On Singularity and the Event: Further Reflections on the Ordinary

Veena Das
Caroline Humphrey opens her majestic 2008 essay on Reassembling
Individual Subjects (reproduced in the present volume, subsequent
references as RIS) by the classic statement: Certain kinds of
anthropological experience seem to require the conceptualization of
singular analytical subjects: individual actors who are constituted as
subjects in particular circumstances. (p.357)

She goes on to

characterize these circumstances as follows -

the advent of new

regimes, convulsions wrought by war, schisms of former social wholes,

and, in general, the overturning of accepted patterns of intelligibility
and the advent of radical new ideas. (p. 357) These are the kind of
events that I characterized as critical events

(Das 1995) -

Humphreys formulations of why such events lead us to singular

analytical subjects is deeply thoughtful and inspiring. As a seminal
contribution to the shaping of these debates and, indeed to what
Foucault calls equipment in the sense of veridical regimes of
anthropology (Rabinow 2009), Humphreys work challenges us to think
of the relation between subjectivation and eventalization, at both
conceptual and empirical levels. The most impressive achievement
here is the manner in which Humphrey formulates the puzzles that
arise in her ethnography in the course of her long term engagement

with the ethnography of Inner Mongolia. I admire the succinct

discussion but there is also a thin line of difference in Humphreys
reading of the issue of singularity, event, and the ordinary, and my
understanding of these concepts that weaves itself in and out of our
agreements.

As the Buddhists say, it is the near enmity of close

concepts that need clear articulation big differences are easier to

settle and much less dangerous. I wonder if these differences to which
I shall allude are due to the fact that we are attracted to different
modes of philosophizing or whether our different field locations lead to
different configurations of these concepts.
Humphrey takes the French philosopher Alan Badiou (2006) as an
inspiration for anthropology. Badiou is a philosopher of axiomatic
reasoning whose picture of ethics depends very much on our ability to
recognize prophetic moments that are world altering whereas I am
much more attracted to philosophers whose work rests on the humble
use of words philosophers, such as Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond
and Sandra Laugier - all of whom I place in the lineage of Wittgenstein
as the philosopher of the ordinary (see Das 2014.) It is also the case
that the singular subjects Humphrey constructs in her essay on
singularity are constructed through the combing of the archival record
in which they appear as riding the waves of transformation leading a
revolution, confronting assassinations, facing madness in the face of
betrayal, and confronting the horror of violence inflicted not only by

others but also by oneself. As we shall see later, the ordinary does not
simply disappear from these events as evident in the way certain
concepts such as the karmic consequences of vows taken by ancestors
or Buddhist notions of responsibility are evoked in the narratives so as
to explain the turn of events. The appearance of such concepts in the
archive shows that ordinary concepts in the light of which life is both
lived and understood are woven into these

extraordinary events.

Humphrey is clearly troubled by Badious somewhat contemptuous

language about the ordinary (see especially page 363 of RIS ) but
assumes that the violence against the ordinary in his formulation is not
essential to his philosophical stance. However, though she sees these
individuals who come to be identified in the historical record as having
achieved singularity in the dramatic ways in which they connect local
events to larger historical tidings, she also shows that they do not ever
escape the hold of their earlier allegiances that come to them
unbidden through all kinds of cultural expressions such as dreams,
The singular subjects who appear in my book Life and Words (Das
2007), in contrast, are those who engage the violent events of the
Partition or of the massacre of Sikhs in 1984, through everyday acts of
repair; but which, I claim, allow life to be knitted back in slow rhythms,
pair by pair. Should one think of their work as a mode of subjectivation
given that they are not likely to be found as singular subjects in the
historical record and are much more likely to be assimilated to an

undifferentiated collectivity such as abducted women or victims or

survivors? Humphrey is careful to note that the historical actions she
is talking about are not about great men versus collective subaltern
subjects, but about how (in my words) might one be incited or invited
to become a subject. I want to ask in response, in what manner might
one think of subjects as singular but not sovereign (though the issue of
non-sovereign agency does not figure as an analytical issue in RIS) or
of agency and patiency as two poles around which eventalization and
subjectivation might be made to

turn? I will offer some of my

ethnography from the work I have done among the urban poor in Delhi
to ask how we might think of the everyday through the opposite
movements of ascent and descent? Could one say that Humphrey
wants to privilege the former and I am more attracted to the latter?
These movements of ascent and descent are not the same as the ideas
of transcendence and immanence

- we can take the former two

concepts as possibilities of the everyday rather than think of descent

as immersion and ascent as escape from the everyday, I want to ask if
a distinctive anthropological understanding of the ordinary might be
generated through such an analysis? My own reflections in this matter
have been productively challenged by the continuous attention to the
event and its relation to subjectivation that Humphrey and others have
drawn attention to so what I have to say here is a further step in my
thinking of the ordinary.

