Anshul Kumar
“The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization”
This is a popular quote which is attributed to Sigmund Freud but as per Freud Museum’s website, it is a quote by the neurologist Hughlings Jackson.1
But why am I writing about hurling abuse as the basis of civilization? Are we all not bombarded with pyramids and grand tombs, giant architectures and cities, buildings and canals and agriculture as the markers of civilization?
How does “hurling abuse” become the beacon of civilizational leap?
Gestures of communication first evolved in humans in order to communicate with others and coordinate while on hunt.2 This was a pure survival mechanism and speech thus developed was still very archaic and almost incomprehensible without any linguistic syntax or grammar.
Now to come back to the above mentioned quote misattributed to Freud, hurling abuse instead of a stone as a marker of civilization, might seem contradictory at first glance, because the ‘civilizations’ that we find ourselves living in currently have clear demarcations on decent speech and abusive speech. There is a pedantic sense of a civilized life which is marked by restrictions and sanctions on foul speech.
This foul speech is seen miles away and even antithetical to the idea of a civilization.
To such an understanding I am bound to ask if we are really living in a civilization?
What is a civilization? Isn’t it supposed to bring us out of the uncertainty and harshness of nature?
But what we witness is that today, life in modern “civilisations” is even worse than life in nature for billions of people while a few enjoy all the benefits of civilization.
I refuse to call these unequal societies as civilized.3
To preface civilization and its discourse is for me to make a point about hurling abuse as an act of resistance against the ills committed in the name of civilization.
With regard to India and its history, restrictions on speech have been a very important part of the caste society.
The ideas of pure speech or sacred speech have always been associated with the Sanskrit language and the priestly class of Brahmins. The context of speech and its purity helps situate the people who have branded me as abusive for using the words “Bastard and Bitch” for Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak. This was in response to an incident in which she behaved towards me like an old haggard Brahmin lady masquerading as an egalitarian socialist who runs schools for dalits.
Yes you read it right. This description of Spivak brings out the messianic complex inherent in upper caste intellectuals in India, through which they try hard to portray themselves as casteless and beyond caste.
What transpired between Spivak and me has already been written in detail by me in another article which can be read here.
I am taking this opportunity to further problematize this very incident and the strong response it evoked from the academic community, which took to the mainstream media to reprimand me.
It makes me wonder that an academic institution like JNU which boasts about being against capitalist ideas of a corporate work environment but all of a sudden ganged up against me on my usage of abusive words instead of problematising and going into the nuances of that spat.
Are they not behaving in a manner espoused by a capitalist workforce, where there are demeanors, rules and ideas on behavioural conduct which govern the lives of its workers? Are we supposed to behave in the same manner in academia? To shun abuses as an uncouth or should we study and understand why people abuse?
Is JNU a corporate work office where it aims to produce profit or is it engaged in producing knowledge to better understand our societies and ourselves?
But then, they have not yet problematised the idea of university itself or for that matter being reflexive enough to study academia itself.
The academic warlords from Menon to Gudavarthy will go on giving their commentaries on every demographic unit of Indian society and their lives and mores but they won’t ever look inwards and study their own folks. And that is what I call the Brahmin gaze, which always defined the other, and historically the Brahmin has always been in a pursuit to define himself has taken great pains to define the other.4
On the other hand, these upper caste academics, from Ajay Gudavarthy to Brinda Bose to some Simran Chaddha from Delhi University used all their might, all their institutional networks and connections with publication outlets to put me down.
It takes one to be a joker to write terms like “implosion of subalternity” and “can the subaltern speak” in an academic arena to talk about the same thing.
Isn’t it amusing that the subaltern who couldn’t speak has now imploded?
The subaltern who till now cannot speak has now imploded? Why? Just because he showered a few choice abuses on one of you?
When I chose to use those words for Spivak, it was not speech per se but in written form.
It was not for nothing that Socrates despised the invention of writing, because the art of writing changes the entire discourse of power and creates new ruling hierarchies which are based on who gets to learn to write and legitimize that writing.
What hurts the academic elites in India so much is that I rose above their bastion of written world and their mafias and shook it all with my mere abuses.
The Brahmin is so cunning that he wrote so much esoteric content that if we put all our energies into dismantling their written canons with our counter writing it will prove to be futile. Raidas and Kabir knew it beforehand and hence chose to not even give two cents of legitimacy to their written canons symbolically represented by the vedas.
It was not for nothing that Raidas didn’t produce a reply to the Vedas but simply said, I Raidas proclaim all Vedas to be worthless.
As I consider myself to be a part of academia, it is but a required thing on my part to write in detail about the shenanigans of mischievous Brahmins but what I personally believe is that their canons of writing should not be considered worth engaging and be outrightly condemned as acts of oppression.
My mere two words of abuse led to star intellectuals of Indian academia to write in defense of Spivak. Imagine the easy power and might they hold to sway public opinion and discourse. It is this power I am fighting against and I refuse to play by the rules of their games.
The very fact that I was able to rattle them enough gives me strength enough to continue attacking them at their very roots because I have opened a line of attack against these academic ganglords which if utilized well by the leading intellectuals from marginalized locations can prove to be of much help to them.
I am here using speech and written words interchangeably to make a point. A point about the politics of language. A politics of refined speech and the origins of linguistic warfare.
In defense of my speech, I take this opportunity to define what I term in dishonor of Gayatri Spivak as “Spivakian Abuse”.
Spivakian Abuse is a set of ruling ideas which are disseminated in the academia by upper caste academics who further their academic career by talking and writing about the people who are victims of oppression.
It is an abuse because often these ideas are used to further that oppression rather than fighting it from within.
