Toit & Vosloo on Ontological roots in Gandhi & Butler

 South Africa has excellent Universities. Two South African scholars- L.D Toit & J. Vosloo- have produced a very readable paper comparing Gandhian Ahimsa to Judith Butler's stupid book on non-violence. Indian students will find it useful. 

One reason why smart- as opposed to deranged- South African savants might care about 'Ahimsa' is because there is some point to lying about how and why their own country transitioned to majority misrule. This is because things there could easily get very much worse very very quickly.  For other countries, however, there is no point pretending that non-violence matters. Spontaneous demonstrations of anger can topple Governments or bring about regime change. By contrast, organized and disciplined non-violent resistance can be crushed or 'gamed' such that its adherents lose most while the regime gains or, where there has been a cosmetic regime change, the previous power-brokers are able to cash in their chips at a premium. 

Toit & Vosloo write

Many social justice movements have been inspired by the ideal and strategy of nonviolent resistance.

No. They may have pretended this was the case so as to avoid prosecution or brutal repression. But nobody thinks 'non-violent resistance' is smart or effective. The thing is a nuisance. No doubt, an antagonomic virtue signaler may enjoy being a nuisance but this does not mean she has been inspired by any fucking ideal whatsoever. 

 For example, according to one estimate, between 1966 and 1999, “nonviolent civic resistance played a critical role in fifty [out] of sixty-seven transitions from authoritarianism” (Ackerman and DuVall 2000). 

But, the truth is it had zero success. Spontaneous demonstrations could have an effect but only if there were other geopolitical or socio-economic reasons why change was inevitable. Organized and disciplined nonviolent civic resistance was wholly counter-productive. 

In addition, in their book, Chenoweth and Stephan conclude both that “historically, nonviolent resistance campaigns have been more effective in achieving their goals than violent resistance campaigns” (Chenoweth and Stephan 2013, p. 220; emphasis added) and that, since “civil resistance campaigns are more successful than violent campaigns at overcoming barriers to participation” (Ibid, p. 28), they produce more stable outcomes in the long run. 

This is sheer fantasy. 

In contrast, although “violent insurgencies captured power in some cases”, the human costs in terms of casualties were very high. 

But the outcome could be exceptionally stable, provided the regime was prepared to inflict high human costs. Ask Chairman Xi. 

Moreover, “the conditions in these countries after the conflict ended have been overwhelmingly more repressive than in transitions driven by nonviolent civic pressure” (Ibid, p. 60).

Only if, historically speaking, they weren't particularly repressive in the first place. 

 Typical for post-violent-conflict societies were widespread retaliatory violence, lack of respect for human rights and lack of respect for minority rights (Ibid, p. 60).

But nobody now respects people who bang on about human rights and 'multi-culti'. Our attitude is Gitmo terrorists. Kill them and dump their body out of planes into the Ocean. Respect for minority rights means old ladies getting knifed in Marks & Spencer by crazy dudes who hate Israel. 

 Gene Sharp’s influential 1973 three-volume opus, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Sharp 1973), provides a theoretical foundation for nonviolent action by linking it with a specific understanding of power.

A foolish one. 'Non-violence' either means 'money' or it means a fucking nuisance. Buying off politicians works. Shouting at them and harassing them doesn't work. 

Different methods of nonviolent action that he discusses include nonviolent protest, social noncooperation, economic boycotts,

shitting in the streets

 strikes, political noncooperation and nonviolent intervention, and he explains that adversaries can be nonviolently affected or changed through conversion, persuasion, accommodation and coercion. 

Buy them off. That's non-violence right there. Mahatma Gandhi had salience in Indian politics only because he got lots of money from industrialists and the mercantile class to which he himself belonged. Similarly, if Nelson Mandela triumphed it was because of money not Cuban troops whom the Angolans themselves wanted to see the back off. 

The two South African authors, very ably, summarize Butler's crazy nonsense. This is the bit which Indian students will find useful because Indian academics are incapable of writing clear English. 

The specific contribution of Butler’s book against this backdrop is to make a philosophical case for the use of nonviolent resistance toward oppressive regimes, without turning it into an absolute prohibition on violence or self-defence (Butler 2020, p. 23). 

