The Geometric Elasticity of Force
Prasanta Chakravarty An Honest Letter An exceptional testament about the nature of violence in times of civil war appears in the form of a letter: the one sent by Simone Weil to the novelist Georges Bernanos around 1938, being moved by his novel A Diary of My Times. In his work Bernanos, a devoted monarchist and a visionary, candidly describes the ferocity and casualness of violence on the part of the nationalists and church dignitaries as it unfolds at Majorca during the Spanish Civil War. Weil had participated in the war on the Republican side. In her first encounter of the Civil War in 1936, nearsighted as she was, Weil stepped in a pot of boiling oil and completely burnt her lower left leg and instep. She found enough courage to return to combat. Should there be any confusion about the sides the two chose, she tells Bernanos early on in the letter that her native inclination has always been to side with the ‘despised strata of social hierarchy.’ This was the left radical Simone Weil who in her many teaching assignments and the grueling factory work among unskilled female labourers in the early 1930s realized and conveyed to everyone that ‘the organization of labour is the deepest root of oppression’—something that produced humiliation, which in turn, produced fatigue. But that confession of being with the oppressed strata is qualified immediately in the letter by a simple yet momentous addition: that the same associations were of a nature that proved instrumental in ‘discouraging all sympathies’ for her. What had happened that had led to such a fundamental perceptual hardening in a person who is exceptionally dedicated and driven in her acts, politics and thoughts? What did dehumanization look like at the front? The letter is actually a dialogue and an inner battle with her selfhood and its alterations as it passes through such extraordinary violent times. Writing the letter to her ideological antagonist who is equally alive to little acts of fiendish bestiality and its effects during extraordinary violent times seemed an obligation to Weil. It was a leveling with what actually happens behind the lines during violent outbursts that takes humans to the brink of the purgatorial state of nature. In such circumstances, what does it mean to participate emotionally in a war, and at what price such first-hand knowledge? In the letter we come to witness Weil addressing a fundamental truth about nodes of intensity among the combatants: that grandeur and vice sometimes find a simultaneous natural outlet, so that all idealistic, righteous ventures are always sieved and purified at a point through the realist-determinist lens. But when the volunteer who joins the battle of resisting and fighting fascistic forces comes to square up with the realities of actual warfare, she often begins to weigh in the returns of her idealist immersion in the first place. On the one hand, the realist lens refracts back to sacrificial ideals as she ruminates upon the large catholicity of the anarchists. They did allow everyone to join their ranks. But what happens when idealists begin to waste themselves in a rut that begins to take a life of its own? Were the genuine radicals outnumbered by those who were impelled to political action by baser forms of violence? On the other hand, it is evident to those who live such a bloody war that love, an ambiance of brotherhood and, the demand for dignity among the humiliated are more than recompensed by a mix of immorality, cynicism and cruelty among those who profess equity and human dignity. In Bernanos, Weil found a kindred soul who breathed the same odour of blood and terror as her, albeit the two nurtured diametrically opposite views about the political temperament of their times. In the rambling, confessional middle of the letter, Weil recounts several tales which depict the unleashing of actual anarchist terror, which is always offhand and banal: her almost witnessing the execution of a priest, a boy killed and his father instantly going mad, and a young prisoner given twenty-four hours to join the anarchist camp and having refused that option, shot dead in cold blood when he refuses. In a different instance, the radicals, having discovered some haggard souls in the caves, shoot them to death lest they join the fascists. The reasoning for the mass murder is the key point: since the poor souls had not joined them and awaited the fascists, they were considered to be fascists themselves. It is not possible to hold on to any middle ground to those caught in the crossfire of civil war. And there are always justifications for such brutality: as some others were spared the anarchists considered their acts as humane and just. The final story concerns the manner in which an anarchist leader narrated the following incident to Weil: two priests were apprehended by the anarchists. Having shot one, the other was asked to leave. At twenty paces he was shot down too. Weil concludes the tale by pointing out the surprise on the face of the leader when he noticed that she was not laughing at his retelling of the incident. Such punitive and murderous expeditions were rife in Barcelona at that time. But the vital point is not about the number of people murdered. It has more to do with the attitude of those who committed those crimes in the name of transformation and equity. Weil emphasizes that she never saw among the intellectuals any remorse or disgust for the pointless killings. Rather the obverse was more forthcoming: ‘a brotherly smile’ whenever the killing of the priests/fascists was recounted to others. Civil war converts human beings to automatons. Fear is offset by a strange kind of courage among the partisan which inures them to all human loss and tragedy. After a point, you go with the tides and perform the motions. Shall we call this courage? Perhaps every act of courage has an underside. Perhaps there is no
Brief History of Spitting: An Indian Account

