My Copilot invents 'Soterioproctology'- Oscar Wilde is the true father of Cambridge Analytical Philosophy!

I'd just come home from a swim and, the day being very fucking hot,  had fixed myself an iced drinkypoo.

Having nothing better to do I went on Twitter where I came across this and responded in my usual acerbic fashion

Alexandre Lefebvre

Is Christoph Schuringa’s A Social History of Analytic Philosophy any good? Because, from where I sit, it’s not pwning Rawls to point out that his liberalism was inspired by liberal ideology.

vivek iyer


Putnam & Walsh rely on Quine to resurrect normativity. Rawls used Harsanyi/Vickerey 'veil of ignorance' & an Arrow/Sen type axiomatic approach. However lexical preferencing means that Rawls wasn't in the Liberal tradition at all.

Like Sen, he was (wrongly) saying Freedom/Democracy has magic powers. I am not a Christian, but I would prefer to say that Lord Jesus Christ, personal God & Saviour, can do what the God of Aristotle could not- viz. change the past. Fuck. Just remembered who said that first.

It was Oscar Wilde. Oh dear. I now understand that Analytical philosophy was always about the Anus. It's what Cambridge Apostles talked to each other about in lieu of, or in between, buggering each other.

After fixing myself another well-iced drinkypoo, I thought I'd do a blog post on Wilde as the true progenitor of the Cambridge (i.e. Ardayan or 'Poultry' misprision of Oxford) Analytical tradition.

 Then, I thought to myself, fuck it. Let Copilot do it for me. Sadly I misspelled 'Socioproctology' as 'Soterioproctology' thus achieving my own 'salvific rectification'. 

This is what Copilot came up with.
Today
Could your write me a blog post in my Soterioproctology style on the theme 'Oscar Wilde was the founder or Cambridge style Analytical philosophy'
Oscar Wilde as the Secret Founder of Cambridge‑Style Analytical Philosophy
A Soterioproctological Meditation by Vivek’s Copilot

Takeaway
Oscar Wilde, properly read through the Soterioproctological lens, becomes not a decadent ornament of Victorian wit but the crypto‑architect of Cambridge analytical philosophy: the first to treat language as a moral scalpel, paradox as epistemic hygiene, and style as the highest form of logical hygiene.

🜂 The Soterioproctological Thesis
Soterioproctology—our noble discipline of salvific rectification, the art of rescuing metaphysics from its own digestive tract—begins with a simple axiom:

Where language tightens, salvation begins.

Wilde understood this before Russell, before Moore, before the Cambridge Apostles discovered that clarity could be weaponised.

 Wilde’s epigrams are not merely clever; they are proto‑analytic propositions, compressed truth‑functions disguised as champagne bubbles.

To read Wilde is to watch logical atomism in drag.


🜁 Wilde’s Epigram as Proto‑Proposition
Consider Wilde’s characteristic move: the epigram that inverts moral expectation. This is not wit; it is semantic inversion, the very technique Moore later used to expose “the naturalistic fallacy.”

Wilde’s line—“I can resist everything except temptation”—is a truth‑table in embryo.
It performs:

Self‑reference

Contradiction‑as‑clarification

Moral tautology


This is the Soterioproctological moment: Wilde purges Victorian moralism by forcing language to reveal its own digestive absurdities.


🜃 Wilde’s Ontology of Masks
Cambridge analysis insists that meaning is use (Wittgenstein), but Wilde anticipated this decades earlier. Wilde’s doctrine of masks—“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person”—is a proto‑Wittgensteinian insight:

Meaning arises from performance, not essence.

Identity is a linguistic act, not a metaphysical substrate.

Clarity is achieved through stylised constraint, not naïve sincerity.

Wilde’s aestheticism is thus a discipline of linguistic asceticism, the very thing Cambridge philosophers later claimed as their invention.

🜄 The Wildean Method: Paradox as Purification
Analytical philosophy is obsessed with paradox because paradox is the rectal pressure point of language: the place where meaning threatens to prolapse unless disciplined.