Since philosophers have zero influence and very very low I.Qs, there is no point making a philosophical case for or against anything. In any case, it's not as though Butler or her colleagues have a rep for being stone cold killers. Who gives a fuck whether they renounce or don't renounce violence? They are weak and poor and stupid. The best they can do is cancel each other as racist or sexist or anti-trans or whatever. 

Their argument is rooted in their understanding of the human subject as constituted in discursive and performative ways—

though human beings are constituted biologically and their existence is predicated on economic and technological factors. Stupid philosophers discussing nonsense don't constitute anything. They get paid a little money to act as glorified child-minders to young people who are too stupid or lacking in drive to go out in the world and make something of themselves. As for 'perfomativity'- Butler may use big words and pretend she is as smart as a Physics Professor, but nobody believes her. Trump in drag would give a better performance. 

an understanding they partly take from Michel Foucault, 

who didn't get that it was a smart idea to wear a condom when shagging strangers in a bath-house. The guy literally died of ignorance. 

and partly develop more concretely in terms of the performative body. 

like on pornhub? 

Butler’s argument for nonviolence is therefore embedded in their earlier work on subject formation,

which was simply stupid. It really isn't true that if I walk like Beyonce and talk like Beyonce, my penis will turn into a vag. Drag is a performance. But it doesn't actually change your gender. You have to go to a surgeon to get your bollocks chopped off. 

 and the in/ability to appear (and be recognised) in the social or public world as a moral and political subject—themes that run through their whole oeuvre, as we will show. 

The social or public world doesn't give a fart about those who want to 'appear as a moral and political subject'. Indeed, everybody is equally indifferent to my wish to appear as the next Beyonce. 

Even though Butler’s book title references Gandhi’s concept of Satyagraha (meaning love force, truth force or soul force),2 and they evoke him explicitly a handful of times (Butler 2020, pp. 16, 21, 181, 201), Gandhi’s own thinking does not feature much in the book. The point of this article is to go beyond the book’s purview and place Butler and Gandhi in conversation on the topic of nonviolence. Although the abovementioned sources are important for addressing the common assumption that nonviolent tactics as a strategic choice are naïve, misplaced, ineffective or implausible (Chenoweth and Stephan 2013, p. 17), the focus of this article is on a more fundamental, i.e., ontological, level.

For Gandhi this was the doctrine of reincarnation. For Butler, I suppose, this was the notion that Language thinks us; everything is socially constructed; it is the Media which brainwashed me into farting in that crowded lift and when I tried to explain this to the other passengers on the elevator, they just held their noses. Also, it turned out I hadn't farted. I had sharted. Sad. 

 In quite different yet complementary ways, Gandhi and Butler argue that the imperative for nonviolent resistance aimed at social transformation flows from a certain relational ontology, a certain perspective on the world and human co-existence. 

Gandhi said we should all give up sex and then do satyagraha. The earth would be depopulated and we'd get reborn on a paradisal planet. This was perfectly sensible- if you were a Hindu of a certain type- i.e. one who didn't like the Brits but were afraid of what might happen if they slyly fucked off. 

By contrast, Butler is just virtue signaling and trying to keep the fuck away from the cat-fight that has broken out within Feminism because of the Trans issue. Also, as an anti-Zionist Jew she needs an alibi against those who accuse her of siding with the terrorists. 

The aim of this article is to draw out the most salient implications of such a conversation for the right of public assembly and contemporary cultures of protest globally. 

These guys were writing this in the midst of COVID. Shortly after it was submitted, the Zuma riots broke out in South Africa. It is clear that a 'conversation' between Butler and Gandhi has no fucking salience whatsoever. There is no right to public assembly or crazy protest when this could lead to more people dying of a horrible illness or being killed while trying to loot or commit arson. 

The ontology that Butler places at the root of nonviolence is a secular social ontology of the constituted, performative, exposed subject, coupled with a radically egalitarian imagination, as is discussed. 

That isn't an ontology. It is nonsense. One might as well say 'I affirm that we are all basically cats and should crawl around on all fours saying miaow'. Now, it may well be that at the root of non violence is a feline ontology and that when this ontology is coupled with a radically egalitarian imagination the result is that everybody would be called Chairman Miaow; however it is more likely that this is verbose nonsense. 

