Bhabha's sly civlility

Bhabha took the term 'sly civility' from this sermon by Archdeacon Potts in 1818:

If you urge them (Indian people whom Missionaries were seeking to convert to Christianity) with their gross and unworthy misconceptions of the nature and the will of God, or the monstrous follies of their fabulous theology, they will turn it off with a sly civility perhaps, or with a popular and careless proverb. You may be told that 'heaven is a wide place, and has a thousand gates'; and that their religion is one by which they hope to enter. Thus, together with their fixed persuasions, they have their sceptical conceits. By such evasions they can dismiss the merits of the case from all consideration; and encourage men to think that the vilest superstition may serve to every salutary purpose, and be accepted in the sight of God as well as truth and righteousness.

Bhabha says-

In the native refusal to satisfy the colonizer's narrative demand, we hear the echoes of Freud's sabre-rattling strangers, with whom I began this chapter. 

Bhabha is shedding false light on what actually happened in India. The Colonizer was the East India Company which deported or otherwise prevented many Missionaries from proselytising in India. There was no 'narrative demand' on the part of John Company. An Indian was free to converse with a Missionary- just as I am free to converse with Bible thumpers who knock on my door- but they were perfectly at liberty to refuse any demand from the Missionary just as I am at liberty to slam my door in the face of any such unwelcome visitor.

Freud was speaking of paranoia- a situation where one might see a stranger approaching and think he is bent on homicide- but there is no paranoia here. One can talk to a proselytiser or slam the door in their face. It is literally mad to suggest that one is under an obligation to justify ones beliefs to any and every nutjob who might accost one in the street or come knocking on one's door.

Bhabha had begun with a quotation from Freud's 'Some neurotic mechanisms in jealousy, paranoia and homosexuality'. We know Freud was wrong about male homosexuality. It isn't a mental illness at all. That fat fuck who harassed you in College, or High School, saying 'you're actually gay, but don't want to admit it. Let me fuck you in the ass.' was gaslighting you. Nobody wants to be fucked in the ass by a scheming little shithead. Similarly, jealousy is often about control, about power. The proper way to respond to this sort of harassment or stalking is by naming and shaming the culprit and Title 9ing the cunt off campus. Don't kick the fucker's head in. You may damage your Doc Martins.

The natives' resistance represents a frustration of that nineteenth-century strategy of surveillance, the confession, which seeks to dominate the 'calculable' individual by positing the truth that the subject has but does not know.

This is sheer nonsense. The East India Company was a commercial enterprise. It sought to minimise costs and maximise revenues so as to repatriate a larger profit to its shareholders. Surveillance is costly. John Company wasn't even keeping tabs on its own sepoys- which is why the Mutiny happened. It is utterly mad to claim that an Indian telling a Missionary, politely or not, to go fuck himself was 'resisting' surveillance or stalking or sodomy.

What is this shite about 'confession'? It was not a sacrament of the Established Church. It was not a pre-requisite for the application of Judicial punishment.

There was no 'nineteenth century strategy' which sought to dominate anybody by positing nonsense.
Suppose you say 'you have a truth which you don't know'- i.e. you want to be fucked in the ass- , do I feel dominated? No. I feel you are piece of shit. I may tell you to fuck off in a polite manner. However, if you persist, I may kick your head in.

The incalculable native produces a problem for civil representation in the discourses of literature and legality.

Utter nonsense. We know a lot about why the legal services provided by John Company proved attractive to Indian capitalists and some agricultural communities- e.g. in Coorg. There was no problem at all for civil representation because Court Pundits and Maulvis were easily available. Over the course of a 100 years, enough case law had accumulated to allow them to be dispensed with, though they reappear as lawyers, and- after the Crown took over from John Company- Codification proceeded in a manner that was favourably received.

This uncertainty impressed itself on Nathanael Halhed whose A Code of Gentoo Laws (1776) was the canonical colonialist codification of Indian 'native' law, but he was only able to read this resistance to calculation and testimony as native 'folly' or 'temporary frenzy ... something like the madness so inimitably delineated in the hero of Cervantes'.

Halhed's code was used by lawyers. It was not binding on Judges. Other codes existed and, in several instances, stare decisis law followed those Codes or others suggested by the Court Pundit or Maulvi.

What Halhed said about Indian folly or Indian mangoes or Indian prostitutes had no importance whatsoever. The fact is, a guy asked about a law which might apply to himself has an incentive to muddle the issue. In any case, Jurisprudence is a confusing field.

The native answers display the continual slippage between civil inscription and colonial address.

But 'native answers' in native States display the same slippery property. There is always going to be a slippage in our account of a law which may be applied to oneself. One muddies the issue so as to leave a door open for oneself later on.

