Wendy. "Suffering the
‘good’ mean for art that seeks justice? In this article, I will attempt the use of a Paradoxes of Rights." Left Legalism/left
Critique. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 432.
critical methodology extracted from Critical Legal Studies in the evaluation of
Tania Bruguera’s project Immigrant Movement International or art as “social [7] Latour, Bruno. "Why Has Critique Run
and political movement.”[2] Namely, a project that has instigated claims for out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to
Matters of Concern." Critical Inquiry 30.2
rights. The critique is drawn from a faction of theorists within Critical Legal
(2004): 225-48.
Studies, the rights critics, who, beginning in the 1980s, questioned basic claims
of utility in campaigns for social change.[3] Specifically, they argued against the [8] I am quoting Claire Bishopʼs discussion
status of rights as paramount for systematically subordinated groups, stemming of this binary in her article for the Living as
Form catalogue. Bishop, Claire.
from ongoing, and in many ways reinvigorated, inequality despite the legal "Participation and Spectacle: Where Are
achievements made by the civil rights movements of the 1960s.[4] As the legal We Now?" Living as Form: Socially
theorist Duncan Kennedy illustrates, if one is to seriously deconstruct the “Left Engaged Art from 1991-2011. New York,
project,” namely the pursuit of “greater equality and participation in public and NY: Creative Time, 2012.

private government,” “it follows that the status of all kinds of normative [9] Kennedy, Duncan. "The Critique of
assertions, including utilitarian assertion, become uneasy.”[5] Already, such a Rights in Critical Legal Studies." Left
claim, that the notion of ‘social tool’ should be subject to critical analysis, poses Legalism/left Critique. Durham: Duke UP,
2002. 184.
a different answer to Thompson’s query for art: what is useful? Can there be
consensus or a stable point of reference to deduct if something is useful for [10] States, 97.
achieving social gains?
[11] Brown, Wendy. "Suffering the
The political theorist Wendy Brown, in her text Suffering the Paradoxes of Paradoxes of Rights." Left Legalism/left
Rights, asks for a space beyond the judicial which articulates what equality Critique. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 420.
might look like outside of a “progressive historiography,”[6] wherein rights [12] Ibid,. 422.
function to achieve the illusion of progress within a still intact and unchanged
social order. While Brown doesn’t specify as to what this new space is, I argue [13] Ibid,. 421.
that it is the cultural, or at least that the cultural provides one such space for
[14] Ibid,. 421.
envisioning rights discourse under a wholly different set of constraints. Bruno
Latour articulates the role of the critic as one who introduces ‘new spaces of [15] Ibid,. 118.
assembly,’[7] which is a role I hope to inhabit in applying the rights critique to
[16] Bishop, Claire. "Participation and
social practice, necessitating a third space of inquiry outside of either discipline. Spectacle: Where Are We Now?" Living
I am responding to the “ethics” or “aesthetics” binary which plagues scholarship as Form: Socially Engaged Art from
surrounding social practice, also articulated as “equality” vs. “quality.”[8] 1991-2011. New York, NY: Creative Time,
Suffering the Paradoxes of Rights offers an evaluation of ‘Immigrant Movement 2012. [