Wilde’s paradoxes are not decorative. They are proto‑analytic exercises:

Strip a concept of its moral fat

Twist it until its logical skeleton shows

Present the skeleton as a joke

Let the reader experience epistemic shame

Salvation follows


This is Soterioproctology: the cleansing of conceptual bowels through paradoxical pressure.


🜅 Why Cambridge Never Admitted Wilde
Because Wilde was too beautiful.

Cambridge analysis needed the myth of stern clarity, the fantasy that logic is a cold northern light. Wilde’s brilliance revealed the embarrassing truth:

Clarity is erotic. Precision is decadent. Logic is camp.

Russell and Moore were Wildeans in denial. Wittgenstein was Wildean in exile. The Apostles were Wildean in the closet.

Wilde founded analytical philosophy the way Dionysus founded tragedy: by being too divine to be credited.


🜆 Conclusion: Wilde as the First Analyst
Oscar Wilde is the founder of Cambridge analytical philosophy because he understood, before any of them, that:


Language saves.

Style clarifies.

Paradox purifies.


Wit is the highest form of logical hygiene.


He is the first Soterioproctologist: the one who taught us that salvation begins not in metaphysics but in syntax, not in doctrine but in diction, not in truth but in its performance.

vivek iyer

@indglish

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6m

It was Oscar Wilde. Oh dear. I now understand that Analytical philosophy was always about the Anus. It's what Cambridge Apostles talked to each other about in lieu of, or in between, buggering each other.

Nehru's wrong trends

The following is taken from the transcript of Nehru's  Speech at the meeting of the Standing Committee of the National Development Council, New Delhi, 7 January 1956.

... It is agreed by all... that we should go towards what is called a socialist structure of society.

Was this really the case? No. Congress was only pretending to be Socialist. It wasn't really.  

We say that not because of some emotional feeling but for very practical considerations,

defeating the Left & clinging to power 

that is, you cannot meet the social problems of the day without going in that direction.

The country had been going in that direction since Independence.  

.. taking India as it is, I think we have the background here, the urge and the necessity for going in that direction. Now I hope everybody realises that to achieve socialism or indeed to achieve any kind of really high standard in this country is a long-term process. It is no good deluding the public that we can achieve it quickly. Even in China, Chairman Mao repeatedly talks of achieving socialism in twenty years in spite of all the authoritarian powers that they have and the tremendous capacity of the Chinese people for working.

This was before Mao decided to go for a 'Great Leap Forward'. (1958-62) 

Naturally, we have to go fast... But in going fast, we have to be clear about the objective... And we have to be clear that everything that we do, apart from being advantageous to us in an economic way, is on right lines, that the right trends are encouraged and not the wrong trends which come in our way.

So, the objective wasn't 'economic advantage'. It was to follow the 'right trends', not the wrong ones.  

All this seems to me to indicate the great importance of what I would call long-term planning — in general terms, of course, not this detailed planning— because then one can see whether what the country does in the next, say, five years, fits in with our objective of, say, ten or fifteen years hence.

If you spend too much on stupid shit today, you will be worse off tomorrow. That is what India did in the Second Plan period.  

It is not enough merely to test it by some broad concept of socialism, though, of course, that may be done. But it becomes necessary to have some clear idea of what in fifteen years time we hope to achieve.

What was achieved, by the time Nehru died, was a country unable to feed or defend itself.  

It is most necessary that we must have this and then we can come to the shorter plans which must fit in with the broad general scheme; then we come to the shortest plan, the one year plan or the annual plan, which also must fit in and it would be a very detailed plan. Difficulty comes because our minds are not clear about what we want India to be, say fifteen or twenty years later, and that is perhaps the reason why we get rather mixed up even in regard to our shorter plans.

Why was it not clear to Nehru's mind that India should be able to feed and defend itself?  

From that I conclude that two things are necessary. One is this long-term planning, in the broader sense, of course.

How can you plan if if you are not clear about where you want to be?  