Now let me come to my language, which is being termed as bad and disrespectful towards an old lady Spivak. What most of them tend to forget is that it is not simply bad language towards an old lady. It is bad language towards an Old Lady who is an authority and the symbol of the entire cannon of Indian liberal academia. She is not just the symbolic head of the star academics. She lives that stature.
And since she ain’t just an old woman, my choice of words are not just bad words but an upfront attack on that masculine image of a lady who both symbolizes and enacts the masculine ruling ideals of academia and the authority that it entails.
My choice of bad words thus were directly subverting the almost religion-like authority which the Brahmin academics hold in the knowledge economy and Spivak is the God of all these academics.
Of the two words I used for Spivak, one has garnered the most outrage as an act of misogyny. The other word has not been talked much about. That word is “Bitch.” (read the semantic development of the term Bitch by Collins 1984,).5 The other being “Bastard.”
What most of the academic intellectuals here missed to notice is that it is indeed misogyny of the word I used that they are raging against but wait, there’s a catch here.
The misogyny with which they have a problem is not the plain act of abusing a woman, which they pretend is the case. Deeply hidden in their identification of my choice of word as misogyny is their angst that I used a term of abuse used against women for a woman who symbolizes the masculine warhead of their ruling discourse.
They got angry and rattled not because I abused an old woman, their pain is the outright manifestation of me laying bare and emasculating the masculine “man hood” of their God mother who rules in the image of a masculine patriarch.
Isn’t Spivak the symbol of the “Academic Patriarch” against whom none can show disrespect, let alone abuse her?
David L. Paletz and William F. Harris in Four Letter Threat to Authority argued that: “the public use of obscenity undermines authority, whether that authority be political, moral-aesthetic, or linguistic.”
They further make a schema which goes like this:- “Political and social authority is based on public rationality and morality which embodies the processual flow of command and is based on the system of language which incorporates the values and conventions of a social and political system, and provides a model or a logic of action.”
My choice of word of abuse for Spivak fits exactly in this schema, it belittled the political and social authority of the academia.
Spivak is a representative of that authority and my choice of word of abuse has little to do with the personal female being of Spivak, but more to do with her authoritative being.
I am not related to Spivak and neither was I conversing with her as an acquaintance or in any capacity as a personal correspondence. My interaction was purely academic and in an ontological sense, she is “the other” to me as much as I am “the other” to her.
I chose to abuse that ontological other schematic in her being of an academic who is the doyen of subaltern studies.
My usage of abuse for Spivak had nothing personal those rushing to protect Spivak have an impending motive to defend the outrightly patriarchal and masculine image of Spivak.
I don’t know whether you will agree to accept this fact or not, but being in JNU I have clearly observed that success in an academic career is built upon how softly you can teabag the testicles of the academics you are working under and Spivak is the boss lady to whom all the Indian academics bow down to. It is not for no reason that Ajay Gudavarthy and Brinda Bose chose to play their tricks of academic jugglery to defend Spivak. And most of the students need references and overshadow of the likes of Gudavarthy and Bose to succeed in their career and hence their attitude of contempt against me because I symbolize that angst and rage against the dominance of these so called leading intellectuals and to support or praise me is to send their career down the academic drain. Hence an outright boycott and public castigation against me is seen in most of the lackeys and chelas of Spivakian academic warlords.
Civilisation is built not merely by bricks and mortars, it takes people and their rights to govern themselves for a civilization to grow.
And by any standards, I don’t consider Indian caste society a civilization.
The codes and conducts of language are clearly defined in a political and social authority because such an authority is built upon paying obeisance to that authority. It is the collective will imposed by the ruling authority that determines these linguistic mores and customs. And the big power of smallness of abusive language is not inherently because of it being abusive, but because it undermines that collective system of ruler vs ruled. It subverts and destabilizes that construction of superimposed social contract and violates it. It is in these interstitial acts of abuse that the power structure gets shaken and the existing incongruities are exposed to the world, to be seen.
Little do I need to explain the restrictive nature of laws in pre industrial societies because they valued the collective consciousness as against individual expression of dissent. My choice of abuse characteristically challenged that collective consciousness upheld in Indian academia that keeps Brahmin academics as the incharge-of-the-collective-will. A classic example of the struggle between the sacred and the profane. What I ended up doing with my profanity was challenging the sacred. The profanity of seeing things from below, from the margins as opposed to the sacredness of always being on top of the academic hierarchy.
This collective consciousness was dented only when a capitalist economy made it possible to have atomised individuals to exist in a society.
A society can only provide the grounds for dissent, it can never lead dissent. Dissent is always atomistic and always against the collective will, led by individuals. It is only through the effort of individuals that the society collectively changes and this again produces new atomistic individuals who again challenge the incongruities of the society.
Although it’s altogether a different thing that such an atomisation of individuals is now bringing up new found challenges to human societies.
Notes
1. Freud did in fact use something like it, but he is alluding to another writer. Freud writes: ‘as an English writer has wittily remarked, the man who first flung a word of abuse at his enemy instead of a spear was the founder of civilisation.’ The witty English writer was the neurologist John Hughlings Jackson.
2. In Engels paper “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man ”, he writes in detail about how it was labor that transformed and differentiated man from ape.
3. Aime Cesaire, Discourse in Colonialism “A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.”
4. The Indian caste structure was a very unique attempt in which the Brahmin racialised himself in order to racialise the entire population of India (Ramdas, 2018)
5. Collins, 1984 Bitch – An example of semantic development and change (http://soar.wichita.edu/bitstream/handle/10057/1784/LAJ_16.1_p69-86..pdf?sequence=1)
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Anshul Kumar is currently pursuing MA in Sociology at JNU.