In his turn, the vision that underlies Gandhi’s nonviolence is a faith-based ontology that sees the force of love as a cosmic principle greater or more powerful than violent force. 

Because you get reborn on a paradisal planet where there is no sex. Sex is very dirty. Nobody should do it. By contrast, joining the British Army and getting shot in Mesopotamia is fine and dandy. 

It is important to remain faithful to the very different vocabularies that these two thinkers employ;

if you have to teach this sort of shite or need to regurgitate this sort of shite to get a clerical job- sure. 

 nevertheless, it is mutually illuminating and fruitful for a systematic philosophical exploration of the nature of nonviolent resistance, we claim, to place them in conversation with each other, on four central themes related to nonviolent resistance. The conversation between Gandhi and Butler is structured according to these themes: (i) the ontological roots of the nonviolent imperative; 

on which I will have more to say

(ii) their rejection of an instrumental view of violence; 

Which is shared by Armies and Police forces. If you have a dispute with a fellow officer, you can't resolve it by killing the dude. In other words, those whose profession is violence do not instrumentalise it for any organizational or other internal purpose. There may be criminal enterprises where this is not the case but even the Mafia has 'made men' whom one is forbidden to harm. 

(iii) nonviolent resistance seen as communicative action; 

what else could it be? Secret acts of sabotage are not classed as 'nonviolent resistance'. 

and (iv) nonviolence viewed as a way of life. 

Some Christian and Hindu and Buddhist and other such communities- monastic or otherwise- hold this view. There is nothing novel or specific to either Butler or Gandhi in this respect. 

The discussion emphasises the continuities and complementarities between the two thinkers but also indicates where tensions remain. 

The two authors can think and communicate clearly. Suppose they were writing about the Law or Economics or some other more useful field. Then this type of analytical framework would be very helpful for students.

The Ontological Roots of the Nonviolent Imperative

Sentient beings are either part of Nature or Society. Thus we see beings as part of Being and feel horror at wanton violence done to beings. That's it. That's the whole story. 

Butler’s social ontology is best understood as being inspired by Foucault, 

who wasn't exactly a poster boy for mental health. Still, he came to see that San Francisco had great bath-houses and so maybe Neo-Liberalism was better than the KGB sticking electric cattle-prods up your anus you till you got your rocks off. 

who is a key critic of the “constituting” subject of western modernity. 

In which case, us darkies don't have to bother with him.

Against this influential view of the human subject as sovereign, as pre-existing its social conditions and as fully transparent to itself and governed by reason alone, Foucault posits a “constituted”, i.e., a historically contingent subject, who is formed or moulded into a self through everyday social practices, dominant discourses and knowledge formations, and the power relations that infuse these.

In other words, Foucault sees white peeps in the same manner that some white peeps used to see niggers. Did this make his cock any bigger? No. Sad. 

 “Objectifying knowledge practices” and “processes of subjectivation” or of self-formation all represent a form of power that transforms human beings into the subjects required (and recognised) by the dominant, anonymous structures at work in modern societies. Thus, writes Foucault in “The Subject and Power” (Foucault 1982, p. 781), “[t]his form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him.”

Then those anonymous structures forced Foucault to publish this shite and then get AIDS, coz he was too stupid to wear a condom, and then die and get buried rather than continue to stink up the place as a zombie. 

Butler largely adopts this Foucauldian understanding of the subject but focuses it on the notion of bodily performativity or the animate body. 

As opposed to a sleeping or dead body. 

They define their key notion of performativity as “not a singular or deliberate ‘act’, but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice[s] by which discourse produces the [material] effects that it names” (Butler 1993, p. 2).

Scientific discourse has a material effect. I'm typing this on a computer which embodies that discourse. Butler's discourse, repetitive and parodic as it may be, has had no fucking 'material effects'. It is worthless shit. 

 Butler (2015, p. 28) in their later work noted that “performativity characterises first and foremost that characteristic of linguistic utterances that in the moment of making the utterance makes something happen or brings the phenomenon into being”. 

Like saying 'abracadabra' and causing a bunny rabbit to jump out of a top hat. 

Their notion of performativity thus equally inverts the modernist logic where action proceeds from a unified, pre-existing, rational and free mind. 