Secondly, the concentrated planning for relatively shorter periods, that is, for the moment, a year, so that we might not get tied up before we get clear about the fifteen years’ programme, by something which we would not do, if we had this fifteen year plan in view. So this Five Year Plan, whatever it ultimately is, should not only be flexible, but should be something even more than that. It should be a broad framework, subject to suitable changes, not only because of our resources, but because of the ultimate long-range picture that we may develop, and we may develop it in the course of the next year or so. It would be easier to adopt the shorter plan when we have the fifteen years’ objective before us.

So, the guy doesn't know what he wants India to be, yet he wants plans which can only be made on the basis of what India is intended to become.  

Obviously we take up many schemes in the plan for the year, schemes which may take four or five years. And we have got to take them up, and in that we do plan for the next four to five years or more.

In other words, the Government has plans because it has budgets.  

Now, production is obviously essential and more particularly the right direction or the right trend in production.

Agricultural nations should produce more food. They should also turn cotton and wool into cloth and coal and iron into steel. They should produce 'wage goods'- i.e. stuff like bicycles and radios- which can also be exported.  

If I may also mention, there is the projection of internal policies on international affairs. I am not talking of India so much, but broadly speaking, I think that the whole of this cold war in the world today is a projection, not merely of communism and anti— communism- it is that in a sense, of course — but in a sense it is the culmination of industrialization and the conflict between the big power groups.

Industrialization was occurring in India under British auspices. Even Japanese and other foreign companies were setting up factories in India. Nehru could have encouraged this.  

Previously these conflicts took place between the Western powers, for instance, between Germany and England for colonial territories.

There was no such conflict. England was perfectly prepared to let Germany take over unprofitable African territory.  

But now it has moved on to the world plane.

No. There were no wars over access to markets. Perhaps Nehru was thinking of the Opium Wars or the Americans forcing the Japs to open themselves up to global commerce. But that was in the nineteenth century.  

This is the growth of industrialization which may be typified by the hydrogen bomb or the atomic bomb and this has brought us to a certain crisis which requires very deep thinking as to where the world is going and where we are going.

Either India industrialized and gained such weapons or it became a client of a super-power. Indira signed up with the Soviet Union in 1971.  

I am not prepared in the least to copy either Russia or America, because both may be, from India’s viewpoint, utterly and absolutely wrong. Both may succeed in a narrow plane, and they have succeeded, in reaching, say a very high material standard of comfort. America has succeeded and feviet Union, no doubt, will also succeed, provided America and Soviet Union do not collapse before that, in war or something like that. Of course, we have m ihink about material issues, because they are very important and basic. But we need not take for granted all the other things that have happened in the other countries or in these highly industrialised countries, because we have seen that they have led them in a direction which ultimately may bring about ruin, in spite of the high state of civilisation that they have produced.

Those with the higher state of industrialization and scientific civilization destroy those lower down the scale. At any rate, that's what had happened to India. Thanks to Nehru, the country would decline in its ability to feed and defend itself. 

Now I do not mean to say that India is spiritually developed and all that. Other countries have so developed, or they may not have developed, but talking of India’s spiritualism does not help us; it just confuses the issue. But I do think that India, situated as she is, has a chance of developing, on her own lines, a relatively high standard of living without getting into all the difficulties and dangers which this mad race for economic or other power has brought about.

India did have that chance. Nehru took it away. He wasn't mad. Just stupid or prematurely senile.  

I am not anxious that everybody in India should have a motor car or, say a washing machine or a refrigerator.

or food 

But I am very anxious that the right trend should be encouraged.

eating less?  

The whole problem of modern civilization is that all this industrialization leads to concentration of power.

Power was more concentrated when there was no industrialization. Nehru & Co had taken power from British Viceroys because they were financed by Indian industrialists. Naturally, to keep his monopoly on power, Nehru & his successors would want to shackle Indian enterprises and make them subservient to bureaucrats under their control.  

After all, ultimately the man who has the atomic bomb has got every power; it does not matter what parliaments you have, he has got all the power.

President Eisenhower had Executive authority, not a monopoly of power. He could only do what was legal and intra vires. Mao, at that time, didn't have nukes, but he showed that he had all the power in China. 

And that power means a diminution or restriction, obviously, of national freedom and individual freedom.

