Wittgenstein and the Nature of Violence 9780367368043, 9780367368913, 9780429351839

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
CONTENTS
Series editor’s preface
Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
1 Modernity and the instrumentality of violence
2 Violence and the body
3 The silent stories we tell
4 Wittgensteinian interventions
5 The rules of the everyday world
6 Conclusion: tying the knots
References
Index

Citation preview

WITTGENSTEIN AND THE NATURE OF VIOLENCE

How do we explain violence? What is so significant of modern forms of violence that it has produced such large-scale destruction in its wake? This volume builds on the political philosophy of Wittgenstein, his notions of peace and violence, to explore how violence in any form is contained in culturally or ideologically formed institutions. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s work on language, it explores the link between language and violence, everydayness and culture. It examines everyday instances of micro-violence that we sometimes forget to recall. This book puts forth the claim that any theory of violence will have to touch on the myriad – both micro and macro – political, social and cultural interactions that make up the human condition. The author further comments on the unseen ways violence has been instrumentalized in modern history’s many stages to create a spectacle of power to reinforce authority. The volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of peace and conflict studies, political philosophy, linguistics and modern history. R. Krishnaswamy is an assistant professor at the Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities (JSLH), O.P. Jindal Global University (O.P. JGU), Haryana, India. He is interested in the interface of language and the mind.

PEACEMAKERS Series Editor: Ramin Jahanbegloo Executive Director of the Mahatma Gandhi Centre for Nonviolence and Peace Studies and the Vice-Dean of the School of Law at Jindal Global University, India Peace is one of the central concepts of the spiritual and political life of humanity. Peace does not imply simply the absence of war. It implies harmony, justice and empathy. Empathy is the key to the education of peace in our world. In other words, despite the vast differences of values between cultures and traditions, it is still possible to grasp an understanding of one another, via ‘empathy.’ Throughout the centuries, peacemakers have endorsed a ‘shared human horizon’ that according to them had the critical force of avoiding moral anarchy and relativism while acknowledging the plurality of modes of being human. Today in a different manner and in a changed tone, but with the same moral courage and dissenting voice, this series on “Peacemakers” offers the first comprehensive engagement with the problems of peace in our age, through a meticulous and thorough study of the lives and thoughts of peacemakers of all ages. WITTGENSTEIN AND THE NATURE OF VIOLENCE R. Krishnaswamy

WITTGENSTEIN AND THE NATURE OF VIOLENCE

R. Krishnaswamy

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 R. Krishnaswamy The right of R. Krishnaswamy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-36804-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-36891-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-35183-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

TO APPA

CONTENTS

Series editor’s preface Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations

viii x xiii xv

1

Modernity and the instrumentality of violence

2

Violence and the body

32

3

The silent stories we tell

64

4

Wittgensteinian interventions

95

5

The rules of the everyday world

133

6

Conclusion: tying the knots

163

References Index

187 197

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1

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

Peace is one of the central concepts of the spiritual and political life of humanity. When we study the world’s religious and philosophical teachings, whether they are from the East or the West, we see that one of the basic ideals of all religions is peace. Peace does not imply simply the absence of war. It implies harmony, justice and empathy. Empathy is the key to the education of peace in our world. In other words, despite the vast differences of values between cultures and traditions, it is still possible to grasp an understanding of one another, via ‘empathy.’ Therefore, we can maintain that all cultures have a shared core of common humanity. Throughout the centuries, peacemakers endorsed a ‘shared human horizon’ that according to them had the critical force of avoiding moral anarchy and relativism while acknowledging the plurality of modes of being human. The first step for peacemakers has always been not only to assume that there are differences among nations, cultures and traditions of thought but also to admit that people may have different value systems which need to be understood and approached dialogically and critically. Philosophy of peace is, thus, expressed here in the idea of a ‘self-respecting’ community or nation which strives to remove its own imperfections instead of necessarily judging others. As a result, peacemaking is always a call not only to cultivate humility but also to foster pluralism. Such a view is essential if we are to avoid the danger of cultural conformity and move towards the recognition of the shared values of humanity and the acceptance of what Martin Luther King Jr called the cosmic companionship. viii

S E R I E S E D I TO R ’ S P R E FAC E

To put it differently, we can say that it would be an error to hope that we can ever achieve a truly universal vision of peace without an intercultural approach to the idea of civilization. Peacemakers have always been in favour of farsighted peacemaking in our world, one which has seriously advocated the logic of solidarity and civic friendship beyond national selfishness and global exclusion. Let us not forget that all peacemakers, young or old, from the West or the East, were all engaged in the process of seeking peace by fighting for care, openness and empathy as constructive forms of being together. Today in a different manner and in a changed tone, but with the same moral courage and dissenting voice, this series on peacemakers offers the first comprehensive engagement with the problems of peace in our age, through a meticulous and thorough study of the lives and thoughts of peacemakers of all ages. Ramin Jahanbegloo

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PREFACE

If we were to reinstitute all our university departments not along the lines of subjects like political science, philosophy, literature or history but along certain themes or issues, the Department of Violence would be a huge one. Such a university department would be highly populated because unlike the traditional disciplines that we have all studied in our schools and universities, the phenomenon of violence touches our daily lives in ways that are more direct than sometimes the usual subjects and their theoretical constructs which we are wont to study. Beneath our daily realities, criss-crossing our different engagements, as a professional, as a mother, as a friend, as a son, as a citizen, there lies always the threat of disruption, disharmony and violence. The historical memory of the many different violent acts that as a species we have committed, which we carry from Cain and Abel – at least in the Abrahamic tradition – is embedded in our ‘collective DNA’ in a way that even sometimes psychoanalytical or historical representation cannot bring forth. But this subterranean volcanic force, which erupts from time to time, in our civilizational history, has not gone unnoticed by the seers, poets and philosophers of all ages. That explains how the creators of myth in different epochs have always addressed the problem of violence. However we translate the problem of violence in different words, our inherent vulnerability to violence is ever present and outstrips the possibility of successful communication. The dread of that existential vulnerability which gnaws at

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the nether side of our soul is difficult to describe in a matter of fact way. Because violence as a phenomenon is so real in its sense of immediacy and so visceral in its existential effects, to get at a proper understanding of violence, it is a good idea sometimes to discuss the obverse of it – nonviolence, or ahimsa in Sanskrit. Nonviolence is generally understood to be a passive state, whereas violence is associated with force, movement and activity. This is unfortunate because to be in a state of peace internally and externally requires as much or even more force than any act of violence that one may commit. The tension in any nonviolent act is highly taut. If violence is considered to be the result of an importunate act, then the act of nonviolence will have to be correctly interpreted as a difficult achievement. Being nonviolent is what one attains after much effort, and maintaining one’s calm is many a time a perpetual struggle. Between these two forms of archetypal acts, human history has played itself out. If the question of violence and nonviolence are tied as two terms of a dialectic, then the third term that can successfully mediate between the two, according to me, is language. When we talk about language, we have in mind the different natural languages that we speak and the artificial languages of logic or computers that we have invented. But language is all this and more. Language is not merely the signs and symbols that we use to communicate. Language is not merely the reflection of the cognitive powers that we as humans have to compute thoughts into words. Language, I argue, is the recognitional capacity that we as ethical beings have and with which we engage each other. It is misplaced earnestness to problematize how one can from our windowless monadic existence communicate with other people. I say it is misplaced because this problem arises only if we think of language as the exercise of an internal cognitive function. Communication breaks down not because I am not able to understand what you intended but because I refuse to recognize you and where you come from – i.e., the embodied practices that you express which in turn you have imbibed through historical channels. Communication happens only as a

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form of ethical engagement. It is only when one refuses to ‘see’ the other that communication stops. Therefore, we need to inverse the problem of language and start with language not as a system of signs or computational rules but as the ultimate meaningful form in which intersubjective engagement is made possible. When we talk about any kind of intersubjectivity, we are back in the social and political sphere of things. In more ways than one, to talk about language is to talk politics. This is because language is what connects people, but it is crucial that we understand language properly; otherwise, our political engagement might be at risk of violence. Earlier I talked about how nonviolence must be interpreted as active engagement with oneself in order to attain a state of existential equilibrium. This engagement with oneself cannot bypass the role of language in our daily lives. To actively be at peace with the other is to actively engage with the other. The linguistic-pragmatic network within which we are all active participants calls forth for deeper involvement with the linguistic other. It is only by talking, pleading and arguing and through other linguistic acts that we can seek to remove violence. Violence happens, as I said earlier, when we don’t want to come to terms with differences that we encounter. If we hope to have in our lives a corner for nonviolence, then the only way is to begin to talk to the other. This form of commitment has a lot of normative implications. But negotiating the effects of linguistic acts is what makes life interesting and gives it a sense of wonder. In this book, I have tried to place language, along with its normative and pragmatic aspects, as the centrepiece in my design of a political society. If speaking a language entails having to use it on a daily basis, then negotiating differences in meaning is what we do all the time. But our successfully using language goes to show that we don’t need any high-blown theoretical construct to solve political problems. We already have a blueprint for successful political coexistence in our daily lives. We need only to extrapolate the lessons that we learn from each other on a daily basis to a larger canvas, and thus, we can have the beginnings of a meaningful political conversation. I hope this book at least helps to initiate that conversation. xii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am finding it difficult to think of when I exactly started writing this book. Some of the ideas in this book were latent in my thinking even three years ago. But I thank Prof. Ramin Jahanbegloo for giving me an opportunity and a trigger to start collating my dispersed ideas on various matters on political philosophy, language and Wittgenstein. Without his prompt, I don’t think this book would have ever seen the light of day. Along the way, I have relied on a lot of people who have intellectually and emotionally supported me throughout this journey, whom I must thank. My first serious exposure to the later Wittgenstein came in my graduate work at Delhi University, and it was Prof. Ashok Vohra’s class discussions and his sympathetic ear to my persistent questions that enabled me to realize that the later Wittgenstein had a lot of important things to say. Meanwhile, it was attending Prof. David Hyder’s lectures at the University of Ottawa that woke me up, to paraphrase a slightly by-now overused quote, from my philosophical slumbers and taught me what it is to be rigorous in thinking and research. I count myself lucky to have attended his lectures and to have known him. He has been supportive of my intellectual and academic endeavours since then. Later, my stint at the Central European University, CEU, Budapest (now Vienna), as a postdoctoral fellow opened me up to various philosophical styles, and for that exposure, I am thankful. Particularly, my interactions with Prof. David Weberman have been helpful and, I must say, the most pleasurable.

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AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S

I thank my father-in-law, Amit Jyoti Sen, for always thinking highly of me. It gave me the confidence that I sometimes lacked in myself. Also, my mother-in-law, Mandira Sen, has been of immense help in guiding me with some of the editorial issues that I had with this book. She graciously set aside time from her busy schedule to help me with my first book. Through all this, my wife, Sucharita Sen, has been the constant pillar by my side. If it hadn’t been for her goading me to write this book and extracting a promise from me to such an effect, I might not even have thought of putting ink on paper or, to use a more current analogy, starting to click on a writing pad to populate a blank computer screen. My mother, Vijayalakshmi, and her motherly care, have been a balm in times of crises. My brother Karthik has always been the most supportive of all I do and have done in the past. But I can’t finish this note of acknowledgment without mentioning my dad, R. Ramakrishnan, who passed away in 2018. My father, whose unconventional ideas on education and care, has shaped my emotional and intellectual outlook in more ways than one. He taught me everything of value I know. I hope I have imbibed in my life at least some part of his immense courage, integrity and generosity. To him, I dedicate this work with love and utmost gratitude.

xiv

ABBREVIATIONS

TLP

Wittgenstein, L. (1961). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. Pears and McGuinness. Routledge. RFM Wittgenstein, L. (1964). Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Edited by G. H. Von Wright, R. Rhees [and] G. E. M. Anscombe. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Blackwell. PR Wittgenstein, L. (1980). Philosophical Remarks. University of Chicago Press. PI Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical Investigations, 4th edition (trans. Hacker and Schulte). Wiley-Blackwell. PG Wittgenstein, L., 1889–1951. (1974). Philosophical grammar/Ludwig Wittgenstein. Edited by Rush Rhees; translated by Anthony Kenny. Blackwell. RC Wittgenstein, L., Anscombe, G. E. M., McAlister, L. L., & Schattle, Margarete. (2007). Remarks on colour. University of California Press. OC Wittgenstein, L., Anscombe, G. E. M., & Wright, G. H. von. (1969). On certainty. Blackwell. BTS Wittgenstein, L., Luckhardt, C. G., & Aue, M. A. E. (2013). The big typescript, TS 213 German-English scholars’ edition. Wiley-Blackwell BB Wittgenstein, L. (1958). The Blue and Brown Books (Vol. 34). Harper & Row. CV Wittgenstein, L. (1977). Culture and Value (Vol. 15). University of Chicago Press. xv

1 MODERNITY AND THE INSTRUMENTALITY OF VIOLENCE

The nature of political violence Hobbes was probably the first to describe violence as the politically unconstituted state of nature in modern times. For him, the state of nature was before – in either a prehistorical or a pre-contractual sense – the collective peaceful existence that is possible (under a sovereign) in a social and political setting. He said famously that our lives, if we don’t get out of our state of nature, will be “nasty, brutish and short.” Sadly, as we review our recent history, we are made aware that our lives have become brutish and short not because we live outside a social collective but because we live in state institutions. Any history of modern times, even if it is a ‘Whig’ account which catalogues the progressive institutions that we have had, cannot ignore the many violent acts that have been perpetrated in ‘advanced’ societies. That is, many of the acts of horrific violence, if one were to take the 20th century alone, have been the result of wars conducted by state governments or pogroms initiated as a result of institutional apathy and sometimes complicity.1 This unprecedented scale of violence in the modern world raises two questions. One – the perennial question – why is there violence? Two, what is so significant of modern forms of violence that it has produced such large-scale destruction in its wake? Both questions need deep reflective thinking. Only by understanding the role of violence – which has been pervasive throughout history and especially virulent in modern times – can we hope to understand the nature of the human condition, or 1

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so I will argue in this book. It is my thesis in this book that all violence is constituted in institutions, which are either culturally or politically embodied.2 This implies that there is no such thing as ‘pure’ violence. Nor is there a utopian world possible where there is no violence, as someone like Rousseau (and even Rawls) would advance. In this book, my purpose is not to map a future where the problem of violence is solved once and for all. I aim to look at the nature of violence and probe how it is possible, by studying the everyday linguistic practices that we embody, to make a case for shifting the grounds of a critique of violence from the ontological plane to the discursive and linguistic plane. I will argue that the debate around violence, while it rightfully talks about political violence, doesn’t talk enough about the kind of violence that is perpetrated on a daily basis. In our everyday life, there are so many instances of micro-violence which sometimes we forget to even consciously recall that any ultimate theory of violence will have to touch on the many everyday interactions that form the fabric of our lives. I set the parameters of the debate around violence, and in doing so, I will try to answer the two questions that I raised a couple of paragraphs ago. I will first start with the second question: what is it that makes modern violence unique? (By answering the second question, I hope to answer the more fundamental question of why there is violence.) Modern times, if it were merely a temporal signifier, indicating the present time, would be a floating signifier because every epoch would be modern to the people who live in it. But that is not what is implied by the phrase ‘modern times.’ When we say we live in modern times, there are some social, economic and historical references that are implicitly made which point to certain recent historically singular events like industrialization, technological advancement, the rise and fall of colonialism, etc. One mustn’t interpret modern times as merely a particular point in history in which we became modern. It is in a way also a reflexive attitude that we take regarding our own position in history and time. That is why our modern condition or the condition of modernity has come to be understood as a paradigm shift in our cultural, aesthetic, political and economic 2

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self-understanding.3 Modernity is not a doctrine as such but a way of thinking that is understood to have permeated all our cultural and collective practices. Because modernity is socially, culturally and even cognitively reflected in all our practices, it is sometimes difficult to disengage ourselves from our own immersed lives and try to go deep into the sources of all our beliefs and pragmatic concerns. To grasp the rise of the culture of modernity, it is not enough that we merely look at philosophical or literary texts of some authors in our current era. It is important to move beyond the textual and literary expressions of cultivated people to know the essence of modernity. Modernity, since it pervades every expression of our collective existence, will have to be searched for in our daily practices as well as in the heights of secluded intellectual meditation. Therefore, it is important if we want to understand the origin of our modern way of thinking, that we pay heed “to the rise of the novel, to the changing understanding of marriage and the family, and to the new importance of sentiment” (Taylor, 1989, p.  285). By following all concurrent changes in our different practices, we can hope to see the influence of modernity. The methodological conduit to understanding modernity is in a way itself a modern phenomenon. This will become apparent as we discuss the different methods that people have used to come to terms with the condition of modernity. All the social or political changes that modernity is said to have brought about can be traced genealogically towards a new self-reflexive attitude. This quest to find out who we are in the cosmos and what role we are to play in history, even though has been a perpetual philosopher’s quest, has had peculiar twists in modern history. Philosophically, the project of modernity is supposed to have started when we started thinking of our self and identity in a way that was fundamentally different from earlier times. The rest of the social and political changes are supposed to follow from this change in our attitude towards ourselves. The project of modernity is considered to have given birth to a new sense of self. Implicit in the theory of modernity4 is a ‘diremption,’ as Habermas calls it (Jürgen Habermas, 1987, p.  21) in the social world of the dichotomy of reason and understanding 3

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(Kant), understanding and sentiment, ends and means, the personal and the social. As the old political and social order was undermined by Western history from the time of the Reformation and the era of the Enlightenment, an exhaustive bifurcation was eventuated in which the realm of the personal and the realm of the social were rent asunder. This also meant that the normative criteria of judging moral action, in modern times, was not something that was transcendental in either but something that had to be immanent to the social processes in which each person found themselves. As Alasdair MacIntyre, a philosopher who has critiqued the many facets of modernity, puts it, The bifurcation of the contemporary social world into a realm of the organizational in which ends are taken to be given and are not available for rational scrutiny and a realm of the personal in which judgment and debate about values are central factors, but in which no rational social resolution of issues is available, finds its internalization, its inner representation in the relation of the individual self to the roles and characters of social life. (MacIntyre, 2007, p. 34) As much as modernity opened us to the sense of the future, through unshackling its cosmological vision from the Ptolemaic and tying it to the Copernican,5 this sense of freedom also brought with it an incongruity in the moral sphere as the disengagement of normative principles from its cosmic and transcendent roots. According to Charles Taylor, “the essential difference can perhaps be put in this way: the modern subject is self-defining, where on previous views the subject is defined in relation to a cosmic order” (Taylor, 1975, p. 6). This new form of subjectivity implied that our self-understanding was now confined not in the cosmic order but in contradistinction to the world outside. The new modern subject becomes the epistemological observer whose self is the atomic subject of psychology and whose inward operations can be observed as objectively as nature around them can be. 4

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The technique of drawing morals from nature because nature and the humans were part of the same macrocosm became suddenly illegitimate upon the arrival of modernity. The new historical consciousness that projects the present as the progressive culmination of past moments forces the moral self at the present to be at the precipice of a future to which they alone are given the responsibility to shape. Until the advent of modern times, as long as the human self was tied to teleological (and deistic) notions of the normative order, the sense of temporal completion and personal fulfilment coincided. But the undermining of any notion of telos – what a human could be if they realized themselves – meant that the moral code had a content and directives for action but without a context for those morals. The ‘modern self,’ becomes, to use the term that Sandel brought into currency, ‘unencumbered’ from its telos and its context, which includes possibly its religion, culture and immediate surroundings. In modern times, not only is the responsibility to act morally imposed on the self, but the criterion of judging whether an action was right or wrong is also to be decided by the same person. The sense of agency that was generated for such a self was bounded not by the will of God or the duty to the Church but the Cartesian ego. That is, the boundaries between humans who were capable of moral agency was what later came to be crudely called consciousness. Consciousness was the seat of not only our thinking but also the seat of moral criterion. As morality was more and more equated with the possibility of it being grounded in a form of human reason, people came to believe that only humans endowed with reason could be moral. The modern epistemologically grounded person was seen as having the power to frame the conditions of representations for themselves. In other words, what makes it possible to attribute a point of view to persons is that they have a representation of things. They have the wherewithal to reply when addressed, because they respond out of their own representation of the world and their situation. What this view takes as relatively unproblematic is the nature of agency. The 5

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important boundary is that between persons and other agents, the one marked by consciousness. (Taylor, 1985, p. 98) This meant that to be a human, a person had to be a moral respondent. As the worldview of modernity spread politically and socially to different societies and the strata within them, it was only a matter of time, before a strong self-realization of what modernity meant came to take a hold of people. If the project of the Enlightenment started in the 15th century, by the 18th century, the Western world can be said to have been completely modernized in all its pursuits. This is exemplified in the 18th-century pursuit of freedom as the political foundation of justice. Freedom in the 18th century came to be understood as the pursuit of selfhood. The determination of the political order was justified only to the extent that it legitimized the realization of humankind’s freedom.6 The French Revolution itself came to be realized by many of the philosophers of that time as the most significant event in world history. It was for many philosophers, the primary ones being Kant and Hegel, a world-event. This meant that “the Revolution itself must positively qualify as an epoch of European world history and its freedom of being human insofar it makes freedom the foundation upon which all legality is based” (Ritter, 1984, p. 51). Because with the French Revolution, freedom came to be understood as some form of a foundational ethics, it was only natural that universalism became a moral corollary to freedom as a value. But these ethical debates around the value of freedom also meant, given the constellations of political movements at the end of the 18th century in France, that it was believed that only political institutions would be able to execute the distribution of the value of freedom. That is, with the French Revolution, we started to think of human freedom as a universal right that it is the inherent duty of political institutions to realize. If we are born free but are everywhere in chains, then the duty of any human collective is to realize this freedom that is inherent in each person, it was believed. More importantly, this sense of freedom cannot 6

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be gained through any kind of spiritual or religious exercise but only through engagement with the body politic. What the 18th century brought to political and social reality through the instantiation of moral duty as the realization of human freedom was a new historical sense. The negation of the past and its traditions opened the way to think of the present as unbounded by the past. Time became discontinuous with the past, and this problem of the rupture between the past and the present is in a way the ultimate problem of modernity. If the hermeneutic continuity provided by traditional customs and beliefs through history was not valid anymore, meaning came to be that which can only be self-generated. Interpreting traditions and their moral force produced a difficulty as the bridge between the present and the past was burnt. If meaning is not all pregiven as either the sacred text or the word of God, then the absoluteness of meaning and its constant nature are dissolved. The advent of modernity meant that the foundation for any interpretative exercise that is fundamental to intersubjective existence was made relative to the human subject or subjects. This in turn brought about a large-scale reorientation in the human being’s relation to their nature and to other human beings. No change was more pervasive than the changes in our political self-representation. The philosophical node around which our social, cultural and political representational thinking expressed itself was a new self, a new sense of history and a new normative code. But out of all of these changes, the political changes that modernity brought about will be my focus. It is in the new politics of our times that we will have to place the history of the growth of national identity politics, the rise and fall of colonialism, modern-day revolutions and more importantly the nature of large-scale violence.

Modernity and political reality If we see ourselves as a globalized world where the traffic of values and capital is made easy because ultimately there are certain economic and moral interdependencies that we share with the 7

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rest of the world, this kind of thinking owes its provenance to the heritage of modernity. As much as we use the dubious currency of ‘progress’ and ‘technical advancement’ to engage in descriptions of our modern world, it is equally important to see that there have been large-scale political ‘tectonic’ shifts that have occurred in modern times that need to be understood. Much has happened in the past 250 years in the political realm across the world. But colonialism and nationalism remain the two crucial large-scale events whose repercussions still haunt us globally. Even if Herder is sometimes considered the spiritual father of the concept of nationalism, the consequences of the spread of nationalistic movements in the 19th and 20th centuries could not have been something that Herder would have foreseen in its historical details. The unfurling, so to speak, of nationalist movements throughout Europe – such as the French Napoleonic nationalism, the Italian Rissorgimento and the German Unification plan – gave way to certain economies of self-reflexivities whose contours were further defined through many of the imperialist projects of the West and its encounter with the ‘Orient.’ Let us take, for example, the British annexation of India as part of its imperial plans. The history of the colonization by the British of the Indian subcontinent cannot avoid mentioning the different strategies that the British imperial power used to legitimize its power. The annexation of India as a colony was enabled not merely through the formal militaristic threat of power. We now know that colonial conquest was not just the result of the power of superior arms, military organization, political power, or economic wealth – as important as these things were. Colonialism was made possible, and then sustained and strengthened, as much by cultural technologies of rule as it was by the more obvious and brutal modes of conquest that first established power on foreign shores. (Dirks, 2001, p. 9) The legitimization of power was made possible through formal implements of administration and through the informal creation 8

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of discourses. The normative power of these informal discourses was disseminated through educational programmes, which were indispensable forms of control by the colonial power. When the West met the ‘Orient,’ it was not a clash of civilizations as much as a clash of epistemologies. The British in the 19th century was very much on its way to becoming completely modernized. Along with the visible architectural and landscape changes that were happening in the old world,7 what was also occurring was a new way of placing the role of humans in the linear map of history and along with the rest of nature and fellow human beings. When the British invaded India, it was not only a physical space but also an epistemological space: The British conquest of India brought them into a new world which they tried to comprehend using their own forms of knowing and thinking. . . . The British believed that they could explore and conquer this space through translation: establishing correspondences could make the unknown and the strange knowable. (Cohn, 1996, p. 53) The British believed that the hermeneutic and epistemological tools that they had were strong enough to be able to understand the Orient. Even though a lot of what they saw and experienced in the East was ‘curious,’ ‘alien’ and ‘primitive,’ the normalizing paradigm of their knowledge practices in the 19th century lent itself easily towards grasping the Indian experience from, as it were, outside the engaged reality of the West–East encounter. This ultimately meant that a form of Procrustean epistemic framework was applied to Indian practices and beliefs. An important tool in bringing Indian practices into the paradigm of modernity was to place the Indian or non-Western notion of time into a historical linearity. This was effected by reimagining the Indian past as temporally coeval with the rest of the Western world. By placing the Indian ‘past’ in with Western history, the complete translation of Indian experiences along Western standards was complete. In other words, the British, through the historization of the Indian past, sought to understand India and 9

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thereby create a common discourse through which normative channels (broadly in the legal and nomological sense) can be built. This was through the historization of the Indian past.8 What this tells us is that colonialization must be understood as operating at different levels. If the formal and the legalistic aspects of colonial rule can be read off historical documents and the treatises that were formed, then the subterranean aspects of colonial rule will have to be read between the lines, so to speak. In other words, the implicit nature of colonial power had been to create subtle instruments of governance which was predicated on the creation of informal networks of discourse, which was then disseminated through the various institutions (educational, administrative, etc.) and practices (history writing, scientific education, etc.) that the colonial masters brought about. Sudipta Kaviraj has perceptively analysed this double phenomenon inherent in the generation of power and colonial rule in his book Imaginary Institution of India, where he says, There are some operations which wielders of power consider both vital and unmentionable. Purely administrative histories find it difficult to name such things. Formal implements of governance quite often depend on informal mechanisms which cannot by their very nature be part of the declared world of political language. (Kaviraj, 2010, p. 48) This battle of the different epistemologies can be witnessed in the substantial difference in how modern Western communities in the 19th century viewed themselves and the ‘Orient’ represented themselves. The Western notion of their place in the world was preceded by their belief in certain values whose roots in the modern times go back to Enlightenment values like freedom, the spirit of scientific endeavour, the role of the state in respect to the role of the Church, etc. But notions of freedom as the separation of the private religious sphere from sovereign control was an organic development out of certain historical events and battles that was peculiar to the West. Colonialism 10

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meant the beginning of the imposition of certain historically contingent values onto newer geographic territories. It was the start of an asymmetric relation where the traffic of values was always one-sided – from the West towards the Orient, from the colonizer to the colonized. Thus, when we talk about colonialism as an imperial strategy, what is meant is the dissemination of certain values and knowledge structures. Integral to the idea of “imperial formation” is a notion of “imperial knowledges.” These are the universalizing discourses, the world-constituting cosmologies, ontologies, and epistemologies, produce in those complex polities at their upper reaches by those persons and institutions who claim to speak with authority. (Inden, 2000) Colonization means not only the annexation of geographical spaces but also the application of modern self-representing techniques to traditional communities – or, as Kaviraj calls them, fuzzy communities – whose history was not tied to Christendom.9 A fuzzy community is that in which the construction of the individual was tied to a larger social or historical context. ‘Being fuzzy’ implied having an identity that was in a way fuid. This meant that a person could belong to more than one ‘identity’ – a person could identify themselves with their religion, caste, village or profession all at the same time and not feel any sense of inner tension. The discursive realities of the person from a fuzzy community was different from the colonial elite who control the central power and who have inherited the language of individual rights. For the colonizer, identities were supposed to have defnite boundaries, and the colonizer was baffed to fnd fuzzy identities where a person could have multiple personalities at the same time. But faced with such fuzziness in the colonized, the colonizer was impatient to delimit the boundaries of identities more sharply. A successful method which was employed by the British against the Indian fuzzy sense of self was what Appadurai calls 11

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the enumerative strategy (Appadurai, 1996, p. 116). According to Appadurai, the history of British rule in the nineteenth century may be read in part as a shift from a more functional use of number in what has been called the fiscal militarism of the British state at home to a more pedagogical and disciplinary role. Indian bodies were gradually not only categorized but given quantitative values, increasingly associated with what Ian Hacking has called “dynamic nominalism,” that is, the creation of new kinds of self by officially enforced labeling activities. (Appadurai, 1996, p. 125) What can be gleaned from reading the many historians and authors on the rise of nationalism and colonialism in the Indian subcontinent is that the colonial project was coeval with the project of modernity. Many of these historians seem to converge on the belief that colonization was not merely sanctioning different forms of logic but was also about creating new normative planes of discourse whose epistemological source was mainly Western in outlook. Frantz Fanon, the French philosopher and anti-colonialist, for example, has powerfully expressed this in his works. He says The colonial world is a Manichaean world. The colonist is not content with physically limiting the space of the colonized, i.e., with the help of his agents of law and order. As if to illustrate the totalitarian nature of colonial exploitation, the colonist turns the colonized into a kind of quintessence of evil. Colonized society is not merely portrayed as a society without values. The colonist is not content with stating that the colonized world has lost its values or worse never possessed any. The “native” is declared impervious to ethics, representing not only the absence of values but also the negation of values. He is, dare we say it, the enemy of values. In other words, absolute evil. (Fanon, 2004, p. 6) 12

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Even if we discount the anti-colonialist fervour of those times in France in the 1960s that necessitated Fanon’s strong language, we can still see that the encounter between the West and the ‘Orient’ produced a form of violence that was pervasive across multiple registers. That is, the informal methods of hegemonizing the colonies were through different forms of enculturation and the diffusion of the practices of knowledge creation. Through the administrative and legalistic logic, what the colonizer was able to do was initiate new boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. In other words, through redrawing the normative behavioural patterns of the colony, the imperialist power was able to create – through the spread of its language and educational institutions – a new moral code whose effects the Indian subcontinent still carries. All these political, social and aesthetic sensibilities which have come down to us as being ‘modern’ is what the heritage of modernity has bequeathed.10 The philosopher who was probably the first to give a powerful map of modernity and its political manifestations through Western imperialism, capitalism and the rise of different modern power techniques was Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a student of Heidegger, came to realize the immediacy of the problem of modernity and its political structure not only through a solid education in political philosophy but also through her personal difficulties as an exile from Nazi Germany. In one of her major works, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt traces how the call for human rights started with the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man, which declared humans as the source of moral claims. These rights, which were declared to be inalienable and irreducible to other rights, were but the beginning of an essentializing human project that made “the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human .  .  . [humans’] greatest danger” (Arendt, 1973, p. 300). She says If a human being loses his political status, he should, according to the implications of the inborn and inalienable rights of man, come under exactly the situation for which the declarations of such general rights provided. Actually, the opposite is the case. It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities 13

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which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man. This is one of the reasons why it is far more difficult to destroy the legal personality of a criminal, that is of a man who has taken upon himself the responsibility for an act whose consequences now determine his fate, than of a man who has been disallowed all common human responsibilities. (Arendt, 1973, p. 300) The paradoxical double element in the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man was that a person was a human being only to that extent they had the basic right to be human, but when it came to the definitional scope of ‘human,’ the notion of human was so universal that the idea of humanity became an abstraction removed from all social and cultural contexts. The fundamental right of humankind became tied to an essentialist notion of what human nature was considered to be. This essential universal value came to be a sense of freedom or liberty as expressed in the French Revolution and the American Revolution. To be human meant to realize one’s essentialist core, which is to be free. Rights were inalienable because the nature of human being was to be free. But through certain historical events and contingencies in 18th-century France and United States, this basic human right to be free was refracted to be constitutive only to citizens of nations. Because of this, there came to be a further double bind on this abstract but essentialist concept of human nature. If freedom was what was at the core of being human, much of the debate on human rights got bounded with the right of national emancipation as though to be a human one had to be a citizen of a nation. This meant that through a form of ironic reversal, the right of the individual human being became the right of the people – the collective as expressed in a nation. Thus, for an individual to be free, a nation had to be free with sovereign self-governing powers, and thus, the individual was no longer a human (homme) but only a citizen (citoyen). The promulgation of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man did two things. One, it extolled the rights of the individual. The rights of ‘man’ (it would take a few more years to 14

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think of humankind as including women and others, as well) meant that suddenly each person was free to pursue, unbounded by the historical chains of privilege, their wishes and opportunities. The human being became the author of law and sovereignty, as opposed to either the Church or the king. Two, it ensured that many people who were earlier outside the border of sovereign power – embodied in the king – were now enfolded in legitimate power. As we saw, historically, human rights came to be enshrined only in the institution of a nation-state. But all the same, rights became a universal principle. This form of universality was, to use Balibar’s terminology, an “intensive universality” (Balibar, 2014, p. 170). In other words, rights were accorded, in practical political affairs, not to all humanity but only to humans who exhibited enough of a homogenization and a ‘civilized’ culture: The whole question of human rights, therefore, was quickly and inextricably blended with the question of national emancipation; only the emancipated sovereignty of the people, of one’s own people, seemed to be able to insure them. As mankind, since the French Revolution, was conceived in the image of a family of nations, it gradually became self-evident that the people, and not the individual, was the image of man. (Arendt, 1973, p. 291) The concept of human rights, because it was tied to national identity, was not extensively universal, in the sense of potentially including all humanity. Some people were excluded whose self-determination was not determined through nationalistic categories and institutions. A far-reaching consequence of this double-edged sword of the promulgation of the rights of humankind meant statelessness – a modern mass phenomenon. If only people who were part of the institution of a state with well-defined geographic boundaries were entitled to human rights, then it meant that people who were not still part of the ‘comity of nations’ would have to start the process of becoming one. But that still didn’t rule out the huge number of people who faced internal 15

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repression and violence from their own a state and were thrown out of a nation – for whatever reason. They became stateless. Stateless people are those who lived outside the pale of the law, and they became easy victims for the state apparatus to deal with as they pleased, because stateless refugees can easily be subject to ‘exceptional’ violence by the state. Statelessness, according to Arendt, became the “newest mass phenomenon in contemporary history, and the existence of an ever-growing new people comprised of stateless persons, the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics” (Arendt, 1973, p. 277). This new category of people whose legal rights were in limbo because they didn’t have a nation as their home came into prominence especially after the First World War. The Heimatlosen were pushed outside the boundary of legalistic appeal. If the mere human – like the person who is about to die at the scaffold (or electric chair if you will) – has nothing in them worth being human but their bare life, as Agamben has theorized, one can only imagine the case of the stateless people whose identity has not even been assigned. These insights are also reflected in the recent work of Seyla Benhabib on exiles and the nature of statelessness, where she says the subject of human rights law is the individual person, even if the circumstances and causes leading individuals to seek refuge and asylum are always collective; in centering on the individual, the law is forced to neglect the interdependence of economic, climate- related, military, and other factors in the society of states, which give rise to these collective circumstances. (Benhabib, 2018, p. 114) The philosophers who were instrumental in drafting the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man did not reflect the opinion of St. Paul, who said that “the law is not made for a righteous person, but for the lawless and insubordinate, for the ungodly and for sinners, for the unholy and profane” (Timothy 1:9). The people who drafted the declaration believed that being lawful should be the primary aim of everyone – the criminal and the 16

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just. The drafters believed in the Kantian dictum that the only way to be free was to obey a universal law. This Kantian understanding of how obeying the law was at the same time both being free and being human (through obeying the categorical imperative) was instrumental in subsequent interpretations of the content of human rights. With the advent of legalistic constitutionalism, what came to pass was that the sovereignty of the state became immanent not in the king but in the law. The law was not to merely repress the criminal or merely to promote justice, but rather, by becoming universal, it was instituted to guide any kind of behaviour. This also paradoxically meant that if it were in the nature of all humans, as Kant has proven, to be free because they are able to obey the law because of their inherent rationality, then those people whose rational powers haven’t reached the required maturity will need to be ‘made free’ by more enlightened communities.11 But this idea of progress and the confidence in Enlightenment values started to crumble during the First World War as ‘advanced’ Western countries fought a war where millions were killed. This led to a lot of self-introspection. The crucial question that needed to be answered after the First World War was if the Western countries are so enlightened, why did they fight each other? More importantly, how did Enlightenment values lead to state violence – that is, the violence of the state against its own people? What is significant in 20th century history is the kind of violence that governments (both fascist governments and other totalitarian governments) have inflicted on people within its own borders. If law were instituted to bring order and control behaviour, how can violence be legitimized within the state apparatus? One would think that if all were rational, they would see the futility of violence and large-scale destruction. But somehow, the rise of totalitarian governments in the West belies this conclusion. In totalitarian Western governments, especially during the interwar years, violence and law seemed to go hand in hand. Even if one were a Hobbesian and believed in the need for a despotic Leviathan in order to instil peace among warring peoples, the reality of the rise of totalitarian governments seemed to point 17

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to the opposite. It was as though the Leviathan was inflicting the violence on a people who might otherwise have been peaceful. The logic of modern totalitarianism shows that state leaders – with despotic power – are instrumental in bringing violence on their own people. Underlying this logic of state extermination – whether it be ethnic cleansing, pogroms or political killing – is an exclusionary tactic which was diabolically used by despots to exterminate large scores of people. What is crucial in Arendt’s diagnosis of modern problems of large-scale violence and the reality of totalitarian governments is her insight that on the universalistic conception of human rights, it is not possible to exclude someone from its rubric without also denying them the right to be even human.12 The exclusionary circumstances of human rights ironically makes people become alienated from humanity itself. It must be remembered that Arendt’s contribution is not merely pointing out that there are foreigners whose legal status is in limbo because of political events. She makes the larger claim that the engine of modern administrative logic enables the production of the excluded in the state apparatus itself. The rise of totalitarian governments is due to this productive capacity of the state to exclude – through denying people an identificatory category – people from civic rights and thereby make them easy targets for extermination. Arendt in the last chapter of the second part of Origins of Totalitarianism argues that modern forms of political violence is a tragic consequence of modern imperialist wars. If the growth of the political values of human rights, individualism and nationalism perpetuated a certain understanding of the human self, it also excluded tribes and communities which were felt not be civilized enough to be independent. The origins of totalitarianism in a way can be traced to a particular turning that modern history took after the French Revolution. With this turning, there opened up an epistemological and political space in which state violence, which was a completely modern phenomenon, could have free play. This kind of violence traces back to a form of instrumental thinking that modernity inherited. We will discuss this in the next section.