Arijeet Mandal The first reaction after receiving a small cut or bruise in humans is to put it inside the mouth. If the bruise is in some other part of the body that we cannot readily lick; we often apply spit. Children do it too, often learning from other children or from the oral fixation triggered after the hurt. This is a trait we share with almost all the other mammals that we share our Earth with at the present moment. This is not mere mimicking of other mammals (though predators often mimic the calls or behaviours of their prey). The spit is, as if, an inherent biological trait. Children and adults alike do it almost automatically, as if with a gene-deep certainty. We apply spit to what was hurt, or in other words, what hurts us. At first it appears to us that the answer to the question “What is spit?” is easy. Spit is saliva thrown (spat) out of the mouth. Saliva itself is a reflex function that comes from salivary glands upon expectations of external factors like tasting or eating. Saliva contains around 99% of water, along with several other inorganic and organic compounds which help in several processes of the mouth and digestion. Not only it helps in fighting tooth decay, pose as a bulwark against harmful bacteria but also produces mucin, which in turn “acts as a lubricant during mastication, swallowing and speech”[i].In other words, not only does saliva help in tasting, chewing and digesting, but also effectively is a catalyst in one of the fundamental aspects of human nature—speech. During old age, one of the problems in speech and overall oral health is caused by the erratic nature of salivary glands (ibid.). Saliva itself has been used differently throughout history, perhaps requiring separate book on it, if not volumes on the subject. We know for sure that the salivation of certain birds in the form of their nests are consumed as human food. The industry that runs on the (wrongly named) Indian Swiftlets’ bird’s nest has gained such popularity that it has been named “caviar of the east”[ii]. We know of ceremonial uses of spitting across cultures, or the fact that there were cultures of ceremonial spitting[iii]. The spit was also believed to be a good fermenting agent and was used to ferment different elements like the ceremonial Japanese sake and various other edibles throughout history (ibid.). We also know of other medicinal uses of saliva, and the medicinal concern of the same. For the longest time people held the belief that spit after fasting has healing properties. Jesus used the ‘spittle cure’ by smearing saliva thrice in The Bible, in the passages of Mark 8:22-26, Mark 7:31-37 and John 9:6. Jesus, in The Bible at least, had healed two blind men, and one “deaf and dumb” person using his spit[iv]. Theology aside, a rational look then would suggest a major cultural belief of the healing properties of spit, especially by Monarchs and healers. Spitting, however, also had another concern for the medical world. The British Medical Journal made a report as far back as in 1900 about the ‘spitting nuisance’ that has been causing the rampant spread of tuberculosis in the urban areas[v].The Americans too were not falling short on taking measures against spitting in public spaces. Once again, this was due to the rising crisis of the spread of tuberculosis. Just on the basis of its economic loss, America had lost almost $33,000,000 by the 1900s to tuberculosis, or as it was known, the “White Plague”[vi]. While the ground problems of rapid industrialization and lack of healthcare was the primary problem, unfortunately, it was not the primary concern for the growing bourgeoisie owners. ‘Not spitting’ was supposed to be one of the primary targets in spreading public health awareness. However, as the author puts it, “The rise of anti-spitting legislation was on one level a practical response to a legitimate medical concern, but it frequently over lapped with wider issues concerning the consolidation of the middle class and the social control of the working classes (ibid.)” Just as the author notes, the class question about certain diseases and their spreading has seldom been studied. Historically, we can see that diseases and their class relations have often been ignored. However, spitting takes a special position in a class based society. Since the early times of Western society (except for Pliny’s account on spittle cures) spitting has been in general associated with rudeness, uncivil behaviour or an act of humiliation. In India too, at least in Natyashastra, the act was related to similar feelings, so much so that even aesthetically ‘vamati’ or ‘sthiv’ are under the Bibhatsya (odious) Rasã, and are not to be associated with the ‘high-borns’ or upper-castes. In essence, it appears that the ruling classes had generally posited spitting against civil behaviour, a savage instinctual nature versus culture. It is as if the good classes of history do not spit, unless met by lack of order. Spitting, or expectoration, for most of history has been an act of ridicule and humiliation. In all of recorded human history, we find but a few dots to map out some divine or superstitious reverence for spitting. For the most part, we have hated spitting, and we had spit on those we hated or held in contempt; whether they were powerful individual or empires, powerless peasants or rude rebels, or perhaps some image of God itself—some human at some point had spit on them. The real question not asked is this: What does spitting really mean? The Ontic Problem Up until now, whatever was discussed was either a scientific or a historical fact. Therefore, it is ontic in nature. By ontic, I mean a fact or information which proves to be a useful tool in unravelling an idea, but lacks the quality to clarify what it really means. An example would be this: we know for a fact that we have but
The Canon and the Syllabus