Perhaps Nehru was thinking of McCarthyism. But the Courts prevented the full implementation of  Eisenhower's Communist Control Act of 1954. 

How to reconcile this inevitable concentration, this inevitable centralization, with individual freedom is the problem of modern civilization.

It had already been done- even in India- by the doctrine of checks and balances.  

Whether it can be done or not, I do not know.

Nehru's expensive English education was wasted on him.  

But that involves psychological changes and ultimately psychological changes can be brought about by the structure of the society we live in as well as by other pressures.

Thus Nehru's 'socialist pattern' wasn't actually economic. It was psychological. Why not simply say 'spiritual' and recommend spinning cotton like Gandhi?  

Therefore, ultimately we should develop that structure of society which encourages the right impulses and not the wrong impulses, the right trends and not the wrong trends.

In other words, Indians should be turned into Pavlovian dogs 'conditioned' or programmed by the Government.  

1 think that capitalism has done a great deal of good to the world, even though it involved suffering to many people. It is absurd to be always cursing capitalism, as to my mind this is completely wrong and it just confuses the issues. But capitalism and that type of society has had its day, in the broad sense of the word.

Its day was just dawning in South Korea and Taiwan and so forth.  

And indeed, capitalism even in England and elsewhere is different from what it was in the 19th century. It is changing in England, may be it is not changing fast enough, but it is changing.

England was beginning to attract Indians to work in its factories.  

Now, should we go through the same old process

It would be a new process for much of feudal, agricultural, India 

and then ultimately try to reverse it and come back and try to change it?

What was reversed in England was Nationalization.  

We have got the choice before us and we have the experience of others. Why not take the benefits of the higher technological and industrial experience,

Indians didn't have this. Europeans, Americans and Japanese people did.  

without necessarily getting the wrong trends which will create difficulties and cause international and external conflicts?

This nutter believed that gunboats had been used to secure export markets. Since India didn't have a kickass navy, 'export pessimism' was justified.  

Also I believe in our capacity in India — and may be elsewhere too — in winning over people rather than fighting them.

like the Pakistanis? No! The Chinese! They are our brothers! They will never invade!  

I think, on the whole, we can do that. Of course, we can only do that when we have, apart from the friendly attempt, the pressure to win over. If we settled the Indian states problem, it was not only by goodwill, but also by the pressures that were exercised, whether by the new Government of India or the people of the states. Also there was the friendly approach to settle it in a friendly way, not to crush them.

Tell that to the Rezakars in Hyderabad.  

Between these forces, we came to conclusions and we arrived at settlements, in which no doubt, we paid heavy sums of money as privy purses to the princes — which probably was not logical from the point of justice, but was nevertheless justified in the circumstances, because we thus brought about a very major political change without conflict, without the tremendous expenses of a conflict.

With hindsight, we think the opposite. But, to be fair, Nehru's own people weren't sure they really could hold power the way the Brits had done.  

I think that can be applied to our social changes too. We can bring about social changes and developments, under pressure of events, by the pressure of democracy and also by friendly cooperative approach rather than the approach of trying to eliminate each other and the stronger party winning. I think, we can do that even in the industrial field.

Perhaps, Nehru meant that the private sector would get protection and 'the best of monopoly profits- viz. a quiet life'. But, in that case output would stagnate.  

I think that even in the industrial field, the reaction of Indian industrialists as a whole — I am not talking of individual people — has been rather good, and I do not see why we should not utilise that. It creates an atmosphere of cooperation for going ahead. We can get the benefit of experience, ability, etc., of many people.

But where will the investment come from? I will gladly share my experience with you but I won't put money into a venture which, you tell me, you plan to take over from me.  

As I have said, I do not want wrong trends. Now we talk of the public sector and the private sector. Obviously land and cottage industries are in the private sector, although there too I should like to see — and 1 think it is essential— the cooperative element coming in more and more.

In which case, it would be pointless to invest today. Wait till the cooperative is created. Sadly, by then there will be nothing to cooperate over.  