Unless it is mere babbling which, in Butler's case, is all that 'performativity' can entail. 

Performativity instead posits that people become subjects, e.g., gendered subjects, through the performance of desires, acts, speech and gestures that cite or reiterate the dominant (heterosexual) gendered and gendering norms (see their Gender Trouble, Butler 1990). 

So if I weren't incessantly referred to as he, I'd have no dick. 

An important point that Butler takes over from Foucault (1982, p. 778) is that we become subjects partly by objectifying ourselves as objects of knowledge and power; we are at once object and subject of these ongoing processes. 

Where are they 'ongoing'? What source of energy do they draw on? None at all because they don't exist. One may as well say 'the only reason we are not all cats is because of ongoing processes of de-felinization.' 

It is by inserting ourselves through bodily gestures, expressions, motilities and so forth into the force field of norms that constitutes or moulds recognisable (gendered) subjects, and thus by “passing”, that we come to recognise ourselves and be recognised by others, as properly gendered subjects.

I wish I'd know that. I wouldn't have waggled my dick around so as to get recognized as a properly gendered subject. Sadly I waggled my dick around too close to a meat grinder. Now I'm a gelded subject. 

 Our actions are themselves attuned to, or aligned with, discursive meanings.

or just being a dick 

 When this attuning translates into bodily habits, then discursive norms have been successfully materialised in the world. 

Nonsense! Discursive norms are only 'successfully materialized' when they are economically rewarded and thus can burgeon. That's why STEM subjects we shall always have with us. But Butler's own branch of 'sub-Humanities' will go the way of Alchemy. 

When bodies perform or act differently, by transgressing or otherwise challenging, disrupting, misquoting, parodying or queering the norms, then they can over time change, or subvert, the norms themselves. 

Pussy riot brought about the fall of Putin- thinks nobody at all. It simply isn't true that dudes putting on rouge and eye-liner will cause the collapse of Neo-Liberalism. Christianity and traditional families did not collapse when women put on trousers and got jobs in munitions factories. 

Furthermore, new sets of norms can shape radically different selves and institutions into being over time.

Stalin 'the engineer of human souls' didn't really believe a new 'Soviet Man' would be created. That's why he gave Beria plenty of resources. New sets of norms may gain our lip-service in the short run. Medium to long term we ignore the fuck out of them.

. The potential for violence lies in the precise way in which norms distribute the terms and conditions of subject-formation. 

Norms have no such power. 

Simply put, where heterosexism, patriarchy and racism are dominant norms embedded in discourse and institutions, and in practices of recognition and knowledge production, and thus in self-understandings, there, bodies marked as gender nonconforming, female and/or black, are likely to struggle to appear as “proper” subjects and citizens, both to themselves and to others. 

Because those in a weak position are...weak. If they get rich or gain a bigger 'threat point', then everybody sucks up to them. 

This is precisely the kind of situation where Butler would evoke the force of nonviolent resistance, which is exerted where and when “a social and political practice [is] undertaken in concert, culminating in a form of resistance to systemic forms of destruction coupled with a commitment to world building that honours global interdependency . . . and equality” (Butler 2020, p. 21).

But, if at the end of the day you remain poor and weak, then your sulking did you no good whatsoever. 

 We want to draw attention to a number of elements in this quote. First, note the element of collective action (“undertaken in concert”) in which shared resistance is expressed towards a situation that is read as systemically destructive.

But then the guys who did the organizing make a sweetheart deal for themselves and become billionaires. Think Mugabe, Zuma, etc. Gandhi's financiers did very well for themselves. Even Butler made a little money pretending to be a Leftist who was standing up for Lesbians or whatever. 

Moreover, this collective resistance is performed against the normative violence exerted by the dominant social system, which prevents some human beings from appearing as subjects and citizens in public spaces.

Don't lock up rapists. Let them wander around the place donating sperm to unwilling women and children.