International,’ which elucidates the problems its rights introduce, while [17] Bruguera, Tania. "Partido Del Pueblo
acknowledging their undeniable material impact. Brown’s text circles the central Migrante / Immigrant Movement
debate around the rights critique, in which critical race scholars such as Patricia International."Partido Del Pueblo Migrante
/ Immigrant Movement International. Web.
Williams, Derrick Bell and Robert A. Williams Jr argued against it, on the 27 July 2012. <http://immigrant-
grounds that rights are non-negotiable for historically marginalized peoples and movement.us/>.
even that it was “demoralizing to criticize them.”[9] As her writing on rights
crucially departs from the problem posed by this conflict, Brown occupies a [18] Bruguera, Tania. "Partido Del Pueblo
Migrante / Immigrant Movement
central place within the debate, pressing upon its most contentious, and most International."Partido Del Pueblo Migrante
productive tension, that of the “place of rights in the politics of politicized / Immigrant Movement International. Web.
identities.”[10] My aim is not to evoke the legal for the work of culture to aspire 27 July 2012. <http://immigrant-
movement.us/>.
to, or as a distant sounding board within the realm of consequence, but rather,
insofar as the work of Bruguera and her contemporaries make claims for rights [19] Brown, Wendy, and Janet E. Halley.
which are correlative to the aligned work of those operating within the law, it is "Suffering the Paradoxes of Rights." Left
necessary to evaluate such claims through the deconstructive developments Legalism/left Critique. Durham: Duke UP,
2002. 422.
made in CLS over the past three decades.
[20] Bruguera, Tania. "Partido Del Pueblo
Brown begins by stating that the essay is not for or against rights, but rather is Migrante / Immigrant Movement
an attempt to “map some of the conundrums of rights for articulating and International."Partido Del Pueblo Migrante
redressing women’s inequality and subordination.”[11] Brown has worked to / Immigrant Movement International. Web.
27 July 2012. <http://immigrant-
account for the ways in which the achievement of rights for women by feminist
movement.us/>.
movements of the 20th century failed to address the modes of power through
which subjects are constituted and entrapped, even while certain material gains, [21] Brown, Wendy, and Janet E. Halley.
the right to vote, divorce, and abort, were bestowed. Critical Legal Studies as a "Suffering the Paradoxes of Rights." Left
Legalism/left Critique. Durham: Duke UP,
discipline set out to theorize the ways in which the rule of law, far from being a 2002. 424.
neutral deployment of pre-constituted, transparently applied judgment, was in
[22] Bruguera, Tania. "Common."
fact always a political exercise. Therefore, I critique IMI not with the intention Performance Matters. Toynbee Studios,
London. 29 Oct. 2011. Lecture.
of signaling wrongdoing, but rather as a method of approaching Brown’s
discussion of the paradoxes of rights for the contemporary moment, through the [23] Sassen, Saskia. Globalization and Its
specific frame the project provides. Discontents: [essays on the New Mobility
of People and Money]. New York: New,
Brown’s article inhabits a Foucauldian perspective in opposition to the currency 1998. 161.
of an ‘oppression’ and ‘liberation’ binary, instead seeking to illustrate the law as
[24] Kennedy, Duncan. "The Critique of
one regulatory framework which continually constructs and reconstructs Rights in Critical Legal Studies." Left
subjects in the service of power. As Brown points out, the “proliferation of rights Legalism/left Critique. Durham: Duke UP,
for women also recalls that rights almost always serve as a mitigation – but not 2002. 188.
a resolution – of subordinating powers” and that they “vanquish neither the
[25] Bruguera, Tania. "Partido Del Pueblo
regime nor its mechanisms of reproduction.”[12] Subjects are shaped as much Migrante / Immigrant Movement
by disempowerment as they are by access to the new freedoms rights afford. As International."Partido Del Pueblo Migrante
Brown states concisely; “if we are constrained to need and want rights, do they / Immigrant Movement International. Web.
27 July 2012. <http://immigrant-
inevitably shape as well as claim our desire without gratifying it?”[13] movement.us/>.
It is important to note here that as Brown stated in her introduction, she is not
[26] Bishop, Claire. "Antagonism and
against working for rights. Rather she quotes Gayatri Spivak’s incisive grasp of Relational Aesthetics." October 110
rights as “that which we cannot not want.”[14] The material reality of women’s (2004): 51-79. [27] Brown, Wendy, and
still precarious political standing, and the undeniable bodily consequences of Janet E. Halley. "Suffering the Paradoxes
of Rights." Left Legalism/left Critique.
the loss of such freedoms, requires the continual maintenance of legally Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 427.
recognized rights; in opposition to appeals solely for direct action, as is argued
within Autonomous thought. This creates the paradox Brown outlines; a tension [28] Bruguera, Tania. "Partido Del Pueblo
Migrante / Immigrant Movement
between rights as political citizenship, the way in which “new groups can enter
International."Partido Del Pueblo Migrante
into the discourse of American politics with the expectation that they will be / Immigrant Movement International. Web.
understood,”[15] and rights as maintaining a social order that continually 27 July 2012. <http://immigrant-
produces power imbalance. As the exhibition Living as Form asked last year, “is movement.us/>.
it better for one art project to improve one person’s life than for it to not exist at [29] Brown, Wendy, and Janet E. Halley.
all?”[16] Brown considers that question precisely in her discussion of the "Suffering the Paradoxes of Rights." Left
paradox. How to reconcile the freedoms afforded by rights, the making lives Legalism/left Critique. Durham: Duke UP,
2002. 423.
better, with the ways in which they reinscribe the subjugation, and provide new
ground for the proliferation of power, that they were meant to appeal in the first [30] Bruguera, Tania. "Partido Del Pueblo
place? If an artist’s project succumbs to these problems, is this acceptable if Migrante / Immigrant Movement
even one person’s life is better? Of course, one could argue that the material International."Partido Del Pueblo Migrante
/ Immigrant Movement International. Web.
gains of legally obtained rights are more substantial than those accessed by 27 July 2012. <http://immigrant-
artist projects, and therefore such a comparison is irrelevant. However, the movement.us/>.
campaign for rights, achieved or not, large or small, is subject to the same
critical dilemmas that plague any civil rights bid before the Supreme Court. [31] Sassen, Saskia. Globalization and Its
Discontents: [essays on the New Mobility
What is useful? What helps? of People and Money]. New York: New,
1998. XXV.
In IMI, Bruguera calls for ‘immigrant respect,’ ‘immigrant rights’, and the
achievement of an ‘international citizenry.’[17] The work consists of a [32] Brown, Wendy, and Janet E. Halley.
headquarters in Corona, Queens where community building under the "Suffering the Paradoxes of Rights." Left
Legalism/left Critique. Durham: Duke UP,
masthead of ‘everyone is an immigrant’ occurs. Legal and social services,
2002. 430.
promotion of political participation for legal and illegal immigrants, and English
literacy programs run by artists all occur through the center. With Immigrant [33] Bruguera, Tania. "Partido Del Pueblo
Movement, Bruguera is rallying the call for a genre of social practice titled Migrante / Immigrant Movement
International."Partido Del Pueblo Migrante
‘Useful Art’, or arte util. To quote, “the way it operates is dictated by the / Immigrant Movement International. Web.
practical impact of its strategies.”[18] I have also chosen to discuss Bruguera 27 July 2012. <http://immigrant-
because her definition of ‘useful art’ establishes a distinct genre within the movement.us/>.
expanse of social practice that can be taken up by critical legal theory. ‘Useful
[34] Ibid,.
Art’ becomes set of characteristics, which defines a genre of social practice
transhistorically: it is work that is not only relational but intervenes politically.
Its “utilitarian assertion” is productively considered under a Left legal critique,
which accepts no universal claims of use-value, even automatically distrusts
such affirmations as counter-productive. To be sure, the universalisms of rights,
as Brown and others have illustrated at length, serve to conceal and facilitate
existing power hierarchies.