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Instrumental violence If political theorists are considered to be the diagnosticians of the times they live in, some of the modern problems that we have faced in the past 100 years have really befuddled the ingenuity of these theorists. As we look at the human lives that we have lost in the past 100 years alone, it is difficult not to think of the cruelty of the large-scale violence that was perpetrated. Unlike in premodern times, in which warfare was hand to hand and was confined to a particular battlefield, modern warfare – with its large destructive machines – and the capacity to kill thousands, if not more, instantly presents the modern theorist with a unique problem. How did we get here – to a time in history in which millions have marched onto battlefields, at the command of superiors – to discharge bullets and bombs on people who were and will also remain anonymous. In this section, I aim to make conceptual connections between the condition of modernity and large-scale political violence by understanding the role of technology. One such modern event that is unprecedented is obviously the pogrom against the Jews in Germany during the Second World War. Such a kind of violence was so horrific that the philosopher Lacoue-Labarthe was moved to say that it was the ‘tragedy of our times.’ It is so unprecedented that he finds the Holocaust to be the ultimate event (Ereignis) which has broken history into two. For him, the Holocaust is the caesura – the break – “which within history interrupts history and opens up another possibility of history, or else closes off all possibility of history” (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1990, p. 45). The event of the Holocaust has opened up an irreversible temporality in which what historically comes after the caesura will never be the same as what went before: the end will and can never again resemble the beginning. Ironically, the philosopher who provided many philosophical tools to deal with the modern problem of large-scale violence and political brutality was Heidegger. I say ironic because Heidegger had Nazi affinities and was briefly a member of the Nazi Party.13 For Heidegger, the most important problem for modern times is the rise of technology. It was for later philosophers like Arendt

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to make explicit the insidious connection between technological modernity and political violence.14 Technology is ultimately a way of thinking, according to Heidegger: “The manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve, all belong to what technology is” (Heidegger, 1993, p. 312). What common sense tells us is that the right way to approach technology is through the concept of instrumental rationality. In a way, what instrumental thinking tells us is that the essence of technical objects is to be useful no matter the internal composition of what the object is. But technology as we use today has advanced a great deal from mere tools and instruments. With prescience, Heidegger saw 60 years ago that what we know now as the technology of film and television, of transportation and especially air transportation, of news reporting and as medical and nutritional technology, is presumably only a crude start. No one can foresee the radical changes to come. But technological advance will move faster and faster and can never be stopped. In all areas of his existence, man will be encircled ever more tightly by the forces of technology. These forces, which everywhere and every minute claim, enchain, drag along, press and impose upon man under the form of some technical contrivance or other – these forces, since man has not made them, have moved along since beyond his will and have outgrown his capacity for decision (Heidegger, 1966, p. 51) The question that Heidegger asks is, “what is the ground that enabled modern technology to discover and set free new energies in nature?” (Heidegger, 1966, p. 50). If we think of technology as the advancement of science that has enabled people to live longer lives, to be happier and to be able to use many more resources, then such a view for someone like Heidegger is naïve. There is an obverse side to technology which shows the dangerous side of it. The danger with a technological frame of mind is that “the approaching tide of 20

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technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking” (Heidegger, 1966, p. 56). The problem with calculative thinking is that technology conceals a form of our living which is inherent in our collective existence. Heidegger understands the world that we live in not merely as a world of things – both living and non-living. For him, the world that we inhabit is primarily a world imbued with meaning and significant structures. Human beings, according to Heidegger (for purposes of exposition, I am simplifying some of the intricacies of Heideggerian philosophy, as this will do for our purposes now), are always involved in a world where there is always a pregiven structure of meaning and language. That is, we are, as Heidegger says, ‘thrown’ into the world that we come to inhabit. The things in the world that we see around us are ‘revealed’ to us in a horizon of meaningful structures – Gestell. In our modern technological world, on the other hand, our life becomes meaningful only to the extent that we perceive the things around us as equipment to be used for our ends. This is where he says the tragedy of our modern times is being revealed. For Heidegger, technology – the direction of which has been appropriated by modernity in a violent way from its Greek roots of techne – has come to mean a total mobilization of means towards human ends. This form of thinking and approaching our status in the world from a technological perspective has meant that we look at ourselves engaged not in meaningful intersubjective activities which can reveal further creative possibilities of coexistence. Rather, we now look at nature and ourselves as resources that can be exploited as energy sources (Heidegger, 1993, pp. 311–333). For Heidegger, the techne, in its original Greek roots, was a form of revealing meaning and opening up possibilities of human engagement: From earliest times until Plato the word techne, is linked with the word episteme. Both words are terms for knowing in the widest sense. They mean to be entirely at home 21

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in something, to understand and be expert in it. Such knowing provides an opening up. As an opening up, it is a revealing. (Heidegger, 1993, pp. 318–319) Heidegger says that modern technology, unlike Greek techne, doesn’t reveal possibilities but does the opposite. By enframing (Gestell) all things in the subject–object dichotomy, technological thinking, broadly interpreted, takes whatever is not the subject as merely pure objects detached from the epistemic subject. This form of instrumental thinking always leads one to further attempting to open up nature and its objects to expedite the process of ‘unlocking’ it for our goals and needs. This expediting process “is always directed from the beginning toward furthering something else, i.e., toward driving onto the maximum yield at the minimum expense” (Heidegger, 1993, p. 321). From the technological perspective, there are no ultimate goals, whether it be serving God, helping fellow beings or making larger sense of our lives. Human beings from in this view are also resources to be used and maximized. When we are engrossed in the technological form of thinking, we become blind to what it is that we want to manipulate for our needs and ends. It could have started with a heuristic division between nature as passive resource and humans as producers or creators, but soon, this distinction becomes blurred in the ends–means logic. It is only a short step from there to thinking of humans as being a part of a network of resources themselves. And the utilization of all resources is done by an anonymous somebody, and everything is moving towards the goal of greater efficiency and mobilization. Our technological mindset has meant that whatever we encounter in our world, we perceive only as resources for something else and never as it is. The technological understanding of our world is so universal that when we come across any anomalies in our everyday practices that resists our technological advance, we are baffled but at the same time confident that that object can be brought under our control and ultimately be made a resource. In a way, Heidegger was meaning to say that technology fosters a particular mindset which is coeval with instrumentality: 22

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instrumentality refers to a way of approaching our world in terms of means and ends. This insight has had a lot of influence with subsequent philosophers who have tried to think deeply of modernity and modern political problems. This understanding of how technology ‘enframes’ our mindset and constrains our thinking into looking at nature and ourselves are mere resources whose worth is only in its usefulness has set philosophers like Arendt, Herbert Marcuse and Andrew Feenberg into thinking that instrumentality is a clue to unlocking some of the political and social consequences of modernity and its practices. Someone like Feenberg goes that extra bit to believe in technological determinism: Unlike science and mathematics, technology has immediate and powerful social impacts. It would seem that society’s fate is at least partially dependent on a non-social factor which influences it without suffering a reciprocal influence. This is what is meant by “technological determinism.” (Feenberg, 1992, p. 304) This means for Feenberg that “modern forms of hegemony are based on the technical mediation of a variety of social activities, whether it be production or medicine, education or the military” (Feenberg, 1992, p.  302). Even if one is not inclined, as I am not, to go all the way with Feenberg’s thesis of technological determinism, an important lesson from his work as well as his teacher’s work – i.e., Marcuse’s work – is that the time of modernity is unique in engendering a form of thinking that is uniquely one-dimensional and quantifiable. This has led to a form of abstract reification of human nature whose essence is merely the calculable input in statistical rationality. As Marcuse put it well in his book One-Dimensional Man, technology has become the great vehicle of reification – reification in its most mature and effective form. The social position of the individual and his relation to others appear not only to be determined by objective qualities and laws, but these qualities and laws seem to lose their 23

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mysterious and uncontrollable character; they appear as calculable manifestations of (scientific) rationality. The world tends to become the stuff of total administration, which absorbs even the administrators. (Marcuse, 2013, p. 172)15 This form of technical reification has a social and political correlate as well. When we review the formal rules of administrative law, we can discern that many of its purposes are to delimit and circumscribe the powers of different kinds of agencies – whether it be human or institutional – thereby reifying the essence of humans to be that which can be easily governed. If technology was a means of using objects as resources for efficiency, then it is not a surprise that this mindset should look at political beings as means for the advancement of efficient power. The nature of political discourse in modernity, as we saw in the earlier section, kept in step with the calculative rationality of human pursuits in other fields as well. This meant that humans were reified to have an ‘essential’ nature only as long as those humans were to be governed – be given support in sustaining their life. Through a combination of the administrative logic (I use ‘administrative’ and ‘instrumental’ interchangeably) of modern governments with the nominalizing logic of universal rights discourse, we can see that governmental power was tied up with ultimately determining the boundary of what is to be human and what is not to be human. The Holocaust is the classic and horrific example where technology (and technological thinking) was used effectively to exterminate people whose human function had been made obsolete through the mere device of converting undesirables into those that are politically otiose. Institutionally, modern history has shown that violence is made possible through the universalizing and moreover essentializing of categories that are to capture the human essence. For someone like Arendt and also to a larger extent her teacher Heidegger, as we saw, the quest of human essence is the basis of technological thinking. This kind of thinking can produce only homogeneity and universality. In keeping with these reflections on the condition of modernity, Hannah Arendt in her polemical pamphlet “On Violence” 24

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makes the case that the world has moved to a time in history which is not only completely new but also characterized by a kind of violence that is purely instrumental. Arendt’s essay on violence comes at a post-Holocaust and post-nuclear world in which the destructive potentiality of technical advances were at the highest. The spate of global violent events largely initiated by powerful state apparatuses led people to believe that violence was through the effective abrogation of power to enable the state or the wielder of power to make others do as they wish. Arendt, on the other hand, said that violence is not merely a handmaiden of power. “Violence” according to her, is distinguished by its instrumental character. Phenomenologically, it is close to strength, since the implements of violence, like all other tools, are designed and used for the purpose of multiplying natural strength until, in the last stage of their development, they can substitute for it. (Arendt, 1972, p. 145) Power, though conceptually cognate with violence, is a unique political category. Power can be legitimate or illegitimate: Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together. When we say of somebody that he is “in power” we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name. (Arendt, 1972, p. 143) Power, as opposed to violence, needs number and legitimacy. Power at some level, for Arendt, is partially coeval with obedience. When obedience is extracted from the subjects of a state through numbers, power becomes legitimate. The greater the number who obey, the greater the legitimacy index of the authority that wields the power. It is only when obedience from a group is denied that power is undermined. 25

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At least according to Arendt, that political structures seek power as power is the inherent element for the justification of the existence of any political community. Power is that which justifies the existence of a polis – broadly understood: “What it [power] does need is legitimacy. . . . Power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert, but it derives its legitimacy from the initial getting together rather than from any action that may follow” (Arendt, 1972, p.  151). “Violence,” on the other hand, “is instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues. And what needs justification by something else cannot be the essence of anything” (Arendt, 1972, p. 150). The instrumental nature of violence is evidenced not only in the conceptual map that Arendt gives us but also in social and historical reality. Ironically, with the advent of technical expertise, violence was instrumentalized in a way unseen in history. Such literal instrumentalization of the implements of violence further distanced the person pushing the button (of the bomb, if you will) from the people being killed. If the hand-to-hand combat was the order of the day in premodern times and if gunpowder16 made shooting and bombing from long distances possible, the invention of the nuclear bomb distances even further the people fighting each other. Earlier, state violence was a means of showcasing the power of sovereignty. The greater the spectacle of violence, the stronger the message sent to the people of the power of the king. Modern times followed a break in our habits of punishment such that – as Traverso, the Italian Holocaust historian, puts it – after the French Revolution, for example, “execution henceforth mechanized and serialized, would soon cease to be a spectacle, a liturgy of suffering, and would instead become a technical process in the production line of death, a process that was impersonal, efficient, silent and rapid” (Traverso, 2003, p. 24). This efficient serialization of death is a modern phenomenon. This goes to show that state violence (or any form of modern violence for that matter) is impatient in wanting to categorize among its victims. The stateless, the refugees whose legal status is in limbo, are in the greatest danger of being victims of violence: 26

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The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion – formulas which were designed to solve problems within given communities – but they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. (Arendt, 1973, p. 295) The loss of identity exposes the stateless to the direct power of the state, which is its ability to exceptionally infict violence. The process which creates conditions for the state of exception is that which homogenizes and makes the victim faceless. There is an inherent link between the process of excommunicating from legal identities and the universalization of all stateless as having merely corporeal life. What, I hope this chapter has made clear is the interlocking connections that modernity as a form of life has enabled through our different social and political practices. If we categorize modernity through the notion of scientific progress and the lessening of unwanted pain, there is also the obverse side to it, which includes the possibility of large-scale destruction through technically perfect weapons of mass destruction. I claim that there is an underlying form of rationality which permeates not only our epistemological, social and political theories but also our different practices. In other words, when we review modern political theory and study the history of modern forms of state in our textbooks, we must also not forget that the reality of political history is far more revealing of what kind of social existence we practise than what textbooks tell us. If we are sometimes beguiled into thinking that democracy has been hard-won, which to a large extent is true, we must not forget that there are other subterranean epistemologies and practices which burst forth into violent eruptions from time to time. Modern problems such as the refugee crisis, the chemical and biological wars, the ethnic cleansing of various peoples, etc., are realities that we need to face, and that can be done only by understanding our overall human condition in the modern world. I have made two claims in this chapter. One, the condition of modernity engenders an instrumental epistemology. Two, this 27

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form of rationality is responsible, apart from other historical reasons, for the possibility of the large-scale violence that the modern world has witnessed over the past century. Both law and lawlessness are immanent to our modern form of living. In the next chapter, we will discuss what violence does to our human agency.

Notes 1 If one were to count only three genocides in the 20th century – the Armenian genocide (1915–1916), the Holocaust (1941–1945) and the Rwandan genocide (1994), the casualties of violence would exceed 8 million if we don’t take into account aftershock and contagion processes. That probably could have led to another 4 million deaths. Read Midlarsky, 2005 for a detailed history of these three genocides. Apart from genocides and the millions of casualties in the two world wars was the mass violent displacement of people – or, as Hobsbawm writes, “the flood of human jetsam” – and the tragic effects that wars have caused. The Korean War, for example, produced 5 million displaced people. Another example is the Partition of India in 1947, which caused the displacement of 15 million people, along with millions of deaths. To know more about partition violence in the subcontinent, read the work of Paul Brass, especially (Brass, 2003). 2 This thesis is also held by Michaud, 2004 and Staudigl, 2013. Read especially the introduction to the edited volume by Michael Staudigl. 3 This in a way can be understood not merely as the secularization of our culture and the separation of church and state in our power apparatus but also as Weber theorized, as the institutionalization of purposive-rationalist thinking. 4 If we are looking for the sharpest presentation of this problem of modernity, we must turn to Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit. Whatever Hegel’s solution might have been to circumvent this problem, the credit for the identification and problematization of our modern existence has to go to him. For Hegel’s contribution to the discourse on modernity, read (Pippin, 1997), especially pages 157– 184. Also read Habermas (Jürgen Habermas, 1987) to know the role that Hegel’s philosophy plays in our understanding of how modernity is constituted. But for an alternative interpretation on Hegel and his relation to modernity, read Frederic Jameson (Jameson, 2010). Frederic Jameson believes, unlike standard Hegel interpretations, that it doesn’t do justice to read Hegel solely as a thinker of modernity. He says,

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The Americans have tried to forestall this unfortunate development by lending Hegel contemporary relevance as a philosopher of modernity; and insofar as the epithet directs our attention to the more immediate cultural problems of Napoleonic and post-revolutionary society the effort is meritorious. But it cannot long block the downward rush; and when “modernity” comes to be endowed with all the familiar Nietzschean and existential characteristics – death of god, end of values, alienation, etc. – Hegel’s originality as a thinker evaporates (along with his relevance to the postmodern age, for which none of these “problems” are any longer an issue). (Jameson, 2010, p. 11) 5 The paradigm shift in the cosmological vision from premodern to modern times has been showcased wonderfully in Alexandre Koyre’s classic book From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Koyré, 1968). 6 Expressed in the American Declaration of Independence as “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” 7 If one wants to learn the visible architectural and artistic expressions that the project of modernity effected in the modern world, one can read David Harvey (Harvey, 1989). He finds connections between modernism and the art movement in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Moreover, he aims to look at the history of architectural designs in big cities as a “representation of a connection between the urban experience and modernist thought and practice” (David Harvey 26). Obviously, the locus classicus on the relation between urban experience and its impact on human self-representation is Simmel’s essay Metropolis and the Mental Life, written in 1903. For a specific case study, please read the classic The Painting of Modern Life by T. J. Clark (2008), where Clark talks about the influence that the changing modernizing landscape had on Parisian artists like Manet, Monet and Edgar Degas, among others. This book gives a great account of the sweeping modernizing changes that were happening in Paris and how artists reacted to that. Even though Clark’s book talks mainly about Paris and the artists around it, it is invaluable in giving us hints about the larger social changes that were happening in Britain and France – the two leading financial and cultural centres of the old world. 8 One can read the now-famous essay by Thapar criticizing the underlying rationalist notion of progress and other Western Enlightenment values which undergird one of the first histories of India written by

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an English writer – James Stuart Mill. Thapar says, “For Mill the principal value of a culture was the degree to which it contributed to the furtherance of rationalism and individualism. He saw neither of these two values in Hindu civilization and therefore condemned it severely” (Thapar, 1978, p.  4). To learn more about how James Mill’s The History of British India was a defining moment in the British historiographical imagination, read (Knowles, 2011). 9 The colony was imagined through a classificatory logic where for the convenience of rule and administration, many administrative techniques were used by the British to understand and rule India. This is so as to create ‘an official nationalism,’ to use Anderson’s phrase from his essay Western Nationalism and Eastern Nationalism: Is there a difference that matters? to mean how a form of nationalism arose as a reactionary response against popular nationalisms from below. 10 This view is also echoed by one of the most prominent critical religion theorists, Talal Asad. According to him, in the rulers’ attempt to outlaw customs the European rules considered cruel it was not the concern with indigenous suffering that dominated their thinking, but the desire to impose what they considered civilized standards of justice and humanity on a subject population – that is, the desire to create new human subjects. (Asad, 2003, p. 110) 11 Read Lucien Jaume (2009) for a history of the philosophical roots of the concept of human rights, especially pages 331–356 for the trajectory that the concept of universal rights took in Europe after the French Revolution. 12 Arendt takes her conceptual cue from Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Critique of Violence,” where he says that violence is an endemic part of law itself. He says there that all violence as a means is either lawmaking or law-preserving. If it lays claim to neither of these predicates, it forfeits all validity. If follows, however, that all violence as a means, even in the most favourable case, is implicated in the problematic nature of law itself. (Benjamin, 1986, p. 287) 13 With the rediscovery of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, many of his Nazi beliefs during the period of 1932–1936 have been unearthed. These views are unambiguously damning of his later silence on the question of his association with the Nazi Party and even show that

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National Socialism and Heidegger share a common set of fundamental commitments. For more, read Adam Knowles (Knowles, 2019). 14 For a more detailed discussion on this, read (Bauman, 2017). For a contrary view, see Gillian Rose. She doesn’t believe that there is a tight fit between the Holocaust and the legal-rational features of modernity. She resists equally the super-eminence conferred on the Holocaust as the logical outcome of Western metaphysical reason, and the unique status bestowed on Judaism as providing the communitarian and ethical integrity which otherwise lies in ruins in the ‘post-modern’ world. (Rose, 1996, p. 11) 15 This view that the values of modernity and the Enlightenment have led to problems in the political and social world is a thesis that was first initiated by the early critical theorists. Adorno and Horkheimer, two of the earliest critical theorists, were the first to problematize the heritage of the Enlightenment in their work Dialectic of Enlightenment. According to them, the values of the Enlightenment has had a problematic reception in the modern world which it was their task to uncover. They wrote in the preface of that work that “what we had set out to do was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism” (Horkheimer et al., 2002, p. xiv). 16 Francis Bacon is said to have famously quipped that printing, gunpowder and the nautical compass were the three modern inventions that have changed the appearance and state of the whole world.

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2 VIOLENCE AND THE BODY

The truth of the body In the short story “Penal Colony,” written by Kafka (1961), a Traveller is being taken to a penal colony and shown around an elaborate torture device. He is taken there by an Officer, who shows the Traveller an apparatus that is designed to inscribe the punishment on the body of a Condemned Man. The Officer talks to the Traveller in a language (in the story, in French) that the Condemned Man or the Soldier who is holding the Condemned Man can’t understand. The Officer gives the Traveller a lengthy description of the work of the apparatus and its different parts. While the Officer is explaining the history of the penal colony and the purpose of the apparatus, the Condemned Man, who is being held by the Soldier, looks at the two of them – trying to grab at any morsel of meaning that he might be thrown from their body language and facial expressions. But the Condemned Man doesn’t know the sentence of his punishment: “There would be no point in telling him. He’ll learn it on his body” (Kafka, 1961, p. 95) says the Officer. As in many of other Kafka’s stories, there are always allegories that point to the play of larger issues. This particular story can also be read as a parable for the increasing jargonizing of modernist legal terminology where a layperson who is the defendant is at the mercy of the lawyer, who is the specialist. But that is not the moral that I want to draw from this story. Let me first describe the torture apparatus in the story. The apparatus consists of three parts. There is a bed at the bottom

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and an inscriber at the top, and in the middle, there is a harrow. The Officer gloats over the effectiveness of the apparatus to the Traveller, who is initially indifferent but who as the tour gets along is drawn into the intricacies of the machine. The Condemned Man is laid out naked, face down, on the bed, and he is strapped tightly into the bed. Some felt has been stuffed into his mouth, which is to stop him from biting his lips. The bed and the inscriber are of the same size and separated by about 2 metres, with the inscriber hanging over the bed. The harrow is in between, where there are needles arranged in a row. The Officer is proud to say that the harrow hardly squeaks and is efficient in its potential to inscribe the punishment in the body of the condemned. The Officer then gets into the detail of the process whereby the punishment is inscribed. When the man lies down on the Bed and it begins to vibrate, the Harrow is lowered onto his body. It regulates itself automatically so that the needles barely touch his skin; once contact is made the steel ribbon stiffens immediately into a rigid band. And then the performance begins. An ignorant onlooker would see no difference between one punishment and another. The Harrow appears to do its work with uniform regularity. As it quivers, its points pierce the skin of the body. which is itself quivering from the vibration of the Bed. So that the actual progress of the sentence can be watched, the Harrow is made of glass. (Kafka, 1961, pp. 99–100) The whole process lasts 12 hours. By the end of the 12 hours, the man is dead, and he is later buried. But when the man is under the harrow undergoing this punishment, there is a layer of cotton in the bed that turns the body slowly to give the harrow new areas to inscribe. While the harrow is digging into new areas of the man’s fesh, the lacerated parts are being spurted with water through another narrow hose. This immediately stops the bleeding and prepares the body for deeper inscribing. In the frst six hours, the condemned man feels nothing but

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pain but doesn’t die. The Offcer can’t but hide his amusement when he says But how quiet he grows at just about the sixth hour! Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted. It begins around the eyes. From there it radiates. A moment that might tempt one to get under the Harrow oneself. Nothing more happens than that the man begins to understand the inscription, he purses his mouth as if he were listening. You have seen how difficult it is to decipher the script with one’s eyes; but our man deciphers it with his wounds. (Kafka et al., 1961, p. 104) For some, this fictional description could well be in any history of modern-day violence, and nobody would be able to detect its incongruence from the surrounding historical account. This kind of elaborate torturing technique is usually identified with strategies that the state apparatus is considered to have used in modern times. One only needs to read the Gulag Archipelago of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn to find proof of the enormity of some of the torturing techniques that have been practised in the modern world. In the story, what is significant is that the person who is silent throughout is the Condemned Man. He is the onlooker of his own subjection. His agency is constrained. What in the story is presented as the confinement of the Condemned Man, who doesn’t even know his judgement, is a description that is accurate of many arrests and imprisonment of people around the world for political or other exceptional reasons, some would argue. It is not merely the physical subjection that is horrific but also the different legal and bureaucratic subjections that have preceded the arrest and confinement of the prisoner. What these methods of arrest and questioning point to are a new method of subjection. In a way, the physical subjection of the Condemned Man is the external signifier for the implicit forms of epistemological and moral techniques that are used to hem in and thereby control and constitute the modern human subject. The powers of incarceration are the logical step in a series of actions in which the human subject is already made to feel the weight of legalistic power in their daily life. 34

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When one reads the “Penal Colony,” along with some of Kafka’s other works, especially the Trial, there are some deep underlying metaphors to larger and older questions regarding the nature of justice, law and punishment. The “Penal Colony” has affinities with the fate of Job, who was faced with a series of tests by God for a crime he did not commit. And he didn’t even know why he was being punished.1 The completely anonymous way prisoners in totalitarian states have been imprisoned, tried and executed without raising either the curiosity or the horror of the neighbours or the media points to a background of political and epistemological practices which enable the completion of alienation in the modern political prisoner. This alienation is made possible through certain paradigm shifts that have been effected in our epistemological assumptions regarding how we understand the normative framework of our lives. All the institutions that we follow – whether it be the personal (family, ties of kinship, religion, etc.) or public (professional, friendships, etc.) – are guided by certain nomological considerations, which create the boundaries for what is acceptable behaviour and what is not. These boundaries in a way constitute our moral code in our daily lives. How those moral and epistemic boundaries in a way constitute and produce our behaviour is something I will look at in the next section. For some, on the other hand, the story of the penal colony is a dark reminder of what had happened in the past in certain totalitarian regimes. Not any more, they say. With penal reforms, such torture doesn’t occur anymore, it is believed. But such a naïve trust in political rhetoric is sure to be broken with even the quickest glance across the events that have transpired in the past few years, even in advanced democracies. In today’s world, torture still exists, as Rejali (2009) has pointed out in his book Torture and Democracy. But what is different from earlier forms of torture is that in today’s current world, the state (mainly) uses ‘clean techniques’ of torture. They are not psychological techniques but techniques to apply torture instruments to the body that leave no physical mark. But there is a continuity of purpose between torture regimes in totalitarian systems and those in non-totalitarian states, Rejali argues. The objective in both 35

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kinds of power systems is the same: to use violence on the body to extract information from the suspected criminal/terrorist.2 Since the end of the Cold war, people had assumed that torture would no longer exist. In the post–Cold War world, torture was seen to be the diabolical device of totalitarian regimes which haven’t become enlightened or democratic enough. But events like Abu Ghraib3 have exposed the lie in such an assumption. The question is not anymore whether we have torture still but rather why torture techniques are still practised by democracies. The crucial difference between modern forms of torture and classical forms is that earlier, punishment was public and was about the sovereign’s pleasure: “Torture now is not about the ruler’s pleasure, his satisfaction in the suffering of his enemies, the slow madness or painful death before his eyes over weeks” (Rejali, 2009, p. 537). In premodern times, as Foucault points out, torture was meant to “make everyone aware, through the body of the criminal, of the unrestrained presence of the sovereign” (Foucault, 1995, p. 49). Modernity withdrew the sight of the infliction of torture from the public view. In modern times, the state monopolized the act of torture. Through technological torture, the act of extracting information was thus appropriated by the state and was used as a form of justification for the existence of the act of torture itself. Torture was supposed to get the truth out of the prisoner. An internal relation between truth and the body of the condemned is implicitly maintained. This relation between truth and torture is still maintained in modern legal practices. Like classical, premodern torture, the goal of modern forms of punitive violence is to inscribe in the body of the criminal or the condemned marks of punishment. When the body gives way to complete pain, the truth is supposed to come out. Unlike in premodern times, by hiding the act of torture from public view, the state is meant to set an example – not a spectacle during which witnesses could see the torture – to an absent spectator. To that extent, the torture that was invisible created as much terror as the visible signs of sovereign violence. What we infer from Rejali is that by using clean methods of torture, the marks of the torture are hidden even from the condemned. 36

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What we must understand about torture even in classical times – whose genealogical roots go back to the Greek polis – is that torture was a means of extracting the truth. Alethiea (broadly translated as truth) as that which was ‘unconcealing’ meant that the process of coming to truth was through extracting truth from its concealing and obfuscating accretions, and in the case of the human, those accretions were corporeal. The Western philosophical tradition shows how “some of our inherited beliefs about truth, leads almost inevitably to conceiving of the body of the other as the site from which truth can be produced, and to using violence if necessary to extract that truth” (DuBois, 1991, p. 13). Dubois, analyses the Greek word for touchstone – basanos  – which was “a dark-coloured stone on which pure gold, when rubbed, leaves a peculiar mark” (DuBois, 1991, p. 16), which by semantic mutations came to have the figurative meaning of ‘test.’ This meaning of ‘touchstone’ as ‘test’ came to be applied analogously to juridical procedures in Athenian courts. Like the metal or coin is applied to the touchstone to see whether it is genuine or not, the human body is subjected to the test – basanos – to see whether it would yield to the truth. The test is the process of torture. If one is morally upright, one can survive the test of torture, it was believed. In the Greek legal system, slaves were considered to be those who always lied and prevaricated. The slave is put on the rack because it is assumed that because of their servile status, they will not produce the truth easily. The slave is tortured so as to bring out the truth, which is hidden in the slave, unlike in the case of aristocrats. The speech of the slave when it is tortured will, by definition, contain the truth. Thus, an axiom in the Greek polis was that torture produced the truth (in a slave). In classical torture, pain, confrontation and truth were bound together: they worked together on the patient’s body. The search for truth through judicial torture was certainly a way of obtaining evidence, the most serious of all – the confession of the guilty person; but it was also the battle, and this victory of one adversary over the other, that “produced” truth according to a ritual. (Foucault, 1995, p. 41) 37

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In modern forms of power, on the other hand, torture was instituted as a policy of coercions that act on the body so as to more effectively manipulate its gestures and behaviour. At the start of our juridical times, the human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it. A “political anatomy,” which was also a “mechanics of power,” was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others’ bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. (Foucault, 1995, p. 138) What this goes to show is that juridicality, truth, power and the body are somehow tied to each other inextricably. Torture is rightfully considered to be the crudest and cruellest form of punishment because torture as an act of violence paralyzes the body and makes the human subject ‘worldless’ and ‘wordless.’ It is an agreed-on fact when we reflect upon our daily lives we can see that we engage with the world around us both in a prelinguistic corporeal way and through the use of complex linguistic signs. We can say that a person’s ‘world’ is the totality of their engaged activities with their immediate environment. They are supposed to have meaning in their life only when the ‘world’ around them allows them to engage with it in different self-fulfilling ways. We project our wishes and plans onto the world, and thus, we create meaning wherever we go and in everything we do. The meaningful reference that is reflected from our activities is a projection of our intentional purposes onto the world. Our activities and the meaning they give us are in a way a self-mirroring activity. This relation that we humans have with the outside world is not a reflective or distantial relation between the human self and the non-self but a relation of, what Merleau-Ponty calls, ouverture au monde (openness to the world) (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 35). Openness to the world or “having a world” is to 38

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experience our world as a comprehensible reality. Such understanding, therefore, involves our whole being-our bodily capacities and skills, our values, our moods and attitudes, our entire cultural tradition, the way in which we are bound up with a linguistic community, our aesthetic sensibilities, and so forth. (Johnson, 1987, p. 102) This embodied nature of our meaningful activities is destroyed when our body is subjected to violent torture. The paradigm case of that is when the person tortured is in such excruciating pain that they are not able to express their feeling of pain. If we look at all our meaningful activities as those which can be expressed and communicated in language, pain represents a mental state which is not ‘significant’ in the sense in which my other mental states can be. Pain doesn’t represent anything in the outside world as my perceiving a pen or a table would be. Philosophers of mind have taught us that pain has no referential content. If the overarching medium for meaningful activities is that which can be expressed in language, then pain is obviously that which defeats the power of language to express. To borrow from Scarry’s important work Body in Pain, Physical pain – to invoke what is at this moment its single most familiar attribute – is language-destroying. Torture inflicts bodily pain that is itself language-destroying, but torture also mimes (objectifies in the external environment) this language-destroying capacity in its interrogation. (Scarry, 1985, pp. 19–20) When the torturer tortures the condemned, there is such excruciating pain that the only reality for the condemned is the phenomenal reality of their corporeal existence. This reality as having neither intentional nor extensional correlate to anything in the world refers only to itself. If our intentional inexistence (to use Brentano’s category to refer to imaginary thoughts) is that which can be semantically mapped onto either propositional 39

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thought or word images, the phenomenal nature of something like pain is such that pain cannot be so linguistically expressed and meaningfully mediated. In a way, pain becomes the world – the world turned inside out, so to speak. If the world creates the horizon of meaningful activities for our sentience, then the brute reality of pain closes the external world completely and externalizes our pain onto our existential condition. In such a condition, the world is negated, and pain becomes the only reality we know. In a way, pain overflows into the world and colours all our external engagement. This inner brute corporeal reality of pain is that which, for the tortured, manifests in the external world. Scarry says that in a painful condition “the prisoner experiences an annihilating negation so hugely felt throughout his own body that it overflows into the spaces before his eyes and in his ears and mouth; yet one which is unfelt, unsensed by anybody else” (Scarry, 1985, p. 36). As the condemned undergoes more pain, their world and their self are voided of all meaning, and only the reality of pain remains. The prisoner doesn’t have a world anymore but has only corporeal pain, which is the utmost obliteration of any form of contentful consciousness that they can have. The need to create meaning is so innate in our existence that even in the most dire circumstances, we are looking to engage with the world in a purposeful way.4 But pain at its most extreme opens us to that possibility in which we are unable to make meaning because our bodies are subjected to such an extreme torture that our linguistic abilities are made mute. Violence pushes us to the edge of our existential condition where we are on the precipice of losing our meaning of life. In a way, the eventuality of us being in a condition where all meaning will crumble and give way to a nihilistic condition is written into our life as a kind of existential vulnerability. We, as Heidegger pointed out in Being and Time, are thrown into the world and all our so-called purposeful activities fly away from the ultimate vulnerability that is written into our existential DNA.5 But however we deal with our existential vulnerability, violence forcefully rips open that vulnerability. In a way, to follow Heidegger, we are all vulnerable to death, and that feeling as 40

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a horizon precedes many of the activities that we engage in. As Judith Butler, who also has talked about our vulnerability, says, “[vulnerability] is a condition, a condition of being laid bare from the start and with which we cannot argue” (Butler, 2004, p. 31). We in our lives at each point try to cover over this vulnerability through the different activities that we engage in and thereby make our lives whole and meaningful. When the subject is at peace with themselves and the world around, there is a large network of cultural and communal meanings that surround them. The world that they inhabit is embodied through their affective and meaningful activities. During war – especially in modern forms of war, which is chemical, biological and on a large scale – when the apparatus of either the nation-state itself is the instrument of violence (when it is a matter of ethnic cleansing) or it is through an external enemy, all the visible signs of meaning for civilians are destroyed. Not only that, but the violence that is inflicted on the self, as we saw earlier, suddenly reveals the abyss of vulnerability – the loss of language – at the heart of every human existence. In everyday life, our vulnerability is buried under many of the meaningful and not-so-meaningful activities we engage in. The cultural meanings that we imbibe and the linguistic markers that we exchange are all imbued with significance that we hardly reflect on or notice as we go about our lives.6 When I drink from a bottle or ride a bus, I am using external physical signifiers which symbolize and make manifest a whole network of agreed-on practices that connect all of us in different ways. The gestures we pose, the gait that we use, even the twitch of the eye and the movement of the muscle all indicate a cultural memory that is encoded and historical. Not only is bodily memory culturally and historically encoded, but it goes deeper and further.7 We can even think of the body’s DNA, its self-immunizing antibody system, as a memory system. Our immune system when it encounters a foreign body reacts to it and produces certain antibodies. When the body encounters those same foreign bodies, the bodily memory is triggered to produce those antibodies again. This system of action and reaction is mediated through a complex form of corporeal memory that is embedded at both the 41

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cultural or conceptual level and at the nonconceptual level. This vulnerability, along with the historically embedded and culturally coded memory, is laid bare when the body is tortured. The abyss of vulnerability ‘presents’ itself as the cause or effect of our inability to speak, and what remains is only the cry of pain. Given these remarks on pain and torture, we can only imagine what relation torture establishes between the inflictor of pain and the tortured. The relation between the torturer and the tortured, as pain is inflicted more and more, reaches a crescendo of intensity where the tortured is slowly made to feel a complete annihilation of the world around them. When the pain is intense, the tortured phenomenological vision is blinded by everything but the pain. What would have started as the relation between two subjects with two separate worldviews in turn becomes the relation between one person (torturer) who remains the subject with a worldview, and the other person (tortured) becomes merely an object the more they lose their phenomenological orientation through their increased experience of pain. The subject–subject equation becomes through torture a subject–object relation. When the prisoner is tortured, they feel a complete annihilation of the world around them. For the tortured, the pain and interrogation is so intensive that the question being posed loses its meaning and urgency. The brutality is so grotesque that the tortured subject will give the answer readily because the question is of no consequence to them. When the pain is extreme, all the contents of consciousness is obliterated, the world around them is made senseless. Through the act of torture, the only thing that is accomplished is that the prisoner records the fact that intense pain is world destroying. The voice of the prisoner is silenced, while through pain the phenomenality of the body, which is undergoing pain, is brought to the fore. Whereas for the torturer, the instrument of torture is a language of which the objective is to eliminate the tortured’s voice, in the act of torture, the tortured prisoner is made to magnify the body’s presence while depriving that subject of a world, meaning, a voice and a self. The torturer, on the other hand, through the urgency that they put on the question and the answer that they require of the prisoner, becomes merely a voice for the question: 42

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“In his desperate insistence that his questions be answered, the torturer luxuriates in the privilege or absurdity of having a world that the other has ceased to have” (Scarry, 1985, p. 46). But in this way, power that a person can have over somebody manifests itself in the suppressing of a person’s corporeal engagement and through the confinement of the prisoner’s body. When the body is tortured, the corporeal possibilities of a body is slowly eliminated, and one is faced only with the brute force and violence of the other. The foregoing account of torture talks about the manifestation of power between the torturer and the tortured. This implies that torture is ultimately that which happens between two people. But the history of torture in the modern world has shown how the infliction of pain on the body of a person is operated through institutional apparatuses. As much as there is a personal aspect to the act of torture, there is also an impersonal aspect to the supposed legitimacy of the use of torture. The next section will therefore talk about how power and violence have become so institutionalized that the infliction of violence on the body of the human has come to be the result of impersonal nomological forces.