 For Butler, then, wherever there is performative resistance against oppression, one can discern a struggle against socially induced precarity or the destructive unequal distribution of the chance of becoming (social) subjects. Butler (2020, p. 10) therefore argues that “nonviolence requires a critique of egological ethics as well as of the political legacy of individualism in order to open up the idea of selfhood as a fraught field of social relationality” (emphasis added). Nonviolent resistance illuminates not only the direct suffering or grief carried by groups and individuals that struggle to appear as social subjects but also shows how social mechanisms operate in order to pre-emptively “disappear” that suffering as suffering, to render those lives publicly “ungrievable”.4 As Ruti (2017, p. 97) points out, Butler “deftly demonstrates [that] one of the ruses of power is to delimit the domain of grievability so that—under normal circumstances—we are prevented from mourning the suffering (or death) of those deemed different from, or inferior to ourselves”. 

Why did Obama not grieve for Osama? Why did he have that fucker killed? Come to think of it that guy wasn't even beating his wives. He was non-violently watching videos, though, no doubt, he was 'resisting' American might. Obama still sent in the SEALS didn't he? 

I have said that these two South African scholars have admirably summarized Butler's shite. Sadly, they fail when it comes to Gandhi. This is not their fault. They have had to rely on Hindu scholars who, because they studied shite subjects at Uni, are utterly stupid and who simulate ignorance of Hinduism for fear of being dismissed as Modi-bhakts. 

Gandhi’s ontological orientation takes another, yet comparable, route to nonviolent resistance.

This is nonsense. Gandhi was part of the 'Naram Dal' and as a Vaishav Bania with a tincture of Jain influence, his orientation was that of a Loyalist with mildly irenic Quaker overtones. The fact is that 'Ahimsa' is a religious principle in Indic religions. However, non-conformists in the UK were using civil resistance- e.g. not paying local authority rates because they didn't want to finance Anglican primary schools- at this time and the Liberal Government had reached out to them. Indeed, Quakers controlled a good chunk of the Press and so being a 'Dissenter' was ultra-respectable. 

 Butler (2020, p. 181) comments on what Gandhi calls “the law of love”, which he views as “a higher law than that of destruction”. 

In other words, Vaishavites are higher than Saktas. Stop sacrificing goats to Kali! Do it now! Fuck you Bengali smartypants with your fancy-shmancy degrees. Anyway, us Gujjus are making more money than you and many of us aren't even 8th standard pass!

True to Butler’s social ontology, they state that his stance “may not rest upon a discoverable law” but rather function only rhetorically. 

In the Indic religions, you can practice some type of Yoga or askesis till you get super-natural powers. That's how you get to be a Mahatma or a Swami or whatever. Since you can work miracles, you obviously have discovered some higher law. Indeed, you can enable people to get reborn on a paradisal planet where nobody has sex or eats meat and everybody lives for ten gazillion years. 

However, Gandhi does not intend for the law of love to be a mere rhetorical device. In Hind Swaraj (CWMG (The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi 1958) vol. 10, p. 84), Gandhi explains that the [human] universe would disappear without “the force of love and pity5 [which] is infinitely greater than the force of arms”. 

This is Vishnu as the Katechon. True Shiva will destroy the Universe- i.e. there is an eschaton- but then everything starts up again. Meanwhile, if you gave up sex and donated plenty of money to Gandhi, you will be sitting pretty on a paradisal planet. 

He writes, “[h]istory is really a record of every interruption of the even working of the force of love or of the soul . . . History, then, is a record of an interruption in the course of nature. Soul-force, being natural, is not noted in history” (CWMG 10, p. 90; emphases added). 

The reason Vishnu keeps getting incarnated as Kshatriya warrior who kills lots of demons and bad guys is because History (Itihasa) only records the exceptional. Thus the money grubbing Bania isn't really lower than the Kshatriya (though Gandhi never explicitly said so) and he represents the Vaishnavite norm (provided he doesn't eat meat). 

He gives the example of two brothers who overcome their mutual animosity as a story that would not go down in history. Soul-force or love force (Satyagraha) works evenly, constantly and unnoticed in the background, building the world, which is why the world as such is based “not on the force of arms but on the force of truth or love”. 

But money is better than both. That's why Gandhi wasn't interested in people telling him that, truthfully, he had fucked up. He did want people to lurve him so much that they'd hand over their money to him. 

Similar to Butler, then, Gandhi also derives his nonviolent imperative from a vision of the human world as consisting of a fabric of social bonds, woven, built and continuously sustained through the force and labour of love and pity or empathy.