Queenʼs Dream Team, Immigrant Movement International. October 2nd. 2011. Courtesy Immigrant
Movement International.

Brown discusses several dimensions of the paradox and I will apply roughly
three to Bruguera’s work, insofar as they can be isolated from one another. The
first is the regulatory dimension of rights discourse, wherein subjects are
interpellated through the definition of the Right afforded to them and its
corresponding apparatus. Brown makes it clear that rights mobilize a whole
series of regulative forces as soon as they are claimed, including but not limited
to the law; the “agencies, clinics, employers, political discourses and mass
media” that iterate and reiterate normative categories of identity are activated
in the establishment and exercise of a Right. This recalls the educators,
employers, media devices, and civil servants that surround Bruguera’s evocation
of ‘immigrant rights.’ Bruguera’s project actually opens up avenues for
regulation and control that didn’t exist before. While the project presents
material gains that ‘we cannot not want,’ rights are never used ‘freely’ but
always through identity categories which are entrenched within a larger field of
power operations. As Brown explains, “to have a right as a woman, is not to be
free of being designated and subordinated by gender. Though it may entail some
protection from the most immobilizing features of that designation, it
reinscribes the designation as it protects us, and thus enables our further
regulation through that designation.”[19] While IMI attends to the urgency of
immigrant access to basic rights and services, such rights also establish new
routes for maintaining a second and third class citizenry. If the project
“challenges the way human migration is perceived, in order to eliminate the
social stigma associated with it,”[20] as IMI states, it does so through the
humanizing rhetoric of rights, “forfeiting a political analysis that recognizes”[21]
the specific conditions that have created the need for the right in the first place.

