Textures of the Ordinary

Doing Anthropology after Wittgenstein

Veena Das

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780823287901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

How might we speak of human life amid violence, deprivation, or disease so intrusive as to put the idea of the human into question? How can scholarship and advocacy address new forms of war or the slow, corrosive violence that belie democracy's promise to mitigate human suffering? To Veena Das, the answers to these question lie not in foundational ideas about human nature but in a close attention to the diverse ways in which the natural and the social mutually absorb each other on a daily basis. Textures of the Ordinary shows how anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy in the exploration of everyday life. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture aligns ethnography with the anthropological tone in Wittgenstein and Cavell, as well as in literary texts. Das shows that doing anthropology after Wittgenstein does not consist in taking over a new set of terms such as forms of life, language games, or private language from Wittgenstein's philosophy. Instead, we must learn to see what eludes us in the everyday precisely because it is before our eyes. The book shows different routes of return to the everyday as it is corroded not only by catastrophic events but also by repetitive and routine violence within everyday life itself. As an alternative to normative ethics, this book develops ordinary ethics as attentiveness to the other and as the ability of small acts of care to stand up to horrific violence. Textures of the Ordinary offers a model of thinking in which concepts and experience are shown to be mutually vulnerable. With questions returned to repeatedly throughout the text and over a lifetime, this book is an intellectually intimate invitation into the ordinary, that which is most simple yet most difficult to perceive in our lives.

1

WITTGENSTEIN AND ANTHROPOLOGY

Anticipations

This chapter was written for a series in which different anthropologists were invited to consider the relation they saw between fundamental anthropological questions and the philosophy that provided the grounds (however unacknowledged) in the work of one major philosopher. The series was a visionary project conceived by Valentine Daniel and it was the first time I had found the courage to express my longtime engagement with Wittgenstein’s later philosophy on which I had run reading courses at the Delhi School of Economics. I was fortunate that soon after the publication of this essay in 1998, I could teach a formal course on Wittgenstein and anthropology at the New School for Social Research in 1999. It took courage to make this strand of my thinking knowable, public, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for an anthropology department to have a course on Wittgenstein. Then and now, I do not claim the credentials for being a Wittgenstein scholar, but I do claim that his philosophy might appeal to those who recognize the uncanniness of everyday life. In some ways this chapter functions like bija sutra—a seed that contained the problems that will become fleshed out through ethnography later. Placed right at the beginning of the book, it will allow the reader to see the distance or closeness among the issues that go on to define the trajectories of my work.

The opening sentence of the paper as it was then said, “I wish to invite reflection in this paper on a certain kinship in the questions that Wittgenstein asks of his philosophy and the puzzles of anthropology.” That sentence could well be regarded as defining the domain of this inquiry into everyday life. Consider Wittgenstein’s formulation “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’ ” (Wittgenstein [1953] 1968, §123). For Wittgenstein, then, philosophical problems have their beginnings in the feeling of being lost and in an unfamiliar place, and philosophical answers are in the nature of finding one’s way back. This image of turning back, of finding not as moving forward as toward a goal but as being led back or turning back, is pervasive in the later writings of Wittgenstein. How can anthropology receive this way of philosophizing? Is there something familiar in the feeling of being lost in anthropological experience? Wittgenstein’s fear—“the seed I am likely to sow is a certain jargon” (Diamond 1976, 293)—is to be respected so that the translation of his ideas into anthropology should not be taken as the opportunity for merely a new set of terms. Instead of rendering a systematic account of any one aspect of his philosophy, I shall try to follow a few lines of thought that might interest anthropologists, hoping to convey the tones and sounds of Wittgenstein’s words. My thought is not that this will help us reach new goals but that it might help us stop for a moment—to introduce a hesitancy in the way in which we habitually dwell among our concepts of culture, of everyday life, or of the inner. In this effort, the work of Stanley Cavell’s thoughts on several of these questions have been crucial for me, acting like signposts in my own efforts to move within Philosophical Investigations.

THE PICTURE OF CULTURE

Definitions

Writing in 1997, traumatized by what he had experienced in the unravelling of Sri Lankan society in what was to become a civil war that lasted for twenty-five years, Daniel (1996) coined the term the anthropography of violence. He was moved to say, “Anthropology has had an answer to the question, What is a human being? An answer that has, on the whole, served us well, with or without borrowings from philosophers. The answer keeps returning to one form or another of the concept of culture: humans have it; other living beings do not” (194). He went on to discuss how Tylor’s ([1878] 1974) founding definition of culture helped to move it away from the “clutches of literature, philosophy, classical music, and the fine arts—in other words, from the conceit of the Humanities” (Daniel 1996, 194). Let us consider for a moment the actual definition proposed by Tylor: “Culture or civilization taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (Tylor [1878] 1974, 1). What is interesting in this definition is not only the all-inclusive nature of culture but also the reference to it as capability and habit acquired through one’s membership of society. As Asad (1990) notes, this notion of culture with its enumeration of capabilities and habits, as well as the focus on learning, gave way in time to the idea of culture as text “that is as something resembling an inscribed text” (171). Within this dominant notion of culture as text, the process of learning came to be seen as shaping the individual body as a picture of this text, inscribing memory often through painful rituals so that the society and culture of which the individual is a member is made present, so to say, on the surface of the body (Clasteres 1974; Das 1995a; Durkheim [1912] 1995). The scene of instruction in Wittgenstein ([1953] 1968) in the double sense of showing how one—say, a child or a builder—is instructed into a life in language, and also how we as readers are to be instructed through that scene, is quite different.