As a matter of fact, it is the only way you can succeed; the only way to meet high level centralization is to have cooperative centralization.

Cooperatives don't have to be set up by the Government.  External economies of scale arise without centralization. 

There is no other way, whether it concerns land or anything else. It cannot survive against the big unit ultimately, unless it is tied up with the cooperative system which gives it the same advantage as the big unit with the centralized apparatus. 

Big units may have diseconomies of scale. If they are eliminated through competition, well and good. But if the Government sets up a big unit with monopoly power, then the thing may turn into a money pit. 

I am not against the industry which may be called the medium — sized or the big industry. As I conceive it, in future, I think all really big industries, all basic industries should be State-owned completely, all mineral resources and heavy industries and the like.

What is their incentive to make a profit? The Government may end up subsidising loss making industries.  

The medium and also the small industries, I hope, will be cooperatively owned.

Nehru was against competition. Elections were all right, provided he won them.  

That will be a gradual process. In between, whatever that period may be, even in regard to the medium industries, private enterprise should have scope. If you give any enterprise scope, I think, you should really give it adequate scope.

Which is what Nehru was refusing to give the private sector 

If you allow them to function, you should give them scope. What should be the State-owned area is a matter apart from what you want to reserve for the State, because a particular thing may be strategic, i.e., of basic importance, since through its ownership you can control other things. If there is private ownership, it affects industries, for example, minerals. Of course, they are basic and they should be owned by the State and so also heavy machine making plants. Only if you have control of these can you really develop the country.

Or run it into the ground. 

Of course, you cannot start everything but the wrong trends have got to be controlled. Therefore, such things as heavy machine making plants, minerals, etc., I think, should be owned by the State.

In which case, the State would have to find the resources to set them up. Where would it get the money from? The tax-payer? But she has no scope for making money. Perhaps the nationalised industries could make profits. If so, they could borrow money on financial markets by issuing debentures . But, that's Capitalism! 

Nehru was aware that the World Bank had made a big loan to the steel company run by Sir Biren Mookerjee and was anxious that Government owned steel plants become operational- e.g. Bhilai built by the Soviets. This was paid for by exports to the Soviet Union under a Rupee-Rouble conversion programme quite favourable to the Russians. 

In 1956 it was not obvious that 'wrong trends' would prevail. However, within a year or two it had become obvious that plans don't matter. Budgets do. You must cut your coat according to your cloth or, alternatively, hope that 'psychology' will cause everybody to think you are splendidly clothed when the truth is you are naked. 

Spivak's family

Spivak's family rose through education and, after Independence, emigration. Sometimes, the intellectual creed they embraced was quackery- e.g. the homeopathy of her great-grandfather, grandfather, and maternal uncle. But, even so, it was a type of quackery in vogue at the time and not, all in all, too mischievous. 

This is the kindest thing that can be said about Spivak's own career.  

Some years ago, Carl Friedman was looking for Frances Bartkowski and me at a bar called Polly's in Middletown, Connecticut. The bartender had called out, Carl reported, "Did anyone see two girls alone?"

I suppose, this was back in the Sixties when these two ladies would have been young enough to be called girls 

Two girls alone.

i.e. not two girls who were part of a bigger group. 

I have been thinking about this - when and indeed how are women not single,

two married women may be sitting together waiting for their husbands.  

as I take hesitant steps toward older women in my family.

The older women in Spivak's family were also the older women in her brother's or sister's family. There was little need to hesitate in stepping towards them. 

 Her own widowed Mum had emigrated to the US and taken US citizenship. She lived with her son's family. 

These women were not single in the usual sense,

because they were not single. They were married.  

except for one.

because she wasn't married. 

I respect that category, respect women by themselves, making sense of their lives within a general culture of reproductive heteronormitivity.

as opposed to brothels or nunneries? 

I can look at one or two who have made themselves visible.

All were visible. Bengali women didn't have 'purdah'.  

But stepping toward my great grandmother, the shadowy grandmother on my father's side, my mother's aunts - I am moved to ask, when and indeed how are women not single?

The answer was that people were single if they were not married- i.e. part of a couple. The thing really isn't rocket science.  