For starters, let us consider Humphreys formulation of the relation

between the everyday and the event and the theoretical stakes of
anthropology in this relation. Humphrey writes,

Anthropology has

mostly privileged the everyday and the repeated rather than ruptures.
And although there is a vast literature on the person and the self, it has
only rarely attempted to theorize the subject in situations of innovation
or improvisation. (RIS, p. 367),
Although

Humphrey

takes

the

privileging

of

the

everyday

in

anthropology for granted, this notion would only hold if routines,

habits, and traditional maps of social action were seen to be
unproblematic and the everyday

was invested with the quality of a

taken-for granted given entity. In such a rendering, the everyday is

opposed to innovations, improvisations and ruptures. My own view of
the matter, however, is that anthropology has rather too hurriedly
equated the everyday with routine and unthinking repetition these
are indeed characteristic of the everyday but much depends on how
we think of these categories, for neither is routine, a matter of
mechanical action, nor repetition, the matter of return to sameness
(Das 2012). A different theoretical tradition of the everyday (e.g Freud,
Cavell, Austin, Wittgenstein) would see the everyday as haunted by the
possibilities of skepticism, a scene of trance and illusion, and, of the
uncanny; or it would point to the fragility of human action as evidenced
in Austins discussion of excuses and infelicities (Das 2014).

I have

tried to capture this idea of the everyday when I say

that under many

conditions, maintaining the everyday becomes an achievement (Das

2007). While some might readily concede this point in the context of
poverty,

vulnerability

and

violence,

its

implications

for

our

understanding of habit and disposition as concepts is rarely spelt out.

While the idea of habit as sedimentation of previous experience is well
integrated into anthropological theory - following especially Bourdieu the creative, generative capacity that humans develop within the
scene of habit is less well understood 1. I propose to show that a more
enriched understanding of habit sees it as an intermediary between
the pole of the active and the passive in human action and not as a
mere residue of repetition (Das 2012). Finally, I am interested in seeing
the everyday not only as it is actualized in routine and repetition but
also how it contains the possibilities of innovation and of moral striving
by contrasting the actual everyday with the eventual everyday. Thus
the contrast I offer is not that between situation and event as in Badiou
that would take being in the situation to be equivalent to a passive
acquiescence to the given conditions of our lives and the event as that
which breaks this allegiance to socially inherited obligations. Instead, I
want to ethnographically see the potential of the everyday to itself
produce a different everyday or what I have called, following Stanley
1 For an excellent exposition of the philosophical underpinnings of
Bourdieus work with regard to the difference between habit and
disposition see Hage (2014).

Cavell, the eventual everyday.2

Simultaneously I am interested in

exploring the threats to the subject through the figure of the spectral
when it (the subject) becomes a shadow of the real or ghost-like.

Interrogating the Event

In this section I propose to analyze the particular event about
revolution

and

counter-revolution

that

produces

the

theoretical

reflections on singular analytic subjects in Humphreys paper and her

analysis of the unfolding of the event as a series of decisions. I will
then contrast this mode of reasoning on the relation between the event
and the everyday with another mode of reasoning drawn from my own
ethnographic experience and ask how the sources we have access to
affect the way we think of the everyday and the event.
The historical example Humphrey analyzes is taken from the Urad West
Banner, a small polity ruled by a hereditary duke - the relevant event
occurred in 1920.

Humphrey describes how a young man called

Bayar, who had been sent to Beijing by the Banner as a clerk for
Mongols in the capital, became enthused with revolutionary ideas and
decided to travel in disguise to socialist Outer Mongolia to contact the
leaders there. In 1922, he returned to Urad West Banner and started to

2 For an exposition of the relation between the actual everyday and

the eventual everyday see Critchley (2005).

propagate revolutionary ideas about equality and freedom, contesting

the feudal hierarchies and entrenched customs. Bayars ideas became
popular not only among the lower strata of Urad society but also
among the nobles, including the 8th Mergen Gegen (the most senior
reincarnation of the main monastery) who permitted twenty of his
lamas to join the revolution. Only one lama, head of another
monastery, held out against the revolutionary zeal that was spreading
in the area. By 1926, Bayar, with the help of local strong men had
established the Urad West Banner as a key revolutionary redoubt for
the whole of Inner Mongolia. By 1927, however, with the split in the
Chinese Nationalist Party, the political landscape shifted. One of the
strongmen who had supported Bayar switched sides and the revolution
was defeated. Bayar fled toward Mongolia but was killed before he
reached the border.
Humphrey calls this a Badiou-ian event because of the deployment of a
new vocabulary Party, masses, us, them as well as the
creation of a new kind of polity based on unity and equality of all. Yet,
as

she

notes,

this

was

a strange situation, for, the very feudal elements against whom

revolutionary ideas were being propagated were providing support for
the revolution by asking their lamas to join Bayar.