Life is short and there are many books to encounter. How does one underline the ones that are worthwhile? More importantly, how do whole societies and traditions take up certain readings as important and dispense with others at any given moment of time? If we keep aside the absolutely subjective element involved in any choice of reading, perhaps guesses can be made as to how certain texts gain authority over a period of time and then lose their power of suasion and magic in another age. Some others come to be called classics and thus turn ‘timeless.’ On the other hand, the formation, approval and implementation of a syllabus in a programme housed within an institutional framework are part of a wholly different story, of a much narrower scope. On the surface, there are more academic reasons for a syllabus to take shape in a particular way. But those academic reasons are always offset by partisan interests that stoke the fancy of the stakeholders, like politics or shifting trends or utilitarian reasons like employability. Reliability is perhaps the foremost criterion that helps inculcate canon consciousness. A set of texts become reliable over a period of time because it is able to provide generations of scholars a testing ground for certain principles of a knowledge base that tallies with the internal logic of an evolving discipline, which may be jurisprudence, theology or literature. This is what David Hume meant in ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ (1757) when he argued that in the final analysis the canon consists of “those works that have survived all the caprices of mode and fashion, all the mistakes of ignorance and envy.” Hume marries a collective idea of epistemological reliability with the notion of timelessness. The earliest formations of the canon therefore arise out of a text centered epistemology which the practitioners and the connoisseurs would hermeneutically unseal and bring forth. The guiding principles of the earliest texts were in fact based on interpreting revelation, emic reception of ritual application and deciphering natural philosophy. This scope of encountering the divine utterances (and deciphering the oracle/sutra)simultaneously gave canonical texts the stamp of a mystical authority, and also opened up possibilities of interpretive scope. For instance, the interpreter could argue that behind the apparent narrative of the gods and their actions lies another level of hidden meaning. A redemptive tradition of textual interpretation comes into being. In other situations, the mystery or sublimity of a poetic utterance or the symbolic nature of a painting gives rise to the restive and libertine tradition. But the basic idea remains the same: to consider form and excavate meaning, dwell in analysis and expand the ambit of the art object by means of imagination. Whatever is concealed in form and meaning (connotation, subtext or undertone in later times) is what the scholar or the connoisseur tries to seek out. But once you have a space for interpretation, the esoteric baseline of the canon opens up and becomes subject to divergent ways of analysis and imaginative interpretation. What started as rarified and mystical becomes evolving and dynamic. Reliability still remains a fundamental baseline but an argumentative tradition begins to emerge out of the enigmatic,as multiple interpretations of a text or a problem begins to blossom. Ineke Sluiter, the great Dutch scholar of the classics, used to say that obscurity is a disguise in blessing. The very act of writing a commentary or engaging in various textual practices tacitly acknowledges the fact that the text is not clear and therefore requires certain exegetical endeavours to unlock it. In fact, it would be impossible to think in analytical terms unless the text or the art object is obscure enough. There could be various reasons for obscurity to emerge in the most complicated movements and styles of literary and artistic production, say, in the classical world, the romantic movement or in the whole of modernism. Obscurity may also be a way to avoid obscenity or dogma and also a method for matching a hard subject matter with a certain style of expression (the epigram, the riddle and the parable are the earliest of such forms, leading eventually to figura and allegoresis). Obscurity may also be a stimulus for the readers and the students to delve deeper and make some serious effort to appreciate the nuances of various situations and problems that an art-object or a problem throws up. This will also keep the less motivated students outside of the purview. The canon is one way of initiation into degrees of difficulty, by which the would-be-specialist is thrown in at the deep end of the pool right at the onset. Besides, veiled messages in a text are also a way of protecting the author and the interlocutors in times of social turmoil. Most importantly, obscurity gives elbow room for a slow and gradual interpretation, rather than quickly trying to diagnose and move on with a text. One the other hand, textual particles of literature also sometimes emerge as sudden erruption of thought and then do not go anywhere. These we call fragments or trace. The romantic and certain forms of modernist art are fundamentally about such fragmentary erruptions. Freed from classical constraints, such works present the partial whole—“either a remnant of something once complete and now broken or decayed, or the beginning of something that remains unaccomplished.”If we care to expand confines of the idea, we shall realize that letters, excerpts, gnomic statements, speeches, epigrams and mythologies—all would lose crucial vitality without their fragmentary nature. Fragments let us retrieve and recast the whole if we so wish. The exercise would be somewhat like cracking a jigsaw puzzle. But the more daring prospect is to leave the trace as is and place oneself by the side of the composer and encounter a similar emotion of the partial whole every time one reads or listens to the fragment. Engaging with the fragmentary is also revelatory in a deeply secular sense. Canon formation is always relational in nature. This
Hayden White’s Interpretive History