The phenomenology of power Any account of violence is sure to prick our moral sensibility. Sometimes, we are prone to think that violence exists only when there is a form of powerful oppression of or from a person. When someone is forced to obey laws that they feel are unjust, we feel then that is what engenders violence. To a certain extent, that is true. But power has become more insidious in its operations because force is not something that is external to one’s choices in life, but if we review our lives, we can see that all the things that we do are constituted within a horizon of a set of rules – whether those rules be formal, legalistic, customary or habitual. We hear of laws that are enforceable by the state and other customs which we, in our hearts, feel are merely informal laws and that one is free to break them with relative impunity. But whatever code of conduct one follows, as Derrida points out succinctly, 43

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there is no law without enforceability, and no applicability or enforceability of the law without force, whether this force be direct or indirect, physical or symbolic, exterior or interior, brutal or subtly discursive and hermeneutic, coercive or regulative, and so forth. (Derrida, 1992, p. 6) If with the notion of force there is an implicit connotation of violence, what is significant is that the state, in modern times, has come to occupy the position of being the only legitimate wielder of the instrument of that force that bridges regulative claims and our normative behaviour. The power of the state has grown because of the nomological reach of the modern state and its legislative power has become almost pervasive. We can see this even in ‘advanced’ countries, where the rule of law not only confines itself to the public sphere but also has dictates on how to govern one’s life. In other words, the reach of the law has gone into ‘caring’ for every individual’s life. This form of care has also an implicit economy of control. This is what Foucault calls pastoral care. In modern times, pastoral care has enabled the power of legislature to dictate the boundaries of the right to life of every individual. Pastoral care has expressed itself in the promulgation of laws against euthanasia, mercy killing, etc. Medical reform and the appropriation of medical education and practices through government institutions have led to a discursive circulation of the view that ultimately the life of the citizen is under the subjection of the law and the state. The obverse of the duty of the state to preserve life is paradoxically the lengths that the state goes to execute its duty. If peace and order are the conditions for a life to thrive, then the state many a time goes to the extreme of using police force or the threat of police force to prevent any disturbance to the ‘peace’ of the social body. If popular upheavals are an expression of popular sentiment, then the state is well in its right, according to statist logic, to put down such upheavals through force and violence so that ‘law and order’ is maintained. In a way, ironically, the law is enforced violently to bring about peace. This is possible because 44

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the law allows for this exception to its domain of justification. In a way, through the enforcement of law and by bringing in all ‘life’ and its activities in legal jurisdiction, the space for any kind of behaviour that can stand completely outside the circumference of law is negated. In this way, any kind of informal behaviour in the private sphere becomes in an indirect way to govern through lawful strictures. Ultimately, the eye of the law wants to see all and thus by being the spectator of the human drama also direct it in certain ways. This interplay of law and violence as two sides of the same coin goes to show that violence is not to be theorized as that which stands opposed to law – as the hydra-headed, chaotic element which needs the calm control of law. Violence is implicated in law itself. To borrow from Derrida again, For a critique of violence – that is to say, an interpretative and meaningful evaluation of it – to be possible, one must first recognize meaning in a violence that is not an accident arriving from outside law. That which threatens law already belongs to it, to the right to law (droit), to the law of the law (droit), to the origin of law (droit). (Derrida, 1992, p. 35) In a way, the inherent logic of law as that which allows force and violence was indicated in the earlier chapter. There we studied how violence has already happened at the ontological plane when through the exclusionary logic of statist law, people have been made less real and stripped of their human nature, and thus, humans are forced to be in this limbo category of being refugees, the stateless, political prisoners and suspected terrorists. These, by being eliminated from the purview of law completely, are made to be subjected to the complete arbitrary violence that is inherent in law. The elimination of the façade of lawful protection – which is the state of exception – brings out its other ugly face, which is violence. The state of exception to the law is that which inflicts the state’s absolute power on the subject.8 This form of force which is absolute is the new face of violence. When humans are faced with the absolute power of modern violence, 45

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all sense of self and agency becomes void. In a way, the hollowing out of another person’s sense of self is the greatest violent act that one can do. Thus, for example, the Jews at Auschwitz had already been made less than human, and the act of putting them in prison was just an expression of the nomological move that the state had already made. When through institutional mechanisms a process is set in motion to bring in people into the fold of the ‘nation,’ already inherent is an othering process whereby some people are pushed to the boundaries. This process creates a psychological impact on those stateless people whose sense of self is made completely alien to itself. This form of absolute alienation is starkly expressed in Levi’s autobiographical account If This Is a Man (Levi, 1959). In that book, the sense that one, as a reader, gets is the complete erasure of the dignity of being human. This erasure is most violent, but as one reads the book, the voiding happens most mechanically and suddenly when all the inmates have realized that they have hit rock bottom: For the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find in ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so the behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains. (Levi, 1959, p. 21) This kind of psychological alienation has been catalogued by people like Lawrence L. Langer, who has collected individual testimonies to the brutality of the violence of the Holocaust. Here Lawrence talks about one such survivor: 46

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She first encountered this dilemma immediately after the war, when she returned briefly to the town of her birth and tried to tell people there what had happened to her family. She remembers thinking that “My family were killed” was totally inadequate, because “killed,” she says, was a word used for “ordinary” forms of dying. But to say matter-of-factly that “My mother and brother and two sisters were gassed” as soon as they arrived at Auschwitz seemed equally unsatisfactory, because plain factuality could not convey the enormity of the event. She was especially reluctant to reduce her family’s disappearance to a mere statistic, because she was sure that was how her audience wanted to hear about it. (Langer and Mazal Holocaust Collection, 1991, p. 61) Both of these accounts (and more can be adduced)9 express a sense of helplessness of the existential state of those people whose sense of self has been hollowed out completely. We must understand that this phenomenological voiding is not merely a subjective feeling resulted through a personal sense of alienation but a collective feeling, as Freud in his Civilization and its Discontents diagnosed. For Freud, much of our diagnosed psychological conditions can be traced back to our modern existential problem, which, at bottom, is nothing but a diffuse sense of guilt – a topological variety of anxiety – and “the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt” (Freud, 1962, p. 81). What we can gather so far is that violence in modern times is double layered. If violence is the voiding of humanity, we must also take into account the micro-violent acts that are made possible at every stage of our lives. One form of violence that we looked at – the juridical form of violence as represented in the fictional story “Penal Colony” – is that in which the citizen or the human encounters the state which has abrogated to itself the power to award or condemn a person. In this dispensation, power is centralized and total. From this perspective, the sense of the possibility of a loss of one’s identity and the personal angst 47

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and the psychological effects it produces are enabled through the complete permeation of the power of the state in all our activities. One way of interpreting the techniques of power is to understand modern society as a form of social contract where the power is represented in a higher authority, then in a way, we are also substituting the conditions of our subjective constitution to a different power centre. The self-representational power that was promised through the Enlightenment and the French Revolution is deferred to the collective power which we call either the general will (à la Rousseau) or the state. By so doing, the identification concepts that make us are never immediate. That is, the recognitional concepts of one’s identity become mediated, in modern political situations, only through the state. By so doing, the state acquires a certain power in holding those concepts. It enables the state to give or withdraw those identities. When the identities are withdrawn, the person becomes not only stateless but less than human, as we saw in the first chapter. If we think of such exclusionary tactics as a form of violence inflicted on human identity, then physical or corporeal violence inflicted on the person is only, in a way, a reiteration of that violent act which has already happened at the discursive level. But whatever injury is done to a person – from the state’s perspective – there is always a breathing human agent that remains – that which cannot be wished away. As Butler puts it well, if violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange way of remaining animated and so must be negated again (and again). They cannot be mourned because they are always already lost or, rather, never “were,” and they must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness. Violence renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of its object. (Butler, 2004, p. 33) Therefore, at the heart of our modern political existence is this fear of being made part of this loop of violent negation where 48

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our nonexistence is reiterated again and again. The deaths that are ‘unmarked’ and unmourned are those identities which have not been assimilated into the discourse of political existence. The ordinary way of looking at human lives is to think of identities that mark and separate the people. Identities are those signifiers which are supposed to do the dual job of marking an individual and of differentiating them from someone else – the old Aristotelian tactic of differentiation and generalization. Violence, by trying to abort any sense of involved life that we can have, resides in the in-between space of constitutive identities. From what we saw in the first chapter of the politics of modernity and the police techniques of the modern state, dehumanization is just the other side of the technique of identification. In a way, my sustained argument has been to establish the case that with modernity, there have been implicit epistemological, representational and nomological foundations which by their very nature have given a space for violence from within its constituting boundaries. Now we need to take the argument further. For that, we have to look for certain non-foundationalist forms of moral and ethical engagement. Our relations with the other can no longer be mediated through what we saw as the nascently violent structure of law and power. This can happen if we can bracket out those epistemological assumptions regarding our own self vis-à-vis the other. The moral claims of the other on me and vice versa cannot be subjected to the rational-instrumental logic of modernity. One of the ways of situating a new ethical demand was theorized well by Levinas. I will make a slight detour into Levinasian ethics to show that attempts have been made to subvert the violent tendency of modern essentialist political logic. I make this detour to enable us to see how such philosophizing can happen, and moreover, I plan to take an insight or two from Levinas for my own discussion of the ethics and politics of everyday engagement when I come to the work of Wittgenstein. For Levinas, the political, being such a sphere whereby through its very nature, tends to overshadow all of our activities through its inherent logic to universalize governmentality. If all intersubjective behaviour is one of power and obedience, then ethical values become hierarchical, according to him. That is, for him, 49

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the domination of totality is also the total domination of politics, where “everything is political.” Left to itself, politics engages in the reduction of all areas of social life, and more particularly that of ethics to politics. The primacy of politics is the primacy of the synoptic, panoramic vision of society, wherein a disinterested political agent views society as a whole. For Levinas, such a panoramic vision, not only that of the philosopher but also that of the political theorist, is the greatest danger, because it loses sight of ethical difference – that is, of my particular relation to and obligations towards the Other. (Critchley, 1999, pp. 221–222) The totalitarian kinds of violence that have occurred in Western modern history have occurred only, at least for Levinas, through the homogenization of difference, thereby violently sublating the other through political means. To circumvent this logic of modern violence, Levinas suggested that we look at our neighbour as the other – i.e., as an absolute alterity. This absolute alterity is supposed to not be captured by any essentialist categories or paradigms for Levinas. This alterity or the otherwise than being which, to be sure, is understood in a being, differs absolutely from essence, has no genus in common with essence, and is said only in the breathlessness that pronounces the extra-ordinary word beyond. Alterity figures in it outside any qualification of the other for the ontological order and outside any attribute. (Levinas, 1981, p. 16) It is only by taking cognizance of the alterity of the other that we can recognize the ultimate freedom of the other. All philosophizing of the freedom of the other – a central concern for modern Western philosophy – has gone down the wrong path, according to Levinas. Freedom of the other, according to Levinas, is not to be interpreted along Kantian lines. Freedom is a phenomenological relation between two people and not a deontological one. Following from Levinas, if we want to talk about 50

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absolute freedom, we will have to recognize the absolute alterity of the other. Freedom is not a quality which accrues to another human being because they share my human nature. My duty towards giving freedom to the other person is not because that is the only way I can call upon him to recognize my own freedom. Freedom is that which is, for Levinas, nonnegotiable. Freedom, like the other, exists as that which cannot be assimilated to any self-interest or other kinds of ethical logic. This absolute alterity of the other is what Levinas had in mind when he said that The absolutely other is the other.* He and I do not form a number. The collectivity in which I say “you” or “we” is not a plural of the “I.” I, you-these are not individuals of a common concept. Neither possession nor the unity of number nor the unity of concepts link me to the Stranger [l’Etranger], the Stranger who disturbs the being at home with oneself [le chez soi]. But Stranger also means the free one. Over him I have no power.** He escapes my grasp by an essential dimension, even if I have him at my disposal. He is not wholly in my site. But I, who have no concept in common with the Stranger, am, like him, without genus. (Levinas, 1961, p. 39) When the other is present as the ultimate nonnegotiable entity, then in a way my ethical attitude will have to take into account the otherness of their presence. The other – or, as Levinas calls it, the face of the other – is therefore the condition for the possibility of any kind of ethical relation and significance.10 The state, on the other hand, as Levinas interprets it, is the repository of power and ignores the face of the other. But my own ethical relation “with the face, with the absolutely other which I can not contain, the other in this sense infinite, is nonetheless my Idea, a commerce. But the relation is maintained without violence, in peace with this absolute alterity” (Levinas, 1961, p.  197). It is this tension between ethical engagement and modernist power that Levinas was trying to bring about in his works. 51

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This powerful attempt to go beyond modernist state logic has a lot to recommend itself. To a large extent, I sympathize with the intention of his approach. But this approach doesn’t take into account how power in the modern world has permeated each of our decisions to act. Even though Levinas talks about the need for ethical action, I believe that he falls into the trap of the dialectic of thinking of ethical action as being the relation between the self and the other. I, through the work of Wittgenstein, aim to go beyond it and not locate it within any boundary but rather look at it as a fluid, embodied concept with no definite boundary between I and the other. Thus, in the rest of the book, I will try to situate another solution to undermining the modernist deadlock. The modernist deadlock in short is how it is that violence is immanent to the law and how the exception to the law – viz. the state of emergency – is inscribed in the law. This problem of the possibility of violence within the modernist framework can be disarmed through a Wittgensteinian approach. That approach will be attempted in Chapters 4–6. In the rest of this chapter, I explore how it is that modern power became totalizing – that is, how modern power enabled itself to permeate the pores of our everyday behaviour.

Power and the body – biopower and violence The idea that I wanted to make explicit is that, through looking at Foucault’s genealogy, we need to realign our thinking regarding the human subject and its role in the nexus of power. When we talked about violence in the earlier section, we said that the possibility of inflicting violence was preceded by the alienation of human subject itself. This alienation is a consequence of the political effects of modernity which make the state power initiate certain political mechanisms which enable the creation of certain new identities, like the stateless, the terrorist, the refugee, etc. But what modern forms of violence has shown us is that power runs deeper than we can naïvely assume. The voiding of pre-established nomological identities is productive of other identities so as to enable the better control of certain classes of people and so as to inflict violence with relative impunity on 52

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others. To understand the many layers of power and the possibility of violence to inscribe its effect on the human body, we must look at the evolution of the idea of power in modern times. As we look to the instrumental causes of violence and the role of state power to legitimatize certain kinds of punishments on the citizen body, what we found to be unique in modern state power was the exclusionary tactic that made large-scale violence possible. In a way, the exclusionary economy of modern power is inherently violent in that it seeks to separate humans from its constituting essence. To explore more this function of power, it is also important to note that modern forms of power are significantly different from premodern forms of sovereignty. Of all differences between premodern notions of sovereignty and the modern ones, I am going to elaborate on one primary objective of modern power and two modalities through which it achieves that objective. The objective of modern power is to inscribe or apply power on the human body. This objective is achieved through the modalities of totalizing and thereby normalizing collective behaviour. I aim to first unpack the modalities of modern power and thereby situate how the body becomes the point of the application of that power. The traditional way of understanding power has been to ask, how does power come to have legitimacy? In other words, what is the most just government possible? This question assumes that power is a necessary condition for obedience and that without some form of minimal obedience, justice or the proper functioning of a society is not possible. The best spin on this understanding of power is that collective governance is the least form of power that we can legitimate. Mainly due to the work of Foucault, we have come to realize that this question is not as important as understanding how power works. He effected a paradigm shift in our discussion from issues of governance to problems of governmentality.11 As we look at how our notions of power and governance have evolved at least in the Western world, we can see that in the Middle Ages in the Christian world, governance was represented as “advice to the prince,” concerning his proper conduct, the exercise of power, the means of securing the 53

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acceptance and respect of his subjects, the love of God and obedience to him, the application of divine law to the cities of men, etc. (Foucault et al., 1991, p. 87) But as Foucault elaborates further, the problem of governance shifted from this practice in the Middle Ages markedly and by the time of the 18th century found itself changed drastically as expressed in many treatises “that are no longer exactly ‘advice to the prince,’ and not yet treatises of political science, but are instead presented as works on the ‘art of government’” (Foucault et al., 1991, p. 87). When we read Foucault’s later work (especially his lectures at College de France), we can get the sense that governance from the 16th century onwards started a process of political orientation in which ‘governing’ came to be understood as different “from ‘reigning or ruling,’ and not the same as ‘commanding’ or ‘laying down the law,’ or being a sovereign, suzerain, lord, judge, general, landowner, master, or a teacher” (Foucault, 2007, p. 116) The ultimate paradigm of power in classical times was that of a sovereign power who was, like God, external to the political body and would therefore be the source of commands from an external point. But modern society became a society of control, Foucault argued. He said that after the 16th century, the command centre was more diffuse and that social command was generated out of a network of dispositifs, which through the creation of normative discourses was able to induce and bind the customs, habits and other productive practices of people.12 Foucault called such a society a disciplinary society. The important work that Foucault devoted to theorizing the modern disciplinary society was Discipline and Punish. In that work, he talks about how the rise of prison reform was possible only in a particular mode of society, one in which criminality was re-formed to constitute and make possible modern techniques of power. Reform in penal law meant the beginning of a new society – a panoptic society in which the delinquent is not outside the law; he is from the outset, in the law, at the very heart of the law, or at least in 54

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the midst of those mechanisms that transfer the individual imperceptibly from discipline to the law, from deviation to offence. (Foucault, 1995, p. 301) Through the use of modern instruments, an elaborate mechanism of normalization was set in motion. This form of normalization is the product of a coordinated relation between what Foucault calls systems of knowledge. An implication of this is that power, in the modern world, is not any more external to the subject who obeys. In our transactional lives, we are prone to thinking of commanding and obeying as that which happens between two people: one commands and the other obeys. This is the paradigm of what the premodern understanding of power is. But what Foucault made us realize is that there is a form of power that escapes, as Ransom calls it, the “consent-coercion duality” (Ransom, 1997, p. 15). The normative power of commands, Foucault argues, is not mediated through a subject or from one particular position of externality (e.g., the law): Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations. Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter; they are the immediate effects of the divisions, inequalities, and disequilibriums which occur in the latter, and conversely they are the internal conditions of these differentiations; relations of power are not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly productive role, wherever they come into play. (Foucault, 1978, p. 94) Foucault effectively showed in History of Sexuality that the emergence of the industrial revolutions and the flourishing of the 55

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different ‘theoretical’ or scientific disciplines was in a way conducive of the acquisition and maintenance of power. For Foucault, theory and praxis go hand in hand. The history of science will parallel the changing normative paradigms of the people who underwent that scientific revolution. The evolution of forms of knowledge is concomitant with that of forms of practice, Foucault argues. In a way, new forms of knowledge create new normative expectations, which together co-constitute new forms of behaviour. In the case of the History of Sexuality, it was new medical practices that were developed to create a new sense of what it is to be healthy. This in turn was co-opted by the government for dictating new policies on governing the lives of the citizens of a nation. That is, modern disciplinary government – or governmentality, as Foucault calls it – is to develop different strategies of power, which in its self-aggrandizing mode tries to reproduce and enlarge its purview. A strategy of power, in Foucauldian language, is “the totality of the means put into operation to implement power effectively or to maintain it” (Foucault, 1982, p. 793). Through the interplay between the positive sciences and the normative implications of public policy, governance no longer meant the ordering of behaviour from an external point, as we saw before, but rather, it was the initiation of the framework of normativity that stood at the constituting source of all and any behaviour. This gives us a new definition of what being a government is. Borrowing from Mitchel Dean, we can say that Government is any more or less calculated and rational activity, undertaken by a multiplicity of authorities and agencies, employing a variety of techniques and forms of knowledge, that seeks to shape conduct by working through the desires, aspirations, interests and beliefs of various actors, for definite but shifting ends and with a diverse set of relatively unpredictable consequences, effects and outcomes. (Dean, 1999, p. 18) Through new forms of governance, a modern disciplinary society is established. In that, the relation between the modern subject 56

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and their normative framework that acts as conditions of correct behaviour are radically different from earlier times. If the subject was in ‘sovereign times’ conditioned externally through an external form of power, what was indubitable was the existence of the subject itself. Foucault’s concept of normalization has made plain that the modern subject is not any more the preconditioned, independent self whose freedom of choice or will is something that is intact. Modern strategies have enabled governmentality to situate itself within all the networks of subject formation such that we can say that disciplinary power is constitutive of the modern individual. Through the ‘apparatuses’ of power, what has been enabled through the knowledge–power nexus13 is that disciplinary power is constitutive of the subject. According to Foucault, we can now understand what power is. Power is a machine in which everyone is caught, those who exercise power just as much as those over whom it is exercised. . . . Power is no longer substantially identified with an individual who possesses or exercises or exercises it by right of birth; it becomes a machinery that no one owns. (Foucault and Gordon, 2002, p. 156) Disciplinary power, it must be remembered, through its tools of normalization doesn’t impose conditions of subjectivity, but rather, it is immanent to the self itself. The self is not any more a substance but a node in an interlocking network of practices. The individual is not a substance but rather a series of circulating relations; it cannot necessarily be located in an individual or institution, but rather is a system of management in which all it touches participate; it operates on the population and on the body, fostering techniques of control, intervention, and regulation often presented as working to mutual benefit. Disciplinary power is constitutive of the subject rather than external to it; it creates – rather than being imposed upon – types of individual. (Heyes, 2007, p. 6) 57

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This brings me to the objective of modernity’s form of power, which is that power inscribes normative conditions of behaviour on the body of the human individual itself. What is most central to this idea, borrowing from Foucault’s, is that power is not repressive of but rather productive of normative behaviour. The history of medical reform14 or penal reform, for example, has shown that it is the body of the subject that is ultimately subjected and manipulated through different practices. By giving criminals different regimes of dieting and other strict routines, an elaborate process of subjection (assujettissement) is started. In that process of classification and examination, the human body is separated, classified and objectified. Foucault, through his work on psychology and the rise of hysteria, was able to show how power relations can materially penetrate the body in depth, without depending even on the mediation of the subject’s own representations. If power takes hold on the body, this isn’t through its having first to be interiorised in people’s consciousnesses. There is a network or circuit of bio-power, or somatopower, which acts as the formative matrix of sexuality itself as the historical and cultural phenomenon within which we seem at once to recognise and lose ourselves. (Foucault and Gordon, 2002, p. 186) Biopower or somatic power targets the body. If the objective of the somatization of the individual is initially to control or ‘repress’ the individual, ultimately the main objective is to, through controlling techniques, enable the potential of the body to be redirected into other channels of behaviour. Many of the institutions that are created by the state are to enable the disciplining of the human body. Encouraging certain regimes of knowledge creates an implicit horizon in which the human self can move and not beyond that horizon. As Clifford says, Discipline involves a whole “political technology of the body” wherein the body is invested with relations of power and domination: it is marked, trained, punished, 58

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worked, ranked, observed. The strategies of discipline directed toward the body proceed by various calculated, organized, subtle tactics, “without weapons or terror,” implementing forces that bear directly, physically, materially on the body, but without recourse to violence or the dictates of ideology. (Clifford, 2001, p. 43) The explanation of the intricate workings of modern power through a Foucauldian perspective should give us pause to realign our thinking regarding the relation of power and violence towards the human body. It is hopefully clear by now that the overall structure of statist power as we see it expressed now in the world is engendered through a form of an invisible normative network of rules in which there are moral signposts which we are led to follow involuntarily. That through modern apparatuses of governmentality we are led to unreflectively take for granted the many practices that we engage in shows that the actions that we engage in are inscribed both in our conscious lives and in our subconscious lives. When power permeates our lives to such an extent, we become blind to the acts of violence that our own behaviour might lead us to. What is significant about modern power is the creation of such blind spots in the normative code itself. In this chapter, I looked at the role of governmentality in creating discourses – both epistemic and moral. Can there be a way out of this vicious circle? In the next chapter, I will look at the power of narration and narrative techniques as a possible avenue for us to be able to reengage with our daily lives and suture the wound of violent experiences. I will look at the question of how the intermediation of violence can have a traumatic influence on our narrative representation of ourselves. This in turn has an effect on how we represent our present corporeal engagements and our own sense of self in the flow of history and time. Although the focus is slightly different in the next chapter, there is an inherent connection between how the self is constituted by the modern state and the techniques of narration that can be used to subvert some of the subjecting tendencies of governmental power. 59

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Notes 1 Kafka’s work has been most rich for political philosophers in their diagnosing the problem of law and obedience, especially in the modern world. That Kafka’s work can be read as a witness to some long-standing issues of human behaviour was first realized by the Jewish theologian Gershom Scholem. He was one of the first to think of Kafka’s work not only as part of the continuum of modern German literature but also as part of the longer history of Jewish literature. Interestingly, Scholem was also a friend of Walter Benjamin. So possibly Benjamin’s interest in Kafka could have come from Scholem. Scholem says in a letter to Benjamin that “I advise you to begin any inquiry into Kafka with the Book of Job, or at least with a discussion of the possibility of divine judgment, which I regard as the sole subject of Kafka’s production” (Scholem, 2012, p. 179). 2 Rejali even has an appendix where he has enumerated all the everyday tools that one can use to inflict ‘clean’ torture. 3 In 2003, reports of human rights abuses by the U.S. Military in Abu Ghraib prison came to light due to an Amnesty report titled “Iraq: Human rights must be foundation for rebuilding” (2003). Soon the newspapers picked up on it and revealed more damning evidence against the torture tactics used in the Abu Ghraib prison. One can read The Washington Post article by Scott Higham and Joe Stephens (“New Details of Prison Abuse Emerge (washingtonpost.com).” These revelations created a moral outcry from many intellectuals and writers. For example, Susan Sontag was moved to write an article in The New York Times. She asked why these acts, after the Holocaust and the end of the Cold War, were still being committed. She said Looking at these photographs, you ask yourself, How can someone grin at the sufferings and humiliation of another human being? Set guard dogs at the genitals and legs of cowering naked prisoners? Force shackled, hooded prisoners to masturbate or simulate oral sex with one another? And you feel naïve for asking, since the answer is, self-evidently, People do these things to other people. Rape and pain inflicted on the genitals are among the most common forms of torture. Not just in Nazi concentration camps and in Abu Ghraib when it was run by Saddam Hussein. Americans, too, have done and do them when they are told, or made to feel, that those over whom they have absolute power deserve to be humiliated, tormented. They do them when they are led to believe that the people they are torturing belong to an inferior race or religion. For the meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were performed,

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but that their perpetrators apparently had no sense that there was anything wrong in what the pictures show. (Sontag, 2004) Cinematically, Hurt Locker (Renner et al., 2010) was the first to attempt to bring the torture techniques used by the U.S Military to dramatic light. 4 Viktor E. Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and psychologist, one of the first to theorize the Holocaust experience, said that Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning. (Frankl, 1963, p. 121) 5 Heidegger’s early philosophy, especially in his Being and Time, talks about death being the ultimate condition of being Dasein. But according to Heidegger, we don’t have the courage to face death, which produces our existential condition of angst, and therefore, we tend to fly away from it. For him, our resolute comportment towards death determines how we deal with our existential angst in different situations in our daily lives. 6 I stress that the cultural meaning that we all share is not merely symbolic, as someone like Glifford Geertz would have us believe. The possibility of collective culture is made possible only because the ultimate foundations of meaning are mediated through parsed and unparsed corporeal modalities. In a way, this goes back to what Bourdieu implied by his notion of habitus. The environment and our bodily dispositions together create a habitus for a community. As Bourdieu rightfully points out, a habitus contains systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively “regulated” and “regular” without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor. (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 53)

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7 For a sophisticated analysis of how our brain remembers not only events but also dispositions, read (Berthoz and Weiss, 2000). Berthoz shows how our neural mechanisms are geared towards storing not only individual memory events but also our orientational and navigational memory. For Berthoz, it is the hippocampus which “plays a major role in organizing sequences of actions, such as a series of saccades or perhaps the steps in learning how to tie a shoe or knot a tie” (Berthoz and Weiss, 2000, p. 130). 8 Agamben puts it well: “the sovereign nomos is the principle that, joining law and violence, threatens them with indistinction . . . the sovereign is the point of indistinction between violence and law, the threshold on which violence passes over into law and law passes over into violence” (Agamben, 1998, pp. 31–32). Because of Agamben, we look at modern people not as “present-present people, with equal rights from the state and full protection under the law. The dystopia as Agamben describes it, consists of absent-absent people, bare lives sacred men, with neither rights nor protection” (Kishik, 2012, p. 79). The whole discussion on the nature of sovereign violence has had a lot of literature accruing to itself recently. In a way, a new understanding of the role of the sovereign goes back to the work of Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (Schmitt, 1996). Schmitt was the first to reflect on the consequences of the political transition of power from sovereign to post-sovereign or modern forms to the multiple and fragmented body of people. Schmitt understood sovereignty as a founding legislative power. For Schmitt, the ultimate question regarding the nature of politics is not freedom or rights but the nature of authority. For more on how Schmitt shifted the idea of sovereignty from the traditional concept of an authority of command to sovereignty as a creative founding act of legislative power, read (Kalyvas, 2008, pp. 88–126). Also, to learn about how Schmittian categories of authority, revelation and obedience are ultimately theological categories rather than political ones, read (Meier, 1998). But I think it was Agamben whose ideas inform some of my formulations regarding violence, and his theorization of bare life, sovereign power and the law have had a lot of influence in recent discussions on power and the state. 9 For more such accounts, there is the moving account of Elie Wiesel (Wiesel, 1960). For a compilation of such traumatic memories, you can go to (Langer and Mazal Holocaust Collection, 1991). 10 Derrida interprets the otherness of alterity thus: “What, then, is this encounter with the absolutely-other? Neither representation, nor limitation, nor conceptual relation to the same. The ego and the other do not permit themselves to be dominated or made into totalities by a concept of relationship” (Derrida, 2001, p. 118). Also read Critchley’s take about the possible links that one can have between Derridean deconstruction and Levinasian ethics (Critchley, 1999).

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Critchley in detail discusses the philosophical connections between Derrida and Levinas. According to Critchley, Derrida’s practice of deconstruction can be understood as a form of Levinasian ethical demand, which is an interesting thesis (Critchley, 1999). 11 It is sometimes argued against Foucault that his notion of governmentality fails to capture the extent to which the modern state has become a central subject of political accountability. It is argued that Foucault, though he talks about governmentality, doesn’t have much to say regarding the modern state structure. The criticism continues with the charge that Foucault’s idea of governmentality is insightful regarding the nature power, but ignores the centripetal tendency of the state to abrogate to itself all power. My own use of Foucault to discuss interchangeably governmentality and state power can be interpreted as not giving enough heed to this criticism. But I will bypass answering this charge, because this kind of attack has already been answered satisfactory by people like Wendy Brown. She has shown successfully that a fuller account of governmentality, which includes the dynamics of state action, is possible. She has argued that in such an account, we can “attend not only to the production, organization, and mobilization of subjects by a variety of powers but also to the problem of legitimizing these operations by the singularly accountable object in the field of political power: the state” (Brown, 2008, p. 83). 12 For how such a society of control has permeated our technocratic 21st century, read Hardt and Negri’s interesting study Empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000). 13 For more on this, read (Hunt, 1994, pp. 12–32). 14 (Rose, 1996) has traced the history of the evolution of modern medical practices well.

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Historical representation and traumatic memory In this chapter, I will point to certain connections between violence and our different acts of making meaning. By shifting the planes of discussion from state violence and biopolitical power towards our collective abilities to engage in language – broadly understood – I wish to make possible two things. (1) I want to show that our linguistic abilities are somehow at the root of all our embodied existence. Thus, any robust understanding of violence and its role in society cannot bypass its relation to our linguistic abilities. (2) I want to prove that by including our language as a legitimate domain within which we construct our selves, a space opens up in which we can fruitfully engage our  self-reflective skills when it comes to matters of power, violence and force. This is because the domain of language, since it pervades all our activities, will force us to think of and enable us to critically view the many acts of violence that happen in everyday life. Much of the discourse on violence and power talks about either state violence or institutional power structures, even if it’s biopolitical power. Although the ideas that come from these areas of political philosophy are interesting and useful, we also need to talk about how violence is effected between two people in their everyday engagements. I will talk about (1) in this chapter and (2) in the subsequent chapters. In the most recent two chapters, we reviewed how violence manifests itself through power in the modern world. Not only is 64

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violence an expression of the instrumental nature of modernity, but also the object of violence, we found out, was the body of the citizen. In this chapter, we will look at another way power and violence go to the heart of what human existence is viz. language. In the last chapter, we saw how the personal phenomenal experience of pain can be world destroying and language destroying. But at the collective scale as well, violence can destroy worlds – physically and symbolically. In a way, all kinds of violence leave a mark somewhere. It is apparent that whether it be large-scale war or minor skirmishes, some evidence of violence has always remained to ‘tell the tale,’ so to speak. Cities bear evidence of violence and harbour scars from a past in which it saw destruction and massacres. We all know that violence leaves a painful trace, whether it be at the collective or at the individual level. Retracing that violent event can prove to be very painful – sometimes as painful or even more painful than that original violent act itself. This is why we call some acts of violence ‘unspeakable.’ When we are unable to completely assimilate our painful experience in the story of conscious lives, we speak of a traumatic wound. Trauma is produced when a psychological wound is crying out for expression but in a way resists the vocalization of that act of violence. As a matter of fact, ‘trauma’ in Greek means ‘wound.’ Traumas by their very nature baffle our understanding because they create a hole in our sense of self and moreover puncture our inherent faith in the world. It is natural that we as human beings, as meaning-making entities, are always in the process of engaging with the world and people in it so as to make some sense of what is happening around us. We have a natural urge to do so. But when we experience something traumatic, a tension is created between our natural tendency to understand everything that happens to us and the nature of the traumatic event itself which outstrips our phenomenological and moral sensibilities. This tension that is produced is evidenced in, what has led psychologists to call, traumatic neurosis. Psychologists have long found out that any harm done to ourselves and our body produces a neurotic reaction, which is basically our sense of shock. In a way, it was Freud 65

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who first observed and theorized traumatic neurosis. In his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he says “A condition has long been known and described which occurs after severe mechanical concussions, railway disasters and other accidents involving a risk to life; it has been given the name ‘traumatic neurosis’” (Freud, 1975, p. 6). But we have to keep in mind that psychological research has moved forward a lot from Freud’s understanding of what constitutes trauma.1 Trauma as a category has been used not only by psychologists and clinical professionals but also by philosophers and political theorists to understand the nature of historical experience as such. My own engagement with the category of trauma is not through its psychological manifestations. I will be talking about trauma more at a collective level, and whatever I say about the individual psychological sense of trauma derives from my views on the collective level. My initial approach to trauma is to look at it from a historical perspective. What is interesting for me is how traumatic experience poses problems for hermeneutics and our sense of history. This means that a proper interpretation of trauma as a historical experience is possible only when we adequately place the traumatic experience in the right hermeneutical context. When we study the psychological and historical causes of trauma and the events that caused it, we are in a way trying to get back to a past that is not only not present but is also painful in its absence. We are doubly tasked in trying to dig out such historical material from the past, to ‘represent’ (if that is at all possible) what had happened, but in the very task of finding those material, we are made aware again of the pain of those events. In the study of the past, and especially of a past that is personally and collectively painful, it is difficult to bracket out our subjective existence and look at the evidence objectively. This is impossible not only because we are somehow emotionally involved in the events of the past but also because our historical condition is such that it is not possible to stand outside the tide of time, sub species aeternitas, and look at history and its events from an Archimedean temporal point. As much as natural science has fostered the belief that evidence is to be impartial and 66

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open to verification, the nature of historical studies goes to show that such kind of objectivity cannot be sought in such pursuits. In a way, the philosophy of hermeneutics goes back to a methodological debate between the natural sciences and the human or historical sciences. Trauma studies, as a point of entry into historical studies, sits fairly on the side of the human sciences. Natural science, on the other hand, cannot be conducted without certain epistemological assumptions regarding what constitutes truth and knowledge. Natural science inherits the paradigm of the neutral observer as being the judge (or the condition) for truth. This in a way is inherited from Cartesian philosophy. From the 19th century onwards, many professional historians and philosophers, starting with Dilthey in Germany,2 began to doubt the effectiveness of an epistemological method to understand historical truth. The epistemological method, on the other hand, as the foundation for the possibility of any kind of knowledge, looked at experience as the conduit for the formation of belief and thereby truth. Experience, from its Kantian origins, implied a cognitive relation between the individual and the world where the individual is thought to use their faculty of intuition and the different categories of understanding to produce knowledge. According to this approach, we are understood to be cognitively ‘passive’ agents on whom ‘impressions’ impinge through a causal network. From Kant onwards, people interpreted experience as the limit to the scope of our knowledge claims. Given the influence of Kant on philosophical literature in the 19th century, especially with the Marburg school of neo-Kantians like Hermann Cohen, Helmholtz, etc., it was only natural that the epistemological method came to have a stronghold in academic circles. Through Kant and his followers, there was a lot of research and focus on constituting the Kantian method of looking at experience as the canonical one. Given this context in the 19th century in Germany and in Europe in general, Wilhelm Dilthey, the philosopher, is credited with breaking out of this paradigm and trying to look at experience not merely as the foundation for epistemic relation but as the field for lived-experience. The German category that Dilthey is credited 67

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with popularizing is Erlebnis. Erlebnis denotes lived-experience. This notion of experience underscored the non-cognitive aspects of our experience. For Dilthey, the validity of individual judgements brought about through our experiential episodes are not as important as how we arrive at the idea of a historically conditioned worldview. Dilthey enabled a move away from a foundationalist account of mental life towards a descriptive account of our experiential life. According to Dilthey, life consists of a collection of inwardly connected experiences. Life and its experiences, for him, are a structural nexus. This idea that a life is an internally connected whole is crucial for Dilthey. He says that if one were to study a life and do biography or history, it is not possible to gain any objectivity merely through looking at it from the outside. For Dilthey, the study of biography and that of history, which is part of the human sciences, “have indeed the advantage over the natural sciences that their object is not sensory appearance as such, no mere reflection of reality in consciousness, but is rather first and foremost an inner reality (my emphasis), a nexus experienced from within” (Makkreel and Rodi, 1996, pp. 235– 236). As in personal life so too in social life and history, our experiences and plans are not static but dynamic. These Erlebnisse that we have are not independent episodes but are parts to a whole. Our self-understanding of those experiences both at the personal and at the transtemporal level can begin only if we realize that there is always a horizon of larger meaning and experiences from which we can make connections between our different experiences. The different disciplines which look at human experiences are what he calls the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaft). The subjects that come under it include history, biography, sociology and every discipline that deals with humans and their lives. This is different from the natural sciences, which he calls Naturwissenschaft, and their methodology. Even before someone like Dilthey, who was instrumental in redirecting historical studies through making and stressing the distinction between Geisteswissenschaft and Naturwissenschaft, historical science was already on a path towards breaking the homogeneity of approaches across the natural and the human sciences. This was mainly due to the 68