Humphrey

attributes this contradiction to the appeal of universal ideas that held

hopes for a new unity among the people and thus presumably

attracted the lamas to a new vision of society We will leave aside for
the moment the question of what other forms of politics (e.g. about
Mongolian nationalism) were braided into this moment for if the
allegiance to these revolutionary ideas was as compelling as Humphrey
contends, it is difficult to see
betrayed so soon after.

how the revolution could have been

Instead, let us see where Humphreys

discomfort with Badious theorization on the question of the ordinary

human person takes her. Having supported the conceptualization of
event as complete rupture from the past,

Humphrey goes on

to

modify Badious idea of the ordinary because it violates her sense of

her ethnographic subjects. Nevertheless, as soon as one tries to think
in detail of this ethnographic history (about a revolutionary episode in
Inner Mangolia) in Badious terms, some significant lacuna in the
theory become evident. One of these is Badious theorization of the
ordinary human person, the one who exists before the event as it
were, or the one who cannot recognize its significance. In Badious
withering view this some-one is an animal of the human species, a
person who is in thrall to existing knowledge(s) and his or her own
interest; not in a position to know what he or she is capable of and is
not a subject. Such a formulation cannot explain, however, the
capacity to think or act, of which most people are, after all, capable
most of the time.It is necessary therefore to have a theory of actors
who are not subjects in Badious sense but have the potential to

become so. To this end, I make a preliminary proposal that

individuality as an actable-on capacity which may be attained through
decision; the plumping for a specific way of being a person, if only
temporarily, and by prioritizing the keeping at hand of divergent
multiplicities in an emotionally cogent, internally shuffle-able array of
possibilities. (RIS, p. 363).

At one level then Humphrey is content to think of the revolutionary

episode as a Badiou-ian kind of event because, as she says,

in the

local accounts of these events, it is presented as a series of decisions

at another level she feels that there is a leap of faith made which is not
based on reasoning alone - the model for this kind of leap is to be
found in Mongolian notions of divination rather than the Pauline event
that is the model for Badiou. Humphrey seems to agree in a general
sense with the idea that a decision cannot be reduced to a calculus of
reasons and the assessment of possibilities, because that would
eliminate its radical character; but, she also feels that her agreement
need not imply a commitment to the kind of Pauline event Badiou
seems to hold up as one that challenges us to declare our fidelity to
that vision of truth. Yet it seems to me that there is a striking difference
in Badious idea of decision based on fidelity to the event and
Humphreys notion of decision that does not break from existing ideas
on divination but is anchored on them.

It is here that an interesting contradiction reveals itself, for, in offering

her ethnographic insights from the realm of divination in which to
plump for a realm of action is not based on reasoning but on the faith
one might put on chance, Humphrey ends up offering a far more fatal
criticism of Badious theory of the event than simply a partial
correction or a modification of it. In fact Humphrey acknowledges that
there are collective forces that exceed the individual so that the reason
for a decision might not be found in the individual but in the interstices
of events and individuals as mirrored singularities. Here we get to the
notion that the point of singularity indexes the fact that I am both an
actor and one who is acted upon singularity might then be thought of
as the point at which multiplicities have been temporarily recomposed
and resolved into a singularity but from which new possibilities might
emerge.

This opens the way to look at everyday life as both the

ground of ones experience and that on which work

must be

performed so that ones full allegiance cannot be assumed to ones

culture as it is given. In other words I am suggesting that subjectivation
might be seen as the effort to be awakened to ones existence but this
may require a deeper dwelling in the everyday rather than an escape
from it.
It is perhaps worth spending a little more time on the picture of the
everyday in the work of

Badiou, . The two important concepts for

Badiou (2006)that of event and that of situationdespite some

important differences, carry interesting resonances with Heideggers
notion of event and Jasperss idea of situation, respectively. In
Heidegger the authentic everyday emerges when Dasein learns to use
linguistic equipment to make assertions and provide justifications in
order to move from the ready-to-hand to the present-at-hand.
Heidegger places a genuine sense of ones own being-toward-death,
learning to get a genuine sense of ones extinction

at the root of

subjectivationit is not by being cued to a miraculous event that

Dasein leaves ones animality behind. In Badiou, to be awakened to
ones life is linked to the fidelity that you show to the figure of radical
changeotherwise you are but an animal. Badious (2001) language is
in fact quite violent hereeither you show your fidelity to the event or
you remain in the situation and you are but bipeds without feathers,
mere acculturated ants. (Badiou 2001: 12) It is true that Badiou has
argued that the affirmative account of the good that he is providing
does not depend on St. Paul who provides the inspiration for him and
that there are secular examples, such as that of Galileo or the French
Revolution, in which the event could not be absorbed within the
existing categories of the situation. However, the violence of the
language that he uses against those who do not show this awakened
quality, this fidelity to the radical event, carries strong religious
overtones, and he is either deaf to the fact that it is precisely such

language that has been used to perpetrate enormous violence against

the nonbelieversthose who did not believe in the miracle of Christ or
those who did not believe in the miracle of the communist revolution,
or even ends up justifying it on the grounds that such violence is
necessary for the higher good.
I have of-course no difficulty in accepting that what I called critical
events (Das 1995) cannot be comprehended within the available
categories at the time of their occurrence, but I am not sure why such
events cannot be negative, as were many of the events I examined in
my book Critical Events. It is in this context that I think Badious initial
impulse was, in fact, oriented toward a religious experience, though he
tried

later

to

take

account

of

the

criticisms

around

his

conceptualization of Nazism as an event of radical discontinuity, too. In

his short book on Ethics, he notes that I was then obliged to admit
that the event opens a subjective space in which not only the
progressive and truthful subjective figure of fidelity but also other
figures every bit as innovative, albeit negative, take their place (2001:
vii).
But surely this raises the important question of how are we to know in
advance who is a false prophet, not to speak of the fact that most
accounts of conversion to the figure of fidelity narrate the event
retrospectively as one in which there was a leap of faith; whereas, if we
were to distinguish between the time of the event and the time of