Specifically to IM International, its deployment of a diverse set of regulatory

powers compromises the informal economy in Corona. For example, Bruguera
has an anecdote about getting into an illegal cab in the neighborhood and being
charged 4 dollars instead of $20, the sum outsiders would be charged. This, she
says, is how she knows the project is “working.”[22] But by increasing media
concentration on the community, by recruiting immigration lawyers, local
representatives, and educators, and through the myriad other services the
project supplies, the informal economy that the illegal cab is part of becomes
threatened. The legitimizing forces of rights, the ones that do afford protections,
also dismantle such economies that sustain and bind communities together
outside of legally recognized categories. As Saskia Sassen has illustrated, such
economies exist within financial capitals (New York is one of Sassen’s prime
case studies), and they sustain a legal work force of migrants, paid the lowest
possible salary, who maintain the service economy around the financial
industry. Informal economies have sprung up, in part, because of the failures of
the legal system: the failure to impose employment law that mandates a livable
minimum wage and the failure to regulate the finance industry at large. The
“gypsy cab”[23] becomes threatened by rights, in so far as rights become the
only language for “formulating interests and demands,”[24] they become the
centerpiece of how an identified community inter-relates, and displace other
modes of engagement, in this case economic activity outside of a legal
framework. This is not to say that all other forms of community building are
eradicated, and certainly IMI is also a long-term project with a focus on the
many forms of how an immigrant community can articulate itself. However, as
is evidenced by IMI, the use of rights becomes the empirical language in such a
project, particularly as it is geared toward a notion of measureable, or useful,
change. For better or for worse, the rights discourse of Immigrant Movement
inevitably opens this community up to a regulatory framework, that on the one
hand empowers through access to the seat of liberal personhood that rights
afford, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for example, and on the other, can
funnel more individuals into the low wage jobs that come with a green card
while dismantling the informal economy that makes life possible for those in
underpaid legal jobs. To put it another way, the pursuit of happiness offered by
a right does not include illegal cabs, yet this is currently a community-based
method of survival. As the Paradox of Rights underscores, rights discourse does
not attest to the ‘impossibility of justice’ in the now. A right always illustrates
itself as the end point of a process of emancipation, wherein in fact, a right in
and of itself solely shifts the playing field and remedies, only to displace inequity
that takes hold in a different way.

To be fair, Bruguera would prefer the project not to end. It is not structured in
exactly the same way rights discourse is in terms of attainment and ‘case closed’
as Brown bemoans with regards to women’s struggle. However, because
Bruguera is “appropriating political strategy”[25] and is in part using a rights
framework, the paradox still infiltrates her project, even as it operates as a
multifaceted attempt to address inequality. The second element of paradox
Brown discusses is how rights discourse functions to fragment intersectional
subjectivity, recalling Claire Bishop’s observation of the disturbingly unified
subject positions created within relational aesthetics.[26] While IMI is not of
the canon of relational aesthetics Bishop’s article refers to, it’s notable that the
project attests to the homogenizing effects participatory art and rights discourse
similarly have on their publics.

I am today what your grandparents were yesterday. Sticker. Courtesy Immigrant Movement
International.

Brown emphasizes that intersectional identity is not a composite or a series of

‘additional identities,’ as it has been dealt with in the law if acknowledged at all,
but rather multi-signified subjects are functionally regulated differently.
Identity “production does not occur in additive, intersectional or overlapping
parts, but through complex and often fragmented histories where multiple
social powers are regulated through and against one another.”[27] A standard
criticism of Immigrant Movement International would be that it addresses a
massively oversimplified subject position, masking the privilege inherent
between an international artist-migrant and those immigrants in Corona who
frequent the center. Instead it is the inability of the project to address the ways
in which power acts on subjects differently, in a way that isn’t comparable. The
project itself attempts to produce solidarity among immigrants irregardless of
class or other privileges, focusing on “the commonalities that exist between all
migrants, regardless of their individual circumstances and place of origin.”[28]
A slogan like ‘I am today, what your grandparents were yesterday’ sums up the
attempt of IMI to relate immigrant experience to a ‘melting-pot’ American
audience by disregarding the incomparable social and political circumstances of
migration today to migration of the early to mid 20th century. The issue here is
not Bruguera’s privilege alone, but rather that the project assumes equal use of
rights. As Brown points out, the problem with a singular subjectivity with regard
to rights and the reason why a solidarity approach – one which diminishes
difference – cannot work, is that rights are never accessed equally. Any element
of privilege allows the use of a right in a more powerful way. The notion of rights
for ‘immigrants’ operates a dangerous blanketing of privilege beyond Bruguera
herself: inevitably as Brown testifies, old hierarchies structure access to rights,
fortifying them further as they are written into law and exercised. Understood in
this sense, a rights manifesto for an ‘international citizenry’ where borders are
“reimagined in the service of humanity” recollects for example, of NAFTA’s
opening up borders for ‘the benefit of all.’ If a right for immigrants will
inevitably be exercised disproportionately, how to evaluate the question of
benefit?