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work of Giambitssta Vico (1688–1744), whose slightly belated influence on historians and philosophers of history was beginning to grow – at least in England – in the 20th century.3 Thus, in the early 20th century, these two currents of historiographical research – one from Dilthey and his hermeneutics and the other from the English historians like Collingwood and Isaiah Berlin influenced by Vico – converged on the belief that historical sciences were to be approached in a way which is fundamentally different from the natural sciences. This convergence had a lot of influence on subsequent research on historical methodology and hermeneutics. In the 20th century, credit should be given to philosophers of history who followed people like Vico (and Dilthey – in different ways, though), who created a research programme, for stating that knowledge is not a static network of eternal, universal, clear truths, either Platonic or Cartesian, but a social process, that this process is traceable through (indeed, is in a sense identical with) the evolution of symbols – words, gestures, pictures, and their altering patterns, functions, structures and uses. (Berlin, 1997, p. 143) Moreover, these historians and philosophers founded a new method of looking at culture and history. For example, according to Dilthey, Culture is, in the first place, the weaving together of purposive systems. Each of these – like language, law, myth and religion, poetry, philosophy – possesses an inner lawfulness that conditions its structure, which in turn determines its development. The historical character of culture was first grasped at that time.4 (Makkreel and Rodi, 1996, p. 387) But what the work of such philosophers regarding the nature of historical and social experience attests to is that experiences 69

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always come to us not in a discrete or disjointed way but always in an internally connected series. As the philosopher of history Louis Mink showed, the significance of the simple fact that experiences come to us seriatim in a stream of transience and yet must be capable of being held together in a single image of the manifold of events in order for us to be aware of transience at all. (Mink, 1970, p. 547) It was thus discovered that the recall of experience – that which is fundamental to any possibility of historicity – is through and through conceptual. When we remember events, we grasp the past only through placing ourselves, so to speak, in and against that which happened in the past. But historical representation is tricky, because every time we review the past, we have already moved on in time from the present to the future. Every moment that passes creates a new link to the past because our representation of the past will be always influenced by the changing present that we are in. As the present changes, it is only natural that our association with the past also changes. With every change in the present and its associations, our interpretive potential also changes. What this means is that every time we remember, we are trying to re-present the past to ourselves. Crucially, that re-presenting can never be without the possibility of unearthing newer associations every time we think of that event in the past. Making sense of what happened through historical narratives enables us to connect the experience to a series of other experiences. That is what narration as a methodological exercise makes possible – the interpretive connections between experiences so as to exhibit an internal coherence in history.5 The field of narration is open-ended in a way to review and connect historical events multiple times. This brings us to the importance of historical representation as a hermeneutical exercise when it comes to especially talking about violent events of the past. Much of the historiographical insights into philosophy and the hermeneutics of historical 70

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understanding has been used by thinkers of trauma studies like LaCapra (2001) and Cathy Caruth (1996). When we turn to these thinkers of trauma – a subfield of historical studies, if you will – they are more or less in unison in eschewing an approach to experience that uses purely cognitive and epistemological methods. Experience, according to these trauma studies experts (Caruth, 1996; LaCapra, 2001), should not be interpreted narrowly as a collection of cognitive episodes. Nor should one think of experience merely as a processing of information. Borrowing from these thinkers, I would like to state that what is central to my thesis regarding our understanding of experience – especially our understanding of our past events – is that “the study of the past has as its proper aim the hermeneutic ‘understanding’ of human actions” (H. V. White, 1987, p. 50). In representing the experience of our past, especially, “the aim in view should be to represent (human) events in such a way that their status as parts of meaningful wholes will be made manifest” (H. V. White, 1987, p. 50). This interpretation of experience suggests that narrativity is a code of endowing meaning to experience. Not only that, but also the possibility of representing experience in a narrative is the condition for transcultural (and transtemporal) transmission. As Hayden White (H. White, 1982; H. V. White, 1987) has shown, our inherent wish to narrativize comes out of a desire to have the past events of our lives display the coherence and integrity that is a characteristic of the best kind of narratives. Given such an approach to synthesizing our experience – especially experience of the past – the existence of trauma poses a special problem because “Trauma is a disruptive experience that disarticulates the self and creates holes in existence; it has belated effects that are controlled only with difficulty and perhaps never fully mastered” (LaCapra, 2001, p. 41). To revisit the problem of how violence ruptures our self, let us again take the case of the Holocaust.6 Such an event (Ereignis), as it has come to be recognized in some trauma studies literature, seems to represent an unforeseen, unspeakable event – the systematic murder of 6 million Jews and other ‘unwanted’ people – in modern human history. Events like the Holocaust go to show that there can sometimes be some violent events in the past which 71

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can resist the possibility of assimilation. The Holocaust seems to stand there as the event in Western history (Ereignis) which stands firm against our representative and interpretive capacity. Yes, we have experienced it as we experience different things in life, but the uniqueness of that experience and the violent rupture that it has produced in our history points to a certain ‘gap,’ if you will, from which history seems to have to start anew. The question that we are faced with is whether such an event like the Holocaust can at all be historically represented. The uniqueness of certain historical traumatic events signals itself in the present as a spectre, an absence, which does not inhabit it in the name of full reality, which is not an object of memory like something which might have been forgotten and must be remembered. . . . It is thus not even there as a “blank space” as absence, as terra incognita, but it is there nevertheless. (Lyotard, 1990, p. 11) Traumas are produced because – as we are told, for example, by someone like Freud (1955) – of the repression of that painful event. In collective memory, an event is traumatic to that extent that it resists assimilation into historical narratives. Thus is born a belatedness (Nachträglichkeit) that manifests at the collective level. Whatever the verdict is on this debate regarding our representability of trauma, what comes to the forefront of historical representation is the role of signification in memory and historical narratives. When we place in the foreground of our attention the applicability of signification or more broadly language as the site of historical memory, we are invited again to the problem of the possibility of objective representation. This linguistic turn in historiographical research7 has meant reopening the problem of representation through the medium of language. If the reading of archival material and other documents is integral to the writing of history, it has become clear that the historian cannot just read a document without accounting for the different subjective ‘voices’ 72

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of the document and placing themselves as another subjective viewer of the document. For historical writing to be successful, the historian has to be aware of the different subject positions and voices in a particular setting. As LaCapra points out, our perspective would be transformed: the constitutive place of the historian in the research project would be recognized and objectivity seen not as the simple opposite of subjectivity but as a tenuous yet valuable goal of a process of elaborating a range of subject- positions (for example, those of researcher, reader, and theorist or intellectual) by negotiating “transferential” relations in a critical and self-critical manner. (LaCapra, 2000, p. 26) Given that in the exercise of reading, hearing (in the case of oral history) and writing or speaking about past events, the conceptual possibilities of those exercises overlap with the limitations, if any, of language itself. A comprehensive look at language, as the historically conditioned intersubjective repository of concepts, will be needed before we approach any historical document. Given the multiplicity of subject positions and the non-privileged epistemological position of the historian, historians, if they have to practise the art of history, will have to take a stance vis-à-vis the hermeneutics of interpretation, along with the place of language in experience. Language, that which inscribes itself in documents, architectural monuments and all the tools of the historians’ art, cannot be divorced from the historically conditioned interpretive baggage that different epochs’ expression of it carries. In other words, language and its representative scope change from epoch to epoch, and when the historian looks at a document, they are looking, similar to the archaeologist, at visible signs whose meaning was alive for a whole people. The mutations in meaning lie buried in the collective representations of a historical people across time and space. This means that the whole span of history cannot be divorced from the theatre of language in which people come, engage with each other and make way for other 73

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people and other usages. If language is the theatre of historical happenings, then what does that mean for those traumatic events that sometimes break the flow of history – i.e., the possibility of representation? How does that happen? How does violence make possible the gap of representation? In the next section, I will look at the need to review the function of language so that we are able to bestow upon the field of language the possibility of representing all our various embodied realities, which includes our personal, social and political lives. If language is to truly constitute the nature of our existence, it must reflect all the realities in which we participate.

The language of violence The previous discussion on trauma has opened us up to thinking about historical memory. Any violence that is the origin of trauma, even though it has psychological effects, creates a fissure in the collective consciousness as well. When we look at the psychological and historical representations of traumatic events, what is apparent is the hermeneutical tools that we employ to help us make sense of those events. If we are all meaning-making beings, then the present and the past are mediated through our linguistic habits and our myth-making capacities. What is significant about traumatic events is how the memory of what has happened in the past calls out for significative grasping but at the same time opens itself out to future possible interpretations. That is why deeply traumatic events keep ‘haunting’ us. We can think of myths as the attempt to overdetermine past traumas.8 For example, Freud in his last work, Moses and Monotheism, attempted to reinterpret the history of monotheistic religion by arguing that the origins of religion and especially monotheism were founded on an originary violent act: the Jews killing Moses (Freud, 1955). Not only that, but also, for Freud, the guilt of that act of violence has made the Jews’ notion of the coming Messiah become one of the central beliefs or myths of their religion. Moreover, all subsequent myth-making exercises regarding the origin of Judaism has been to cover over this historic fact of the murder of the real Moses, who apparently 74

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borrowed the ideas of monotheism from certain Egyptian concepts, Freud argues. Whatever the historical veracity of this psychoanalytic attempt to look at the origin of religion may be, what we can see in this is that the traumatic event in a way acts as a haunting spectre of the present. Violence stands in our historical consciousness as a haunting memory – a spectre which resists complete thematization or the possibility of being brought into conscious play. The main problem with trauma is that we can never completely forget the traumatic event. If we were able to completely forget the event, then the need for reinterpreting that event will never arise. At the same time, traumatic events, though resistant to assimilation, open up some avenues for conceptual grasping. Violence, by partially resisting a complete determination of the past event, closes certain interpretations and opens up certain others. When we mourn, say collectively, we are making that absent wound present. Here I borrow from Derrida, who poignantly said that mourning consists always in attempting to ontologize remains, to make them present, in the first place by identifying the bodily remains and by localizing the dead (all ontologization, all semanticization – philosophical, hermeneutical, or psychoanalytical-finds itself caught up in this work of mourning but, as such, it does not yet think it; we are posing here the question of the specter, to the specter, whether it be Hamlet’s or Marx’s, on this near side of such thinking). (Derrida, 2006, p. 9) The fissure produced by violence in our everyday interpretive activities creates a rupture in our hermeneutical bubble. Derrida in his Spectres of Marx has an interesting idea about this rupture. He says that whenever we create any work, whether it be merely a table or a great piece of art, its mere presence calls out for reinterpretation and retranslation. The need for reinterpretation is there because works of art as much as they are present are also open to ‘absent’ perspectives. They both exist and haunt with 75

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their absence. Works of art don’t stand there as merely objects but rather are part of a significative network which calls out for us to reuse that sign and reinterpret it again so as to produce more works and so on. According to him, any work that presents itself as a work calls out for translation and understanding. There is no separate understanding as a grasp of an object. An object is already a signifier, and thus, to understand it is to use that sign. Therefore, understanding is translation, according to him. Derrida calls any piece of work, whether it be art, text or other, a Thing. This Thing “haunts, for example, it causes, it inhabits without residing” (Derrida, 2006, p. 21). I find this idea interesting because it has some similarities to my own understanding of what constitutes a traumatic event. For me, this Thing, the haunting of that which resists complete understanding, looks like the violent traumatic act of our past. If we were to point to one faculty in us that helps us fulfil our innate need to create meaning, bridge historical gaps and communicate with each other, that would be language, broadly understood. The possibility of experiencing and representing to ourselves our own world is mediated only through language. Language as the ultimate nexus or network of possible meanings is that which enables communication between people – through space and time. What is crucial in knowing the role of language is that for any theory or philosophy of language to be robust, language must be seen to mirror all the hermeneutical embodied realities that we as meaningful agents engage in. But this paradigm of language, which I am trying to put forth, as the hermeneutical horizon for intersubjective engagement, hasn’t been the dominant one in philosophical circles. In a way, it has had to fight other contending theories for what the nature of language is. I will now look at the other contending paradigm of what constitutes language and what its role is considered to be in our lives. This other dominant paradigm has come to be called cognitivism. As Evan Thompson puts it, A typical cognitivist model takes the form of a program for solving a problem in some domain. . . . Cognitivist

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explanations focus on the abstract problem-solving characterization of cognitive tasks, the structure and content of symbolic representations, and the nature of the algorithms for manipulating the representations in order to solve a given problem. (Thompson, 2007, p. 5) The rise of cognitivism as a philosophical programme has taken language in modern times to be the mediator of our cognitive capacity. The cognitive capacities through which language is expressed in the human self as theorized by Noam Chomsky (Chomsky, 1965, 1986, 1988, 1993) and Jerry Fodor (J. Fodor, 1983; J. A. Fodor, 1975, 1990) are contributions to our understanding of what language is. But one of the downsides of merely looking at the mental aspects of language is that the potential for language to explain our other kinds of behaviour is reduced. I aim here briefly to look at the cognitivist model of language and critique it. I do so to bring about a fresh interpretation, in the next chapters, on the power of language. In the beginning of the 20th century, in Anglo-American philosophy, a view was gaining ground, through the influence of philosophers like Frege and Russell: to understand the philosophy of thought, one must have a comprehensive account of what language is. This ‘linguistic turn,’ a term that was later popularized by Michael Dummett, came to take centre stage in the discussions regarding philosophical problems. Dummett reviews its history: Once the linguistic turn had been taken, the fundamental axiom of analytical philosophy – that the only route to the analysis of thought goes through the analysis of language – naturally appeared compelling. Acceptance of that axiom resulted in the identification of the philosophy of thought with the philosophy of language, or to give it a grander title, with the theory of meaning; at that stage analytical philosophy had come of age. (Dummett, 1993)9

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The importance for the role of language in the history of the 20th century was gaining so much ground in the 1960s that there was an influential anthology of essays and articles published in 1967 and edited by the American philosopher Richard Rorty called The Linguistic Turn. In that, according to Rorty, as he writes in the introduction to that anthology, linguistic philosophy holds the view that “the philosophical problems are problems which may be solved (or dissolved) either by reforming, or by understanding more about the language we presently use” (Rorty, 1992, p.  3). This linguistic turn has come to represent, whatever one’s particular views on philosophy is, the ultimate event of 20th-century philosophy. Whether one is an ideal language theorist or an ordinary language theorist, when one reads any history of 20th-century philosophy, one will be forced to encounter and acknowledge this event of the past century. For many philosophers, especially of the interwar years, philosophy represented only one kind of philosophy, and that was the philosophy of language. Let us turn to A. J. Ayer, an influential philosopher of language and logic, who wrote in 1936 that the philosopher, as an analyst, is not directly concerned with the physical properties of things. He is concerned only with the way in which we speak about them. In other words, the propositions of philosophy are not factual, but linguistic in character – that is, they do not describe the behaviour of physical, or even mental, objects; they express definitions, or the formal consequences of definitions. (Ayer, 1936, p. 57) In linguistic philosophy, a methodological priority is given to language when it comes to understanding thought. If for traditional philosophy the main problem were, “how do we think?” then the answer for linguistic philosophers was, “thought can be understood only through the representative medium of language.” Much of the history of 20th-century Anglo-American philosophy, especially after the Second World War, can be written within this framework that was provided by early linguistic 78

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philosophy. The initial framework as interpreted by Dummett consisted of three theses. One, it was believed, especially by Frege, that the structure of thought must be reflected in the structure of sentences. Two, truth and falsity can be ascribed to thought and thereby also to sentences. Three, it is possible to have objective senses expressed in language that is communicable. The communicability of language, for Frege, can be achieved by excluding the psychological aspects of thought. Given these three basic tenets of initial linguistic philosophy and the fact such an approach was influential, it was only natural that subsequent philosophies played themselves out in the philosophies offered by Frege and Russell. After the Second World War, there were shifts that occurred in Anglo-American academic philosophy. Partly because of the rise of the United States as a global political force and (or therefore) the rise of American philosophers, the direction that linguistic philosophy took was no longer unidirectional. As the decades after the war progressed, philosophers like W. V. O Quine, Donald Davidson and Gareth Evans did not give language the primacy that was earlier assumed. In short, these philosophers aimed to inquire into thought directly without a detour through language. All the same, the terms of the debate that these newer philosophers were taking were already prefigured in the discourse that was created more than a few decades earlier. The shift from language back to thought was perceived so strongly that “in the 1980s it became commonplace in some circles to suggest that the philosophy of mind had displaced the philosophy of language in the driving seat of philosophy” (Williamson, 2007, p. 13). But the debate around the central questions of philosophy was revolving around the role of language in answering foundational epistemological questions vis-à-vis the potential for human thought to get us to veridical knowledge. The problem was whether language had better explanatory potential to understanding thought or not. A key element that pushed philosophical research along a cognitivist model that was initiated after the war expressed itself in the belief that philosophers of language like Chomsky made current: “A person who speaks a language has developed a certain system of knowledge, represented somehow 79

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in the mind and ultimately, in the brain in some physical configuration” (Chomsky, 1988, p. 3). This kind of research into the functions of language aimed to look at only the cognitive origins of language as evidenced either in a language acquisition device (LAD) or something that presupposed an internalist outlook with adequate explanatory capacity to be able to biologically explain the evolutionary capacity of language. This philosophical programme, even though it understood the intersubjective and social character of language formation in people considered only the individual as the object of study. The individual, for heuristic purposes, is divorced from their social surrounding, according to this model, so as to further isolate the cognitive sources of their language power. Moreover, in the Chomskian take on language ability, the use of language shifted from an externalist or social perspective to an internal mentalist perspective. The internalist assumption of linguistic cognition means that language is an individual phenomenon and is a system represented in the mind or the brain of a particular individual. To follow through with the internalist take on language is to say that language becomes the structural expression of an innate capacity in which the real-world properties and representative power of language is mapped onto a biologically deterministic device, which Chomsky has variously called either Language Acquisition Device (LAD) or universal grammar. To quote Chomsky again, the shift in focus was from the study of E-language [externalized language] to the study of I-language [internal language], from the study of language regarded as an externalized object to the study of the system of knowledge of language attained and internally represented in the mind/brain. A generative grammar is not a set of statements about externalized objects constructed in some manner. Rather, it purports to depict exactly what one knows when one knows a language: that is, what has been learned, as supplemented by innate principles. UG [Universal Grammar] is a characterization of these innate, biologically determined principles, which 80

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constitute one component of the human mind – the language faculty. (Chomsky, 1986, p. 24) For someone like Chomsky, therefore, the universality of the fact of natural languages in the world is proof of certain universal internal cognitive abilities. These biologically evolved cognitive functions are both syntactically and semantically structured so as to enable humans to have the competence of a language. A language is a structure of rules – grammar – which dictate the possible combination of semantic and syntactic structures. This grammar is acquired within the first 15 years of one’s life, Chomsky argues. The features of this grammar are that (1) it is cognitive; (2) it is universal, in the sense that every human being has the potential to learn a language; and (3) it is recursive. The recursive capacity of the grammar is expressed in the ability of the rules of language to be able to generate (possibly infinite) new sentences from finite old sentences. This possibility of the infinite generation of new sentences is what gives language its creative potential.10 Given the mapping of the mental to the linguistic, it must be possible to know the mind if one were to look at the subpersonal grammatic or linguistic functions that are set on course whenever one learns a language. This means that all the representative, communicative powers of language can be easily understood through research into the mental life of an individual. This gives us an indication of the processes of the mind. If language is a system of rules to translate sounds into structured rule-governed data, then the mind must be based on a computational model whereby the rules which are fed into the computer ‘process’ the different input into structured output. Given the above intellectual background, the history of philosophy in the Anglo-American world after the world wars was interesting in how cognitive science, consciousness and philosophy of language were combined in different ways to solve some of the earlier philosophical problems. This new constellation of ideas also brought in with itself certain presuppositions regarding the nature of the human being and the role of the self in the 81

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process of knowledge acquisition. The computational model of language theory, which was born out of research in philosophy of language, linguistics and Turing models of computers, brought out the notion that mental processes are computations and not, as Hume would have us believe, associations. This belief that there is one-to-one mapping possible between mental representations and linguistic utterances has had a huge influence in setting the paradigm for philosophical research from the 1960s onwards.11 The research agenda of the 20th century in some ways (and at least in some parts of the Anglo-American world) was to find the connecting link between the mind and language. However we look at language, whether it be as a computational tool (Chomsky, Fodor, Turing), as an intentional entity (Searle, Dreyfus) or as the mediating link between reference and truth (Frege), two basic assumptions came to play a central role. One, mind is something that is internal, and therefore, language is also something that can be individualistically located. Two, language (and mental representation) is computational in a broad sense. In this dispensation, language is thought to be acquired through the different stimulations from the surroundings, which act as a trigger in initiating the innate language device, which in turn starts ‘clicking’ the appropriate syntactic and semantic structures in the brain, and thus, we come to be competent in a language. These ideas in a way rehearse in new terminology the Kantian project of founding some form of experiential intake as the limit of knowledge along with his idea viz., the productive power of transcendental synthesis. But what we have realized in our discussion is that, by reformulating an individualistic and cognitive approach to language and mental life, we are back to the limitations of natural science to depict the lived experiences of our collective lives. In other words, this idea – however useful for related fields like artificial intelligence, mental cognition, etc. – doesn’t quite get to what Paolo Virno (Virno, 2015) calls the transindividual character of language and the fact that language is not private but public. As opposed to the earlier mentalist approach to language, I argue for a more robust understanding of what language is. Given what we have discussed so far, we must reorient ourselves to the 82

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power of language. If language is the theatre of all representation of the history of our embodied collective existence, clearly a theory of language must account for these varied factors. If our inquiry into the sources of violence has shown us anything, it is that human existence is not merely a series of mental episodes. When we look at how violence affects us through its instrumentality, we can see that violence makes us mute both in our body and in our language. Any theory of language must be able to connect our existence to the varied meaningful performances that we make in our lives. Thus, the question of the horizon of language is coeval with the horizon of our collective actions. In the next section, I will look at the social aspects of our language.

Language and performance An important opening into reinterpreting language is given by our looking at language not necessarily as computational rules but as rules of embodied existence. One of the philosophers who will help us in revealing this connection is the later Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein has a lot to say regarding rules, but nothing in his corpus shows he had anything explicit to saying regarding embodiment. I will argue that there are strong implicit strains in his philosophy that will enable us to connect language rules and embodied existence in new and interesting ways and which will also enable us to locate the role of violence in history. But we will come to the latter (the role of violence in history) in the next chapter. In this section, I aim to, in broad strokes, start painting an alternative view, from what we reviewed in the last section, regarding language and our agential actions. I want to do this because, as I had indicated in the earlier chapter, to understand the role of violence, we cannot ignore the interconnected lives that we all live. Trauma studies has shown that the violence against any one person can psychologically affect multiple people. If I see an accident on the road, that event is going to affect me deeply even if the person who got into an accident has got nothing to do with me. This ability to be empathetically connected is part of what it is to be human. Violence is horrific because any kind of violence 83

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breaks the empathic pact that we have with everyone we know and in a way the whole of humanity. Moreover, trauma studies has also taught us that our language fails us sometimes when we want to remember our traumatic past; it shows that language is something that is not internal but public and shared. We share language with our fellow beings geographically distributed but also historically situated. I want to break from the understanding of language as merely being a processing of an internal system of rules. Any theory of language starts with the idea that language is a system of rules. But what makes a mentalist theory different from any other theory, say the performative theory of language, which is where I want to go, is that for the latter, rules are fundamentally pragmatic. To get to the importance that performances have in our lives, we will have to turn to anthropology, where human lives and their performative episodes are the centrepiece of research. For example, anthropologists like Victor Turner (Turner, 1986) have made apparent that the basic units of human life are not necessarily mental episodes or individual actions but ‘performances.’ For someone like Turner or Milton Singer (Singer, 1980), the elementary units of observation are performances. Performances include not only include plays, concerts and lectures – that which is what is normally understood to be performances – but also rituals, recitations, rites, ceremonies and festivals. Performances permeate our daily lives. The study of anthropology has taught us to accept that cultural experience cannot be confined merely to the observation of rituals and practices. Experience includes participation at multiples levels and kinds of what Singer calls “cultural media” (Singer, 1980, p. 76). Cultural media are modes of communication which involve not only linguistic acts but also non-linguistic acts, like gestures, rituals, dance, and other plastic arts. Cultural media points to the intermingling or interlacing of different kinds of symbolic acts, and these acts can be traditional linguistic acts or also other non-linguistic, pragmatic practices. The language and the different acts are, according to Singer, encoded in their particular cultural lifeform (Singer, 1980, p. 76).

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Rituals, like drama, have both speaking parts and acting parts. Sometimes the person who speaks also acts, but sometimes it is separate. The whole social and cultural system is a social drama, as Turner calls it,12 in which rituals and practices have their role and people have their parts. Turner goes one step further by saying that all social behaviour is staged: “People prepare backstage, confront others while wearing masks and playing roles, use the main stage area for the performance of routines, and so on” (Turner, 1986, p. 74). When we look at any performance, onstage or in a ritual, what is striking is that the performance’s temporal durability is over as soon as the performance is over. Unlike writing, performances aren’t inscribed in any medium which can carry its meaning over time and space. When we write something on a piece of paper, for example, that meaning and those words now have a life of their own in the sense of having taken an externalized expression of a person’s thoughts. Not only that, but also this written expression can be reviewed later and can be handed over to someone who was not present when the writing happened. The act of writing, for the most part, is merely instrumental to externally expressing thoughts and inscribing one’s thoughts on a more permanent medium. When it comes to performances, that is not the case. Performances and its ritualistic or artistic effect, since it cannot create a more permanent work out of it, is a singular and contingent event. Because it cannot be inscribed on any medium external to the performative event itself, performances of any kind are not instrumental in that way. As Virno puts it, “at the end of the play, or of the concert, nothing remains. The pianist or the actor performs an activity without Work. Or if you prefer, the purpose of their activity coincides entirely with its own execution” (Virno, 2015, p. 22). Another important factor in the constitution of performances is that performances need audiences. The public character of performance is something that is crucial for it to be counted as a performance – whether it be ritualistic or artistic. In fact, I am deliberately trying to, following Turner, conflate the two. The

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expression of performance cannot sustain its life without the gaze of an audience. To quote Virno again, musicians and actors need the presence of others: their ephemeral performance only exists if it is seen or heard, and therefore only when there is a “public.” These two characteristics are deeply linked: the virtuoso needs a public precisely because he is not leaving behind any object that would remain in the world once the performance is over. An activity without work always implies, for structural reasons, the subject’s exposure to the gaze, and sometimes the harsh reaction, of his fellow humans. (Virno, 2015, p. 22) All performances, whether ritualistic or artistic, are governed by a set of rules which dictate when it should be performed, who are its actors, who is its audience and what social function that that particular performance is supposed to play. These rules are drawn from a wider ethos, whose social and intersubjective rules are already set in place. The social dramas that we as humans play gather meaning only because the rules of the social game, so to speak, have already been agreed on. But what is that role that all of us across a cultural divide and geographical distance play? The role that all of us are in a way programmed to play is the ‘speaking role,’ broadly understood. That is, we as humans before we take up any particular social role are already initiated into language and the rules of that system of linguistic performance. To be human in a way is to speak (“to speak” doesn’t necessarily mean to use the vocal chords). This shows that what stands as the beginning of all possibility of playing any role is language, broadly understood. This whole preceding discussion on performances both ritualistic and artistic is to draw attention to the structural similarities between language and our other performances. If we look at language keenly, we can see that there are a set of conditions that make language a performative element in our daily lives. I would like to point to three such similarities between language and performances. Language, like all performances, (1) is public, (2) has a set of rules and (3) creates meaning 86

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out of its intersubjective performance. Not only is language analogous to performance, in a way, but also fundamental to having a language is the ability to perform the language, I argue. If the purpose of grammar as a set of rules is to dictate the meaningful communication of expressions, then the purpose of language as a whole cannot be merely communication, because if it were, language would be reduced to grammar. Language is more than the rules of its expression. The purpose, in a way, of language, just like the purposes of ritualistic or artistic performance, is the expression of itself. This comes out most when we speak. When we speak a language, the speech act expresses primarily the act of speech and secondarily the meaning of that expression. Linguistic praxis thereby has a set of rules at two levels. At the level of the lifeworld, the act of speech itself is governed or constituted on the social stage that gives it relevance and meaning. To shout “get out!” when noone is in the room makes for an infelicitous use of language and a waste of a speech act. Speech acts therefore require, to use a theatrical concept, a scene, which makes the use of that linguistic act felicitous.13 Moreover, speech as a performative act destroys the distinction between the performer, the performative act and the intention behind the act. As Shoshana Felman has shown in her excellent work, The Scandal of the Speaking Body, the speech act has no ‘ulterior’ purpose than the production of that act itself. Moreover, “the act, an enigmatic and problematic production of the speaking body, destroys from its inception the metaphysical dichotomy between the domain of the ‘mental’ and the domain of the ‘physical,’ breaks down the opposition between body and spirit, between matter and language” (Felman, 2003, p. 65). This is also reflected in Virno’s thought, where he says, linguistic praxis escapes the alternative between “interior” and “exterior” between inscrutable mental representation and solid objective reality. . . . Locution rests at the border between I and non-I: it makes possible the distinction between the two realms but it does not belong completely to either one of them. (Virno, 2015, p. 30) 87

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I will come back to this point later, because this element of a language act is crucial to our understanding of what language is. But what is most significant to the act of speech is that the content of what is spoken and the possibility of its communicability is already constituted by the ‘scene’ of the act of enunciation. The rules of language, unlike in the Chomskian cognitive model, are not those syntactic rules alone but the rules of social engagement as such. Language, as I understand it, is not merely the words and other linguistic acts that we perform but the whole array of significant signs that we make in order to communicate. We know the possibility of communicability is what constitutes language. In other words, when we look at the rules of communication, the enunciation of a linguistic act expresses, sets afoot and calls for the mutual recognition of the rule of engagement itself. Language in a way engages people in communication. But people can’t communicate without an initial mutual recognition. In other words, it is because we all already realize that communication is possible that we take up language. This possibility of recognizing a communicative – enunciative – act is that which enables people to be able to communicate at all, because if one can’t recognize when communication happens, there can be no communication at all. Following from the foregoing points, language, if one were to understand it broadly, is not merely the words and the thetic propositions that we use to communicate truth but also the whole horizon of communicability. To look at the origins of language is to look at the origins of the constitutive power of communication. Communication presupposes a social life – at least two people. If the possibility of communication is what is fundamental to language, as I argue in the coming chapters, then sociality is a precondition for language. The most central assumption in my alternative approach to looking at language is that language is not an individual capacity alone. Individuals are not merely the acquirers of language. The whole human species in its complete historicity is the ‘scene’ for the performance of language. Our linguistic habits – i.e., the use of words to express our feelings – are all on the same immanent plane, along with other meaningful activities that we engage in. Our other meaningful 88

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activities include playing games; acting the role of a mother, father or a professional; performing rituals; engaging in artistic exercises; writing emails; etc. All these activities are meaningful for us. We use words and sentences because they are complex tools that help us perform many of these activities with ease. We are able to dispense with many exercises through the use of language. But to completely restrict our language abilities merely to what we speak orally in pregiven linguistic tokens and to what we write is to impoverish the wealth of our existential condition. We live, as I will argue in the coming chapters, at the transindividual level. By ‘transindividual,’ I do not mean the common social aspects shared by everybody. Instead, by ‘transindividual,’ I mean those aspects of common engagement which are public. The critique of what Jacques Bouveresse calls the myth of the interiority  – a myth presupposed and validated by philosophers who are of the mentalist paradigm – goes deeper than merely undermining internal foundationalist philosophies. In this approach, brought to the fore most significantly by the later Wittgenstein, is that interpretation and understanding are not mental private experiences. Wittgenstein’s most central idea is that the function of a language is completely grasped by the grammar of its usage. In other words, for Wittgenstein, if we have given a ‘grammatical’ description regarding any linguistic expression, we have said all that is really important regarding that expression. He also contested the idea that the grammatical rule was somehow subpersonal and computational in its existence. He denied that the word ‘think’ or ‘cognize’ can be used interchangeably with an internal mental process. Wittgenstein, as opposed to popular opinion, didn’t think that there were no internal processes. He only said that linguistic rules are not rules that can be merely mental. Now we come to an important juncture in our study regarding the function of language and its role in social existence. Language, as I understand it along Wittgensteinian lines, cannot be just the processing of mental functions. If we were to understand language in this way, we would also have to reorient ourselves to how we interpret each other and our historical condition. The main problematic of this book has been to reinvent 89

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the concept of violence such that we are enabled to engage with the public character of its signature. Language is the overarching system of rules in which any sign and its interpretation are made possible. The task of the next three chapters is to retranslate the nature of violence such that we can incorporate the public character of meaning, the performative aspect of our political existence and the instrumental role that violence plays in creating a rupture in our meaning-making abilities. These are the three crucial aspects to our human existence. An adequate account of violence cannot happen which doesn’t retranslate and set an agenda for talking about our political condition through looking at the collective and non-psychological aspects of something that is phenomenologically as basic as pain and violence.

Notes 1 The history of violence from the First World War onwards and its traumatic effects have produced wide-ranging theorizations. It was initially the First World War which created the need to deal with cases of soldiers who began to show symptoms of traumatic illnesses. Freud was the first to say that neurological interventions alone would not be able to deal with such modern forms of trauma. He was also the one to first say that we need psychoanalysis to adequately deal with the aetiology of such cases. This traumatic neurosis of Freud later became the clinical category posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). For more on the initial days of trauma studies and its evolution with later psychologists like Bruno Bettelheim, read (Malabou and Miller, 2012, pp. 80–84). When we review the history of neurosis and traumatic experiences, we have two kinds of accounts. One account is standard and is written by psychologists and trauma studies experts. This account presupposes the ontological categories of trauma and then deduces the various neurological, physical and psychological effects of such events. But there is another, more recent method which revises the history of the invention of the clinical category of PTSD and other similar medical terms. This method of reviewing clinical history in this particular way is that which is supported by the work of people like Didier Fassin and Allan Young (Fassin and Rechtman, 2009; Young, 1995). They have rightfully brought to our attention how the global idea of PTSD started initially as a clinical category. Moreover, they have shown that this idea flourished in medical and clinical circles and indirectly in the

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popular imagination as a result of certain systemic cultural interests, which included epistemological, moral and economic constraints. As Fassin says, we have the professional circles of psychiatry and psychology .  .  . [who] have been substantially influenced by social movements demanding rights, particularly for veterans and women who have suffered violence. It was the convergence of these disciplines and movements, as well as alliances between them, that gave rise to the diagnostic category of post-traumatic stress disorder, which has become the keystone in the construction of the new truth. . . . There are two orders of facts, one relating to the history of science and medicine, and one linked to an anthropology of sensibilities and values. (Fassin and Rechtman, 2009, p. 6) Thus, for people like Fassin, Rechtman and Young, the history of the medical category PTSD is a history in the construction of an episteme in the Foucauldian sense. Having said this, nothing in their work invalidates the reality of trauma as such. They are not saying that nobody experiences trauma because of a violent event in the past. Their work looks merely at the legitimization in certain clinical practices of the production and use of certain terms. Having said all of this, one might question my own use of the category of trauma as being objectionable in the light of the work of Fassin, Rechtman and Young. But here I stress two things in my defence. One, nothing in the work of Didier Fassin implies that the validity of psychanalytic interpretations is at fault. They are looking merely at the anthropological, political and, more importantly, epistemological shifts in the medical profession that brought about the introduction of this new category of PSTD. Two, I am not looking at trauma or PSTD as necessarily a clinical category. My objective in using the category of trauma is to try to situate the hermeneutic gaps that violent events can occasion in our ability to represent the past. My use of the term ‘trauma’ is broader. It is to help me understand the narrative techniques that humankind has used to deal with the past. The concept of trauma I interpret broadly as just the memory of the shock of the past which resists easy narrativization. 2 Wilhelm Dilthey was probably one of the first in the history of philosophy to systematically talk about hermeneutics as the foundation of the human sciences in general, and this includes not only history but also philosophy, psychology, sociology and even economics. For more, read (Kockelmans, 1993, pp. 6–19). Dilthey is already credited with, if not introducing, at least popularizing the use of the German term

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Erlebnis to denote experience, or more accurately lived experience. The earlier phenomenological category was Erfahrung, which meant just experience, which had strong connotations of it being a cognitive relation rather than any other kind of experience. To learn more about the terminological changes that Dilthey brought into the study of phenomenology and hermeneutics, read (Carr, 2014, pp. 19–30). 3 Two English historians whose works were deeply influenced by Vico are Isaiah Berlin and R. G. Collingwood. Collingwood translated some of the works of Vico. Berlin’s interest in Vico was kindled by a series of lectures that Berlin had attended which was on philosophy of history and Vico. For evidence of this, we can go to the biographer of Berlin, Michael Ignatieff: If there was any single source in Oxford for Berlin’s later interest in the philosophy of history, philosophical pioneers like the eighteenth-century Neapolitan Giammbatista Vico and in his evolving conviction that thinking historically was the best way to do philosophy, it was Collingwood.