telling we would find much greater hesitation and doubt that marks the
time of the event. A mode of philosophizing that was not so committed
to the Christian (especially Protestant) notion of the Pauline moment as
the model for action that opens up the space for the making of the
subject might be much more receptive to the way that even dramatic
events have roots in the everyday.
The Everyday and Modes of Subjectivation
I move now to offer some ethnographic examples to ask how this
relation between action and subjectivation might be investigated on
the terrain of the everyday. In a recent attempt to see what it means to
generate philosophical concepts from within ethnography rather than
take concepts to arise from some rarified form of thinking, I took three
different scenes of the everyday that I called: making a world
inhabitable; when words are like wild horses; and withdrawing ones
words from the world (see Das 2014). Juxtaposing these three different
scenes in which everyday life unfolds, my aim was to capture the
character of everyday life such that its routines and repetitions were
shown to contain lethal possibilities, as well as the potential to critique
existing

institutions

and

to

make

ones

world

inhabitable.

summarized this plethora of possibilities as testimony to the double

character of the everyday as the site of routines, habits, and
conventions as well as the scene of disorders, doubts and despair. In

Cavells rendering this double register of the everyday is expressed in

the way skepticism shadows the ordinary through the most ordinary
idioms of kinship and the domestic - he contends that the attempt to
reduce skepticism to an intellectual puzzle constitutes nothing less
than a denial of the threats contained in everyday life (Cavell 1979,
1988) . Second, belonging does not mean that we give allegiance to
our culture as it stands, but rather out of the disappointments of
everyday life arise the laborious processes of critique and reform of
everyday life. Finally, I might state that to understand how the
everyday absorbs the event is to pay close attention to the manner in
which people might engage the open credit of survival so that I
strongly contest the idea contained in Badiou (though not in
Humphrey) that for survival to count as attesting to the possibility of
the human it must always be heroic. Here is one citation from Badiou
made in the context of torture that makes my point.
That some [torture victims] nevertheless remain human beings,
and testify to that effect, is a confirmed fact. But this is
precisely

achieved

through

enormous

effort,

an

effort

acknowledged by witnesses as an almost incomprehensible

resistance on the part of that which, in them, does not coincide
with the identity of the victim. This is where we are to find Man,
if we are determined to think him (le penser); in what ensures
that we are

dealing with an animal whose resistance, unlike

that of a horse, lies not in its fragile body but in his stubborn
determination to remain what he is: something other than a
mortal being. (Badiou 2001: 11-12)
I have to confess that I have never found such contempt for the body
and such demands on the tortured in any account by torture victims
themselves who have far greater respect for the idea that it is not for
us to judge what it takes to survive (see Das 2012 for an a further
elaboration of this idea.)
To return to my own attempts at non-heroic ways and everyday efforts
to make the world inhabitable that I described in some detail in earlier
writing (Das 2014.) I took very simple examples from the work
performed by a local leader living in an unauthorized colony 3 to get
rights over housing and electricity and yet showed how much
learning had to be done by way of legal mechanisms, interpreting
documents, writing petitions and organizing the

community to

temporarily suspend enmities and antagonisms, though dangers from

such

conflict always lurked behind every action. Most importantly I

showed how the poor live within a scene of accusation in which their
ordinary actions are seen by others and themselves as steeped with
3 The administrative regulations of city planning in Delhi distinguish
between several categories of unplanned settlements such as
notified slums, unrecognized slums, unauthorized colonies
regularized colonies each of these residential categories carries
different legal guarantees and rights relating to housing, water,
electricity and sewage removal.

criminality. Yet they also have a sense of the rightness of their actions,
which give them the voice to contest the notion that by occupying land
illegally or by getting electricity or water through irregular means they
have become thieves.

In a remarkable performance in Austins

(1962) sense, one of the leaders, Sanjeev Gupta, who lived in a lowincome unauthorized colony, was able to bring about a shift of
perspective in an official of the Electricity Company who had accused
him of belonging to a colony of thieves. In a remarkable series of
meetings Sanjeev Gupta contested the officials understanding and
declared Sir, we will wipe out this stigma from our colony. The
officials vision changed - he could now see what it was to be denied
elemental needs in the urban context. Through his interaction with
Gupta he was able to conceptualize himself differently from an accuser
to an accused it was not that they were stealing electricity, it was
that we the company was not responding to their urgent pleas.
Thus, instead of his earlier statement that in effect stated that the
company could not supply them electricity because they were living
on land illegally occupied, and because they were a colony of thieves
he came to ask his superiors if the ethics of commercial action would
require them to create the conditions of possibility in which inhabitants
of unauthorized colonies who live on occupied land might

find it

possible to transform themselves from thieves into responsible

consumers.

As I showed in my writing on this issue, even after

recognition of their ethical responsibilities dawned on them, the paths

of expression and action that this opened up were not simple as each
step in this conversion from thieves into responsible consumers
required efforts of map making in the area, getting agreements for
installation of electricity meters, and literally hundreds of interactions
with government officials to get the map of the area approved (Das
2014.) There was no single decision moment but there was a slow shift
in understanding of who they were and an awkward waking together
between different constituents on the path to a slow overcoming of
many obstacles.