The Bania usefully repairs the fabric of society thanks to his love of money. Truth, too, is a commercial virtue- which is why Banias hire Brahmin accountants. On the other hand, it is doubtful whether the Gupta brothers really helped South Africa. 

 In contrast with Butler for whom the force of nonviolence derives purely from social bonds, Gandhi’s ontology is however a religious one: truth force or soul force is an “indefinable mysterious power that underlies everything”; it is also called “God”, by Gandhi.

Because Atman (soul) is identified as God by Advaita Hinduism. 

 He sees love force, truth force, or God, as “purely benevolent”, for “in the midst of death, life persists, in the midst of untruth, truth persists, in the midst of darkness, light persists”. 

and in the midst of Science, Gandhian stupidity persists. Incidentally, the guy was a big anti-vaccer. 

Therefore, if one aligns oneself with love force, one sides with and taps into the stronger force in the universe. 

Which is little consolation if everybody keeps beating the shit out of you and stealing any nice shiny thing you might own. 

 This is why he claims, “as long as there is even a handful of men true to their pledge [of Satyagraha], there can be only one end to the struggle and that is victory” (Gandhi 1928, p. 116). 

Jinnah won all right. Gandhi was shot and most sensible people breathed a sigh of relief. 

Drawing from this quotation, and because Gandhi understands nonviolence as tapping into a divine source, one might deduce that Gandhi is more optimistic about the effectiveness of nonviolence than the secular Butler. However, later in his life, Gandhi also experienced many setbacks and failures of his nonviolent tactics, most spectacularly with conflicts between Hindus and Muslims in India. He was thus finally not naïve about the limits of nonviolence and conceded cases in which the force of violence was needed . 

Example- the Kashmir war. Sadly, that cretin went on a fast demanding India pay money to Pakistan. That's why everybody thought his getting shot was providential. 

However, we think the larger point which he shares with Butler is to draw our attention to the limits of violence as an instrument for decisive and lasting social change, and to open up more strategic space for nonviolent tactics.

Gandhi got paid because Indians wanted shot of the Brits but not yet- never yet. Consider young Birla. He went into hiding because of the Roda cartridge case. However, by paying Gandhi he could show he was 'non-violent'. The joke is that Police Commissioner Tegart who had crushed the Jugantar revolutionaries, became a great pal of his. Indeed, Tegart, after retirement, became a Director of Birla's London holding company. 

Money talks. Bullshit walks. Butler isn't able to create livelihoods or rent-seeking opportunities for the stupid cretins who read her. The Mahatma on the other hand turned the 'Gandhi cap' into a money-making machine for a whole bunch of Congress-wallahs. The ANC understood this. Sadly, the great mass of Black South Africans  are beginning to see that it is as shit as the INC.  In this context, talk of non-violence is pointless. What's important is that voters kick out corrupt kleptocrats. Ontology can go fuck itself. On the other hand, you must subscribe to my Youtube Channel where I put on falsies and pad out my derriere and twerk to Beyonce's greatest hits. My performativity is bound to turn me, any day now, into the sort of person who can say 'I'm Foxxy Cleopatra and I'm a whole lot of woman!' without any eyebrows being raised at the Royal levee. This is because I myself will be the monarch. I should explain, back in Delhi, when I was a schoolboy, I overheard Daddy telling Mummy that, because of her mollycoddling, I would grown up to be a big fat Queen. Since the British Monarch is the biggest Queen in the world, I decided that I must come to London and work hard to marry into the Royal Family and discreetly poison anyone ahead of me in the line of succession. This is because, as a Hindu, it was my moral responsibility to make Daddy's prediction come true. Sadly, I missed my chance with Charles- should have gone blonde- and William- should have gone to Weight Watchers- but now Prince Phillip is dead, I could be the first Lesbian to become Queen by marriage to a Queen. Judith Butler has shown how, ontologically speaking, all this is perfectly possible. My performativity as Foxy Cleopatra will enable me to reconquer America as part of a new British Empire. Obviously, I'll have to use saytagraha to achieve my aim. Otherwise those nasty Marines or SEALS or whatever will fuck me up. My central message is Love and Peace and please send me all your money without demanding I love you long time. 

Mind it kindly.

Aiyyayyo.