The question of benefit, is also one which asks, who, exactly, is the ‘immigrant’
at stake here? IMI succumbs to a classic paradox of representation that
accompanies a rights framework. While Corona has a population where
“approximately 138 languages are spoken,” according to IMI’s website, and of
course there is an endless amount of diversity of nationality and otherwise in
the district, IMI forfeits a specific political conversation about Latino
immigrants in the U.S. by subscribing to a rhetoric of multiculturalism. Brown
articulates this tendency as part of the plight of legal reformers; to either allow
the experiences of some to represent those of all or on the other hand, to render
an identity category so broadly that the particulars of that group’s “violation
remain unarticulated and unaddressed.”[29] It is a trap of appealing for rights.
By trying to avoid rendering invisible the other migrants of Corona, the project
forfeits a large part of what any battle for immigrant rights in the U.S. has to be
about. In the era of S.B. 1070 and the eradication of Latino/Latina studies from
public schools and universities in Arizona, IMI does not explicitly name the
most contentious immigrant group in the U.S, leaving the ‘migrant’ it refers to
“purified of all inflection of race,” as Brown deplores of the category ‘woman’
within feminist rights reform. Just as the feminist movements of the 1970s
created a female subject for women’s rights devoid of race, IMI has put forth a
similarly de-raced immigrant. Although the Partido Del Pueblo Migrante in
Mexico City, the political party branch to Immigrant Movement’s community
center, perhaps remedies this. Furthermore, such a uniform rendering prevents
an economic analysis of migration in globalization – the ways in which
Bruguera and other immigrants of privilege, and that of the finance industry at
large, migrate casually, while whole sections of the globe are forced to move,
either legally or illegally, by these same economic forces. This contrast is
perhaps heightened in Immigrant Movement by the inherent global circulation
of artists, particularly of Bruguera’s fame, a palpable distinction the project
could have capitalized on. IM International’s appeal for “a right to move and a
right to not be forced to move”[30] alludes to this, but cannot articulate the
immense social and political conditions of what Saskia Sassen refers to as the
“new centrality of power”[31] in globalization, an economic restructuring of the
globe which forces mass migration while tightening immigration control,
creating an illegal class of workers in financial capitals. In light of this, if we
know whom migrant rights should be for, how can this be effectively signaled?
Arguably it is a conceptual problem for an artist to respond to.

Similarly, the last dimension of paradox I’ll discuss are the ways in which rights
fortify the power of the intended sovereign recipient of rights. Historically the
‘rights of man,’ a humanism that “routinely conceals its gendered, racial and
sexual norms.”[32] The paradox expressed by an immigrant right, is that it
serves to bolster a notion of sovereignty that such a right defines a lack of. It
develops a defining opposition between an immigrant who is marked as always
struggling with illegality (migrant workers; those of Corona, Queens) and the
sovereignty of natural born citizens of privilege, born into regions of power, who
can immigrate anywhere with their rights intact. Immigrant Movement
International in part doesn’t mention race because it attempts to address the
gap between privileged and proletariat immigration through solidarity, but that
separation is predicated on specific regions of the world and their accompanying
racial signifiers. Neither specificity can be addressed within the campaign’s
rights rhetoric.

IM International, in light of rather than in spite of this critique, emerges as

presenting the potentiality for addressing Brown’s conclusion: How can a
campaign for rights express the ways in which they are inherently inadequate,
while simultaneously working to obtain them out of material necessity? Even
while currently, it subscribes to the same problems of rights in “the tradition of
U.S. civic movements.”[33] Bruguera notes that this is a long-term performance
project, much longer than she was allocated funding for. Looking forward, IMI
could become an essential “think tank”[34] on rights, not solely for immigrants,
but on the structure of rights claims in and of themselves.