The kind of

political subjectivities that were produced in the area

through staging of imaginary dialogues with figures of power as well as

through the processes of engaging state officials were not of the
revolutionary kind but through the work on the everyday, the
inhabitants of these localities showed the ability to move from seeing
themselves as clients of powerful patrons whose votes could be bought
for a bottle of alcohol or a few rupees, to political actors. Even though
their names will not be found in the archival records except as
masses or the lumpen proletariat or the slum dwellers they
achieved something very important for the life of the neighborhood.
Yet, as I argued earlier (Das 2014), within these local worlds the person
himself or herself creates different versions of the self as he or she

acts over different terrains. For instance Sanjeev Gupta could at some
time imagine himself telling off the most powerful politicians and at
another time he ended up seeking protection through the very network
of political bosses he despised because as he said wryly, he had no
desire of becoming a hero, referring to threats of violence he had
received.
(including

As Giovanni da Col (2007) writes of the Buddhist person

non-humans),

the

perspective

on

oneself

might

be

determined not only by where you are, in what relation, but also when
you are. So how is singularity to be imagined in relation to the multiple
possibilities of the self? For Humphrey, this diversity of imaginings of
ontological human being is why we need an idea, such as the Event or
the decision-event, of a mechanism of transfer between these
different possible selves. In her words, Rather than use the word
subject for each of the various positions or perspectives, [as in
Strathern] resulting in an indefinite number of disconnected subjects,
I prefer to reserve the term for the one who engages with (or is
engaged by) the mechanism. (RIS, p. 370) In order to somehow keep
her own perspective on the ordinary in which individuals are as much
made by a multiplicity of external circumstances and can become
different versions of themselves, in harmony with Badious insistence
on the sharp divide between those who show fidelity to a Pauline like
event and those who remain in the situation like animals, Humphrey
then suggests that the singularity of an individual is revealed in the

decision event to compose himself (she uses the masculine pronoun

and I think with reason) as a new self in which earlier versions of the
self are completely discarded. So what I would like to suggest is a
distinction between the more or less ordinary circumstances in which
individual people keep a variety of alternative positions in play, and a
particular moment (the decision-event) when they open themselves to
a radically different composition of the self, a switch that has a lasting
effect and involves the most significant but not all ways in which
that person conceives of her or himself. Such a jump implies, as I
mentioned earlier, a fissure, a void, a space of the unknown. (RIS, p.
371).
Clearly for Humphrey, the making of the subject can happen only if the
ordinary is somehow overcome as Bayar was to temporarily
overcome the conditions he was born into so that the ordinary has
the quality of something comfortable in which various possibilities can
be kept in play while the decision to become this version of the self
and not another is the mark of an awakened existence.

I am

suggesting that having complicated the picture of the ordinary as more

than banal repetition Humphrey does not take the question forward
as to what it takes to secure the ordinary from the threats inherent in
it. Let us listen to Hilary Putnam who says Ordinary does not mean
going to the post office and mailing a letter, it means faith that the way
we think and live isnt all a fiction or an illusion, that the illusion is

rather all these tremendous intellectual constructions that make the

way we think and live look like an illusion. This is what Wittgenstein
was trying to make room for.(as cited in Borradori 1994, p. 67) Seen
from this perspective, what Sanjeev Gupta and others like him achieve
is not a single decision moment when they opt for this or that version
of the self but rather the cultivation of a faith that the ordinary lives
are worthy of being counted and that they can work on making their
everyday count.

Another Mongolian decision-event that Humphrey relates is the

incident of the head in which dynastic quarrels between Duke Shirab
and Dagdan Da Lama are recounted. Dagdan Da Lama is killed by a
soldier of Shirab but when Shirab sees the severed head of his
kinsman, he goes into a terrible despondency, slowly becoming mad.
Now what is interesting in this story is that we find several older
concepts such as those of genealogical connections, karmic pasts and
futures, reincarnation, memories of past births and fulfillment of
prophecies that reframe the events of Shirabs life so that the actions
he took are seen as not having arisen from ( or only from) his own
intentions. Humphrey sees these events as the rise of newness
because though the concepts are old , she says, they are applied to a
new situation in an innovative way. With the idea of reincarnation,
Shirab was now seen as a joint person Dobdon-Shirab counted as one

 and his act became the justifiable and necessary response to the
killing of Dobdon 61 years before. Also, at least for Shirab himself, the
subject created by the event, a new time was initiated, regulated by
the logic of retaliation and prophecy. His mad state of mind is now
understandable as a state of utmost dread, since just as he had been
destined to kill Dagdan Da Lama, the lamas ghost would surely take
vengeance on him. (RIS, p. 373)

Humphrey leaves us here with a very interesting question. If the

making of the subject is so strongly tied to innovation and making of
newness, how is one to distinguish between projection of words and
concepts to new situations that is part of the way in which we live our
everyday lives and the rise of newness?

What gives life to our words?

What are the ordinary conditions under which words come to be
applied to new situations? Instead of thinking of the ordinary as
unremarkable, let us, instead, ask, what makes it possible for different
contexts to be stitched together: how does newness arise? I take two
crucial passages from Wittgenstein that allow us to see these issues in
a different light than that of the simple opposition of everyday life and
event.