Scenes of Instruction

Philosophical Investigations begins with an evocation of the words of Augustine in Confessions. This opening scene has been the object of varying interpretations. The passage reads as follows:

When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and grasped that the thing they called was the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, or avoiding something. Thus as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires. (Wittgenstein [1953] 1968, §1)

Cavell (1979, 1990a), who has given the most sustained reading of this passage, senses here the presence of the child who moves invisible among his or her elders and who must divine speech for himself or herself, training the mouth to form signs so that he or she may use these signs to express his or her own desires. Now contrast this scene of instruction with the famous builders’ scene, which follows soon after in Wittgenstein ([1953] 1968, §2):

Let us imagine a language for which the description given by Augustine is right. The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs, and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words “block,” “pillar,” “slab,” “beam.” A calls them out;—B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call.—Conceive this as a complete primitive language.

Why are these two scenes juxtaposed with each other? Does it make sense to treat the builders’ language as a distorted version of what it is to teach language? If we transpose the scene of instruction in which the child moves among the adults with that of the builders (treating it as a scene of instruction for ourselves), we might see that even if the child were to use only four words, these may be uttered with charm, curiosity, a sense of achievement. One may say, the child has a future in language. The builders’ language, in contrast, is closed. Wittgenstein wills us to conceive of this as a “complete primitive language.” Yet as Cavell (1995) points out, there is no standing language game for imagining what Wittgenstein asks us to imagine here.

It has been noted often enough that Wittgenstein does not call upon any of the natural languages from which he could have taken his examples; thus, his game in this section—whether with reference to the child or the builder—is in the nature of a fiction through which his thoughts may be maintained in the region of the primitive. But the “primitive” here is conceived as the builders’ tribe, which seems bereft of the possession of its culture or of an undoubted shared language—the language the tribe uses is invented language, not to be confused either with the natural languages found among people who maintain full forms of sociality or with the language of the child.

Wittgenstein’s sense of the child who moves about in his or her culture unseen by the elders and who has to inherit his or her culture as if by theft appears to find resonance in the anthropological literature in the register of the mythological (for instance, in the bird nester myths analyzed by Levi-Strauss [(1964) 1969]). Despite the studies on socialization, rarely has the question of how one comes to a sense of a shared culture as well as one’s own voice in that culture in the context of everyday life been addressed anthropologically. If asked at all, this question has been formulated as a question of socialization as obedience to a set of normative rules and procedures. But juxtaposing the child with the builders seems to suggest that whatever else it may be, the inheritance of culture is not about inheriting a certain set of rules or a certain capacity to obey orders. As Wittgenstein ([1953] 1968, §3) says, “Augustine does describe a system of communication: only not everything we call language is this system.” And then, as if the surest route to understand this concept is to understand it through the eyes of the child, he points out that the words in a game like ring-a-ring-a-roses are to be understood as both the words and the actions in which they are woven (§7). The child learns that “we all fall down” is both a chanting of words in unison with others and the enacting of falling down to go in harmony with the words. Unlike the builder whose language, in Wittgenstein’s description of the scene, is capable of only machinelike actions, the child’s language is not simply about obeying orders but learning what it is to be with others, to “fall down” in a funny, giggly, fun way.

Concern with childhood surfaces in classical anthropological literature but only as incidental to the intricacies of age ranking, rites of passage, and sometimes with reference to attitudes toward what can only be a fictional category of the “average child.” Both Nieuwenhuys (1996) and Reynolds (1995) show how sparse the ethnographic descriptions of children and their agency have been in this literature. Reynolds’s (1995) work on political activism of children and youth in the volatile and traumatic context of South Africa is special because she shows how tales of folk heroes might have provided a perspective to young people with which to view their defiance of the regime of apartheid even as they had to negotiate questions of obedience, authority, and kinship solidarity within the domains of family and kinship. I would also draw attention to the remarkable account by Gilsenan (1996) and to Das (1990b, 1990c) and Chatterji and Mehta (1995) on the complicated question of what it is for children to inherit the obligation to exact vengeance, to settle for peace, or to bear witness in a feud or in the aftermath of a riot. Claims over inheritance are not straightforward in these contexts, but even in relatively stable societies, anthropological descriptions of culture as either shared or contested have excluded the voice of the child. As in Augustine’s passage, the child seems to move about unseen by his or her elders.