Civil inscription means me writing to you. Colonial address means me writing to our Galactic Overlord. There is no slippage between them unless you are actually our secret Galactic Overlord.

The uncertainty generated by such resistance changes the narratorial demand itself.

No it doesn't. The guy in the witness box may shilly and shally and dodge and duck and try to muddy the issue, but the prosecutor, if she is worth her salt, does not change her 'narratorial demand'. Rather she reiterates it with greater lucidity so as to show the jury that the defendant is ducking the question because he is guilty. An innocent man, after all, can give a clear, coherent and logically consistent response to any narratorial demand.

Courts are costly. Prosecutors and Judges get paid a lot of money. That is why the State makes no narratorial demand on us save in criminal or tort cases of some gravity.

What was spoken within the orders of civility now accedes to the colonial signifier.

Nonsense! If my ancestor spoke to his barber in Tamil, the imprecations he uttered did not accede to any corresponding colonial signifier. That's why the poor fellow had to go to School and learn English in order to become a lawyer and swindle his way into a modest fortune.

The question is no longer Derrida's 'Tell us exactly what happened.' From the point of view of the colonizer, passionate for unbounded, unpeopled possession, the problem of truth turns into the troubled political and psychic question of boundary and territory: Tell us why you, the native, are there.

Fuck off! Did Ceasar say anything similar to the Druids? Did Cortez? Of course not. That's why History had recorded their names. Colonising a place involves beating and killing people. Asking them foolish questions would just get your head kicked in.

Etymologically unsettled, 'territory' derives from both terra (earth) and terre (to frighten) whence territorium, 'a place from which people are frightened off.

So what? Only the first etymology is commonly accepted. The second one is used only by worthless shitheads writing nonsense.

The colonialist demand for narrative carries, within it, its threatening reversal: Tell us why we are here.

No colonist has ever made such a futile and unprofitable demand.  A bunch of guys who are colonising your country keep killing those who oppose them and taking their cool stuff. It is fucking obvious why the coloniser is doing this. It's coz he likes cool stuff and wants more of the same.

It is this echo that reveals that the other side of narcissistic authority may be the paranoia of power; a desire for 'authorization' in the face of a process of cultural differentiation which makes it problematic to fix the native objects of colonial power as the moralized 'others' of truth.

Fuck off. Trump is narcissistic and has authority. He has no desire for any further 'authorization' in the face of 'a process of cultural differentiation'- for example between himself and Justin Trudeau or Angela Merkel.

It may be that some clergymen and pedagogues and Grub street hacks spent a little time justifying or decrying Colonial policies. But they had zero influence or impact. Either the thing was profitable, in which case it continued, sometimes under a different name; or it was unprofitable, in which case, sooner rather than later, the thing was scrapped.

The native refusal to unify the authoritarian, colonialist address within the terms of civil engagement gives the subject of colonial authority - father and oppressor - another turn.

Did Mahatma Gandhi say 'Daddy, be nice! Stop fucking me in the ass!' to the King Emperor? What about Jomo Kenyatta, or Nkrumah or Ho Chi Minh?
Of course not. Don't be silly.

This ambivalent 'and', always less than one and double, traces the times and spaces between civil address and colonial articulation.

No it doesn't. Colonial articulation was about Balance Sheets and Trade Routes and the geopolitical  balance of power.
Nothing at all is traced by some ambivalent 'and'- otherwise my saying 'Spivak and Bhabha are shite' would lead to the tracing of all the times and places where they shat themselves at the podium.

The authoritarian demand can now only be justified if it is contained in the language of paranoia.

No. If you are as crazy as a bedbug and trying to pretend you are smart, then you utter shite like the above.

The refusal to return and restore the image of authority to the eye of power has to be reinscribed as implacable aggression, assertively coming from without: He hates me. Such justification follows the familiar conjugation of persecutory paranoia. The frustrated wish 'I want him to love me,' turns into its opposite 'I hate him' and thence through projection and the exclusion of the first person, 'He hates me.'

Bhabha, you hate literature. You hate the English language. You hate rational discourse. Yet you want to be loved and admired as a savant dealing precisely with these things. But you begin with the precisely the premise that the sex pest on campus strategically deploys- viz. the low man on the totem pole secretly wants to be fucked in the ass. In such cases 'sly civility' don't cut it. Report the fucker and get him Title 9ed off campus. Ruin the fucker's career. Me-too the bastard till he slits his own throat.

Oddly, there have been no such allegations against Bhabha. Dipesh, yes, but not our good little boy from Bombay. Anyway, he wrote this shite before he got to America- where sexual harassment is de rigueur rather than infra dig and associated with people with unpleasant accents or widowed mothers in Cardiff. Still, at least Bhabha didn't jizz in public. That was civility- even if he was doing it on the sly.