So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true

and what is false? It is what human beings say that is true
and false; and they agree in the language they use. This is not
agreement in opinions but in form of life. (Wittgenstein 1953,
paragraph 241)
What determines our judgment, our concepts, and reactions, is
not what one man is doing now, an individual action but the
whole hurly burly of human actions, the background against
which we see any action. (Wittgenstein 1967, paragraph 567).

This idea of a form of life has a significant impact on what we might

call Wittgensteins picture of culture because it sees convention as not
something static, merely agreement in opinions, but as achieved in the
context of the hurly burly of human actions. So we are led to think of
the complexity of

the ordinary through the fragility of human

agreements to which Wittgenstein points. In a justly famous paragraph,

Cavell (1969) explains what it means to think of this fragility of the
ordinary:
We learn and we teach certain words in certain contexts, and
then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project
them into further contexts. Nothing insures that this projection
will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor

the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing insures that we

will make, and understand, the same projections . That on the
whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and
feeling,

modes

of

response,

senses

of

humor

and

of

significance and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is

similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when
an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an
explanation all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls forms
of life. Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest
upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this. It is a vision as
simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (and because it is)
terrifying.. ( p.52)

The agreement that Cavell then points to shows that language and the
world are not external to each other but have an internal relation. Thus
the issue is not whether we understand the meaning of words but if we
understand each other about when an utterance is a rebuke or an
assertion or a joke. This agreement does not arise from the fact that
we share the meanings of the words we use or have the same opinion
about it but because in learning a language we learn a form of life. It is
this mutual implication of language and life that inducts us into the
unstated criteria that we can apply to new situations that arise. The
forms of life give the confidence with which one can project words in

the future with some assurance that they will be received in a spirit of
ones wanting to be understood for, if our words cannot be received
by another they cannot be understood either.
Now Humphreys point in drawing attention to Shirabs madness is to
say that the expected projections did not happen or were not received
in the manner expected. As she says, Why did Shirab as the solider
must have expected not calmly inspect the head to check it was
Dagdans, pay off the killer, and go about his business? The person(s)
he had been before as a singular individual perhaps particularly that
from early childhood when he had been brought up as a Buddhist lama
taught to abhor killing are an explanation for his complete
consternation the madness that flipped him into a new state. But
one would hesitate to say that they determined anything, especially
the sudden realization that Shirab was really the rebirth of his ancestor
General Dobdon. In this way, the decision-event leaves open a space
for the unexpected, whether this works, consciously or unconsciously.

From the same archive an alternative reading might be that indeed,

our access to context can be suddenly lost precisely because our
agreements are based on nothing else than that we agree to a form of
life. Humphrey too, at times seems to be drawn to the ordinary as she
offers modifications to Badious conception of the ordinary as

completely uneventful. As she moves from event with a capital E to

what she calls a decision event in the ordinary flux of life, some of the
dangers of everyday life reveal themselves as in Shirabs sudden
aversion to violence (a very Buddhist story if one might say so) or the
unbidden revelation of his past birth. We might say that the words that
were his or over which he lay some claims become now drained of
life. It is again in Wittgenstein that we find the extraordinary idea that
words have life which is what allows them to express thoughts and to
stitch contexts but that we might also be vulnerable to language, for
our words may become dead shells.
We might say: in all cases, what one means by thought is
what is alive in the sentence. That without which it is dead, a
mere sequence of sounds or written shapes. (Wittgenstein
1967, paragraph 143).
Or suppose we were to speak of a something that distinguishes
paper money from mere printed slips of paper and gives it its
meaning, its life (Wittgenstein 1967, paragraph143).
It looks as if a sentence with e.g. the word ball in it already
contained the shadow of other uses of this word. That is to say,
the possibility of forming those other sentences. To whom
does it look like that? And,

under what circumstances?

(Wittgenstein 1967, paragraph138)

The notion that words have life then relates to my acknowledgement of

the presence of the other (to whom does it look like that?) who must
be able to receive my words and of a context that is in place (under
what circumstances?). Words might become dead when the contexts in
which they could be received disappear or they might become, in a
famous analogy from Wittgenstein, like wild horses, who have to be
brought home. Wittgenstein and Cavell make us acutely aware of the
fragility of everyday life and its potential for generating madness, a
state of vertigo in which one might fall as did Shirab. In such a state
one might utter the words but life has been drained out of them.
Elsewhere I have explored how narration of events after deadly
violence might carry precisely this affect of words becoming frozen
slides (Das 2007).
But there are other descriptions possible of this struggle over securing
what Laugier calls ordinary realism through which madness is kept
in abeyance, so to speak, a form of caring contributed by the work of
different people in ones life who recognize the violence contained in
the everyday and do not turn away from it (Han 2012; Laugier 2014)
One such case is described in the context of different experiences of
madness in one of the chapters in my forthcoming book on affliction
(Das 2015) and relates to an adolescent girl, Vidya, who lived in a lowincome neighborhood in Delhi and whom I came to know well for a
while and then lost touch with. The events described here occurred