Let me go on to the question that the figure of the child raises here: What is it to say that the child has a future in language? There are several scenes of instruction in Philosophical Investigations: those pertaining to completing a mathematical series, those pertaining to reading, those pertaining to obeying an order. All raise the issue of what it is to be able to project a concept or a word or a procedure into new situations. “A” writes down a series of numbers; “B” watches him and tries to find a law for the sequence of numbers. If he succeeds, he exclaims, “Now I can go on.” What has happened here?

One powerful way of understanding what gives a child the confidence to say “I can go on” is provided by Kripke (1982) with the example of what it is to follow a mathematical procedure or a rule. He points out that Wittgenstein shows convincingly that we cannot speak of an inner understanding having occurred; nor can we say that there are some basic rules that can tell us how to interpret the other rules. Here is how the problem appears to Kripke (1982, 17):

Here of course I am expounding Wittgenstein’s well-known remarks about a “rule for interpreting a rule.” It is tempting to answer the skeptic from appealing from one rule to another more “basic” rule. But the skeptical move can be repeated at the more basic level also. Eventually the process must stop—“justifications come to an end somewhere”—and I am left with a rule which is completely unreduced to any other. How can I justify my present application of such a rule, when a skeptic could easily interpret it so as to yield any of an indefinite number of other results? It seems my application of it is an unjustified stab in the dark. I apply the rule blindly.

Without going into this argument in any detail, I want to comment on one formulation that is proposed by Kripke (1982): that our justification for saying that a child has learned how to follow a rule comes from the confidence that being a member of a community allows the individual person to act “unhesitatingly but blindly.” Kripke gives the example of a small child learning addition and says that it is obvious that his teacher will not accept just any response from the child. So, what does one mean when one says that the teacher judges that, for certain cases, the pupil must give the “right” answer? “I mean that the teacher judges that the child has given the same answer that he himself would have given.… I mean that he judges that the child is applying the same procedure he himself would have applied” (90).

For Kripke (1982) this appeal to community and to criteria of agreement is presented in Wittgenstein as a solution to the “skeptical paradox”—that if everything can be made out to be in accord with a rule, then it can also be made to conflict with it. But this skepticism with regard to justification, says Kripke, applies to the isolated individual: it does not hold for one who can apply unhesitatingly but blindly a rule that the community licenses him or her to apply. As with application of a word in future contexts, there is no “inner state” called “understanding” that has occurred. Instead, as he says, there are language games in our lives that license under certain conditions assertions that someone means such and such and that his present application accords with what was said in the past.

My discomfort with this description arises from the centrality that Kripke (1982) places on the notion of rule as well as from the processes he privileges for bringing the child in agreement with a particular form of life that would license such blind and unhesitating obedience to the rule.

If we take the teacher in Kripke (1982) to be the representative of the community within which the child is being initiated, then I am compelled to ask whether the “agreement” in a form of life is purely a matter of making the child arrive at the same conclusion or the same procedure that the adult would have applied. Rather, it appears to me that, as Cavell (1990a) suggests, this agreement is a much more complicated affair in which there is an entanglement of rules, customs, habits, examples, and practices and that we cannot attach salvational importance to the learning of rules as the best route to the inheritance of culture.¹ Wittgenstein ([1953] 1968) speaks about orders or commands in several ways: there is the gulf between the order and its execution or the translation of an order one time into a proposition and another time into a demonstration and still another time into action. I do not have the sense that the agreement in forms of life requires the child to produce the same response that the teacher does. To have a future in language, the child should have been enabled to say, “And after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.” There is of course the reference in Wittgenstein to following a rule blindly.

“All the steps are already taken” means: I no longer have any choice. The rule, once stamped with a particular meaning, traces the line along which it is to be followed through the whole of space.—But if something of this sort really were the case, how would it help?

No; my description only made sense of it was to be understood symbolically.—I should have said: This is how it strikes me.

When I obey a rule, I do not choose.

I obey the rule blindly. ([1953] 1968, §219, emphasis in original)

And then in §221 he explains, “My symbolical expression was really a mythological description of the rule.” I cannot take up fully the question here of what it is to speak mythologically or symbolically, but from the aura that surrounds the discussion of these issues, speaking of obeying a rule blindly seems to be similar to the way one speaks of wishes, plans, suspicions, or expectations as, by definition, unsatisfied, or the way one speaks of propositions as necessarily true or false—that is, that they are grammatical statements. When Wittgenstein ([1953] 1968) talks about rules and agreement being cousins, the kinship between them seems more complicated than Kripke’s (1982) rendering of either of these two concepts allows.²

I want to take an ethnographic vignette now to show the entanglement of the ideas of rule, custom, habit, practice, and example in what might be seen as constituting agreement within a particular form of life. Gilsenan (1996) gives us a stunning ethnography of violence and narrative in Akkar, a northern province of Lebanon, in the 1970s. From the sev...