(Ignatieff, 2011, p. 58) 4 I don’t wish here to go into how such Vicoin insights led later to German historicism and the notion of historical Verstehen and so on. For more, read (Berlin, 1990, pp.  49–69) and (Berlin, 1997, pp. 100–163). 5 Both Paul Ricouer and Hayden White place a lot of importance on narration as a methodological device through which we gain historical knowledge. For someone like Ricoeur, The narrative structure that I have chosen as the most relevant for an in-vestigation of the temporal implications of narrativity is that of the “plot.” By plot I mean the intelligible whole that governs a succession of events in any story. This provisory definition immediately shows the plot’s connecting function between an event or events and the story. A story is made out of events to the extent that plot makes events into a story. The plot, therefore, places us at the crossing point of temporality and narrativity: to be historical, an event must be more than a singular oc-currence, a unique happening. It receives its definition from its contribution to the development of a plot. (Ricoeur, 1980, p. 171) For Hayden White, “‘Narration’ is both the way in which a historical interpretation is achieved and the mode of discourse in which

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6

7 8 9

10 11

a successful under-standing of matters historical is represented” (H. White, 1982, p. 116). There is an ongoing debate on whether the Holocaust is a founding trauma of modern Western civilization or not. One the one hand, philosophers like (Jürgen Habermas, 1991a), (Lyotard, 1990), (LaCapra, 2001) and (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1990) attest to the belief that it is. On the other, philosophers like Gillian Rose contest it. My use of the event (Ereignis), the Holocaust as it has come to be called, doesn’t necessarily take sides on this debate. I don’t think I need to take sides. I am merely using the Holocaust as a test case for understanding the possibility of historical representation of traumatic events. For more on this linguistic turn, read (LaCapra, 2000), especially the first chapter. Please do read (Girard, 1979) and (Dumouchel, 2014) on the deeply constitutive relations between myths and ‘originary’ acts of violence. The ground for the rise in this kind of philosophy was already being made in Cambridge in the late 19th century and the early 20th century through the discontentment that philosophers like Russell and Moore had felt for the idealist tradition, which apparently was the ruling discourse in Oxbridge around that time. One can read Russell’s autobiography for a personal account of how there was this seething discontentment with the Bradleyan kind of idealist philosophy. There are many accounts of the formative periods of analytical philosophy or linguistic philosophy. For a short account, read (Beaney, 2007). For an ‘insider’ account, read the autobiography of Russell, where he details how he, because of his friend G. E. Moore, was made to abandon Hegelian philosophy and turn to clearer ‘common sensical’ epistemic standpoints (Russell, 1975, p. 54). The creative power of language is assumed to start from what has come to be called the poverty stimulus argument (POS). For a history and defence of the POS, read (Laurence and Margolis, 2001). This approach, otherwise called the language of thought theory, was first articulated by Jerry Fodor: Mental states are relations between organisms and internal representations, and causally interrelated mental states succeed one another according to computational principles which apply formally to the representations. This is the sense in which internal representations provide the domains for such data processes as inform the mental life. It is. in short, of the essence of cognitive theories that they seek to interpret physical (causal) transformations as

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transformations of information, with the effect of exhibiting the rationality of mental processes. (J. A. Fodor, 1975, p. 198) 12

I came to see a social system or “field” rather as a set of loosely integrated processes, with some patterned aspects, some persistences of form, but controlled by discrepant principles of action expressed in rules of custom that are often situationally incompatible with one another. . . . This view derived from the method of description and analysis which I came to call “social drama analysis.” (Turner, 1986, p. 74)

13 In Austin’s seminal work How to Do Things with Words (Austin, 1962), he talks about the appropriate circumstances that are required for the ‘force’ of an expression to be exchanged: “the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked” (Austin, 1962, p. 34). Moreover, according to Austin, there is always in any enunciative act of language an excess of utterance which is more than the locutionary potential of that sentence. In other words, for him, every utterance not only has apophantic content but can only occur always in a context. It is because of such a background context that the expression of any act carries a performative content, which he calls the illocutionary force or force of utterance.

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Early and late Wittgenstein What the preceding discussion has shown us is the close connection that an analysis of social, cultural and political realities has to something like our linguistic ability. It is commonplace to say that our linguistic ability is what gives us the functional capacity to use conceptual terms to understand and interpret our world. But, in continuation from the last chapter, I want to make a larger claim: language is not merely a conceptual tool that mediates us and the world but also a larger body of signifying relations without which even the ontological categories of world and subjects, etc. can’t even come into currency. It is important, for me, that we reinterpret the nature of language properly so that we bring into our foreground the multiple ‘revealings’ that language can enable. Properly understood, language can reveal not only immediate social and embodied existence but also our historical and mythological imaginations. That this deep sourcing of language is possible stands opposed to many of the current takes on the role of language and communication in the aetiology of social and political problems. Many of us are wont to say that political problems will dissolve themselves if only we could ‘listen’ to each other and communicate properly. That this ‘communication gap’ hinders our peaceful coexistence is another trite remark which is peddled in common everyday parlance. But all these remarks, however well intentioned, assume that language and communication are merely tools of our intentional meanings and that what we require first is a ‘change of heart,’ and then the rest will 95

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follow. But these ways of diagnosing the issues of miscommunication and the problems that follow from them are a result of a certain fundamental blind spot regarding our views of the nature of language. I aim to create a pathway to help us struggle “against the bewitchment of our understanding by the resources of our language” (PI 109). I will be doing it by bringing the later Wittgenstein into the discussion. How has our language bewitched our understanding of ourselves and our human condition? Talking about bewitchment for some might imply that we are somehow being delusional in our thinking and that the right way of going about solving social problems is to unveil obfuscating elements that cloud our judgement. This need for clarity has sometimes been taken along romantic and utopian lines. We can see this urge to bring about clarity expressed in the tropes of the play of the light and darkness, good and evil, truth and falsity, etc. Solutions to dialectical problems have tended to move towards a utopian tertium quid, which starts with the assumption that to even start thinking of the problems from the right perspective, we need to be awakened from our slumbers – ideological, sceptical and so on. In a way, the formulation of the dialectical problem of justice and truth goes back to Plato. Plato has had such a huge hand in the direction in which this problematic has moved in Western philosophy that what A. N. Whitehead said of Plato is largely true: “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” But what Whitehead must have meant as straightforward praise is ironically also why we need to blame Plato. In modern philosophy, we can see this Platonic dialectic between delusional and clear thinking still being debated. For example, in modern epistemological literature, the possibility of delusional thinking has even come to represent the ultimate philosophical problem: the problem of the evil demon as formulated by Descartes in his First Meditation. This sceptical problem has subsequently in a way overshadowed the intellectual engagements of many philosophers. Are we being misled into our beliefs regarding the external world through the machinations of an unknown epistemic screen such that we can never 96

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get to absolute truth and knowledge? This question, formulated differently by different people, has so bothered philosophers that we can recast the history of modern philosophy as merely the different attempts to answer this problem. But for the later Wittgenstein, the sceptical problem, which has come to captivate us and hold us in a way imprisoned, is a pseudo problem and is ultimately not a problem of knowledge or certainty but a problem of language. The aim of philosophy is not necessarily to solve this but, as Wittgenstein said, “to show the fly out of the bottle” (PI 309). But what does he mean by saying that sceptical problems come about because we seem to have captivated language like a fly? This whole chapter is about showing how the modern philosophical conundrum, par excellence, which is scepticism, is merely a self-inflicted one and that we can get around this through a fresh perspective on how we engage with language. Through a Wittgensteinian method towards language, I claim, we can not only defang the sceptical paradigm but also help retranslate our current social and political framework into linguistic terms. By so retranslating issues that are of a sociopolitical nature, we will have created a new discourse that looks at our collective existence in linguistic terms. Now, this might sound a bit outlandish at the outset, but by and by, I will show how language, broadly understood to include our embodied and embedded engagement with each other, can be fruitful for understanding intersubjective and institutional issues. But one wouldn’t be criticized sharply for thinking that to connect language to fundamental social, political and ultimately epistemological questions seems slightly far-fetched. It is my endeavour to slowly let the reader see the possibility of such connections between our language faculty and our social condition and thereby undermine our common-sense understanding of language as being merely the different natural languages that we speak. In other words, my aim is first to turn our views around regarding what we understand language naturally to be, and I argue that languages are not merely tools for us to communicate with. Once we gain this perspective, it will be easier to understand how our political existence is intimately tied to how we use our language. In this 97

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chapter, I will be looking at how we can gain that new perspective on the function of language. We will start with some of the conclusions regarding the nature of language that we reached from the earlier chapters. The insight that we gained earlier was that language is a form of praxis that is both collective and meaningful. We had said that language as a form of performance creates the space for communication to happen. It is in the ‘scene’ of praxeological action that the possibility of engaging in contentful expressions is enabled. Broadly put, language is what makes communication possible. I am not claiming a transcendental argument for the possibility of language, à la Kant. If one is wont to label arguments, mine would be an immanent, pragmatic argument for the possibility of intersubjective recognition and communication. Let us revisit the question of what language is so as to connect it to larger social nexus in which we live with each other. We saw in the earlier chapters that a mentalist picture of language, even though it has come to play a major role in our everyday discourses, doesn’t fully explain many of the social embodied aspects of language. The Chomskian model of language as the expression of certain biologically evolved computational capacities in our brain that turns unstructured finite input into rule-governed syntactic output doesn’t have room for many of the functions of language – for example, the embedded social aspects of it. We have to move away from such a model and do in a way what Habermas was trying to achieve with his communicative theory of action. Both our approach and his method have the same basic starting point, which is to look for a theory of collective action, “that places understanding in language, as the medium for coordinating action, at the focal point of interest” (Habermas, 1984, p. 274). Such an approach assumes language as the interplay of coordinated action of any kind. We can see that once we talk about coordinated action, we are already in the social sphere. Thus, one conduit to understanding the Wittgensteinian insights into language is to look at the social aspects of our language use. In a way, the sociality of language is fundamental to Wittgensteinian philosophy. In this chapter, I talk about two such social aspects 98

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of language: (1) the publicness of any language act and (2) the non-foundational character of all our pragmatic actions. Both are connected. I will also show that despite appearances, a social approach to language study undermines some of our entrenched prejudices and beliefs concerning our existence.1 I will first tackle (2) and discuss how language is a social institution and how any kind of action within an institutional framework cannot have any non-pragmatic foundation. Moreover, as a corollary to (2), I will show how social behaviour, institutional or otherwise, is ultimately rule-bound. Let me first talk about rules and their functions in collective behaviour from the later Wittgenstein’s perspective. The Wittgenstein claim from which I will be starting is that rules (any kind: social, ritualistic or linguistic) are ultimately non-foundational and pragmatic. This is, according to Wittgenstein, another way of saying that all our actions form a network of interconnected rules is to say that all rules are self-referential. Any understanding or interpretation of intersubjective actions cannot be enacted outside this self-referential system of rule-bound actions. This claim of mine will bring me to the point that language as a social institution is non-foundational. Then in the last section, I will talk about (1): how language cannot be mentalist in any meaningful sense and that meaning and references are fundamentally publicly accessible, and there is no private referential goal for any of our thoughts. To start the discussion, let me talk about two aspects that are fundamental to language as a performative and communicative medium. One, languages are social institutions and, two, languages are rule-bound. In a way, Wittgenstein combines the two aspects into one when he pithily says, “A game, a language, a rule is an institution” (RFM VI: 32). The nature of rules as it exists in any game or form of social setting is such that the enactment of rules by members or participants (as in a game) is possible only in the horizon of other interconnecting rules, and this expanded horizon is that which forms the overall institution of that social or lifeworld. By juxtaposing language rules with game rules, we notice that both of these rules require a pragmatic element in the interpretation of the execution of the rules. In other words, when we 99

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talk about institutions (social, religious or linguistic) and the criteria for what belongs to that institution (a game is a kind of an institution as well) and what doesn’t, we are already in the sphere of trying to understand the background rules that constitute that social institution or game. In a way, Wittgenstein will argue that any social or intersubjective institution is fundamentally a linguistic institution. This is not just saying that one should substitute linguistic behaviour for social behaviour as the units of social analysis whenever we do anthropological or sociological fieldwork. Nor is this saying that languages that people use reveal more about what people think and do than other kinds of behaviour. What the Wittgensteinian claim about the primacy of language rules says is that any kind of intersubjective (and historical) understanding is mediated only through how we fundamentally use language. Wittgenstein’s understanding of language is broader than the received opinion of language as the syntactic expression through words of certain mental intentions or thoughts. Wittgenstein wishes to go beyond the distinction between natural and artificial language as the only two kinds of language systems that we can think of. Before we present the institutional aspects of Wittgenstein’s linguistic analysis, something that is peculiar to him, it is only fair that we compare the functions of other ready-to-hand institutions like money, marriage, etc. to language. When we review social behaviour from an ‘outsider’ perspective, we find that the more coherent institutions are those in which there are readymade rules for different social contexts with assigned roles to different people. That is, in advanced social settings, we can find, as a general characteristic that underlies all social institutions, a set of rules that are instituted collectively and followed by everyone in that institution. An institution functions only in as much as the rules of that institution is followed. These rules can be informal customs or formal written laws. But all social behaviour is constituted by certain rules which not only govern the behaviour of people in that institution but also give significative valency to those signs which are used in that institution.2 How certain signs and words come to be interpreted in an institution is a function of the overall set of rules that govern behaviour socially. 100

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For example, the institution of money is made possible through the exchange of certain metallic or paper objects – either called coins or currency. The money institution in this case is constituted through a certain regime of the economy of exchange – the basic unit of which is currency. In this institution of money, the ‘status,’ to use Searlean language, that a piece of coin gets in an economic exchange is much more than it being a physical or metallic object.3 The object that is used in currency can’t merely be a piece of metal. That is, a coin in an economic exchange becomes a legitimate sign of barter only when a people so identify the function of that coin to have that particular value. But where and how does this identification of the function of the exchange value of a piece of coin happen? This ‘identification’ of that function is not some originary immaculate perception where people suddenly come to realize individually or collectively at one point and decide to ‘christen’ the coin with the function of money. The function of the coin as a common unit of barter is something that becomes so only through the use of that coin for barter. This institution is set up first when people start using a piece of coin and secondly only when that use is recognized by everyone. This recognition of that use doesn’t happen at an epistemic level. It is not as though we from an objective perspective understand that there is a piece of coin to which that person has the intention of using as a medium of exchange. The understanding of that social act can happen only when I accept that piece of coin as a medium of exchange. My acceptance of that coin and my recirculation of that coin have made me a participant in that practice, and thereby, my understanding is coeval with my use of that coin. There is no prior act to the use of coin that enables the coin to be used as form of exchange. It is the use which makes the metallic object a unit of currency. As Bloor puts it, Coins have shape and physical substance, but being a coin isn’t a matter of shape or physical substance. It is a matter of how the thing is used. We discover the character of a coin, as a coin, not by examining it – by studying its geometry or physics or chemistry – but by seeing how 101

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people relate to it. The important thing is how people regard it and employ it as a medium when interacting with one another. (Bloor, 1997, p. 29) That is, the employment of that coin is what institutes the practice of money exchange. The physical characteristics of that coin recede to the background when exchange happens. The value of currency is there only as long as people use it to exchange it. The value of the coin is not an intentional imposition on that coin. In a way, the story of King Midas doesn’t hold true, because it is not through an intentional ‘touch’ that something turns into gold or of something of value. The value of something is gained only through the recognition of the use, which is transactional. On the other hand, one can argue that coins came into the picture as currency because people felt that the earlier barter system was defective, imprecise and so on. An argument might be made that the need for a more precise form of exchange was what enabled the institution of money to be started. And so one can go onto say that the transactional nature of what constitutes currency is a product of the need to satisfy certain wants and to set up a system that would be easy to carry out throughout the social body, etc. It is true that from a sociological perspective, we can agree that institutions fulfil a need which people have for better coordination and communication. This argument rides on the back of the intentional-picture argument, which states that it is the purpose for which we use a tool that gives it the meaning. A hammer becomes a hammer because we use it to serve a certain purpose of ours, which is, in the case of the hammer, to attach things with nails. Ultimately, the purpose is given by us to that hammer, and it doesn’t have any intrinsic use or meaning as such. But what is being misunderstood here is that there might be purposes for which we use certain tools, and in a certain practical way, we impose purposes on things that we see around us. But from here, it would be wrong to conclude that it is the purpose of a particular action that gives meaning to that action. Meaning cannot be equated with the purpose. That would be a reductionist argument. The meaning of the act of giving and taking 102

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coins may fulfil a need, but what enables the mutual recognition of any particular act of giving money can only be through the mutual participation in that act of exchanging coins. Meaning comes through the recognition of the tools and its purposes. The purpose that I give a tool is not a sticker that attaches itself to the tool that people can read off like that. People can recognize what the tool is only when I use it for the purpose that I have purportedly given it. Similarly, in the act of taking and giving money, the value of that piece of metal is recognized collectively – and this recognition, I stress, is not through privileged epistemic access – and this act is the start of the institution of money economy. Coins, in the institution of money, have come to have a constitutive role in the game of giving and taking money. It is even not possible to imaginatively trace that origin of the modern system of money to certain historical and political decisions that were made at a particular point in time. A story about social rules which goes like ‘once upon a time, there was a person’ not only completely misdescribes the aetiology of social customs but also completely inverts the relation of the individual to society. There was no one person who could have sat down to write the rules of economy (or any other social institution) and then brought about the ‘coin’ as the least unit of currency. It is ‘grammatically’ incoherent as an explanation. It is an incoherent explanation because making a rule or following a rule is not possible only once in a lifetime or by just one person. It goes against the grammar of social institutions, which represents the collective recognition and following of rules. As Wittgenstein rightly puts it, It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which only one person followed a rule. It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which a report was made, an order given or understood, and so on. – To follow a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (usages, institutions). To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to have mastered a technique. (199 PI) 103

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Such an exercise in imagining – to which Wittgenstein invites us – brings us to the limits of representing the origins of institutions. In other words, Wittgenstein points to how certain questions regarding origins will have to stop somewhere, and that will have to be in practices. I will say more on this later. We can see that institutions, especially customs, organically emerge out of other institutions. What is common to different institutions is the underlying shifts of usage that constitute the different actions of a collective. When it comes to language itself as a social practice, the trigger for the origin of meaning cannot be something absolutely external to that institution. The understanding of any game is possible only because the person new to the game has seen and played other games. Let us take the case of playing chess: I am explaining chess to someone; and I begin by pointing to a chess piece and saying “This is the king; it can move in this-and-this way,” and so on. In this case we shall say: the words “This is the king” (or “This is called the king”) are an explanation of a word only if the learner already “knows what a piece in a game is.” That is, if, for example, he has already played other games, or has watched “with understanding” how other people play a and similar things. Only then will he, while learning the game, be able to ask relevantly, “What is this called?” a that is, this chess piece. (PI 31) As in chess and other games, ‘understanding’ a rule of a game is possible only because a person already knows what games are, which means that they are already caught in game-playing even before they come to the gaming table. Similarly, in language learning, there is no external point from which words are learnt. There is no non-playful engagement, and we are always already engaged in games, according to Wittgenstein. The child who is first learning a language already knows the grammar of games, and that is what enables the child to engage with the rules of language. This means that, instead of the idea 104

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that somehow the child learns a ‘new’ word through ostension, we have to substitute that picture with the idea that the child by learning a new word is merely using that word – like a new piece in a game – in a larger embedded game. The child won’t be able to ‘understand’ what this new piece is supposed to do if they don’t already know what the game is. The meaning of a word is gained by the use of that word merely through the act of enunciation by the child. That is, by the mere use of a word, what is brought into play is the whole game or institution of language itself. Meaning is made possible through the speech act itself. Such acts of enunciation whereby the meaning is in the act itself is what J.L. Austin (1962) called performatives. A performative utterance makes itself true by being uttered. For example, I say, ‘I hereby declare you husband and wife,’ or a judge says ‘I convict you to six years imprisonment,’ and there are more everyday utterances like ‘I welcome you to my home.’ Every time a judge pronounces a sentence not only are they pronouncing a contentful verdict on the accused but, by the mere of giving out the verdict, they also establish the legitimacy and force of the whole institution of law to give what she says backing. In other words, what she says becomes meaningful only because everybody recognizes that in such and such settings (a court, with lawyers, a jury and judge) somebody acquires a status (in this case the judge) whose pronouncements (if they come at the end) can act as a verdict. If people don’t recognize the fact that in every pronouncement in a court of law, it is the entire institution that gives a statement its illocutionary and perlocutionary force, then that statement doesn’t have any validity. If a bunch of people were just pretending to be a judge, lawyer or convict, then the speech act (of a verdict, say) would become meaningless. In a way, if we want to inquire into the origins of institutions, then we would do better if we were to observe and describe the different speech acts that are going on. As Austin says, in these examples, it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so 105

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uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it. (Austin, 1962, p. 6) In other words, the origins of institutions are embedded in speech acts themselves and can be read off of our everyday linguistic practices. That is, absolute performatives, to borrow Paolo Virno’s terminology (Virno, 2015, p. 49) are those utterances which don’t require any extra-linguistic conditions. These absolute performatives by their very action institute a practice in which the utterance acts as a rule. If institutions completely overlap with linguistic practices, then the activities of people in institutions form a closed loop. Because institutions as we found out don’t seem to require extra-linguistic conditions that act as external constitution factors, all social practices become self-referring activities. An institution becomes, as David Bloor says, “a collective pattern of self-referring activity” (Bloor, 1997, p. 33). And if we think of language as the strongest abiding institution, then the particular rules of any language game cannot be explained by standing outside all forms of signification. This reinforces my earlier point: it is not possible to find the origin of language as such by trying to stand outside the game of language and try to give a justification. This is because any invocation of any descriptive or normative category is in itself a participation in the institution of language. The interpretation of meaning can happen, according to Wittgenstein, only because one set of signs is replaced by another set of signs. It is futile to go behind and beyond a system of rules to either any mental or intentional content which would immediately point to a meaning. Wittgenstein says, if you see a telegram written in cipher, and you know the key to this cipher, you will, in general, not say that you understand the telegram before you have translated it into ordinary language. Of course, you have only replaced one kind of symbols by another; and yet if now you read the telegram in your language no further process of interpretation will take place. – Or rather, you 106

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may now, in certain cases, again translate this telegram, say into a picture; but then too you have only replaced one set of symbols by another. (BBB, p. 36) (Wittgenstein, 1958, p. 36) The act of justification that people are driven to find is a fool’s errand because it is like trying to imagine a rule, say, the rule such as following a signpost, being followed only once in the history of humankind. It doesn’t make sense. Rules by their very nature refer to each other, and thus, it is not possible to look for that primary rule which was first followed by one person. The possibility of imagining someone following a rule outside any language institution would be trying to undermine the self-referential nature of all institutions. Thus, for the later Wittgenstein, many people (including the earlier avatar that he took in the Tractatus) who have attempted to solve the problem of the origin of language, truth and reference have confused the nature of language rules. Those philosophers who were mistakenly on the path towards finding a justificatory logic behind the use of words were caught up in an Augustinian conception of language.4 According to this conception, it was believed that every word has a meaning and that the meaning of a word is the object that it stands for. According to this worldview, the fundamental paradigm of justifying meaning came to be the ostensive definition – the pointing to an object as the foundation of all certainty. This picture of meaning also went hand in hand with a dualist picture whereby the mind was considered to be separate from the external world, including the body. Psychological expressions like thoughts and judgements and other mental states were thought to be able to refer to objects in the external world.5 The ostensive definition leads us into a false picture of what meaning is. It is somehow believed that when you look at an object, you ‘recognize’ that object as that which refers to the word or thought you have in mind. In Philosophical Grammar, Wittgenstein warns us against this way of theorizing objectivity: It is easy to have a false concept of the processes called “recognizing”; as if recognizing always consisted in 107

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comparing two impressions with one another. It is as if I carried a picture of an object with me and used it to perform an identification of an object as the one represented by the picture. Our memory seems to us to be the agent of such a comparison, by preserving a picture of what has been seen before, or by allowing us to look into the past (as if down a spy-glass). (118 PG) If we had a mental picture, that picture would have to have another picture and so on. A pictorial representation raises the question of where representation ends. This myth of recognition as the grasp of our inner thought of an external world perpetuates a dichotomy of the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer,’ which is an epistemological inheritance that Wittgenstein didn’t quite question, for example, when he started work on the Tractatus. In the Tractatus, one can discern a metaphysics, if at all that is possible to discern, which was realist and atomist. Wittgenstein, in that work, gave in to the theory that propositions are composed of simpler expressions. These expressions are in turn analysable or unanalysable into simpler forms. Those that are unanalyzable are representative of simple objects, and these simple objects are meanings of names. Names have representative content and can be used only in an expression, and a proposition is a logically determined combination of these names. This in a nutshell was the metaphysics that underlay Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language in the Tractatus. Wittgenstein, in his earlier work, namely the Tractatus, expressed in a philosophically pure form the ‘referentialist’ or Augustinian idea that word and reality mirror each other. Even though Wittgenstein later came to repudiate his realist ideas, we needn’t go far but instead read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to see how a realist metaphysics works itself out. Before we look at the advances and changes that Wittgenstein made from his ‘realist’ days to his Philosophical Investigations days and to be able to appreciate the kind of criticism that he had to amount against entrenched philosophical prejudices regarding the nature of knowledge, certainty, mind, etc., it is important to historically and philosophically 108

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contextualize the earlier Wittgenstein. This I will do in the next section. I do this because through looking at the history of the philosophy of language, we can retrace the many arguments of a dominant philosophical paradigm, which to a large extent is still prevalent in many pursuits. This will in turn enable us to be in a better position to see the changes that Wittgenstein brings about in his later work.

Historical background to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy Wittgenstein’s later philosophy regarding the nature of language will have to be placed in the context of Wittgenstein’s earlier ideas expressed in the Tractatus. This will give us a good starting point to discuss some of his later criticism of his earlier views. Even though he came to not like his earlier avatar, if one were to review his intellectual career, one can see that Wittgenstein was always preoccupied in his younger days with the question of language and the importance of grammar and rules in solving philosophical problems. When Wittgenstein started out doing philosophy, at Cambridge in 1911 as a 22-year old man,6 he was more interested in the foundations of mathematics and the logic of Frege. Wittgenstein wanted to work on the laws of logic, the analysis of negation, disjunction and the problem of the theory of types as formulated by Bertrand Russell in those years starting from 1911 and ending in 1921, which was when Wittgenstein finished writing the Tractatus. In his Tractatus, deeply influenced by the logicist philosophy of Frege and Russell, Wittgenstein came to accept some of the basic assumptions of their philosophy. Wittgenstein worked within the framework created by Russell and Frege, for whom the fundamental function of words was to name and refer to the object that the word denotes. This assumption that the role of language was something that reflected the external world came to have an unquestioned position in English philosophy then, although Wittgenstein’s take on the whole relation was something that was unique to him. Wittgenstein believed, unlike Russell and Frege, that even though the task of philosophy was to analyse 109

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and clarify the relation between language and the external world, the link between the two was not a hypothetical link. For the earlier Wittgenstein, it was not merely contingent that there was an external world and that there was language, and somehow, we as rational cognizers had to mediate the two so as to get to knowledge. As Mcginn clearly explains, for Wittgenstein, Rather, the relation between language and the world, between a propositional sign and the state of affairs that it represents, is essential or internal; it is a relation that is constituted by the rules of projection in virtue of which we use language – i.e. a propositional sign – to say how things are in reality. Thus, although we see the items as separate – the propositional sign, “p,” is distinct from the fact that p – we also recognize them as internally linked, insofar as we use the propositional sign, “p,” to represent the fact that p is the case. Thus, a propositional sign can be used to represent a fact, and any fact can be represented by means of a propositional sign. The relation between the propositional sign and the fact that it can be used to represent does not depend upon a correlation between two items, but upon a rule that enables us to construct one from the other. We come to see the relation between language and the world it represents more clearly, not by discovering something, but by clarifying the rules of projection in virtue of which we use propositional signs to say how things are in reality (McGinn, 2006, p. 81)7 This has come to be called the picture theory of representation. This is the Wittgensteinian idea that sentences are pictures.8 To put it in another way, according to Wittgenstein, because the meaning of a name is the object of its representation, the syntactic combinatorial possibilities of names, which constitutes its logical syntax, reflects the logical form of the world. Thus, a proposition which reflects the world must therefore be isomorphic with the state of affairs it describes. For Wittgenstein, this isomorphic relation between the proposition and the state of affairs is a 110

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metaphysical condition of representation as he expressed it in the Tractatus. States of affairs which are contingent can be described through propositions, but this condition of representation itself, according to Wittgenstein, cannot be expressed, because it is ineffable. It can only be shown.9 There is some debate regarding whether the names of objects have a meaning before being part of a proposition (Hacker, 2001, p. 171) or whether these names are able to fulfil their representational role only through the context of a proposition in which they exist. But however names were constituted in the propositional form, the connecting link between names and the objects were through mental acts of thinking. This account of the mental intentional aspect of language and the mind is informed by a fundamental insight: thought and proposition alike are internally related to the state of affairs that makes them true. The thought that p is the very thought that is made true by the existence of the state of affairs that p, and so too, the proposition that p is the very proposition that is made true by the existence of the state of affairs that p. What one thinks, when one thinks that p, is precisely what is the case if one’s thought is true. In this sense, one’s thought reaches right up to reality. (TLP 2.1511) But this didn’t mean that Wittgenstein subscribed completely to the psychologist thesis that the object of judgement was dependent on the act of judging. Actually, he borrowed an anti-psychologist stance from Frege and Russell.10 Despite the overlap or criticism between Wittgenstein and the Cambridge school as represented by Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore principally, much of the later interpreters of Wittgenstein, including F. P. Ramsay, Rudolf Carnap and Moritz Schlick, took the philosophy of language in a direction that came to have a huge influence in philosophical debates in the interwar years. This realist philosophy of Wittgenstein with its many assumption regarding the nature of what constitutes the limits of representability and therefore 111

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the limits of philosophy came to a have enormous influence on debates around epistemology and the philosophy of science. In a way, the Vienna Circle – a hugely influence group of philosophers who were widely interested in science, epistemology, linguistics, etc. – came to think of Wittgenstein in the 1920s as their intellectual guru and source of inspiration. The direct influence that Wittgenstein had on the Cambridge philosophers and later on the Vienna circle came to crystalize around a few central tenets of what constituted philosophy, one of which was verificationism as a method of doing philosophy and the other was a form of cognitivism, which, as we saw earlier, was the belief that certainty can be accessed only from a subject’s internal point of view. This Wittgensteinian thrust to the whole debate around language and our knowledge of the world was influential. In a way, the birth of analytical philosophy, along with many epistemological assumptions, can be ascribed to the linguistic turn that was given to philosophy through the work of Russell, Frege, Moore and Wittgenstein. But having said that, the direction in which the Vienna Circle and other similar philosophers interpreted Wittgensteinian philosophy, Wittgenstein did not approve of. Partly because he felt he didn’t have anything new to say and partly because Wittgenstein was dissatisfied with the state of philosophy as it existed in the 1920s, Wittgenstein took a break from academic philosophy in the 1920s. He came back to Cambridge in January 1929 and was working towards a new conception of what the role of language is. He was beginning to be dissatisfied with some of his formulations in the Tractatus. He had extensive conversations with Ramsay until January 1930, before Ramsay at the age of 26 died prematurely. The developmental progress of many of the Wittgensteinian ideas in the 1930s was witnessed by philosophers like G. E. Moore and Desmond Lee. Those notes and lectures of Wittgenstein, as he was formulating new ideas, was taken down by these aforementioned people. This later came to be published as Philosophical Remarks (PR). During these years, Wittgenstein was in the mix of giving birth to completely new ideas, and those ideas were all in different levels of gestation. For example, Wittgenstein 112

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thought at that time (the 1930s) that he should write a book which would contain his new ideas. He had plans to start working on that book. He even wrote down a few notes and chapter headings. This set of notes and drafts came to be called The Big Typescript (BTS). BTS is important in that it foreshadows many of the opinions that he came to have later – those that were expressed in his Philosophical Investigations. In these two sets of notes, Philosophical Grammar and The Big Typescript, Wittgenstein criticized the picture theory of language, that which he had expounded in the Tractatus. In the Tractatus, as we saw, Wittgenstein had argued for an isomorphism between language and reality. But in the 1930s, Wittgenstein moved away from the view that there is an internal relation between words and the real world. As Wittgenstein was moving away from his earlier view, he started to argue that the least unit of representation is not a proposition combined of denoting words according to definite rules of logical syntax. For the first time, in the 1930s, Wittgenstein starts talking about language games, and he is bringing in notions of rules as in a game to talk about syntax and logic. In BTS, Wittgenstein first starts equating language game with a set of rules that we use to determine how a particular syntactic combination is to play itself out and become meaningful. We can now see the beginning of a paradigm shift in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. A word, Wittgenstein says in BTS, doesn’t get meaning because there is an intentional representation of the object of that word that accompanies it. I want to say that signs have their meanings neither by virtue of what accompanies them, nor because of what evokes them – but by virtue of a system to which they belong – one, however, in which when a word is uttered nothing need be present other than that word. (201 TBT) Here he is clearly moving away from the picture theory of language, where names are meaningful because of their ostensive definition. From the earlier theory of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein 113

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from the 1930s onwards said that language and reality don’t have to be isomorphic at all. He started to believe something different. To know what the new trajectory that Wittgenstein took, let us go to Peter Hacker, one of the foremost authorities on Wittgenstein in recent times: Far from the logical syntax of any possible language having to mirror the logical structure of the world, the rules of a language are autonomous. They owe no homage to reality. They do not reflect metaphysical possibilities, determined by the essential nature of objects represented, but rather themselves determine logical possibilities – that is, what it makes sense to say. And different languages may be constituted of different rules, constrained only by human interests and needs, human discriminatory capacities, shared abilities and reactive propensities, and by the limits of what we call “a language.” (Hacker, 1996, p. 80) Wittgenstein continued to develop his ideas throughout the 1930s and, from 1933 to 1935, he dictated some lecture notes to students like Francis Skinner and Alice Ambrose, which later came to be called the Blue Book and the Brown Book.11 It was so called because for a long time, these notes were exchanged among students in Cambridge wrapped in blue paper and brown paper. These two books and the ideas contained in them had a lot of influence in the intellectual development of Wittgenstein throughout the 1930s and the 1940s and also was formative for his later Philosophical Investigations. A central theme in all these attempts by Wittgenstein to redirect the course of philosophical analysis from his earlier views to his later ones was to make us think anew regarding the nature of a sign in a language. He had earlier believed that there was an intentional relation between our minds or mental states and the external world which mirrored the relation between the word and the world. This relation of intentionality was somehow the reason for the direction of fit in our doxastic states which gave us truth. But for Wittgenstein, 114

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as he was writing in the 1930s, to have a mental picture of an external object seemed merely an occult theory because the mental representation as a theory itself needed explaining. Wittgenstein puts it well in his Blue Book: If the meaning of the sign (roughly, that which is of importance about the sign) is an image built up in our minds when we see or hear the sign, then first let us adopt the method we just described of replacing this mental image by some outward object seen, e.g. a painted or modelled image. Then why should the written sign plus this painted image be alive if the written sign alone was dead?-In fact, as soon as you think of replacing the mental image by, say, a painted one, and as soon as the image thereby loses its occult character, it ceases to seem to impart any life to the sentence at all. (It was in fact just the occult character of the mental process which you needed for your purposes.) (Wittgenstein, 1958, p. 5) Throughout the 1930s, one of the myths that Wittgenstein worked hard to dispel was an internalist myth – that is, the belief that meaning resided in one’s head and that propositions and language in general were the conduits through which these internal signs were externalized. He didn’t believe that thinking must be construed as necessarily something that was to be localized in the head. The problem with the idea of intentional locality, according to Wittgenstein, was that we are being misled by mere metaphors into ontologizing the nature of meaning and signification. As he says, Let us go back to the statement that thinking essentially consists in operating with signs. My point was that it is liable to mislead us if we say “thinking is a mental activity.” The question what kind of an activity thinking is analogous to this: “Where does thinking take place?” We can answer: on paper, in our head, in the mind. None of these statements of locality gives the locality of thinking. 115

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The use of all these specifications is correct, but we must not be misled by the similarity of their linguistic form into a false conception of their grammar. As, e.g., when you say: “Surely, the real place of thought is in our head.” (Wittgenstein, 1958, pp. 15–16) Any internalist doctrine regarding mental content and its divorce from the outside world has led to many solipsist puzzles. This is what Wittgenstein was working against. According to solipsism, only my mental states exist and nothing else besides it. This doctrine has had a long history in the sceptical tradition, from Roman times onwards. But more recently in Western philosophy with Descartes, it got a reboot and has come to play an important part in the history of philosophy in the modern world. Solipsism is different from idealism in that idealism is at best ambivalent about the existence of other minds, whereas solipsism says that only one mind exists and that that mind is mine. Solipsism, taken to its extreme, can be self-refuting since if you are the only person who exists, then there is no need to prove it, since there will be nobody else who can receive the proof. Solipsism in a strong form also denies the existence of the past and doubts the future existence of oneself. Some form of solipsism or the other has had strong defenders even after Descartes. A case in point is Kant. He espoused a form of transcendental solipsism through his categories of understanding, which opened the way to thinking of our self as the transcendental condition of all knowledge. In other words, even though Kant was strict in maintaining that his philosophy was a transcendental approach to situating the role of the self in gaining objective knowledge, a lot of his followers came to interpret the psychological self as the empirical condition for receiving any content from the outside world, as some neo-Kantians in the 19th century were wont to do. In such a picture, if the self is the condition of all knowledge, then it is only a small step to thinking of the self as the only thing that exists. Transcendental solipsism is more sophisticated than other kinds of solipsistic doctrine. But for someone like Wittgenstein, any metaphysical doctrine, whether it be solipsism, 116

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idealism, realism or any other theory, presupposes a mentalist or foundationalist picture of representation and is therefore fundamentally flawed. These kinds of ‘meta’ theories, if you like, regarding the nature of everything, for Wittgenstein, are merely faulty pictures which have come to captivate us. Wittgenstein wants us reflectively to look at the idea of representation itself. If a theory is a way of representing the world, then that representational theory as such must have certain internal rules of representation. In other words, we will be going down the wrong path if we think that the categories of representationalist thinking are somehow nominalistic categories. Wittgenstein asks, why can’t we look at representational theories as themselves rules in a larger or wider set of rules? For Wittgenstein, the worldview that we carry around us regarding the role of knowledge, belief, truth, etc. are ultimately rules of grammar. All worldviews, in a way, are ultimately rules of grammar. Grammatical rules are not the general descriptive rules of syntax that we are accustomed to interpret them as. Something (a particular word or sentence) counts as falling under a rule of grammar or as being ‘grammatical’ if that word or sentence is being used in a particular manner. In a Wittgensteinian paradigm, it is difficult to explain what a rule is, because one can’t give a definition of what a rule is. One can only point to different rules – as in different games – and bring out the family resemblances between all the rules. Rules are arbitrary. He says Grammatical rules determine a meaning and are not answerable to any meaning that they could contradict. Why don’t I call cookery rules arbitrary, and why am I tempted to call the rules of grammar arbitrary? I don’t call an argument good just because it has the consequences I want. The rules of grammar are arbitrary in the same sense as the choice of a unit of measurement. (PG 133) We will talk in detail about rules and grammar, in the next chapter. What I want to point out here is that Wittgenstein’s insistence 117

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on reinterpreting our theories as merely rules of playing a game points to a fundamental paradigm shift. We are prone to looking at theories and justifications as that which underlies many of our beliefs and propositions. A good theory is supposed to not only connect our different beliefs regarding the external world but also ideally express an underlying necessary connection. In a way, that is what Kant was trying to do in his Critique of Pure Reason. Wittgenstein, by saying that there is no privileged justification that can stand over and above the different beliefs and propositions that we make, is opening the door to a different understanding of what language must be. If all justification and propositions are syntactic combination of words, then according to Wittgenstein, it is presumptuous to think that some combination of words is somehow ‘justificatory’ and certain other words are not. All words are learnt in the same fashion – through use. When we are pointing to a chair when we explain the word ‘chair,’ we seem to think that this ‘pointing’ gesture is somehow more fundamental than the use of the word itself. But why should that be? The ostensive definition of signs is not an application of language, but part of the grammar: something like a rule for translation from a gesture language into a word-language. – What belongs to grammar are all the conditions necessary for comparing the proposition with reality-all the conditions necessary for its sense. (PG 45) We somehow believe that our thoughts which are internal can reveal an external world. This is one with our trust in our mental capacity to reveal things of the world. A foundationalist picture emerged in philosophy in modern times which gave privileged status to either reason or understanding. It was thought that the rules of internal representation were different and more justificatory than our external access. What was considered to be fundamental in bridging this gap between the internal and the external

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was the instantiation of phenomenological states like judging, knowing, etc. Wittgenstein believes in the contrary: If we introduce the concept of knowing into this investigation, it will be of no help; because knowing is not a psychological state whose special characteristics explain all kinds of things. On the contrary, the special logic of the concept “knowing” is not that of a psychological state. (RC 350) The focus on rules and grammar brings us to another powerful critique that Wittgenstein mounted against the mentalist myth: ultimately, all our thoughts and significative moves are internal. This is the belief in (1) the dichotomy of the outer and the inner and (2) the foundational picture of the inner somehow standing as a ground (logical, psychological or phenomenological) for the outer. In the next section, we will try to discuss further Wittgenstein’s critique of the view that there necessarily has to be an outer and an inner when it comes to signification.