over a two-year period in Vidyas life but I had known the family for
several years.
Vidya was the eldest daughter in a family composed of her parents, her
paternal grandmother, and her two younger siblings. She was
considered a very bright student and the family seemed to have
delighted in her playful ways when she was little. Around the time she
turned seventeen and was in eleventh grade, Vidya became the object
of close surveillance by her father and her grandmother. I am not sure
if there was any particular event that triggered this response. But she
was said by her grandmother to have changed from a docile and
lovable child to a defiant girl who answered back, was secretive, and
resented having to do so many household chores. I heard from
neighbors that her father was often beating her up. On the surface her
grandmother was full of pity for Vidyapoor girl, her father beat her so
mercilesslybut she would simultaneously manage to convey that the
world was a dangerous place for growing girls who hardly knew how to
distinguish good from bad; that the environment of the neighborhood
was badmahaul kharab haiand if a girl lost her footing once,
there was nothing to redeem her (an oblique reference to desire in
young girls and the dangers they pose to family reputationthe stuff
of soap operas on Indian television).

It was true that Jahangirpuri , where the family lived, was getting the
reputation of being a wild place. There were a number of cases of
elopement, which parents often referred to as abductions. Violence
was always in the air, as fistfights could quickly turn into lethal attacks
with knives. Girls often complained to me that the groups of young
men who hung around in street corners passed lewd comments and
that they could not move around freely for fear of being teased or
harassed.
Vidya

had

become

completely

withdrawn.

The

women

in

the

immediate neighborhood were very worried about her fathers

uncontrolled rage. Her own mother, while often visibly upset, could not
articulate any opposition to her husband or mother-in-law. Whereas a
man might claim rights over his wife to even hit her, according to the
norms of Hindu patriarchy, a daughter must always be thought of as a
gift, who is only temporarily in her fathers house, and thus is to be
cherished and loved. It is not that this stated norm is always followed.
Neglect of female children is common. But whereas mothers might slap
a daughter or hit her, it is rare for fathers to beat their daughters
unless the girl has caused irretrievable loss of honor. Some elderly
women tried to mediate with Vidyas father to say that it was not so
much that Vidya had become defiant and wayward but that she was
possessed by some unnamed spirit who made her say things which she
was not in control of. This was an interesting way of acknowledging the

fathers authority while reframing the event within a different narrative

structure. Thus instead of saying that the fathers rage was the sign of
a demonic possession, it became the daughters behavior that was
made to stand in need of explanation. According to the local
understandings of available trajectories of healing, local diviners and
exorcists were consulted, but these strategies did not work, though
they allowed Vidyas fathers anger to be cooled somewhat. Vidya
agreed that after her school finals she would submit herself to an
exorcism at the famous Balaji temple, to which many who are afflicted
by malevolent spirits are taken for exorcism and healing sessions
(Dwyer 2003, Kakar 1982).
While Vidya was hard at work mastering her textbooks for the final
exams, her grandmother continued to poison the atmosphere with little
jibes that if girls studied too hard, their brains got heatedzabardast
padhai hailadki ka dimag komal hota hai, sah nahin saktaa free
translation would be studies are like confronting a powerful force and
a girls brain is delicate; it cannot bear such force. Or the
grandmother might say, Poor Vidya, her father beats her so
mercilessly, but she is so stubbornshe will not let a cry escapehow
can a young girl bear such heartrending beating? I cannot even bear to
witness it. The ambiguous statementswith the overt expression of
concern and the concealed message that only a demon in her can be
making her so strongare part of the politics of the family, especially

when it comes to gendered speech, as I have described elsewhere too

(Das 2007). I noticed that Vidyas mother was not able to speak or
offer any other version of the events in the presence of Vidyas
grandmother, so dominating was the voice of the older woman. There
was no question of my being able to find Vidya alone and talk to her in
the tiny, crowded two rooms in which they all lived.
Right after the state-level school-leaving examination was over, Vidya
was taken to Balaji, but according to her mother, despite the powerful
rituals to identify which spirit had taken hold of Vidya in order to
exorcise it, the priests could accomplish nothing. At this stage another
neighbor, one who had been suffering from depression and insomnia
and who was being treated in the outpatient department of a nearby
government hospital, came up with the suggestion that what Vidya
was suffering from was tension and that it was a treatable disorder.
She herself had found considerable relief from insomnia and general
debility with medications. At this stage, exhausted, I think, with the
daily battles in the family, Vidyas father took up this suggestion and
took her to the hospital for consultation. After spending five minutes in
the doctors office they came back armed with lithium to be taken for
six weeks, after which the patient was to report for further evaluation
and adjustment of medications.
After the end of the long summer, the results of the state-level
examinations were announced. Vidya had passed with glowing results,

securing a first division. Given the dismal state of teaching in many

government-run schools, this was a miracle. In a class of fifty children
she was the only one to have passed with such high marks. Yet if she
wanted to continue her studies at a public university such as the
University of Delhi, she could do so only as a non-collegiate student
since admission to regular classes demands more than 80 percent
markssuch is the discrepancy between demand and supply. Despite
her success in the examinations, the bureaucratic processes of getting
forms and filing the application were too intimidating for Vidyas
parents, and they did not trust her to go to college by herself.
Fortunately, they agreed to accept my help, and I was able to get her
admission

process

as

non-collegiate

student

completed.