Aniruddha Chowdhury [Aniruddha Chowdhury received his PhD from the Graduate Program of Social and Political Thought at York University. He is the author of Post-deconstructive Subjectivity and History: Phenomenology, Critical Theory, and Postcolonial Thought (Brill, 2014)] _________________________ Hayden White has challenged the veritable intellectual tradition that since the time of Aristotle rests on the distinction of poetry (imaginary) and history (real). According to White, the modern positivism on the one hand and the Philosophy of History on the other consolidate the oppositions (fact and interpretation, objectivity and imaginary, scientific and artistic). However, it is not only the critics of history, White’s favourite example is Claude Levi-Strauss, who insist on the “mythopoetic” aspects of the historical discourse, but the great practitioners of history themselves, say, Jacob Burckhardt or Ranke, to take two distinct examples, dwell on the artistic and the poetic, if not the speculative-theological, ground of history. Now, If White is intrinsically a hermeneutic thinker who questions the separation of fact and interpretation his hermeneutic enterprise has a Kantian aspect (of historical reason) of a transcendental-formalist kind. What characterizes White’s interpretation, I argue, is a catachrestic formalism. The objectivity, in White’s account, is not erased, but appears as figural object. If White is a transcendentalist, as I think he is, then it is quasi-transcendental as the nature of the ground is figurative. When White wrote his essay ‘The Burden of History,’ in 1966, much of the claims of either the scientific or the aesthetic conception of historical work had been considered antiquated in the sense that what was outmoded was history’s attempt to combine a late-nineteenth century social science and a mid-nineteenth century art, which had led the historiography to an essentially positivist distinction between scientific objectivity on one hand and imaginary on the other. 1 Now, it is not only the philosophers of history — Hegel, Nietzsche, Croce, Dilthey, Spengler, Foucault et al– who have challenged the non-discursive claims of the historians either from cognitive-philosophical or from artistic perspectives, but the distinction between objectivity and imaginary in the historical discourse has been refuted from within the “proper” historical discourse itself. Even if we set aside the work such as Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance which experimented with the most advanced artistic techniques of his time and with an aesthetic conception of science not in order to tell the whole truth about the Italian Renaissance but one truth about it, the very notion of objectivity to which Rankean positivism appealed and the radical self-effacement that his (Ranke’s) method implied was supplemented by the theology on the one hand and literary hermeneutics on the other, as Gadamer has shown perspicuously. Even if Ranke rejects speculative philosophy of history of the Hegelian kind he nonetheless grounds universal history in a certain Lutheran theology. The notion of the singularity of each period and its immediacy to God, which the historian chronicles was not sufficient to mark a break with speculative philosophy of history since in Ranke’s universal history, as Gadamer argues, the universe is raised to a consciousness of itself in a manner close to German Idealism. This consciousness is an empathic co-knowledge of the universe in the context of which Ranke’s famous self-effacement should be understood. 2 The Whitean formalism is to show that it is discourse that constitutes the source and the ground of the opposition of history and metahistory. White’s intervention consists in the fact that he represents a kind of Copernican turn that unravels the discursive ground of historical reason and, may I say, of historical being. In Metahistory, White writes an ambitious history of the historical consciousness of the Nineteenth Century Europe. It is a discursive history of the already discursive historicities (on the historicity later). This is precisely what his formalism amounts to. The discursive historicities (the object of White’s history) include the historical practitioners such as Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt and the philosophers of history such as Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Croce. It is White’s point in the masterwork that the real or the actual in historical discourse has no pre-critical, transcendent status as opposed to the imaginary but is constituted in relation to what is imaginable. They are dependent upon not only the figurative discourse that the historian uses but also, on another level, upon the linguistic tropes such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche etc. These two levels — the verbal discourse of figuration as narrative plots and the linguistic forms– constitute, for White, the ideal-type structure of the historical work. 3 The turn from the one level to the other is one meaning of what White calls troping. Even though White never denies the objective pole of the historical discourse, the referent, he insists on the discursive nature of the actuality. There is something profoundly inventive about the discourse that constitutes objects of history. It has to be said that in White the temporality of the historical discourse belongs to the instance of imagination and invention in figurative discourse. Discourse, for White, is a movement of meaning from one notion to another notion with the acknowledgement that things can be expressed otherwise (TD 2). “A discourse moves “to and fro” between received encodations of experience and the clutter of phenomena which refuses incorporation in to conventionalized notions of “reality,” “truth,” or “possibility”(TD 4). The possibility of other expression belongs to the inventiveness of discourse, especially the verbal, figurative, discourse. There is no transcendent (which we have to distinguish from the notion of the transcendental) referent in which discourse must be grounded. Following Barthes White too would suggest that the real in a discourse is a certain “unformulated signified, sheltering behind the apparently all powerful referent.” 4 It is White’s influential point that the content of the historiography is indistinguishable from the discursive form in which the ‘real’ is articulated. A history, especially a classic, is not a picture that resembles the object it depicts but a complex linguistic form, allegorical in nature (more on this later), which is “dense and opaque” (Frank