Wittgenstein and publicity What Wittgenstein was trying to debunk was the epistemological principle that cognition was somehow the abiding and foundationalist act of all kinds of epistemic acts. Again, a starting point for this principle can be found in Kant. The conceptual content of our epistemic acts was something that Kant had assumed to be a priori. According to Kant, it was through a process of transcendental synthesis that our intuitive content connects with the a priori categories of our understanding. Through Wittgenstein’s criticisms of the internalist picture of epistemic acts, what comes to the fore is the public and shared nature of something as fundamental as the epistemic truth. Even in the so-called middle years of Wittgenstein – the 1920s and the 1930s – he was working towards an understanding of the practice of knowledge production as generated by a set of rules which are embedded in certain

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life forms. These life forms were governed by certain public and normative rule-following practices. Wittgenstein’s views matured by the early 1940s and were expressed in its most final form in his Philosophical Investigations. The most trenchant critique of the earlier epistemic worldview – which in a way held sway in many disciplines and saw the rise and popularity of subjects like psychology12 – was encapsulated in what has come to be called the private language argument. Wittgenstein attacks the private language argument in section 243 of PI. We will furnish this section of the chapter with what Wittgenstein has to say regarding private languages. What we have seen so far from our own preceding remarks is that language is a phenomenon of the world like many other social phenomena. Understanding each other through language is not through a mental state but through engaging different capacities that use signs according to certain rules. But through philosophical accidents, the use of language has come to be interpreted through the primacy of thought rather than of action. This is the central problem of philosophy as perceived by many professional philosophers. As Wittgenstein poses the problem for us, How do words refer to sensations? – There doesn’t seem to be any problem here; don’t we talk about sensations every day, and name them? But how is the connection between the name and the thing named set up? This question is the same as: How does a human being learn the meaning of names of sensations? For example, of the word “pain.” Here is one possibility: words are connected with the primitive, natural, expressions of sensation and used in their place. A child has hurt himself and he cries; then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain-behaviour. “So you are saying that the word ‘pain’ really means crying?” – On the contrary: the verbal expression of pain replaces crying, it does not describe it. But somehow, the paradigmatic rule has come to be the rule of reference. (PI 244) 120

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When we take something as personal as pain and as incommunicable as it looks in its phenomenological feel, we come face to face with the limits of understanding and communication. In something as ‘private’ as pain, we are forced to use a word like ‘pain,’ which doesn’t quite convey the ‘inner’ feeling of that pain to the hearer. At best, through analogy, they can understand only what my pain is like. But this kind of argumentation is what Wittgenstein is trying to work against. Let us look at how a baby comes to learn the right word (‘pain’) for the appropriate feeling (pain). We can start with the following question: when we look at the cry of the baby, how and when does the baby come to learn the word ‘pain’ for this kind of feeling? It is apparent that whenever the baby is taught to associate the word ‘pain’ with the feeling of pain, it is not because we as its parents or caretakes make the baby look inwards and say ‘it is because, you as a baby, have a pain feeling that only you can access, and because you want to express that internal feeling (for whatever reason – it can be biological, social or psychological), I will give you now a word “pain,” which if you express this can tell me what is going through in your inner self.’ We obviously have no such move that we make when we teach a baby the use of any such word. This whole explanation of how a baby is taught the function of a word is much later, in view of all the developmental stages of a baby. It is important that when we are trying to describe the activity of teaching a new word to a baby, we bracket out all the later theoretical assumptions that are clearly otiose to the actual practice of teaching and learning a new word. A justification like the one from earlier can be at best a post facto justification. It is the action that comes first, and the justification comes later. Wittgenstein was wont to quote Goethe’s dictum: “Am Anfang war die Tat” (In the beginning was the deed), which is apt to describe our psychological developmental journey. The connection that the baby is taught is not between an internal feeling and an external word but merely the displacement of the connection between crying and pain to crying and the word ‘pain.’ Crying itself is an expression of pain as much as the word ‘pain’ is an expression of pain. The baby cries as an expression of pain. Later, the baby is taught the word 121

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‘pain’ to replace the non-linguistic behaviour. In one way, both the linguistic sign and the behavioural expression are on the same plane of communicability. When the child cries, there is no gap between the act of recognition of pain and the act of crying. The crying is automatically the expression of pain. In a way, the child doesn’t first identify the pain that they have, remember that crying is the appropriate expression to use here and then start crying. It is the people around the child who recognize that the child is crying because the child must be in pain. This implies that crying becomes a significative act in itself because of the social recognition that is given to that act of crying. As Stephen Mulhall has put it well in his commentary on Philosophical Investigations, the relevant linguistic connection between ‘pain’ and pain is set up for the individual learner by the society of which he is a part. His mastery of that connection (and so his capacity to articulate his feeling even in the most primitive linguistic forms) is an effect or function of his presence in a human social world in which that connection is always already effected, or in effect. (Mulhall, 2007, p. 30) But we might still resist such a view. “But obviously, I can name something in my own head. Can’t we name something in our minds and privately?” This is the private linguist talking. The private linguist, who is Locke in a modern dress would want to say “I have certain sensations which are private and nobody can know it as well as I do.” The private linguist can say “Well, only I can know whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it” (PI 246). Wittgenstein attacks this particular understanding that the private linguist has, which is that only they can understand their own pain and nobody else can – that is, the belief that a person can point to their pain in a way that they can’t point to someone’s ‘internal’ feeling of pain. Pain is something that is fundamentally internal, the private linguist will want to say.

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The private linguist would go on to say, I want to keep a diary about the recurrence of a certain sensation. To this end I associate it with the sign “S” and write this sign in a calendar for every day on which I have the sensation. – – I first want to observe that a definition of the sign cannot be formulated. But all the same, I can give one to myself as a kind of ostensive definition! – How? Can I point to the sensation? – Not in the ordinary sense. But I speak, or write the sign down, and at the same time I concentrate my attention on the sensation a and so, as it were, point to it inwardly. (PI 258) But let us analyse this supposedly fundamental and private act of ‘naming.’ How does one name something? Any naming is possible only when people recognize the act of naming. Wittgenstein says that naming as a convention is possible only against a background of an already-established social stage: “When one says ‘He gave a name to his sensation,’ one forgets that much must be prepared in the language for mere naming to make sense” (PI 257). To name something presupposes a standard convention against which this particular act is measured or compared. When I call a taste too sweet, this is enabled only because there is a background of a gustatory scale of recognized sensible qualities against which one can compare this. But what about the diarist we saw who seems to be able to keep a dairy of their private sensations and find that each day they have new and interesting feelings inside them which they call by different names. Wittgenstein denies that such a private christening is possible without a public social setting. Naming as a convention to be legitimate and recognizable by somebody else will have to invoke words and rules that are otherwise public. To be able to say ‘this is a private sensation,’ the private linguist will have to use words like ‘sensation’ and ‘private’ and other words which need to have meaning. And meaning is something that is communicable and public by its very nature.

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What Wittgenstein is doing is inverting the order of priority between what is considered public and private. Wittgenstein doesn’t necessarily deny the idea that there are private feelings. What he is against is the belief that somehow private feelings are not only foundational but somehow incorrigible and incommunicable. The possibility of being understood when I say ‘I have a private sensation S’ implies that what is crucial to the act of communication is the following of a standard against which one can apply a particular rule. In the case of the private sensation, the standard is the idea of ‘sensation.’ If one doesn’t even know what the word ‘sensation’ means, then comparing this particular sensation S to another sensation X is impossible. But what is important for Wittgenstein is that the ‘standard’ against which we can compare and use other words cannot exist in our ‘private’ selves, which we can point to through ostension for that would not be a standard at all. When I name my sensation of a particular red ‘Rx,’ the communicability of my sensation even to myself is made possible only when I already know what the word ‘sensation’ and the word ‘red’ mean. But that doesn’t mean that I have a colour table in my head which I compare my private sensation against, and say my sensation of Rx is not anywhere in this table and therefore will name it Rx since it is unique to my sensory powers, etc. As Wittgenstein rightly says, “Looking up a table in the imagination is no more looking up a table than the image of the result of an imagined experiment is the result of an experiment” (PI 265). The standard against which we are purportedly supposed to compare our sensations is itself another rule which stands against the background of other further rules. The originary comparison – the paradigm example of that being ostensive definition  – of a sample with a standard doesn’t exist, because there can be no standard that is divorced from the way that standard was or is being used. One can object,‘But what about when I concentrate on the internal feeling I have intently?’ That is idle ceremony, according to Wittgenstein. Whether you ‘look’ internally or think about something else as a form of association is completely immaterial to the use of that particular word (for a sensation). All meaning is use, according to Wittgenstein, and the use of words is what 124

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makes meaning communicable. Even the supposed act of ostension is a rule in a language game that seems to point to the limits of language, but what is considered to be the limit of language is merely the grammar of that expression. When we think we have come upon an empirical proposition the opposite of which it is impossible to imagine, we have come upon a grammatical proposition. In other words, when we say ‘I can’t imagine how it would be if I were to feel his sensation,’ this proposition implies that we can’t imagine the opposite of this either. Anything that we can’t imagine the opposite of becomes a grammatical proposition: If the remark really is grammatical, it does not depict any particular way that things are, even necessarily or as a matter of essence; if we really can’t imagine the opposite, we can’t imagine the thing itself either. Accordingly, to imply that we can is again to fall into the very emptiness we are combating. (Mulhall, 2007, p. 58) Having a private sensation like pain is like having a beetle in one’s box, Wittgenstein argued: Suppose that everyone had a box with something in it which we call a “beetle.” No one can ever look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. – Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. – But what if these people’s word “beetle” had a use nonetheless? – If so, it would not be as the name of a thing. The thing in the box doesn’t belong to the language-game at all; not even as a Something: for the box might even be empty. – No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. (PI 293) This passage reveals Wittgenstein’s point regarding the publicness of language rules. Every word has a particular rule for use, 125

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including the word ‘pain.’ Let us say, following the example given earlier, that everyone thinks there is something that they have in their bottle which they look at and call a ‘beetle.’ But there could also be nothing in the bottle. But whatever is or is not in the bottle, the people use the word ‘beetle’ intelligibly and seem to understand, in this thought experiment, the word and the people who use the word get along with the usage of that word. But the fact that people are able to use the word ‘beetle,’ whether there is a beetle in the bottle or not, seems to imply that the use of the word and the intelligibility of the word ‘beetle’ is not dependent on anything that it need point to. How does it matter what the person is holding in their bottle if everybody is able to recognize and correlate one person’s use of the word ‘beetle’ with every other person’s use of the word ‘beetle’? The game of communication is complete when people are able to understand the usage of the word and whatever psychological reference points that we bring in shows itself to be completely otiose. A persistent objector to Wittgenstein would go on to argue that if it is possible to use the word ‘beetle’ even when there is no beetle, does this imply that ‘beetle’ as an object doesn’t exist? Not quite. What Wittgenstein is implying is that the so-called ‘object’ of the designated word is irrelevant to the meaning of the word ‘beetle.’ Similarly, when we come to cognitive meaning, it is a Cartesian mistake to think that somehow there is a mental object that attaches to each word and that it is that word which makes it veridical. Veridicality, like other moves in the game of communication, is also merely a rule. It is not thereby foundational. The whole formulation of this ‘thought experiment’ of the beetle in the box is to throw us off from thinking that there is ‘something’ that is in the box. There need not be ‘anything’ that is referred to when we look for the meaning of a word or the intention of a thought. In the foregoing example, the fact that there could be no beetle at all in the box should alert us to follow Wittgenstein on a different path regarding where to find the meaning of a word. Saying that the beetle itself might not exist without eliminating the legitimate use of the word ‘beetle’ implies that the ontic category of some thing (Ding) is not an epistemically foundational category. In other words, the thing that is supposed to be permanent, such 126

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as pain, doesn’t exist as a thing in the world but exists only as a rule in a game. Now it should be clear that the thinghood of anything cannot exist as an end point of a particular epistemic or linguistic process. The beetle that everyone is looking at (or not) isn’t as important as the fact that everyone is ‘seeing’ into a bottle. This point of seeing or referring to anything is a game, which to be able to even engage meaningfully in, one needs to know the difference between seeing and hearing or feeling. Ultimately, what Wittgenstein is pointing to is that sensations like pain are not objects but are states of living organisms which are, like any language game, interconnected through an array of responses and reactions. The ‘thingness’ that we seem to scribe to beetles and pains is part of a language game which purports to refer to objects, but one mustn’t forget that referring is a rule like a rule in chess. In a chess game, it is immaterial which coin you call ‘king,’ ‘bishop’ or ‘queen,’ but as long as the other person is able to recognize the rule and play accordingly, the thing that constitutes the pieces of the game of chess is immaterial. Things as such, we must remember, are referral points, and they are fluid in their ontological status. Their thinghood is not as important as what you do with it – the use you put it to. Thus, when a thing is divorced from the point of reference mainly because that relation itself can be manifested only through the use of another word, what we have is the interconnected nature of rules which by its very nature, because it cannot be internalist, has to be public. This translation of ontic categories into linguistic ones, which are public by their very nature, is what is most significant in the contribution that Wittgenstein has made in his later philosophy. Again, given the history of the study of language and the mind and the various philosophical objections that we have made so far, it must become apparent that language must not be interpreted as an internalist calculus but as “a rule-governed symbolism, the employment of which in linguistic practices is partly constitutive of our form of life. Words, like chess pieces, are used according to rules” (G. Baker and Hacker, 1991, pp. 135–136). In this use of the word, we are taking away the mentalist medium between the use and the meaning. When we take away the legitimacy of 127

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a mentalist route to understanding meaning and use, we are left with the thought that the rule and the application of a rule cannot be thought of as two different things or processes. To know the rule is to apply the rule. To know and understand what a word means is to use the word, and using the word is expressed by what one does with it. To use a sentence is to make a move in a game. And all rules, as we saw earlier in this chapter, come from a social custom. Rules are those that are engaged by a group of people and passed onto the next set of people through processes of initiation which have come to be called formal education. The overall point I want to stress here is that there are no intermediate processes between the rule and the following of it. Ultimately, reasons for actions are pragmatically necessitated through collective practice. When I reach the end of justification, “My reasons soon give out. And then I shall act without reasons” (PI 211). And soon “if I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: This is simply what I do” (PI 217). I follow rules ultimately because the rules are how I am initiated into a social community. When we review how we are trained in language by our parents or our society, we can see that the process of learning cannot be divorced from the social aspect of rule following. A child ultimately understands a word only when they repeat the word taught to them in the appropriate context and that context is given to them by their parents or society in general. The actions that the child imitates come out of a background of other social actions, which has a certain history, tradition and setting. Some actions have a justification in other actions, but as Wittgenstein, points out, some actions don’t. When we have grasped a meaning, we don’t have a eureka moment in our heads as though a switch clicked, even though we sometimes like this image of a mental spark; But in reality, understanding a meaning is more like an expression of confidence that we can go in a particular way or we can follow the rule in the correct way in the future. In a way, when a child is being taught, they are asked to ‘follow’ blindly because at some point there is no justification for the child, and the child will just have to continue using the word without any justification. At 128

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some point, the parents are going to say, ‘that is how it is.’ This is not a causal explanation but a linguistic explanation in the sense that the child is taught both the game of explaining and the game of following a rule blindly. The obviousness of the rule is taught while the child is initiated into the rules of giving and asking for reasons. Parents ‘run out of reasons’ because they have hit the bedrock of their life form, and this reveals how their lifeworld is constituted. In this way, each lifeworld is maintained through the common sharing of rules (mutually reinforced through continuous performance) of which some rules are considered to be that which is the bedrock where the spade has to be turned and some not. But these bedrock rules are not foundational, it must be kept in mind, because the boundaries between what is a justification and what is not can keep changing depending on the evolution and the internal practices of that community. This long philosophical chapter was necessary so that we can realize that what is important in our lives and gives us a key to ‘knowing’ ourselves are certain collective bedrock practices. They constitute the end of sceptical questioning and in a way reveal ourselves in a more originary fashion. We took the Wittgensteinian route to understanding the nature of our collective existence because the end point of all discussion leads us to those actions and practices that we as a community as a whole share and engage in. These practices in a way form the boundary of all our meaningful engagement with each other. What is crucial in our analysis is that these lifeform practices can’t be epistemically subjected to problems of knowledge, truth or certainty. Practices, by their very nature, are beyond the sceptical challenge, because when we review our lives, we don’t review it from outside in. We are already participants in our lives, and crucially, we are participants who can’t differentially remove ourselves from the space of mutual interaction. In the next chapter, I aim to place these remarks regarding the social nature of our acts within the larger theme of violence. I will also discuss, given this translation of the problem of human existence from the ontic to the linguistic and pragmatic plane, what consequences it has for our discussion of political structure, violence and our everyday world. 129

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Notes 1 I also argue that my social approach to language is not a sociological approach to Wittgensteinian philosophy. There have been sociologists such as (Barnes, 1977; Bloor, 1983, 1997) who have used a sociological approach, and they have some interesting insights that I will also be borrowing, but ultimately, my approach, as will become apparent, is fundamentally different from theirs. 2 Please read social theorists like David Bloor (Bloor, 1983, 1997) and Barry Barnes (Barnes, 1977), who have looked at rules as the constituting elements of social behaviour along similar lines. Pierre Bourdieu’s own view of institutional rules and its relation to his concept of habitus as he has explicated in his Logic of Practice have been interpreted by some to be quite Wittgensteinian. Bourdieu is pretty much saying that same thing as I am when he says, the habitus, as society written into the body, into the biological individual, enables the infinite number of acts of the game – written into the game as possibilities and objective demands – to be produced; the constraints and demands of the game, although they are not restricted to a code of rules, impose themselves on those people – and those people alone – who, because they have a feel for the game, a feel, that is, for the immanent necessity of the game, are prepared to perceive them and carry them out. (Bourdieu, 2007, p. 63) For direct connections between Wittgenstein and Bourdieu, read (Gay, 1996; King, 2000). 3 Searle’s understanding of statuses in institutions must be placed in his whole bifurcation of rules as regulative and constitutive. According to Searle, “Institutions always consist in constitutive rules (practices, procedures) that have the form X counts as Y)” (Searle, 1969, p. 35). For Searle, there are two kinds of rules, and institutions consist of constitutive rules. According to him, Regulative rules regulate a preexisting activity, an activity whose existence is logically independent of the rules,” whereas “constitutive rules constitute .  .  . an activity the existence of which is logically dependent on the rules.” For example, “the rules of football or chess . . . do not merely regulate playing football or chess, but as it were they create the very possibility of playing such games.” (Searle, 1969, pp. 33–42) Regulative rules govern actions that can be performed independently of such rules – for example, rules of etiquette. Regulative

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rules are generally imperatives which dictate how things ought to be done. Regulative rules can be disobeyed without any violation of an institutional practice. On the other hand, constitutive rules, like the rules of chess, give meaning to the game (or institution as such). Constitutive rules make institutional actions possible. For a more detailed analysis of the influence of Searle’s ideas on social theory, read (Balzer, 2002; Tuomela, 1997, 2002). For more on the Augustinian roots of early Wittgensteinian philosophy, read (G. P. Baker and Hacker, 2005, pp. 1–26). For more on this, read (Hintikka, 1986, pp. 179–200). For a personal account, read Bertrand Russell’s autobiography (Russell, 1975), where he talks about his first encounter with Wittgenstein. For a third-person perspective, read (Monk, 1990). There is a persuasive case that Marie McGinn makes for reading the earlier and the later Wittgenstein in one philosophical continuum rather than as a break between two incompatible views. For example, McGinn says that distinction between saying and showing is something that is fundamental to Wittgenstein’s thought in Tractatus and in his later works. McGinn argues, Thus, in On Certainty, a collection of remarks that Wittgenstein wrote in the last year and a half of his life, the distinction between the a priori, or what is shown in the use of language, and the a posteriori, or what is said in language, is fundamental to his diagnosis of philosophical scepticism and its dogmatic alternative. (McGinn, 2001, p. 33) Another alternative reading of the Tractatus has come to have a lot of influence in Wittgensteinian exegesis, and that is the ‘resolute’ reading of the Tractatus given by James Conant (Conant, 1989, 2000; Conant and Diamond, 2004) and Cora Diamond (DIAMOND, 1991; Diamond, 2000). In the resolute reading of the Tractatus, one is to take the proposition that Wittgenstein writes at the end of the Tractatus – My propositions serve as elucidations in this way: anyone who understands me finally recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up it.) (TLP 6.54) – and apply it to the Tractatus itself. In other words, a resolute reading of this quote maintains that the many sentences that compose the Tractatus must be recognized to be nonsensical and have no

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8

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content whatsoever. For an introduction to this debate which started in the 1980s, read (Bronzo, 2012). For an extension of this resolute approach, read (Ostrow, 2001). My own discussion skirts this debate, because I don’t think my ultimate theses depend on whether I look at Wittgensteinian oeuvre as one intellectual continuum or not. For a general exposition of the picture theory of meaning, read the accessible account given by (Pears, 1987, pp.  115–150). An interesting argument is made by David Hyder: the Wittgensteinian picture theory of meaning had its philosophical sources in some of the philosophers of science in the German world in the 19th century – mainly of the Marburg school – like Helmholtz and Hertz. To learn more, read (Hyder, 2002). As Wittgenstein says, “I can only speak about [objects]: I cannot put them into words. Propositions can only say how things are, not what they are” (TLP 3.221). For more on the difference between saying and showing, read (Hacker, 2001, pp. 170–175). Obviously, this didn’t mean that he didn’t have strong objections to Russell’s views on psychology and its relation to logic. For a detailed account of Wittgenstein’s criticisms against Russell, read (Hacker, 1996, pp. 26–29). Hacker lists seven basic points of difference. Fania Pascal’s memoirs with Wittgenstein coincides with the time during which Wittgenstein gave the brown and blue book notes (Rhees, 1984). Wittgenstein never explicitly wrote much on psychology nor even on the ever-growing popular discipline of psychoanalysis. He was critical of psychology as a discipline. Read the excellent book by Jacques Bouveresse (J. Bouveresse, 1995), who collects all the various remarks that Wittgenstein made on psychoanalysis and Freud. Bouveresse presents a strong criticism of Freud’s approach to the self from a Wittgensteinian perspective.

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The grammar of violence Chapter 4, which was an exegetical tour into some of Wittgenstein’s ideas, was necessary to show that Wittgenstein was able to establish two things. One, he was able to show that all our collective engagement was instituted through the mutual recognition of rules, which in turn were embedded in larger life forms. Two, he was able to prove that the reasons for our actions were not hidden deep in our internal selves in an area accessibly only to the subjective certainty of that person. These two insights into our existence should enable us to completely overhaul our thinking regarding the nature of how and why violence happens in society. Some of the implications of these two Wittgensteinian insights and its relation to the study violence is what I will draw in this chapter. There has been anthropological, historical and theoretical work done on violence, some of which we have reviewed in this book so far. But the question of the role of language in violence has not been touched upon in detail, especially from a Wittgensteinian perspective by many philosophers. But the exception to this is the work of Veena Das, especially her book Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Das, 2007). This book has combined anthropological fieldwork with great insights into the constituting forces of everyday violence, using the work of Wittgenstein, to look at how violence is engendered when people are forced to question their daily practices – those practices which make up the bedrock of their lifeworld. 133

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Veena Das’s work is insightful and opens up, in fruitful ways, Wittgenstein’s later philosophy to larger themes of violence, everydayness and the grammar of collective existence. Her work on combining Wittgenstein with anthropology and social issues is welcome given that generally the professional philosophers of the Anglo-Saxon world have been reluctant to read Wittgenstein as a social diagnostician. In the next section, I will elaborate on some of Das’s ideas and also take some of her ideas in new directions. Before I go into her ideas, I want to remark that until recently the work of Wittgenstein has generally been confined to academic departments that are devoted to technical problems of logic or language, knowledge, etc. Only in the last three decades or so have there been some steps towards trying to integrate Wittgenstein’s work into a larger social and political theme. This revival of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and its connection with political philosophy is unfortunate because Wittgenstein himself never believed in silos and also because his contribution to philosophy as a whole is so rich that his philosophy has deep insights into answering some of our modern political problems. I will devote this section to elaborating what I think are some of the historical and philosophical reasons why Wittgenstein’s philosophy was confined by his commentators to addressing technical problems and why his reception as a political and social diagnostician has had to wait this long a time. In the next section, I will pick the thread which I left off at the end of Chapter 4 and look at grammar, lifeworld and the constitution of violence in our everyday lives. I think this contextual detour which I am engaging in now in this section is necessary because it points to certain larger structural blindness that had become academically and institutionally entrenched in philosophy departments, especially after the Second World War. My own work at some level can be seen as an attempt to free the problems of philosophy from its ‘specialized’ corners to the public ‘agora’ and to show that technical issues can still be fruitful for larger social and political problems. The generation of philosophers influenced by the later Wittgenstein never took him to be saying anything particularly important regarding our political existence. One justification that is 134

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given is that Wittgenstein never explicitly said he was engaging in political philosophy nor was he debating for or against explicit political issues. But this interpretive strategy is highly limiting the usefulness and the breadth of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. This is something I wish to correct through this work. One main reason that Wittgensteinian studies after the Second World War took the direction it did in the Anglo-Saxon world was mainly, I would like to argue, because of the growing tension and division of philosophical methods in Europe vis-à-vis the English-speaking countries. Anyone who is even remotely aware of the history of 20th-century philosophy, and this is something every undergrad in philosophy comes to know, would realize that a persistent fault line across different ideas and philosophers in the 20th century has been the analytical/continental divide. This divide, which is historical, geographical and in a way ideological, came to crystalize itself and start to become entrenched academic camps around the First World War. Analytical philosophy has come to represent, crudely put, a methodological approach to philosophical problems that closely allies itself with some of the scientific disciplines. Analytical philosophy, whose initial proponents were Russell, and Moore in England, Rudolf Carnap and Moritz Schlick in continental Europe and other philosophers within what came to be called the Vienna Circle were instrumental in setting up a powerful critique of what they disdainfully called ‘metaphysics.’ According to these ‘analytical’ philosophers, questions regarding the ultimate nature of things whose solutions didn’t reveal themselves through verificationaist procedures was not worthy of philosophical pursuit because it can be shown that ultimately such questions are either tautological or meaningless. This kind of philosophy had a lot of followers in England, especially during the interwar period. The other kind of philosophy, the continental kind, was initially that which came into its own as using methodologies that were starkly opposed to the analytical philosophers. One can look at the oeuvre of Heidegger, a person much criticized by the analytical philosophers of the 1920s and 1930s as being emblematic of continental philosophy. His approach, which is sceptical of science and its epistemological premises, has borrowed methods 135

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from other disciplines, such as art, poetry, history and philology. This method, unique to Heidegger and his immediate followers, in its perceived opposition to scientific disciplines, came to be set up as the paradigm of what continental philosophy was aiming to do. The climax of this divide between analytical and continental style of doing philosophy has been historically placed by Michael Friedman in his excellent work Parting of the Ways (Friedman, 2000) in the 1930 Davos conference between the philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger. Ernst Cassirer was very much a neo-Kantian influenced by the need to involve philosophy of science in philosophical debates, but he also engaged in the ideas of the larger humanistic disciplines like tracing the cultural and philosophical roots of the Enlightenment. For example, Ernst Cassirer was as comfortable writing about the philosophy of Einstein and talk about the development of scientific theoretical advances in physics as he was in the Lebensphilosophie of Wilhelm Dilthey. We know from our previous discussion of Dilthey that Dilthey was the champion of bringing in hermeunetical techniques to the study of history and other human science. And anyone sympatheic of Dilthey’s work, as Cassirer was, would not only be aware of the methodological distinction between Naturwissenschaft und Geisteswissenschaft but would want to further the cause of the study of Geisteswissenschaft. In a way, by the 1920s Cassirer was primed to be the best mediator between the analytical ‘logicist’ philosophy of Russell and Carnap & Co and the newer kind of philosopher that Heidegger was initiating. Thus a major intention behind the Davos conference was to start a dialogue between someone who was versed in both the human sciences and the natural science approach (Cassirer) and someone like Heidegger, who was always sceptical of science, technology and its methods.1 What Davos conference started as a debate only brought into sharper focus the differences in the approach to not only the methods of philosophy but also in the object of what was considered to be proper philosophy. On the one hand, there was the logicist camp who believed that logic should supercede philosophy and 136

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the other camp which looked at questions of existence, death, Time, Being, etc. It was only natural that as the years rolled on, the two camps grew in size and with more adherents on either side, the debate was kept alive even post-Second World War. With the bifurcation of Germany into two, and the emigration of German philosophers to the US to escape Nazi pogroms, the scene of action in a way changed from England and Germany to a global scale. But the fault lines still remained across different philosophy departments throughout the world. For example, before the Second World War, if Germany was the centre of continental style of philosophy, after the war, France took on the mantle of being the prime champion of continental philosophy. Keeping with the larger humanistic concerns of continental philosophy, many of the politically and socially mediated philosophical problems were taken up by the French philosophers whose interest in political philosophy was also in keeping with interests in Marxist theorists and critical theorists.2 Thus, there was a move, within continental philosophy from questions of existence and being to larger political and social issues. This historical background is necessary because it is this intellectual context in which Wittgenstein’s work was received. Mainly due to the fact that Wittgenstein worked in England, much of his philosophy has been appropriated by English philosophy and their concerns with the nature of language and its place in the sceptical tradition at large. This has also meant unfortunately that many of the statements that the later Wittgenstein made regarding art, aesthetics, religion, ethics, etc. were somehow seen to be secondary to his main work on the philosophy of language. Subsequent to his Philosophical Investigations, volumes have been published which collect his ethical, aesthetics and religious remarks.3 But this way of bifurcating Wittgenstein’s oeuvre has had the unfortunate consequence of taking Wittgenstein to be mainly trying to solve technical problems in the sceptical debate (as expressed in G. E. Moore’s essay Proof of the Refutation of Idealism). Another unfortunate fallout of this debate between analytical and continental camps is that many people on the European Continent (especially immediately after the Second World War in France) looked at Wittgenstein as mainly an 137

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‘analytical’ philosopher and as not having anything important to say regarding social or political issues.4 Again, this context is important in understanding the reception of the later Wittgenstein’s work in the academic world immediately after his death in 1951. As we saw, immediately after the Second World War, there was this tug of war between what constituted the proper methods of interpreting philosophical problems across different departments. There was, on the one hand, the epistemological tradition, which espoused ‘hard’ methods which assumed the validity of the advancement of science in furthering the cause of truth and knowledge and, on the other hand, the more hermeneutic, classical approach, which assumed that because modernity and science went hand in hand, we need to return to other non-scientific approaches (poetry, art, literature or religion) in order to solve our social and political problems. Since Wittgenstein was appropriated by one side of the debaters (the analytical ones), it so happened that the Philosophical Investigations was never looked at from a political or social angle. But having said all of this, there were some initial attempts to overcome this hesitation to not assimilate Wittgenstein’s ideas into larger political themes. Among the first works that sought to find links between the later Wittgenstein’s linguistic philosophy and politics was one by Ernest Gellner. He published a book called Words and Things: A Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study in Ideology (Gellner, 1960) in 1960 with an introduction by Bertrand Russell. In that book, the first of its kind as far as I know, Gellner dismisses Wittgenstein’s linguistic philosophy because of what Gellner thinks are certain pernicious political consequences. In a way, this book is not much of a surprise from the English-speaking world given the academic and philosophical climate around that time, which was sceptical of what they considered non-rigorous scientific approaches to philosophy. In this book, Gellner says “the linguo-philosophic approach is absurd, for a variety of reasons” (Gellner, 1960, p.  223). According to Gellner the job of linguistic philosophy, by saying that ‘philosophy leaves everything as it is,’  becomes non-committal. This is problematic because according to Gellner,

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political issues are those which need correction, and that can occur only by a process of identifying what is wrong or unfair and unjust and actively engaging with the real world to bring about changes. Gellner asks, if the purpose of philosophy is to leave everything as it is, then how can political problems be solved? Being non-committal is equivalent to ‘being neutral,’ which according to him is somehow the same as being irrationalist. He says that Wittgenstein’s ‘neutralist’ philosophy by stressing the impossibility of justification, and the fallaciousness of criticism from general premises, it [linguistic philosophy] is irrationalistic. Thus, linguistic philosophers have shown that, contrary to what Orwell thought, a cult of oldspeak can muzzle thought as much as an invented newspeak. (Gellner, 1960, p. 225) He finds this view problematic because irrationalism, according to Gellner, has been at the political vanguard of much of modern totalitarian regimes. Because of such political attacks on Wittgenstein’s philosophy, it was felt that linguistic philosophy cannot have a salutary influence in the region of political theory. This view was held despite the later publication of Wittgenstein’s work on ethics, aesthetics and religion. But slowly, with the general proliferation of academic philosophy departments worldwide, there came more sympathetic interpretations of Wittgenstein. Later, there started to appear in English a more generous interpretation of Wittgenstein’s work. One example is Hanna F. Pitkin’s Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Poltiical Thought (Pitkin, 1973) in 1973. In that book, unlike previous philosophers who had ignored the social implications of Wittgenstein’s ideas, she tried to place Wittgenstein’s later philosophy as a credible answer to many of our political and social problems in the modern era. Pitkin said that different political theories, or political theory in general as such, tended to

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look at problems from above, so to speak. They suffer from what she called moralism: the tendency of some philosophers of ethics to sound as if they were talking down to, or preaching at, their audience; as if they imagined themselves as the source of all ethical wisdom and their audience as its passive recipients; as if they imagined themselves to be free of, or even exempt from, the faults they see around them. (Pitkin, 1973, p. 327) Pitkin found that in Wittgenstein’s work, there was an antidote to moralism. This is because in Wittgenstein, one can find that he consciously tries to subvert our attempts to abstract from any of our daily ethical discourse. The focus on the contextual everydayness of our speech acts brings political theory to the ground, so to speak. When we talk only of action in general and in abstraction without the everyday context in which action is mediated and understood, we fall into the error of moralism. Moralism is the imposition of a standard from the outside to the political and ethical actions of a people in a lifeworld. Moralism and political coercion go hand in hand according to Pitkin. She says “It seems possible, then, that a Wittgensteinian return to specificity, to particular cases and to the self, might somehow help with the problem of coerciveness in political theorizing” (Pitkin, 1973, p. 328). According to Pitkin, we live in a time and space in which the epistemological privilege we give ourselves as the condition of any kind of knowledge seeps into our social and linguistic behaviour. We think of the other person as mere objects that can be ‘known’ from an outsider’s perspective. This divorce between the privileged self of oneself vis-à-vis the image of the other that we get is seen in our understanding of language as merely a tool which can be manipulated to either reveal truth or hide it. One can project ‘false’ pictures through language as much as we can use it to tell the truth. This double function of language reinforces, according to her, the instrumental nature of language and cuts us off from the power of language to genuinely connect people and be the forger of social links. 140

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This belief in the instrumentality of language is sometimes, she argues, expressed in the conviction of some people that language is a screen that comes in between us and reality and that if we can somehow rend it asunder, we will reach reality as such. We are always compelled to find some foundations for our beliefs that are certain and without any mediation. But according to Wittgenstein, the foundations are being sought in the wrong place. This wrong approach is symptomatic of many of our modern problems. As Pitkin says, the conventions of our language and thought rest in the language games that we play. And that means that the seeming gap between thought and reality is bridged on the one hand by human forms of life, and on the other hand by human action, by the responsibility we assume when we speak. Forms of life are what bridge the apparent gap – what explains why there is no gap – between the subjective feelings characteristic of expectation, the occasions when something is expected, and the various (verbal and nonverbal) expressions of expectation. (Pitkin, 1973, p. 335) It is here in elaborating Wittgenstein’s idea of lifeworld as a solution to the problem of political miscommunication that Stanley Cavell’s work comes in and proves to be crucial. This brings us historically to the period in which Wittgenstein’s work had a more catholic reception through the work of Stanley Cavell. Through a serious of essays and books, Cavell has throughout his career from the 1960s onwards helped give Wittgensteinian philosophy pride of place within the history of modern philosophy. Stanley Cavell’s journey through Wittgenstein makes us see that life forms are conventions that give us the possibility of communicating with each other. In other words, what Cavell says, through his oeuvre on Wittgenstein, is that language gives us criteria which enable us to communicate with and understand each other. Criteria, according to Wittgenstein, are produced through the grammar of the language. At the most basic level, a criterion is the condition for our use of a word. Criteria for 141

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language can answer questions like ‘Why do we call a bat a bat?’ or more generally ‘Why do we call things by words?’ According to Wittgenstein, this is given by the grammar of that language use. Grammar reveals the criteria in which we can say how a word is being understood and used. What the grammar ultimately reveals is human convention and shows that language is shared, that the forms I rely upon in making sense are human forms, that they impose human limits upon me, that when I say what we “can” and “cannot” say I am indeed voicing necessities which others recognize i.e., obey (consciously or not) and that our uses of language are pervasively, almost imaginatively, systematic. (Cavell, 1979, p. 29) Cavell in his work on Wittgenstein has talked about grammar as the condition of communicability. This is obviously not in any cognitive or Chomskian sense. For Cavell, the grammar of a language represents the ultimate forms of life and those necessities of language and life that I am compelled to obey. These necessities of life are those which are encoded and embodied in language games according to Wittgenstein, and “grammar is what language games are meant to reveal” (Cavell, 2002, p.  56). Thus, the limits of language and the limits of action coincide in a life form, and the grammar of a community encodes those limitations. And For Wittgenstein, philosophy comes to grief not in denying what we all know to be true, but in its effort to escape those human forms of life which alone provide the coherence of our expression. He wishes an acknowledgment of human limitation which does not leave us chafed by our own skin, by a sense of powerlessness to penetrate beyond the human conditions of knowledge. (Cavell, 2002, p. 61) These conventions of grammar are not merely arbitrary but constitutive of all speech and activity. From Cavell’s perspective,

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the learning of a language and the initiation into a lifeworld are coterminous. The boundary of language institutes us into understanding what are acceptable and unacceptable usages, which are learnt not through any extra-linguistic mediation but through the enactment of the boundaries of acceptable (and unacceptable) behaviours. One can learn words only through other words, and as we saw with children, when words are taught to children, at some point ‘the spade is turned’ and the child just must learn to go on. The child’s inquiry into the definitions of words will have to stop somewhere, and they will have to just follow the use of that word that is given to it. In a way, the meaning of a word is understood by a child because the child already knows what the game is about. If the child didn’t know the game of meaning asking, then it wouldn’t know what meaning you were teaching it. If learning is through use, so is proving that one has learnt it. A kid knows a word only when they use it in the same context in which it is taught to her. Cavell’s interpretation shows that the act of saying and the act of doing are of the same genus. There is no saying the word ‘cat’ which is different from pointing to a cat. Moreover, pointing to a cat and saying the word ‘cat’ are equal criteria for successful communication. The work of Stanley Cavell and that of Hannah Pitkin have subsequently enabled the placing of Wittgensteinian work in a more productive space regarding political and social theory. Now, we can come to the work of Veena Das. Even Das acknowledges the influence of Cavell and his interpretation of Wittgenstein that has informed her work. She has borrowed key ideas from Cavell, especially in relation to her questions of how violence is enabled in social communities and what violence entails in the lifeworlds that are subjected to it. I will be looking at Das’s work in the next section, and will review some of her assumptions and will try to make space for a more robust interpretation of Wittgenstein’s idea of grammar, lifeworld and lifeworlds’ relation to violence. Given the contextual history of the reception of Wittgenstein’s work, we are in a better position now to look at how recent work, especially Das’s work on violence and the idea of everydayness, can be an effective way of looking at political structures.