accompanied Vidya to the college to introduce her to the college

environment and give her some confidence that she could navigate the
demands of the weekend classes that were offered to the students.
On our way home I offered to take her to a caf where we could have a
snack, and the girl who had avoided me through the last two years
burst out with her story in response to a simple question of whether
she was feeling better. But Aunty, I was not the one who was ill. It is
my father who needs treatment. They took me to Balaji to have a spirit
exorcised. But what is it that I had done? My father had created such a
situation that every one was watching me all the time. If I was late
returning from school by even fifteen minutes because I had stopped to

chat with a friend, then I would get a beating. If I wanted to study late
at night, then I was wasting electricity. If I wanted to borrow a book
from a friend and needed to go to her house, my father would accuse
me of brazenly trying to meet a boyfriend. I was always the accused
no proof of anythingjust suspicion, accusationsbut you know I am
very stubborn [ziddi.) I said whatever you can do to medo ityou will
not break my resolve to study. I asked what happened at the Balaji
temple. Her response was very simple. They tried to get the spirit to
speak. Now I do believe in the existence of such spirits, but since I did
not have any such thing in me, who could speak? They had lamps with
some kind of smoke which is supposed to be unbearable to the spirit,
but all it did to me was make me drowsy. Then reflecting on the
medications she was taking, she said , it is not that I was possessed by
a spirit or that I have a mental illness, it is that I had become a
believer in hope (ashavadi ho gai thi).

I never found such moments of intimacy with Vidya again. She graduated from
college, and though she did not become a teacher as she had wished to be, she
worked in a gas agency for some years, earning a decent income. The conflicts
around girls and their education were resolved for this family as her younger sister
graduated from high school and went on to college without the kind of trials and
tribulations that Vidya had endured. What the psychiatric diagnosis accomplished
in this case had nothing to do with therapy, but it did buy the peace that Vidya

craved and allowed her to move on with her life.

In other cases of mental illness

I have studied it was often the illness that craved recognition, whereas in Vidyas
case mental illness was a fiction created within the network of relations that kept
Vidyas fathers anger in abeyance. Here we can see that even a new
concept such as that of a psychiatric diagnosis receives life, becomes
mobile through being put into play with already familiar concepts such
as those of demonic possession, or tension. The intensities of the battles

around her education waned as her younger sister grew to a college going stage
showing a much slower shift in subjectivities than any dramatic event could
capture.
Clearly neither the notion of culture nor of everyday life can be taken
as given once and for all. Both are continuously made in the act of one
trying to imagine the paths of ones his or her own life in the light of
the life that the words and concepts and practices of ones culture
have lead one into. The signal importance of the opening lines in
Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations (1953) in which he cites
Augustines lines in which a child is shown to steal language and make
it speak to his own desires, lies in the fact that one can see culture as
the scene of both inheritance and of education. The figure of the child
that haunts this text and the various scenes of instruction (of learning
to read, of learning to project numbers) show the limits of thinking of
culture as simply a set of rules or of shared values that have to be

imbibed fully they gesture powerfully toward the processes through

which I learn to make words of my culture my own but also to confront
what I regard as my culture, with what is my imagination of my words
and my life.
For Wittgenstein, the process of coming to own ones experience is
neither a simple act of resistance to the norms of ones culture nor an
act of simple acceptance rather it is through an education that one
learns what is going to be the shape of agreements and attunements
to ones culture. It follows that against the claims that Wittgenstein
was a conservative, a deeper reading of Philosophical Investigations
suggests that claims to ones culture rest on being able to find ones
voice within it both as a gift and also a rebuke. Vidyas words , But
Aunty, I was not the one who was ill surely perform this rebuke. One
can see similar performances at a higher pitch in such genres as a
mothers lamentation at the wrongful killing of her child, or in Shirabs
sudden turn to madness.
A Concluding Thought
I hope in engaging one particular paper of Humphreys rather than the
larger corpus of her impressive work I have been able to show the
force of her arguments even within a single paper,

as well as

the

provocation her work provides for anthropologists across many regions.

The kind of close engagement with the specificities of her ethnography
that I have attempted also raises very important questions about

anthropological knowledge and the picture of thinking in anthropology.

If we think of theory not as a network of concepts that is put on a flux
of data as a fisherman puts his net on the swirling waters of a river, but
as generated from within our ethnographic engagements, then we
should expect differences to arise that cannot be settled through
criteria of rightness or wrongness. Instead, perhaps our sensibilities are
honed, just as those of our respondents, through the knotting of our
autobiographies with those of the individuals we come to know within a
form of life. My sense of the depths in the everyday encounters in
which I swim and the thickening of concepts through everyday
encounters in my fieldwork is not unrelated to the succor and threats
in the everyday that made up my own sense of being, of learning how
to inhabit the world and how to leave it. From that perspective I am
content to think that my picture of writing is rather like that of Poes
declaration that all he is doing is recounting some household events.
Humphrey too participates in this vision of anthropological knowledge
on and off in her paper I dare to suggest then that the higher realms
to which she is attracted as going

beyond the everyday might be

turned around to reveal that they might actually be seeded in the

everyday?

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