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Veena Das and Wittgenstein 5

Veena Das in her book Life and Words: Violence and the Descent has a detailed discussion of the sources of violence in our everyday lives. Das, borrowing from Cavell’s interpretation of everydayness, says that experiences of violence occur when criteria (for meaning) end. In other words, a failure of grammar or what we may also call the end of criteria is what I see as the experience of world-annihilating violence – the figure of a brother not being able to decipher whether love consisted in killing one’s sister to save her from another kind of violence from the crowd, or handing her over for protection to someone whose motives one could not fully fathom; or a mother’s failure to know that her child was safer with her out in the open, in sight of a murderous crowd, rather than hidden in a house with his father. (Das, 2007, p. 8) In her work, for example, Das has rightly located the ineffable cry of pain, the ultimate signifier of a violent act, not in the inner self but more as a gesture for the acknowledgement of the other. The form of life that constitutes any social body resides ultimately in the background practices of the group of people. To quote Wittgenstein in this regard, “What is true or false is what human beings say; and it is in their language that human beings agree. This is agreement not in opinions but rather in form of life” (PI 241). Given that the forms of life are what creates the horizon of agreement between people which are encoded in their mutually recognitional actions, then pain, in this Wittgensteinian picture, is not something that remains ineffable or incommunicable, according to Das. “Instead, [pain] it makes a claim on the other – asking for acknowledgment that may be given or denied. In either case, it is not a referential statement that is pointing to an inner object” (Das, 2007, p. 40). When we reach those propositions or ‘feelings’ (like pain) that appear to be unquestionable, we are not at the edge of a sceptical 144

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cliff. The process of verification when it ends doesn’t point to any realm of existence that is not open to communal recognition and is not constituted in a life form. This social life form is what Wittgenstein calls a system. “All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system” (OC – 105). What is significant here is that because of Das’s interpretation of lifeworlds, we begin to think of pain as acknowledgment and recognition; denial of the other’s pain is not about the failings of the intellect but the failings of the spirit. In the register of the imaginary, the pain of the other not only asks for a home in language, but also seeks a home in the body. (Das, 2007, p. 57) In using Das’s work, I would like to take on an interesting idea which I will use to situate my own stance regarding where and why violence happens in the modern world. According to Das, it is important when we use Wittgensteinian categories like ‘forms of life’ to underscore the idea of life that is central to the practice of language games. Life as a biological category is implicated in all the problems of the sceptical tradition of which modern science is an inheritor. In other words, the epistemological assumptions that underlie the notion of life as a marker of a species with certain external characteristics reinforce in a way the dualist picture of what constitutes life (read: mind or motion) to what doesn’t constitute life (read: the body). But life, from what we have discussed so far, must be seen not merely as the ‘carrier’ of certain bodily affective tendencies. Life is, in a crucial way, embodied, as Elaine Scarry’s work and the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben have shown. For Das, life stands at the limit of what constitutes a Wittgensteinian system – a lifeworld. This limit of our social existence is the axis around which my sense of meaning and social engagement revolves. When we create certain criteria of meaning and following a rule, there is also an end point that we reach whereby all justification ends – when I have exhausted my search for justification and I just do it. The so-called unquestionable 145

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propositions that defy our search for further criteria only go to show that we have reached the bedrock of our lifeworld and that life in that world is the ultimate frame of reference for any kind of meaningful engagement. As Wittgenstein clearly states, “You must bear in mind that the language-game is so to say something unpredictable. I mean: it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there-like our life” (OC 559; my emphasis). Therefore, violence happens when the criteria for the recognition of life is denied to the other. Life in a way being at the limit of the language game points to its own self-certainty. “That is to say, the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn” (OC 341). When we reach those propositions that are free from doubt, we reach our life form that which cannot be questioned. Life must go on: “My life consists in my being content to accept many things” (OC 344). When we take away the criteria of meaning, what we are doing in a way is taking away life in both the literal sense and the metaphorical sense. What is interesting in Das’s (and Cavell’s) take on the violence of life is that life according to them is ultimately vulnerable – which in a way echoes what Butler had talks about in her book Precarious Lives, which I quoted in Chapters 1 and 2. When we withhold the recognition of the criteria of going on in a lifeworld, we are not only withholding the recognition of meaning of that particular action but also in a biopolitical sense eliminating that person from any kind of informed life and thereby making that person the carrier of ‘bare life’ and thus a target for violence with impunity. This danger lurks all the time, when when one withholds recognition from the other, not simply on the grounds that she is not part of one’s own community but that she is not part of life itself. This is not a question of a reasoned denial but of a denial of accepting the separateness of the other as a flesh and blood creature. (Das, 2007, p. 16) 146

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Through Das’s work, we can confidently say that violence is engendered when what remains at the limit of our game is brought into the game. If criteria for communication stand as the horizon of collective practices, then criteria by their nature escape a thetic inquiry. In other words, the ultimate criteria for meaning, because it stands at the limit of all meaningful activities, cannot be subjected to a sceptical or epistemic inquiry. Criteria are bedrock propositions – actions that express their naked situatedness in our social existence. By subjecting those ‘unquestionable’ limits of our mutual engagement to a form of radical scepticism, we are committing an act of violence: first, it is epistemic violence, and then the second time around it is physical violence. Radical scepticism regarding the boundaries of our knowledge is considered violent because it completely undermines our faith in the game of asking for and giving reasons and thereby undermining the foundation of all mutual recognition. Moreover, a sceptical attitude, because it doesn’t make a distinction between criteria of the meaning of a word and the usage of that word, does away with the distinction between what is at the limit of a lifeworld and what is not. The framework of any kind of lifeworld is what enables the discussion to be carried on within that lifeworld, and that framework is not something that stands above and beyond in a transcendental world but is constituted in and through the mutual recognition of the ‘life’ of each other. In the sceptical tradition, by raising questions as to what life is or can be, we are opening up the possibility of creating an ontological category called ‘life’ which can be recognized and understood. But we must keep in mind that the very debate of what life is and the possibility of creating conceptual categories creates the possibility of not recognizing certain kinds of life. When we want to capture the essence of life in either political, social or biological categories, we are moving away from recognizing the fact of life, which is that life is the transactional product of intersubjective rule-following behaviour. This behaviour in a way, like the hands that Moore wants to show as proof of the existence of an external world, proves that what stands indubitable in life itself is the expression of our everyday actions. Life is not recognized before mutual engagement but is the result 147

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and product of meaningful communication within a lifeworld. When we reach the disputational field of what ‘constitutes’ life, we move into the unsayable. To quote Wittgenstein again, “The inexpressible (what I find enigmatic & cannot express) perhaps provides the background, against which whatever I was able to express acquires meaning” (CV p 23). But by trying to establish and effect the unsayable, we engender violence. Das also says something similar: “I suggest, therefore, that what becomes the non-narrative of this violence is what is unsayable within the forms of everyday life” (Das, 2007, p. 90). Therefore, what we need to be reminded of again and again is that “the precise range and scale of the human form of life is not knowable in advance, any more than the precise range of the meaning of a word is knowable in advance” (Das, 2007, p. 90). The urge to delimit boundaries between me and the other is what creates the first condition of violence. When there is bodily violence, our pain cries out as a call for the recognition of oneself by the other. It is not because pain is incommunicable that pain needs to be recognized by other. The recognition of the life of the other is the condition for the possibility of engaging in discussion with the other person. Violence is made possible only because we feel that the other person’s values are those that need not be engaged with – when we feel the other person to be inherently vile. The social contract theories that we are all accustomed to presupposing, on the other hand, start from a mythical place of origin – a utopian standing point from which questions of justice are solved once and for all. Such utopian theories tend to be a “form of moralism that fixates on the presence of ideals in one’s culture and promotes them to distract one from the presence of otherwise intolerable injustice” (Cavell, 1988, p. 13). But as opposed to this form of institutionalizing justice once and for all is the kind of justice possible from a Wittgensteinian perspective. A prima facie conceptual and genealogical link can be made between the contractual tradition and the modern state. Any elaboration of that link will show how there are inherent violent tendencies in the possible elaborations of the contractual model of constitutional government as seen in history in 148

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the 20th century by state-sponsored pogroms. But again, one can counterargue by saying that such violence can be removed only if we have a better starting point for justice. But there are two ways that I would like to defeat this above charge: (1) the history of political structures in modernity has shown how violence is engendered from the institution of law itself. Law as the enforcement of discipline inscribes on the body the many facets of its authority, and (2) any mythical starting point for instituting justice does away with the need to revisit and engage in what Cavell aptly calls the conversation of justice. (1) was the topic of discussion of the first two chapters of this book, and I will discuss (2) in the rest of this section. In utopian theories of justice (this includes Hobbes, Rousseau and Rawls), disagreement is always to be overcome through some form of modus vivendi. The problem for contract theories has been to somehow reconcile differences – either through a powerful sovereign (Hobbes), a general will (Rousseau) or principles of justice (Rawls). The Rawlsian paradigm, the latest and the strongest theory in a long tradition of instituting political authority, starts from the sceptical insight that truth over matters of value is not possible. This sceptical starting point has led to Rawls’s idea “that in a constitutional democracy the public conception of justice should be, so far as possible, independent of controversial philosophical and religious doctrines” (Rawls, 1985, p. 223). Any method of arriving at a consensus, according to Rawls, must eschew ‘metaphysical’ doctrines concerning the ultimate values of life. These metaphysical values are ultimately irreconcilable and therefore are charged to bring about violent disagreement without agreed-on principles of justice. This sceptical approach to questions of value is what Wittgenstein found problematic. Scepticism for Wittgenstein is a standing threat to being human. Being human, if one were to ask him, is engaging in everyday practices according to certain rules, which are ultimately going to be different from other people’s interpretation of those very rules. The scene of social life is always an interpretative engagement with rules and those who follow those rules. Because there are always going to be interpretations of actions between two people, the everyday in itself, becomes a 149

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conversation in justice. If we think of contractarian theories as enabling frameworks of arbitration (over disagreement), then the Wittgensteinian approach is to criticize the possibility of having a framework of arbitration that can be had which is indubitable or standard. In our ordinary lives, we are exemplifying our actions as engagement with the other. This engagement with the other calls for recognition of and from the other. In our everyday arguments with the other, “the argument cannot and must not have a victor . . . this is not because agreement can or should always be reached, but because disagreement, and separateness of position, is to be allowed its satisfactions, reached and expressed in particular ways” (Cavell, 1988, pp. 24–25). In our conversations of justice, what is important to understand is that there will always be differences between people as evidenced in their everyday practices which are going to be diverse. Violence occurs not because there are differences as such but because one doesn’t recognize the other and the differential position that the other occupies vis-à-vis oneself. The attempt to somehow want to get behind those differences and find a point of ethical reference is what makes friction possible. Frustration comes because we realize that our search for a moral common point of reference is chimerical one. By assuming that there must be a common ethical horizon between two people, we are committing the error of thinking that there is a transcendental source which will enable ethical transactions. Sometimes there need not be such a common absolute point. When there are any absolutist positions (i.e., transcendental positions) regarding the constituting power of moral values, otherwise called moralism, what is being committed is the act of ignoring the other as the embodied everyday self. Having pointed to many of the flaws of contractarian theories, I must also admit that we find Wittgenstein also talking about a contract. But his notion of contract differs from other contract theories, in two ways. One, the contract is not decided on once and for all. It is forever renewed in every act of engagement that people participate in. Two, this contract is linguistic and not social. That is, the social behaviour of people who abide by certain rules don’t come to those rules by mere convention. It is not as if in a 150

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state of nature it can be decided that we a society will come to agree on the rules of the social game. Agreement itself is a move in the game. The recognition of this linguistic act as the condition of sociality ultimately makes Wittgenstein’s views unique. In our everyday life, “what we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (PI 116). But in our effort to ‘found’ political societies, we are, to borrow from Cavell again, in exile from ourselves (Cavell, 1989). We forget our home (Heimat). What Wittgenstein stresses the most – one can glimpse at it even through the stylistics of the Investigations as a form of dialogue – is that a life form is immanent to our ordinary conversations. We are exiled from our own life forms when we are constantly in search of justification for the meaning of our words and forget that being at home is merely ‘using’ the word and that is the end of that. Constantly asking for a reason makes us like “tourists, who stand in front of a building, reading Baedeker, & through reading about the history of the building’s construction, etc. are prevented from seeing it” (CV 46). To be able to completely understand how to live in our home, to be native in it, is to be able to use the words and recognize and ‘listen’ to the conversation around us – listening not as a cognitive exercise but as a participating one. The interlocutor refuses to recognize the pain of the other because the interlocutor feels that “only I can know whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it” (PI 246), and therefore, they feel that ultimately they can’t completely feel or ‘understand’ the pain of the other person. But the home is where epistemic distance is not the norm. One exiles oneself from one’s home – one’s lifeworld – when one creates a distance between oneself and the other or puts up a screen of incomprehensibility. In the location of violence, we can see that violence occurs in that space in which the words that we use to communicate with each other is consciously mediated through a foundational search for meaning. Wittgenstein is quoted as saying that philosophical problems arise when language goes on a holiday. But I want to more pertinently paraphrase that quote: violence arises when language goes into exile. The infliction of bodily pain as personal revenge or as the consequence of an instrumental logic of modernity, as Arendt talked 151

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about, points to the same point which I have been trying to make from the first page, which is that violence is the refusal to recognize. When I see somebody cry out in pain and I bracket out the inherently social nature of that phenomenal quality, what is being enabled is the extermination of that self. In the home of everydayness, the self is not an individual pregiven to the rules and customs of that society and life form. The task of philosophy is therefore to find the way back to responsible engagement in society: It is as though I had lost my way & asked someone the way home. He says he will show me and walks with me along a nice smooth path. This suddenly comes to an end. And now my friend says: “All you have to do now is to find the rest of the way home from here.” (CV 53)

Nonviolence and a sense of wonder Central to a Wittgensteinian approach to human existence is the avowal of a plurality of lifeworlds. The multiplicity of lives implies that at the centre of any kind of social existence is the acknowledgement of the other.6 The other is not a person whom one can perceive as standing divorced from the rules of the lifeworld that normatively guides them. In a way, we can’t even “perceive” the other in a cognitive fashion but can engage with them only by participating in the larger rules of which both they and I share. That is because “the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn” (OC, 341). The lifeworld that we share makes meaningful engagement possible. It would be a form of violence if I were to try to situate some propositions as standing outside the life form. This is an act of violence because ultimately I am undermining the possibility of coming to an agreement with the other because I have already placed the criteria of consensus outside all contextual life forms. All that we have discussed so far shows that there can’t be any ethical theories that can ultimately justify actions. Mutual 152

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ethical concern can come only out of a respect of the other. The violence that is engendered when ethicity is ignored occurs when people try to transcend everyday human life into another utopian world. Ethical knowledge for Wittgenstein is coeval with an acknowledgement of the meaning of life, and this acknowledgement is not a cognitive achievement. This ethical stance comes about only through working on oneself and realizing that being in the world is the condition of human life itself. As Wittgenstein says, “I regard it as very important to put an end to all the chatter about ethics – whether there is knowledge in ethics, whether there are values, whether the good can be defined, etc.” (Wittgenstein, 1965, p. 13). The perception of the ethical is different from the perception of things that we encounter in the everyday world. The ethical, for Wittgenstein, is a praxeological concept whose goal is to understand worldly engagement as practical (praxis) engagement. The lack of foundation for our ethical actions doesn’t mean believing in the religion of ‘anything goes,’ which again, is a form of radical relativism. When all is uncertain, then it is the occasion for the agent to trust in their own sense of responsibility. What Wittgenstein has done in enabling ethical engagement to be disaggregated from rationalistic frameworks is to place a person’s sense of responsibility on to the person themselves. What is particular to Wittgenstein’s idea of a form of life is that life, as we saw in the earlier section, cannot be divorced from the political and social context in which it is embedded. In a ‘form of life,’ the form and the life are equally important to consider. The criticism of modernity’s disengaged view of human actions is to talk of normal human life as already shaped by meaning and understanding is also to imply the existence of the world in which that normal human life is lived, a world without which there can be no talk of normal human life, a world that (normally) neither forces its meanings on us (realism) nor on which we force our meanings (antirealism). (Cahill, 2011, p. 140) 153

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Kevin M. Cahill has well shown in his book The Fate of Wonder: Wittgenstein’s Critique of Metaphysics and Modernity that the end of explanations that pose such big epistemological anxiety to many philosophers must be turned on its head. The need for sceptical angst must stop if we find that there are no foundations: Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end; – but the end is not certain propositions’ striking us immediately as true, i.e. it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game. (OC, 204) The terminus of all explanations – which is the bedrock of our actions, according to Cahill – is the existence of language (read: life) as such, which is “the terminus we moderns are left to acknowledge, and even perhaps to regard as miraculous” (Cahill, 2011, p. 140). When we come to realize that if meaning, which is the currency of mutual engagement, has nothing behind it, then the realization of this shows up in its authentic clarity in the end of scepticism and the awakening of the wonder of the existence of life. This will enable the re-enchantment of the world – something Max Weber felt we had lost. Life is therefore not a question to be inquired into. Life as the condition of any form of existence implies, one, that the practices of any people are embedded in their everyday lives and, two, that not only are the rules of social living embedded in the community but in a way the meaningful interpretation of those rules can be read only off of the embodied practices of the individuals of that community. When we take away the veridicality of a belief as the necessary foundation for the existence of the expression of that belief, the interpreting possibilities for a particular action become multiple. The violence engendered at the personal level and at the political level is because the value that a believer holds faith in is considered to be an expression of their personal conviction. Once that becomes the foundation of belief, the actions of the person 154

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become inexplicable, because the framework of understanding a person’s thoughts is removed from the view of the other person. When the framework of common understanding and mutual recognition is undermined, what is left is merely incredulity on one side and stubbornness on the other. Ethical explanations should not be thought of as explanations in the sense of providing a justification for actions. When we hold certain values as the ends of our life – whether they be religious values, aesthetic values or personal values – we are trying to provide ourselves an answer not to an epistemological question but to a personal torment. In a way, both ethical and epistemological questions ask for justifications, but the kind of justifications requested of ethical questions is fundamentally different from that of epistemological questions. The urge to find non-sceptical reasons for a question can happen only in a language game, but when we reach the limit of the game, we reach the justification – if that is at all the appropriate usage here of the word ‘justification,’ – of ethical questions. We must remember that the ethical explanation for something solves a personal puzzlement. The values that each one of us holds dear to us is not a belief as much as the end of our sceptical doubts. As Norman Malcolm says, there is a difference between ethical questions and secular questions. An ethical question is a question which cannot and doesn’t have a non-sceptical solution: In secular life, when something distressing occurs and there is a demand for explanations of why it happened – at some stage someone may say: “It is pointless to continue seeking for an explanation. We are faced with a fact which we must accept. That’s how it is!” The words, “It is God’s will,” have many religious connotations: but they also have a logical force similar to “That’s how it is!” Both expressions tell us to stop asking “Why?” and instead to accept a fact! (Malcolm, 1994, p. 86) The kinds of facts that such religious or ethical doubts settle on are completely different from other kinds of realist facts. 155

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Being guided by deep-seated values – and these values can be multiple, religious or secular, aesthetic or something else – is being committed to a set of practices which completely inform all the actions that occur within that framework. Having a set of such values, incorrigible and incommunicable, such as religious beliefs, is being committed to a system of coordinates: Hence although it’s belief, it is really a way of living, or a way of judging life. Passionately taking up this interpretation. And so instructing in a religious belief would have to be portraying, describing that system of reference & at the same time appealing to the conscience. And these together would have to result finally in the one under instruction himself, of his own accord, passionately taking up that system of reference. (CV 73) Wittgenstein talks about having faith in a way as the end to the problem of scepticism. But his understanding of faith is capacious enough for us to interpret faith as the overarching ends that constitute and guide our lives – even if those beliefs turn out to be atheistic. In a way, both the atheist and the religious person have faith. But what is important to underscore is that faith is not merely a belief. “There are instances where you have a faith – where you say ‘I believe’ – and on the other hand this belief does not rest on the fact on which our ordinary everyday beliefs normally do rest” (Wittgenstein, 1966, p. 54). When one brackets out scepticism as a possible attitude, the existence of the life of the other is a reason for wonder and amazement. That is, the life that is ‘unfoundational,’ so to speak, doesn’t become the target for the inquiry of truth and justified belief but stands as the end of all explanation. When something helps remove a sense of doubt, that can be ‘wonder’ful only in the sense of enabling you to see something which didn’t exist there before or you are led to find something new. For Wittgenstein, in this context, faith is submitting oneself to a set of values – religious or not. Submission in turn is not merely doxastic assent but “submitting to an authority. Having 156

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once submitted to it, you cannot then, without rebelling against it, first call it in question and then once again find it convincing” (CV 52). Similarly, submitting to ‘life’ means one does not and cannot call into question the embodied practices that stand as the limit of all possible mutual engagement. In other words, when one recognizes the other person, one is not merely saying what Kant would say, which is that one is to consider the other never as mere means but always as ends. In the kingdom of ends of Kant, a perfect society would be one where the categorical imperative reigns supreme. But this kind of Kantian ethical doctrine presupposes a metaphysical doctrine regarding the nature of the human whose sense of authority comes from their freedom to obey the categorical imperative. This notion of the individual and their role in society doesn’t quite capture the many daily ethical and motivational problems that one can get into. But given the Kantian heritage regarding our ethical duties, we have been carrying around this notion of ‘duty’ and moral norms as encoded in many of our political constitutions. It is now time to review this notion of duty and how it is tied to the idea of a rational human being. The idea of rationality, having a long history but more recently being used to produce the modern ethical deontological individual, has come to play a role in our language games and doesn’t quite have an answer to the simple but persistent question of why it is that if we are all rational there is so much disagreement among ourselves. If dissent and disagreement abound in rational individuals, then there obviously must be some gap in the ethical demands of rationality and the human sensory and motivational apparatus. It is in this gap that we can place the fact of violence. Violence is supposed to happen because we as human beings are not able to jump over the gap between what we are ‘animalistically’ led to do and what our moral sense tells us what we ought to do. This problem in a way has been as old as Hume. And Kant is supposed to have answered this sceptical problem, but I argue that we are ultimately back at this gap. This gap has caused the ‘rational’ person’s moral quandaries many a time because he doesn’t know whether he has to listen to his heart or his head.7 157

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This psychological dilemma which many people are wont to get into can be extrapolated to the whole of the social and political scene. This tension between what one ought to do and what one wants to do is how social problems of disagreement and dissent are viewed – as the irreconcilable differences between people whose ways of life clash. Violence is said to ensue when differences remain irreconcilable. This is how standard political theory reflects on social realities. If much of political theory is a way of creating a programme to minimize the incidents of violence (either through a contract, through a form of government neutrality, or through more freedom, among other things) it hardly touches on what the individual must do when they encounter a form of life that is completely alien. Or to ask a related question, why is a person who encounters a form of life which is fundamentally different from theirs unable to tolerate the alienness of that different view of life. This is the ultimate question regarding the source of violence. Violence doesn’t arise just because of differences in views and practices but rather because one person or a group of people feels that a particular life form ought not to exist. There have been broadly two answers to this problem. If I am allowed to be crude in my categorization of responses to this problem, I am going to say that ultimately the answers have been either a ‘liberal’ one or a ‘conservative’ one. Both are faulty, according to me. The liberal answer would be to have a more ‘tolerant’ approach towards anomalous behaviour. The liberal would want a looser code of ethics which doesn’t chastise a person merely for nonconformity. Ultimately, the liberal would want to reach a conception of the ‘rational’ person in society to which we would construe the member of a society to be a ‘neutral’ participant. According to the liberal, the social person is rational sans phrase. But the liberal doesn’t realize that this approach is self-contradictory. It is not possible to have a ‘neutral’ conception of sociality. Being social in itself implies being embedded in certain contexts and cultures. It asks everyone to make a psychological leap from their context to a neutral no-place (U-topia), which is not possible. Worse still, it cannot solve the following puzzle: after someone has been able to accomplish this impossible feat, why will they be motivated to act at all? 158

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On the other hand, we have the conservative view, which looks at human behaviour and practices from a specific region of discourse. But such contextualist discourses regarding practices have made the question of moral deviance only highly relativistic (to either a religion, social context or history, among others) and thus the conservative view doesn’t give an answer to the person who is tied to their own worldview. How must they look at the person whose lifeworld is alien and according to them expresses ‘unsittlich’ values? If a person is conservative, they cannot thereby move out of their discourse reality, and they are thereby prone to condemn the other person to being inhuman and not worthy of social recognition. Thus, the problem of violent disagreement is still an open one from the conservative viewpoint. Ultimately, both the liberal and the conservative views regarding the problem of violence doesn’t understand that the language game that people engage in presupposes the non-foundationalism of ethical justification. The only way out of this is to move beyond either liberal or conservative solutions. A person who completely understands the wonder of life will also understand that ultimately the other person is not someone whose differential position is merely to be ignored when they act differently but rather – like the baby which cries when it is in pain – someone who calls out for acknowledgement and recognition. As we move through our differential moral coordinates in our respective lifeworlds, what we think personally important is that we don’t come unstuck in ours. Our everyday engagement requires us “to descend into the old chaos and feel at home there” (CV 74). Our need to explain away the chaotic world that we live in is part of that sceptical urge that Wittgenstein is trying to cure us of. When we try to stop trying to explain and justify our behaviour to ourselves and the other, then we can see that the other’s behaviour is ethical not because it has a foundation but because that action expresses their self completely. Violence arises when we are faced with an alternative worldview which we feel threatens our sense of cognitive control of our lifeworld. It is thus the attempt to gain cognitive control of the other person, which leads to a sense of fear when we find that 159

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control is difficult. To quote Sabina Lovibond, who puts it well, “the strength of our compulsion to explain any discrepancies which may come to light between our own moral beliefs and those of others corresponds to the degree of insecurity, or fear, that we feel when confronted by such discrepancies” (Lovibond, 1983, pp. 181–182). But ultimately, the way to engage with the other person – with one’s own or another’s lifeworld (however alien) – is to open oneself to the participatory potential that one’s receptive engagement to the other’s practices might hold. This potential becomes one-sided only when only one person is open to change but not the other. When we have a social world in which everyone is acutely aware of the importance of life and the need to recognize each other, then what can come out of such a society is the possibility of mutual recognition and change. In a way, when everyone realizes that life is wonderful, the possibilities of mutual cohabitation and influence rise immensely. The question of what is right and wrong in such a world is not to be debated through textbooks but is to be engaged in with a sense of wonder and humility. Ultimately, I hope this chapter has driven home the need to understand life as being the subject of wonder. Once we recognize this fact of life, we can start engaging with each other in an ethical manner. If we try to find normative frameworks for behaviour, we are moving away from the immediate everyday world. In our everyday world, what motivates us and should motivate us is not some abstract principle but our engagement with each other. If we don’t talk about our intersubjective embodied engagements, then no ethical or political philosophy is possible.

Notes 1 No rapprochement was effected during this debate. This debate, if anything, only further deepened the divide between the methodologies of the two camps. But the tension and distrust between the analytical way and the continental way of doing philosophy was prefigured in a way even in the 19th century. The work of Michael Friedman – see especially his edited volume The Kantian Legacy in Nineteenth-Century Science (Friedman and Nordmann, 2006) – has shown that the analytical/continental divide goes back to the reception of the critical work of Kant in the 19th century. Kant, as we know, had deep interests

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in justifying scientific knowledge. Kant’s book Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Friedman, 2004), which he wrote after the Critique of Pure Reason, tried to find a transcendental ground for Newtonian science. This had a huge influence on post-Kantian philosophy. Roughly, post-Kantian philosophy in the 19th century can be divided into two groups. One group of scholars and philosophers took the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason and Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science seriously. This comprised the neo-Kantians of the Marburg School like Hermann Cohen and Hermann von Helmholtz, among others. These philosophers interpreted Kant as mainly an epistemologist who was trying to create the appropriate scientific grounds for a theory of knowledge (Wissenschaftstheorie). And the other group comprised those who took the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique to contain Kant’s main contribution. These philosophers were Hegel and Fichte and other later idealists. From a different historian’s eyes, this debate between the analytical ‘scientific’ philosophers and continental philosophers can be seen to begin with the debate between neo-Kantians and the German idealists. 2 There are some excellent reviews of the intellectual life of French philosophy and its roots in German political and phenomenological traditions. To get a good view of the historical development of French philosophy after the Second World War, please read (Jay, 1993). For an excellent overview of how political movements, especially leftist movements in France, had an impact on many of the French philosophers’ philosophical views, read (Wolin, 2010). To learn more about the legacy of Marxism and leftist movements on the intellectual life of France, read (Judt, 2011a, 2011b). 3 The two volumes that were published that collected his views on culture, religion and aesthetics are Lectures and Conversations: On Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Wittgenstein, 1966) and Culture and Value (Wittgenstein, 1977). 4 Immediately after the Second World War, philosophy in Anglo-American philosophy departments was concerned primarily with the role of language, objectivity, reference, etc. without bothering much about issues of political or social importance. Even if political philosophy was engaged in inside philosophy departments, it was considered more downstream, and the more important work was thought to be done in ‘technical’ aspects of the philosophy of language. And Wittgensteinian commentators in a way fell victim to this way of looking at philosophy. In England, Wittgenstein was received with much fanfare because he was viewed as the initiator of a new kind of philosophy of language, and on the European Continent, philosophers thought people like Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, etc. had important things to say regarding philosophy. One only has to read histories of modern philosophy, especially after the Second World War, to see the stark difference

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in the urge or reluctance to appropriate Wittgenstein, depending on whether the philosopher writing the history is on this side of the Channel or the other side. To give an example, when we read, for example, Alain Badiou’s L’aventure de la Philosophie Francaise, there is hardly any mention of the influence of Wittgenstein on any of the French philosophers. Badiou enumerates many French philosophers whose work has been seminal in political and social thought and finds the sources of their influence in Husserl, Heidegger or Freud, but hardly Wittgenstein. He mentions only once that Francoise Lyotard borrows some ideas from the later Wittgenstein (Badiou, 2012, p. 145). This attests to the general relegation of Wittgensteinian philosophy to the philosophical background, in France. But I must bring to the reader’s notice a strong exception to this way of approaching Wittgenstein, in France, is the work of Jacques Bouveresse (Jacques Bouveresse, 1987a, 1987b, 1991), who has, I think, singlehandedly in the last 50 years brought the work of Wittgenstein into the forefront of discussion in France. Many of his works are still untranslated in English, but he has still done a great service in bridging the divide between French philosophy and Anglo-American philosophy. On the other hand, the history of philosophies written by English-speaking philosophers mention Wittgenstein but mainly confine his influence to issues related to language, scepticism, etc. and do not extend it to political philosophy and social philosophy. For example, the voluminous Origins of Objectivity by Tyler Burge (Burge, 2010) can be read apart from other things as a history of Anglo-American philosophy after the Second World War. This book, unlike Badiou’s work, contains many mentions of Wittgenstein and his influence on Anglo-American philosophy, especially on epistemological issues of objectivity, perception and translation but hardly talks about Wittgenstein as a contributor to political debates. I have only presented two examples and it is difficult to generalize from this but all the same, these books are symptomatic of the ways in which Wittgenstein was received in academic departments in Anglo-America or in France. These two ways of appropriating Wittgenstein have unfortunately missed out on the political significance that Wittgenstein’s views on language could have had. 5 I thank my colleague Atreyee Majumder for bringing Veena Das’s work to my attention. 6 This might have some Levinasian ring to it (read Chapter 2), but what I am saying is different from Levinas’ philosophy in that here the focus is on the everyday use of language which is something Levinas, as far as I know, doesn’t touch upon at all. 7 This Humean model of moral psychology has come to be called the non-cognitivist model of ethical expressivism. The latest two defenders of Hume’s model of non-cognitivism are Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard (Blackburn, 1993; Gibbard, 1986, 2012).

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6 CONCLUSION Tying the knots

Because we have reached the end of this book, it is time to collect the different ideas scattered throughout the book to take a complete and coherent picture of how we look at violence vis-àvis our collective historical existence. In the rest of this chapter, I present my thesis along three conceptual axes, which connects certain key ideas that I have touched on so far. In elaborating on these three conceptual axes, I will be serving my overarching aim, which I specified in the first chapter, which was to not necessarily find a solution to the problem of violence but merely to retranslate the social, personal and cultural impact of violence into a linguistic-pragmatic discourse. The three axes are public-embodied existence, the grammar of life form and memory and language.

Public-embodied existence Many of the examples of horrific incidents of violence over the 20th century have shown the singularity of our present political existence, which has seen the killing of millions of people and the displacement of many more. What I attempted to give an idea of in the earlier chapters was that a form of biopolitical power has grown hand in hand with the development of modern public institutions. In a way, a history of power will also have to be a history of public institutions. The idea of a public institution as opposed to a private sphere itself evolved historically in England, France and Germany in the 18th century, as Habermas 163

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has shown in his seminal work The Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere (Jürgen Habermas, 1991b). What made possible the growth of public institutions were the prior changes in the social mindset of the people of France, England and Germany in the 18th century. It was a gradual process in which, with the entrenchment of the idea of the individual as the limit of public authority, there came the distinction, in the period of early modernity, of the space of social and public practices and the subjects who enacted in them. This social distinction was reflected in the legal terminology of voluntas and ratio. The public sphere was considered to be the rational sphere where the different conflicting wills of individuals were to be managed through some form of rational debate. As Habermas puts it, “Public debate was supposed to transform voluntas into a ratio that in the public competition of private arguments came into being as the consensus about what was practically necessary in the interest of all” (Jürgen Habermas, 1991b, p. 83). This public sphere’s role in legislating laws to enable coordination among the different opinions of the people reinforced a view of society as merely the repository of multiple irreducible differences. But in this approach there grew a tension between the ideal of complete assimilation and the reality of private differences. This tension was not because enough ‘private’ people weren’t included in the public sphere. In fact, the public sphere understood that “civil society stood or fell with the principle of universal access. A public sphere from which specific groups would be eo ipso excluded was less than merely incomplete; it was not a public sphere at all” (Jürgen Habermas, 1991b, p. 85). But even with the inclusion of as many individuals as possible, this dialectic of individual private person versus the social public person kept on seesawing between the authority of the citoyen (public person) and the freedom of the individual (homme). One end of this dichotomy was stressed in the French Revolution, where the individual’s liberty came to be the most important expression of political power, while the other, public authority, was expressed in Rousseau’s social contract. With Rousseau, the social contract was supposed to have been a modus vivendi among people which would enable everyone 164

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to get to the natural state that we have lost. In the natural state, Rousseau writes in the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Mankind, people “being that in which the care of our own preservation interferes least with the preservation of others, was consequently the most favorable to peace, and the most suitable to [hu]mankind” (Rousseau, 2002, p. 105) It is only when power tried to suppress this natural state that we had the first instance of violence which thereby created the need for law to suppress that violence, according to Rousseau. The historical alienation that was produced due to the imposition of law on humans meant, Rousseau argues, that each person’s cultivation and progress was considered to be proportional to their internalization of this primordial alienation. This historical rift, when humankind fell from the mythical state of nature, must be regained, for Rousseau. Moreover, for Rousseau, the social contract was supposed to restore the social and psychological wounds of alienation. As Habermas has pointed out, The ingenious artifice of the contrat social was supposed to heal this rift: everybody submitted to the community his person and property along with all rights so as to have from then on a share in the rights and duties of all through the mediation of the general will. The social contract demanded self-surrender without reservation; the homme was absorbed by the citoyen. (Jürgen Habermas, 1991b, p. 97) The creation of civil society created a discursive space for the dialectic between the idea of human as needing law to suppress their individual ‘violent’ tendencies and violence as itself the expression of statist law. But this dichotomy assumed the gap between the individual and the collective as that which needed to be bridged. By acknowledging this rift, it was inevitable in a way that the discussion around political issues should move between the two poles of individualism and a form of collectivism. This has only led to the entrenchment of modernity’s discourse of a form of diagrammatic identity in which the human individual is placed. The restrictive character of this form of 165

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identity, even though it has meant the valorization of a sphere of ‘will’ or freedom that is inviolable, has also had other deleterious philosophical side effects. One of them has been that the notion of individuality has come to carry cognitive connotations and the private person (homme) is supposed to have cognitive access only to their own feelings and not to someone else’s. We have looked at some of the criticisms of this ‘internalist’ view already in the earlier chapters. To recap, what we found out was that the private person who is cognitively self-enclosed then becomes, as a consequence of contractarian views on political association, someone whose moral chart is forever a mirror of their personality. Moreover, such a person by foreclosing the possibility of a many-to-one relation between the ultimate values she holds and her personality, she will naturally feel at bottom that she is merely a residue of universal determinism. If we follow this logic, the modern human being by enclosing their moral sense in their cognitive shell has made themselves the prisoner of their inner self. The inaccessibility of some aspects of oneself is only the reaffirmation of the metaphysical and religious idea of faith as the inviolable moral sanctum which need not be recognized but must be politically respected. But philosophers like Wittgenstein have, to the contrary, placed the role of oppositional recognition, as opposed to mere acknowledgment of differences, at the centre of any debate around philosophy, ethics and collective engagement. Wittgenstein has shown that respect for difference cannot arise without the recognition of differences. The moral call for recognition is what must be deeper in political engagement. If there is no recognition of the other’s difference, then what is left is only a distant respect which cannot be a condition for any meaningful social engagement. Everyday life is about engaging with the other and not finding excuses to disengage with the other. Political freedom is not be sought in the multiplicities of values and identities. As we saw, if freedom is tied to the ‘inner’ life of a person, it has a restrictive character, and the multiplication of such identities won’t necessarily lead to a free life. One way, shown by Wittgenstein, to enable moral recognition and freedom to have a role in social life is to do away with this distinction 166

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between the private and the public. It is no accident that the study of freedom, individuality and identity (and other such political concepts) has grown side by side with the scientific study of psychology and other related subjects in the cognitivist programme. There are deep genealogical links between the cognitivist model of the mind and the libertarian model of the political self. What Wittgenstein’s philosophy has helped us in debunking is the myth that somehow the ‘internal’ has causal powers over us. According to Wittgenstein, a causal explanation of our lives and actions through an intentional or internal model is completely irrelevant to our stories. The aetiological map of psychologists and cognitivists to explain our behaviour is not, for Wittgenstein, composed of causal stories at all. The ultimate psychological invariables, like many of our internal phenomenal properties or intentional states like believing, seeing, etc., are not private but ultimately criterial questions. What a person believes in is not to be decided by looking into their ‘self’ but is to be settled ultimately by the form of life they are in. As Meredith Williams has rightly pointed out, According to Wittgenstein, understanding, belief, and meaning are states of a person only in a practice over time. Without the practice, there is no understanding or belief, no matter what may be going on in the person’s head. It is this central idea that threatens current cognitive psychology for, prima facie, cognitivist models share the basic view that meaning, belief, and the rest must be inner, for the most part unconscious, states of that person. (Williams, 1999) It is this idea of a practice that is rule governed that is most central to Wittgenstein’s attempt to undermine the myth that somehow to follow a practice is a private affair: “That’s why ‘following a rule’ is a practice. And to think one is following a rule is not to follow a rule” (PI 202). What is fundamental to Wittgenstein’s idea is that it is not possible to separate or bracket out the environmental and social features of propositional attitudes. But 167

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it is important to not misinterpret Wittgenstein as a behaviourist. Behaviourism is a form of reductionism which explains all our mental properties with physical analogues. But for Wittgenstein, a causal theory of mind is merely a conceptual game, and all games are embedded in larger practices which go beyond the distinction of public and private. The rules of our game are just there like our lives – something that is given and beyond theoretical justification. Dissatisfaction with a strict cognitivist ‘internalist’ model has also come from other quarters of philosophy as well. We can go to the history of phenomenological research for an alternative view to cognitivism. Phenomenology as a tradition has always been slightly critical of a mentalist picture of human interaction.1 In phenomenology, we can read early advocates like Merleau-Ponty saying that perception is not necessarily the first or primordial relation that a person can have to the body that is being perceived: The subject does not live in a world of states of consciousness or representations from which he would believe himself able to act on and know external things by a sort of miracle. He lives in a universe of experience, in a milieu which is neutral with regard to the substantial distinctions between the organism, thought and extension; he lives in a direct commerce with beings, things and his own body. (Merleau-Ponty, 1963, p. 189) What is salient for our own inquiry regarding the nature of public behaviour is that there are certain ultimate immovables, so to speak, in the furniture of our world. The immovables are those that ultimately are bound to certain forms of life which are embedded in the social and natural world. This path down this intellectual landscape, started by Wittgenstein, can reveal richer views on the nature of our mind. What we need is not a cognitive model of mind but instead, to borrow from Meredith Williams again, a social theory of the mind, and Wittgenstein enables us to do that well. The public/private dichotomy has been the staple 168

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of a lot of philosophical debate for the past 400 years, and it is time to move on from that discourse, because if we were to undertake a genealogical study, à la Foucault, we would be able to see that the production of knowledge systems has gone hand in hand with the dissemination of power structures. Wittgenstein can help us find a new site for breaking this power–truth nexus, and that site is only through looking at our life as embodied practices as the ultimate limit of any form of communicability between people. This brings us again to the question of violence. Violence as we have theorized is mainly because of the asymptotic relation that the individual has towards law. Law, as the enforcer of ‘correct’ behaviour, has implicitly been the constituting factor in the production of violence. This is because for law to enforce its legitimacy, it must first come up with a notion of what is normal behaviour and thereby delimit what is deviant behaviour. Any such definition, as definitions go, is ultimately going to be at some point arbitrary and will be based on convention. But if our thoughts on the underlying nature of law is correct, it shows that violence seems deeply embedded in a way as the condition of the imposition of law itself. If this is so, then if we fail to realize that law is a convention and ascribe absolute normative or ethical properties to the goals of law, then we are in a way allowing law as a nomological entity to self-serve its own ulterior motive – which is to suppress through violence different practices. Law starts with the goal of achieving obedience of whatever kind. But many a time, we are blind to the idea of obedience as being merely a move in the game of modernity, and we start thinking of obedience as an end in itself or as the means to peaceful co-existence. The fundamental problem with the functioning of modernity is that a modern worldview glides over the self-reflective blind spot it has. Modernity’s own mechanism for its proliferation involves the suppression of the gaps in its assumptions and beliefs. By espousing the need for absolute values like justice, equality or freedom, modernity is trying to hide that all behaviour is ultimately an arbitrary convention. Conventions by their very nature are enclosed in larger conventions, like a Chinese box. The violence of modernity happens when we try 169

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to think that we can get out of this immanent plane and onto a transcendental one. Wittgenstein’s role comes in here because he is probably the first one to teach us that all kinds of political convention are ultimately merely conventions and that anyone saying it is otherwise – that the basis for convention is either natural or god-sent – must have an ulterior motive. How we can get out of this oxymoronic idea of ‘natural’ convention is to say that conventions, like life, are how we express our practices to each other. And each convention is tied inseparably to how we express ourselves. From the above discussion, we have learnt at least two things regarding expressions. (1) Expressions are conventional in the Wittgensteinian sense. That is, expressions gain their meaning not through intention but as being part of a rule of a game that is collectively engaged in. (2) Expressions are inherently embodied. I think I have explained (1) in different ways throughout this book. I will explain (2) now a bit more. When I say expressions are embodied, I mean that any kind of expression, whether it be cognitively downstream, like cultural or artistic expressions, or upstream episodes, like the use of words or perceptual states, is ultimately embodied through corporeal performance.2 When we remove the ‘mind’ as the central mover of our bodies, being in the world and creating meaning implies being corporeally involved in our environment. As Merleau-Ponty said it so many years ago, as he was trying to undermine cognitivism, “The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to be intervolved in a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to them” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 94). To be corporeally involved in our environment means that our body and the environment are not oppositionally situated but are engaged with each other in a differential fashion. That is, our involvement with our social and natural surrounding must not be interpreted along the lines of two ontological entities coming face to face. The division between nature and human or between human and human is an artificial rupture, produced by the multiple mechanisms of modernity. When we take away this 170

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distinction between the boundaries of what is nature and what is human, what we are left with is a criss-crossing pattern of meaningful gestures that cuts across both nature and humanity. In other words, meaning is not the inscription of a human mental intention on nature (read: body). Expressing meaning is not the translation of an internal reference into an external standard. The body itself becomes the vehicle of expression. In short, our body expresses itself through its movements (gestures): the collective practices in which it has been encultured. Through kinetic acts, the body expresses the culture of the life form of which it is a part. Looked at in another way, body inscribes meaning on itself through its gestures. “Gestures are a type of inscription, a parsing of the body into signifying or operational units; they can thereby be seen to reveal the submission of a shared human anatomy to a set of bodily practices specific to one culture” (Noland, 2009, p. 2). With such an interpretation as to the location of meaning, we are, like Wittgenstein, doing away with the dichotomy of intention and expression, first systematically philosophized in the modern world by Edmund Husserl, and going directly to looking at meaning as embodiment and not as expression. But sometimes it is argued that if gestures are just a series of coordinated movements that achieve some end, then the ends of gestures are pretty limited in the range of meaning that it can convey, as opposed to something as complex as language. As a counter to this, it can be said that the comparison between gestures and language can yield greater functional similarities, depending on what features of these two systems are compared. Given that people use both speech and gesture together whenever they express themselves, it is clear that “although each expresses somewhat different dimensions of the meaning, speech and gesture are co-expressive of a single inclusive ideational complex, and it is this that is the meaning of the utterance” (Kendon, 2000, p. 61), or so it is argued. Even though Adam Kendon makes a valid point, the case I want to make is a slightly different one from Kendon’s. I don’t want to merely establish the functional similarities between gesture and language. I want to say that given our embodied nature 171

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of our collective existence, language as a system of intercommunicative meaning is ultimately performative. The nature of linguistic recognition is possible only when the initial gesture of the speech act is made. If meaning is embodied, then “‘I speak’ is the performative act illuminating the general performativity of all enunciations” (Virno, 2015, p. 50). Wittgenstein’s philosophy has taught us that the distinction between outside and inside, use and mention, means and ends are completely arbitrary. If we take this thought to its logical conclusion, we arrive at the conviction that the theatricality of human praxis is constitutive of all forms of embodied meaning. In the interplay of performances, your speech is already a gesture, a behaviour, a mimicry, only when you speak can I grasp your sensible aspect (and even your toothache). This is not at all a metaphoric recognition (we should remember Wittgenstein’s specification: the secondary meaning of a word is not at all metaphorical): when you speak, I see you in the full sense of the word, that is, I perceive you immediately, just like I perceive a green and round apple in a single look. (Virno, 2015, p. 131) Thus, speech act and other kinds of gestures of are one kind because both are expressed through corporeal means, are public and constitute the transmitting and sharing of meaning. When we say that meaning is embodied, we imply that the meaning of a practice in a custom or convention is inscribed in the gestures of the body. Our kinaesthetic experience which is the sensory experience of our movement in the environment – and not opposed to it – is what corporeal performance is all about. The initiation that we get in any form of life can be mediated only through the different collective behaviours that surround us and as it is expressed through our body. In a way, these speech acts or gestural statements, if we follow Carrie Noland, “are performative in the sense that they lend an identity to a subject that doesn’t exist prior to the statement. . . . The gesture, similar to a ‘statement’ (or performative speech act), defines a subject for culture, makes her legible to others” (Noland, 2009, p. 183). 172

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An important lesson that I draw from all my remarks on meaning, sociality and political structures is that if living together creates meaning, then we can’t ignore the role of the body of the subjects of that community in creating that meaning. This is because phenomenologically it is an error, which also has harmful political consequences if we think meaning has a privileged location inside a self or a mind.

The grammar of life form The second conceptual axis that I focus on is the element of what Wittgenstein calls a form of life and the grammar of our collective existence. What is significant with the reordering of language rules and its importance in constituting our form of life is that the interplay of epistemic and pragmatic justifications is put on the same plane. Broadly, what we saw in Chapter 1 was that the violence that was unleashed on modern times was a consequence of the many discursive manoeuvres – through the ideas of rationality, universality, etc. – that was initiated on human beings. An underlying characteristic of these discursive interventions in our political existence was that the production of discursive realities was coeval with the imposition of certain normative ‘power’ structures. This was exemplified in the different ways that state power was seen to be a form of representation of the power of the people. The idea of political representation as that which can displace individual authority and centralize decision-making was similar to the idea of perceptual representation, which can create a displaced space for the sharing of meaning. In one way, therefore, meaning, truth and authority came to triangulate around political and cognitive legitimation in the West’s modern history. This is what Foucault taught us. The genealogical methods of Foucault regarding the nature of power have shown us that there is a knowledge/power regime at work whereby the operation of modern power self-amplifies. Not only does modern power, unlike earlier sovereign power, expend its force against a perceived enemy so as to minimize or eliminate it, modern power also ‘produces’ itself. This means that modernity works itself through the creation of discourses, 173

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which doesn’t eliminate opposing forces but rather brings in or uses those oppositional entities so as to hem in recalcitrant forces within the ‘eye’ of power itself. A classic example is the panopticon, where the prisoner who, by being brought into the disciplinary gaze of the prison, is made to surveil himself. Foucault’s work and Wittgenstein’s later philosophy converge in their focus on the everyday life. Foucault’s understanding of power has enabled us to see that power is instantiated in our mundane practices. What is particular to Foucault is his understanding of everyday life through the nexus of power, especially political power. Foucault shifted the discourse of intersubjective existence from ideology (Marx), history (Hegel) or signs (Saussure) onto relations of power. This meant that for him the different forms of our daily life, family relations, work environment, psychiatry, medical practices, etc. are all embedded within a larger network of immanent power relations. But a fruitful way of looking at Wittgensteinian life forms through power equations can yield us some gain if we are trying to understand modern political structures and institutions. Wittgensteinian methods of debunking the epistemological paradigm are in a way attempts to undermine the nexus between modern forms of knowledge and power. If our practices are tied irrevocably to the different practices we engage in, then a survey of the political institutions that we follow can give us a clue into the role of the epistemological game that we are playing or vice versa. An underlying theme of the modern game of representational epistemology has been the faith in the separation of the self, as opposed to the external world. This faith as an answer to the sceptical problem started by Descartes has also in a way undermined itself because the proof of the external world has always been under attack by the radical sceptics. Radical scepticism, which disavows the possibility of any kind of knowledge, doesn’t help the cause of the epistemologist to find some form of foundations for their set of beliefs. But what Wittgenstein has successfully shown is that scepticism is a by-product of the game of finding foundational reasons. Scepticism is not an attack from without but an immanent attack from the inside, which can never be won, and that is partly why it is an insidiously violent 174

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poison in our modern conscience. What is problematic in sceptical attacks and the persistence of sceptical doubts is mainly the game of epistemology as it has been played out, which is always trying to outreach the limits of language. When the epistemologist starts to believe that our relational cognitive attitudes can be exhausted by either intension or extension, then they fall into the trap of thinking of cognitive relations as being the ultimate proof for any notion of truth. Again, the issue with this approach is that by burying these relational attitudes in a region beyond doubt, we are already in the sceptical game, whether we like it or not. The sceptical game is difficult to win because the sceptic is always questioning the theoretical leap of faith that is required of the philosopher. The only way to win is to move beyond the notion of doubt and certainty and bring a fresher perspective on language which reviews language as not being foundational but as being, like life, that which is shared and stands outside the possibility of either questioning or affirming. This is why for Wittgenstein the ultimate existential problem, if you like, that faces the modern world, is that of scepticism, and it is this philosophy that stands at the root of all our confusion and puzzlement. We can find that scepticism is pervasive not only in our scientific pursuits but also in our political and social goals. The paradigm of scepticism is one with the instrumental method of thinking, which I traced the history of in the first chapter. If instrumental thinking, or what Heidegger calls calculative thinking, underlies our modern conception of ourselves, it has manifested itself in the division of our epistemic goals into that which can be rationally and cognitively justified (facts) and that which cannot be so justified (values). The dichotomy between facts and values has implied that we tend to think of differing criteria for moral judgements as opposed to statements of facts. Therefore, in our everyday lives, we have a ‘double’ standard when it comes to evaluating the actions that we take, depending on what action we are engaged in. From Wittgenstein, we can learn that there need be no separate standard or criteria for judging actions. This doesn’t mean that for Wittgenstein statements of fact are judgements of value. This form of reductionism would mean that there are no moral 175

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evaluations at all but merely naturalistic descriptions. This would lead us to espouse a form of Humean expressivism. That is not what Wittgenstein wants. He would want a fresh interpretation of the notion of ‘criteria’ for the possibility of any kind of political subversion. This is where Wittgenstein has some excellent insights. Even though the context in which he talked about terms like ‘criteria,’ ‘interpretation’ and ‘grammar’ were in a particular historical setting, his views can be used to reanimate a new form of political existence which will not fall prey to the self-aggrandizing element of modern power. A central element of a Wittgensteinian understanding of criteria is that criteria are not universal. What fits the criteria for good governance will not be the same criteria that can be applied to an individual or to a family. What makes a good table is not the same thing as what can make a good hammer. Criteria are object-specific. This may, for some, be commonsensical enough. But Wittgenstein goes further. What he argues for goes to the heart of the critique of the value–fact distinction: “we do not first know the object to which, by means of criteria, we assign a value; on the contrary, criteria are the means by which we learn what our concepts are, and hence ‘what kind of object anything is’” (PI 373). “Wittgensteinian criteria are appealed to in the course of grammatical investigations, and it is grammar which tells what kind of object anything is” (Cavell, 1979, p. 16). To explain this in other words, the naked access that we are supposed to have towards any epistemic object, in a Wittgensteinian paradigm, is negated. Criteria by their very nature move beyond the distinction of fact and value. What is crucial for a correct understanding of criteria is that criteria are conventions by which games are played, as we discussed in the earlier chapter. If criteria, as we discussed, are those by which we evaluate samples against, the sceptic’s interest is piqued to ask, ‘how do we get to come by the standard itself?’ But this should not be the question that we should start with, Wittgenstein says. Wittgenstein argues that it is pretty apparent that in our daily lives, we don’t keep on looking for justifications for criteria. We are not in our everyday selves pathologically obsessed with the ultimate criteria for our actions, because we know that the reasons for 176

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adopting a particular standard can’t go on forever. Our daily use of words shows that the criteria and the application of that criteria hang together. The reason for acting and the pragmatic concerns that we have in our life are both expressions of our life form to which are tied. Criteria can’t be questioned, because they, like life, lie at the limit of all questioning. In one place in his Philosophical Grammar, he compares the adoption of any criteria for action as being prelinguistic and unquestionable: My assumption that this house won’t collapse may be the utterance of a sentence which is part of a calculation. I do have reasons for it. What counts as a reason for an assumption determines a calculus. – So is the calculus something we adopt arbitrarily? No more so than the fear of fire. (PG 68; my emphasis) Here Wittgenstein seems to point to the adoption of any kind of calculus or reason as being a corporeal reaction similar to one’s involuntary reaction to fire. The reasons we act in different ways testify to the use of our different criteria. In a way, our convictions are born out of lived reactions. If our life necessities are those bedrock propositions, then these propositions coincide with those actions which come, so to speak, naturally to us and involuntarily. But such involuntary, nonconceptual pragmatic knowledge, it must be stressed, doesn’t come without already being informed in a cultural horizon. This is what Wittgenstein implies when he says that meaning is in its use. The whole form of life is implicated in each person’s use of any form of meaning: “The stream of life in a language-game involves the whole, turbulent, cross-cutting stream of interests that we come across among men. There can be no a priori restriction on the contingencies that might be involved” (Bloor, 1983, p. 183). We can take the foregoing Wittgensteinian remarks and fruitfully think of them as creating a wedge in the power/knowledge regime, to use Foucauldian phraseology. That is, transposing Foucauldian paradigm into Wittgenstein, we can say the violence 177

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of power is manifested only when the criteria of embodied lives are considered to be absolute. Any absolutist claims to correctness go against the grammar of our social existence. The formal institution of statist law, for example, has come to be the largest and most pervasive currency. Law becomes violent when the normative calculus of its imposition is taken to be universal and transcendental to the condition of life itself. When we look for justification for moral behaviour outside our everyday engagement in absolute notions of humanity, dignity, etc., the violence of law becomes explicit. That the state of exception to law is equivalent to the suspension of something like the habeas corpus goes to show that life and the absolute claims of law stand completely opposed to each other. Life and any question of justice have to come from our life forms. In other words, if justice is the mutual recognition of the meaning of concepts of say, inequality, oppression, violence, etc., then that recognition cannot be ostensively pointed out but can only be shared as a life form. For example, to borrow a scenario from Pitkin (1973, pp. 185–186), if you take a friend of yours to the library, and she says “It is so unjust,” and you ask what it is that is so unjust and she says “books have so many different colours,” and then you, a bit puzzled at your friend’s criteria of justice, ask “why is it unjust?.” I can imagine your friend, if she is quite consistent in her views on what is justice to continue defending her opinion with other examples. And this conversation can keep on going. But after a point, if you can’t “see” why she means having different colours is unjust, the sharing of criteria and meaning is going to be lost. The possibility of irrevocably losing the other person’s meaning is there only if you are going to look for some justification for their belief. If you think that there is and must be a valid justification for a belief, then that is the end of the possibility of communication, and it thereby marks the beginning of a violent othering. When you ‘start’ seeing the other’s person perspective, suddenly all things fall into place, and you come to see the world from the other person’s set of eyes. You thus gain new coordinates and become oriented to another’s perspective. This orientation cannot happen through mere discussion, since as we saw discussions towards finding the ultimate 178

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justification of any system of belief will go on ad infinitum. But we know that ultimately the spade will be turned. The ground of that bedrock will not be doxastic but embodied agreement. In other words, when we look for questions of justice, the criteria of justice cannot come from outside the practices in which people engage. The nature of what is it to be just, fair, generous, etc. can come only from a mutual recognition of these concepts. Then it means that these concepts are not necessarily to be handed down from outside these practices. But one might argue that if this is the way of establishing a polity, wouldn’t it mean that any kind of value might come to be adopted by anyone? Someone can ask, how does one morally evaluate the cannibal or the murderer if we adopt this Wittgensteinian approach? I am not saying that these real moral questions will necessarily be quickly resolved through my approach. But what I am merely attempting to do is first disarm the many moralistic approaches to varied cultural practices. I aim to enable moral conversations and open up the possibilities of moral change and ethical conversion. When you meet someone who is completely different from your worldview, the possibility of looking at things from their practices is open both to you and to your interlocutor. In this way, conversion becomes a two-way street and not merely a one-person endeavour to find the Truth, the Good, God or something else. Any talk of justice as a distributional model based as it is on contractual obligations doesn’t quite get to the many injustices that happen in the everyday life between ordinary people. It is in everyday life that moral decisions are made, cultural education happens, negotiations of differences take place. A theory of justice that doesn’t quite take into account the multiple conversations that happen in everyday life is an impoverished one. When we look at social groups and cultural groups, what we find are different people at differential positions in a society living a life with certain ‘statuses’ accruing to them. These people, by following a life form, are playing the same game by adopting what Brandom calls an “explicit discursive scorekeeping stance” (Brandom, 1994) – which is the adoption of a mutual linguistic recognitional system where “each one interprets the other as 179

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engaging in just the same sort of interpretive activity, as adopting just the same sort of interpretic stance, as one does oneself” (Brandom, 1994, p. 642). The notion of justice which takes into account the multiple games that people play will have to account for the language that people share as well as the explicit and implicit moves that the sharing of that language entails. Violence in daily life occurs when the recognitional capacities between linguistic beings is denied to each other. Theories of justice by removing the recognitional concepts and stances from the everyday world to a representational and political centre have missed the opportunity to theorize about the different instances in which recognition is withheld on a daily basis. Statist theories of justice make the only recognitional currency either the nomological identity of a citizen or of a human being. Thus, the law by being indifferent to every group’s internal discursive scorekeeping abilities creates an asymmetric relation between the person and the state or law. This asymmetric relation between the law, which is impersonal, and the person, who is blood and bones, is thus obtained when the interpreter (read: the state) adopts a simple intentional stance and the nonlinguistic creature [is] interpreted as a simple intentional system. In that case the interpreter [read the state] does not take the system [read social groups] being interpreted to be able to do just what the interpreter is doing, namely attributing (as opposed to acknowledging) beliefs, intentions, and endorsement of patterns of practical reasoning. (Brandom, 1994, p. 642) By denying the interpreted social groups the reciprocal recognitional concepts that the state abrogates to itself, the conversation of justice is foreclosed. In this way, justice becomes a one-way street. There are two consequences from this. One, the state by being impersonal doesn’t necessarily become responsible as formal institutions take over the role of moral and cultural agents, which doesn’t take part in the game that it is trying to adjudicate. Two, institutions by their very nature are removed and made 180

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distant from the scene of moral action. Because of these two features of statist conception of law and justice, many of the acts of violence that happen between two people are ignored. If we think of violence as the physical infliction of power over another’s body, then statist justice, if it doesn’t go into the background context and reasons that could have made such violence possible, is an impoverished one. Despite the best intentions of the government, there is always the possibility of friction between two people. But if the state recognizes violence only when it is manifested in physical terms, then it is in a way blind to all that went before that brutal act of power. Much must have happened before two people come to blows. Physical violence is the climax of a series of instances of interpretive misunderstanding. Physical violence usually happens after much disagreement and tension between two people. But this misunderstanding is enabled only if conversations don’t happen between people, and conversation is ultimately possible only when life forms are shared. We must understand that violence is always possible between two people at all levels – not only at the physical level but also at the hermeneutic and linguistic level. Therefore, the duty of justice is to be able to recognize the gaps in understanding between people every day. And this form of justice cannot obviously come from a centre but from the decentralized recognition of self-affirming moral agents.

Violence and memory The last conceptual axis that I aim to draw is a review of how violence and memory are constituted in life forms. In the third chapter, we saw how trauma creates a violent break in our lived memory. My own account of trauma I stressed earlier was not a psychological one as much as a historical account of how in collective memory, the narratives that we create comes to a stop when they are faced with a violent event. Violence in a way represents the gap in or the inability of narrative techniques to completely assimilate certain traumatic events, I had said earlier. When we look at the place of violence in our representative calculus, we are forced to acknowledge that violence happens 181

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whenever there is a ‘communication gap.’ Academic literature on the question of violence has been divided on how to theorize this communication gap and find the sources of such gaps. In one way, the problem of violence is the problem of the relation of the moral agent to the constituting forces of their identity. In other words, if violence is supposed to dehumanize people and forcefully bring them face to face with pain, torture and death and all that limits their life, then it is important to know the epistemological, moral and political techniques that are brought about to cause that violence. As we look at human beings with a historical reach, the violence that has remained points to the rupture in the continuity of humans’ temporal existence. This rupture, we saw, was mainly because of the essentialist or logocentric approach taken when it comes to theorizing about the constituting powers of human identity. People like Slavoj Žižek – for example, in his essay The Violence of Liberal Democracy (Žižek, 1993) – have pointed in particular to the ideology of liberalism and its historical commitment to the ideals of the Enlightenment as the culprit for its connivance in the production of modern large-scale violence. According to him, liberal doctrines have been historically blind to cultural otherness and therefore created a latent intolerance towards differing practices. This in turn has created the space for a lot of violence in the past. What we can learn from critiques of violence from sources like Žižek is that much of the debate around the nature of consensus has been revolving around the age-old key terms of universalism versus particularism. But this dichotomy of how to found universal values in particular differences, a debate that goes back to Plato in a way,3 has come to invade our TV screens when people find themselves now discussing the merits of identity politics, multiculturalism, cultural pluralism, etc. But in this discourse, the reality of violence is refracted only through an understanding of people as being ultimately different from each other and thereby essentializing their irreconcilability. Much of modern political discourse revolves around this dialectic of squaring irreconcilable differences with the value of free speech. If differences are a political reality, then freedom must 182

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be the normative value, it is averred. But speech as merely the right to say what one wants to say doesn’t quite capture the ultimate performative aspect that is inherent in speech. Speech is an act – a gesture and that must be kept in mind. What we saw in our discussion with the speech act theory of J.L. Austin was that speech as a gesture is essentially epistemologically overdetermined. That is, neither can the act of speech be completely reduced to the physiological movements of the mouth, voice, etc., nor can speech be merely equated to the content of what is being spoken. Austin’s language theory has provided the advantage of knotting agency and action to ‘effecting’ speech, generating a rich heuristic model that, besides drawing many of its examples, from legal or political discourse, permitted the redescription of a whole range of discursive activities in turn. (Hanssen, 2000, pp. 169–170) If we want to take in the points of speech act theory seriously, then the debate around freedom of speech must take into account the constitutional condition that the gesture of speech has. Otherwise, a residual dissatisfaction with the way the debate is being structured will remain. For example, we sometimes exhaust the explanation for my lifting my arm as a gesture by bringing in external force vectors affecting my arm from outside. But this would be a merely mechanical explanation. To correct this ‘mechanical’ explanation, some of us bring in an ‘intentional’ paradigm to explain why I moved my arm. This argumentation would situate explanatory faith in the heuristic or ontic existence of an inner ‘will,’ which is supposed to animate my arm. But such kinds of explanations bypass the heart of the phenomenon of any kind of gesture, including speech acts. What is significant in the lifting of my arm – for it to be a sign of communication – is that any adequate explanation of the reason for me to lift my arm has to come from different ontological fields. As Flusser says, “The arm movement involves physiological, psychological, cultural, economic, and other factors in equal measure, for example. The arm movement can then be explained 183

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as typically ‘human’ or ‘neurotic,’ or ‘Brazilian’ or ‘bourgeois.’” (Flusser, 2014, p. 162). That is the moment when we talk about any act the explanations for which cannot merely stop at the individual level but will have to be conceptually extended to cultural, social and historical backgrounds. The moment when such explanations are allowed, as it must be, we can see that gestures and actions are determined through historically contingent life forms. Each gesture is therefore encoded with a historical and cultural memory that not only connects people who have the same life form but also enables historical continuity. Palaeontologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan in his seminal book Geste et Parole made the important contribution regarding the constituting power of cultural tools towards the understanding of how humans understand themselves. Specifically, Leroi-Gourhan showed that the study of human nature cannot be divorced from the study of the tools that humans have used from prehistoric times to the modern day. That is, tools as cultural artefacts and a repository of a form of knowledge – technê – have come to constitute human nature, not the other way around – Leroi-Gourhan argued.4 This has opened up our thinking into looking at writing, for example, as an embodied gesture of a people’s collective memory and expression. We are able to observe writing itself as a practice that is historically evolved because of the insight that tools, including chisels, pens, etc., are nothing more than the manipulative gestures that control them. Also, in gestures are encoded a programmed routine which has in itself an operating chain which is shared by a life form (Noland, 2009, pp. 93–121). In speech acts, we have to understand that what makes us human is this ability to ‘freely’ perform through our bodies. And we must also keep in mind that that human bodies come into being not because they are pre-programmed to be human by some cybernetic design (that is, are equipped with a set of genes that make them human or automatically give them a recognizable human shape) but rather because they realize kinetic dispositions, and thus osteo-muscular possibilities, through 184

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a culturally informed process of motor interaction with an environment – that is, through miming, imitation, and experiential “tâtonnement [grasping].” (Noland, 2009, p. 117) Note here the inversion of the order of explanation. If speech acts as gestures are how we as human bodies are constituted, then freedom is not to be interpreted as the expression of a power or potential that we as humans have. Humanity is not pregiven as an ontic entity. Being human is a process whereby through the engagement of mutually recognizable acts – speech acts being the most important ones – we come to become human. This recognitional process is therefore the most important element in the production of a political society. Any talk of freedom in a society must therefore understand that freedom is enacted in a life form through merely the living of an embodied and ‘encultured’ life. Speech act as a gesture, as Flusser puts it, “may be defined as a movement that expresses a freedom. But what makes it unique is that, untouched by any of this, it expresses a subjectivity that we are forced to call ‘freedom’” (Flusser, 2014, p. 163). Violence happens only when the avenues of expressing the historically loaded and corporeally coded meaningful gestures like speech acts are not allowed to express themselves. Ultimately, if a speech act is a free gesture, then there is inherently a creative element to that gesture. Violence is engendered only when we disable the environment in which the creative powers of humans are not allowed free play. There is an indelible link between being free and being ourselves, and that is something that we need to keep in mind when we start thinking of designing political programmes for any future society. In conclusion, I hope that this book redirects our interest in solving violent political problems from statist solutions towards other creative avenues. One such avenue is to look at the problem of everyday violence and to find the solution in quotidian life. Most significant in all our lives – day in and day out – are the different speech acts that we carry on with each other. Our whole lives are catalogues of all the thing we have said and done. The content of what we said is as important as the fact that we 185

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said it. Each of our speech acts arises out of a context that calls out for communicable recognition. Whether I am a teacher or a student, a father or a mother, someone of a given profession or something else in a way presents the horizon of a contextual status in which I make certain statements. It is these contexts in our everyday lives that we need to engage with more deeply to be able to understand why violence happens. Because our everyday worlds surround us all the time, it is futile and ultimately impossible to try to get out of this everyday life to find a political heaven. Ultimately, the solution to a nonviolent existence is only deeper involvement in our daily lives, but with a sense of wonder.

Notes 1 The phenomenological school of philosophy has been critical of a theory of mind that doesn’t look at the embodied and embedded nature of human involvement. The philosophers who have recently done great work along these lines are Dan Zahavi (Zahavi, 2001, 2005), Shaun Gallagher (Gallagher, 2008; Gallagher and Zahavi, 2012) and Søren Overgaard (Overgaard, 2012). In a way, this goes back to the work that Husserl did after Logical Investigations (Husserl, 2001). Since then, Husserl’s approach has been fruitful for philosophers in France, like Merleau-Ponty and others. One can also read Alva Noe’s accessible book Out of our Heads to get a map of the arguments currently in use against cognitivism. 2 This has come to be called the affective turn in cultural and performative studies. For more on the ‘affective turn,’ read (Clough and Halley, 2007). 3 Read, for example, Plato’s Sophist, Theatetus and Timeaus. 4 This is taken up in Derrida’s Of Grammatology (Derrida, 1976).

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Traverso, E. (2003). The Origins of Nazi Violence. New Press. Tuomela, R. (1997). Searle on Social Institutions. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 57(2), 435–441. Tuomela, R. (2002). Searle, Collective Intentionality, and Social Institutions. In Speech Acts, Mind, and Social Reality (pp.  293–307). Springer. Turner, V. W. (1986). The Anthropology of Performance. PAJ Publications. Virno, P. (2015). When the Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature. Semiotext(e). White, H. V. (1982). The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation. Critical Inquiry, 9(1), 113–137. JSTOR. White, H. V. (1987). The Content of the Form Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. The John Hopkins University Press. Wiesel, E. (1960). Night. Hill and Wang. Williams, M. (1999). Wittgenstein, Mind and Meaning: Towards a Social Conception of Mind. Routledge. Williamson, T. (2007). The Philosophy of Philosophy. Wiley-Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1958). The Blue and Brown Books. Harper & Row. Wittgenstein, L. (1965). I: A Lecture on Ethics. Philosophical Review, 74(1), 3–12. Wittgenstein, L. (1966). Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1977). Culture and Value (Vol. 15). University of Chicago Press. Wolin, R. (2010). The Wind from the East. Princeton University Press. Young, A. (1995). The Harmony of Illusions. Princeton University Press. Zahavi, D. (2001). Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity: A Response to the Linguistic-Pragmatic Critique. Ohio University Press. Zahavi, D. (2005). Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the FirstPerson Perspective. Bradford Book/MIT Press. Žižek, S. (1993). The Violence of Liberal Democracy. Assemblage, 20, 92–93. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.2307/3181716

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INDEX

absolute alterity 50 administrative logic see instrumental rationality affective turn 186 Agamben, Giorgio 62 alethiea 37 alienation 35; psychological 46 American Declaration of Independence 29 American Revolution 14 analytical philosophy 134 Arendt, Hannah 13–18; on violence 24–28 Asad, Talal 30 assujettissement 58 Austin, J.L. 183

Cassirer, Ernst 136 Cavell, Stanley 141–149, 151 Chomsky, Noam 77 clash of epistemologies 9 classificatory logic 30 cognitivism 76 colonialism 8 continental philosophy 135 cultural media 84 Das, Veena 133, 144 Derrida, Jacques 62, 75 Descartes, Rene: evil demon 96 Diamond, Cora 131 Dilthey, Wilhelm 67, 91 disciplinary society 54

Badiou, Alain 162 bare life 146 basanos 37 Benhabib, Seyla 16 Benjamin, Walter 60 biopower 52 Blackburn, Simon 162 Bourdieu, Pierre 130 Bouveresse, Jacques 89, 132, 162 Brandom, Robert 179, 180 Butler, Judith 41, 146 calculative thinking 21 Carnap, Rudolf 111

embodied 41 Enlightenment 4 enumerative strategy 12 epistemological space 9 Ereignis 19 Erlebnis 68 exclusionary tactic 53 expressivism 176 Fassin, Didier 90 Fanon, Frantz 12 Felman, Shoshana 87 Fodor, Jerry 77

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INDEX

life 154 life form 173

Foucault, Michel 42, 54; power 57 freedom 14; of the Other 50 Frege, Gottlob 77, 109 French Revolution 6, 14 Friedman, Michael 160 fuzzy communities 11

MacIntyre, Alasdair 4 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 38, 168, 170 modernity 2–6; power 58 Moore, G. E. 137 moralism 140 Mulhall, Stephen 122

Geisteswissenschaft 68 Gellner, Ernest 138 Gestell 21 gestures 171 Gibbard, Allan 162 governmentality 53

nationalism 8 Naturwissenschaft 68 ouverture au monde 38

Habermas, Jurgen 3, 163 habitus 61 Hegel 6 Heidegger, Martin 13; technology 19–22 Heimatlosen 16 History of Sexuality 56 Hobbes, Thomas 1 Holocaust 19; memory 71–73 human rights 15

recognition 166 rituals 85 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 165 Russell, Bertrand 77

imperialist wars 18 imperial knowledges 11 instrumentality 22 instrumental rationality 20 instrumental violence 19 internalist myth 115 juridicality 38 Kafka, Franz 35 Kant, Immanuel 4, 17; Critique of Pure Reason 161; Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science 161 language of thought theory 93 legalistic constitutionalism 17 Leroi-Gourhan, Andre 184 Levinas: Emmanuel 49

pain: body 40; Elaine Scarry 39 panoptic society 54 pastoral care 44 performatives: Austin, J.L. 105; Virno, Paolo 106 Pitkin, Hanna F. 139 posttraumatic stress (PTSD) 90 power 43

scepticism 174, 175 Schmitt, Carl 62 Scholem, Gershom 60 somatic power 58 sovereignty 26, 53 speech act 87 St. Paul 16 statelessness 16 state of exception 27, 45 Taylor, Charles 4 techne 21 technical reification 24 technological determinism 23 technology 20, 21

198

INDEX

torture: body 36; Foucault 37; language 42; penal 35–36; truth 36 trauma 65, 66 trauma studies 71, 83 Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man 13 universalism 6 verificationism 112 violence 1, 17, 157; language 65; law 44, 45; state 44

Wittgenstein, Ludwig: beetle in a box 125; criteria 142, 176; family resemblances 117; games 99, 104; grammar of usage 89; instituitions 100; picture theory of language 113; private linguist 123; rules 99, 103; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 107–109; use-theory 100 Žižek, Slavoj 182

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