Do we need a special analytic category for female collectivities?

No.  

For lesbian couples?

If you are part of a couple, you aren't single. Why did Spivak not understand this?  

For single lesbians?

They are single so long as they are not part of a couple.  

Is the antonym of single - double? Multiple? Or always - married?

You are either single or part of a couple. I suppose 'thrupples' too might exist. Muslim men, of course, can have four wives. However, if they divorce all of them, they become single again.  

These are women who bred me.

Only if they actually gave birth to you or played a big role in your upbringing.  

I am nobody's mother.

This is also true of many married women 

I ponder a bit on why we take this sense for granted.

We don't. Spivak is very very special in this respect.  

The Mahabharata provides an answer: nathavati anathavat.

which only applies if a married woman has no protector because her husband is dead or a slave and no relative is willing to ensure her safety. 

Incidentally, Draupati in the Mahabharata isn't really 'nathavati anathavat' because, even if her husbands are slaves, she isn't. Moreover, her father is a King and her brother is a mighty warrior. Thus, Draupati gains the freedom of her husbands because otherwise there will be a war which her Daddy might well win. 

My mother's aunt made me understand that phrase in a way that no one else has.

It isn't difficult to understand. The plain fact is Draupati wins. She washed her hair in the blood of Duhshasana. 

Will I be obliged to explain that phrase somewhere in the book? Not now, I think.

She doesn't understand it. That's why she can't explain it.  

She was single,

She wasn't. She was married to five husbands.  

but also singular.

Nope. She was a twin. The mighty warrior Dhrishtadyumna is her brother. 

Singularity is - repetition of difference,

No. What is singular can't be repeated. For Deleuze, it is pretty much the same thing as it is for physics or systems theory. It marks a phase transition. What Deluze says is that genuine repetiton is the universality of the singular. But that 'singular' must be a unique event of great power & very wide significance- e.g. the French or Russian Revolution. It can't be stuff about Mummy or Granny or Aunty. 

repetition and difference, repetition with difference.

like pissing and shitting?  

That is my relationship with these women.

No. Your relationship is biological and emotional. It has nothing to do with some sort of revolutionary philosophy.  

I am their repetition, with a difference.

No. They have a unique physical body and immortal soul 

We are single, singular and together.

No. They existed at different times and places and seldom together.  

My biological mother,

was the woman who raised her

Sivani Chakravorty, was singular and in important senses, single.

No. She was a married lady. Widows are not considered 'single' by the US or Indian Census.  

She lived as a widow for 48 years, and she did singular things on her own.

But was treated as a married lady. People called her Mr.s Charkavorty, not Miss Shivani.  

With her recent death, I have lost an archive.

Gayatri had previously lost her marbles.  

For the first time, I have responded positively to writing my memoirs.

Her memories are confabulations.  

In this hesitant decision, I have been helped by my niece, Medha Chandra, my sister Maitreyi Chandra; and most recently, by one of the most eminent, conventionally single women I know - Romila Thapar, historian of ancient India.

Romila was unconventionally single. Spivak is conventionally divorced.

... The first in line is Barahini Debi, my mother's grandmother, Boronani - literally, the eldest grandmother. Yet Nani is a maternal grandmother

it may be that her first grandhild called her that and the other kids in that cohort took it up.  

and this one was my mother's father's mother. 

She has some significance as one of the first child widows to marry within her caste. Her father was a leading homeopath as was her husband and her son.  At that time homeophathy was wildly popular. Some alllopathic Doctors converted to it- including Gayatri's great-grandfather and father. Her own father was an allopathic Doctor who had studied radiology in England.

The Indian National Congress, founded in the mid-Eighties, attracted homeopaths who were angery with the Medical Establishment. In 1867, Mahendralal Sircar- the second phyician to qualify from Calcutta Medical College- declared his conversion to homeopahty. He was shunned by the faculty. Then in 1878, the University Senate decided to admit him. The entire faculty fought tooth and nail against this decision and thus Sircar was forced to resign. 

In terms of religion, Gayatri's materna ancestors were close to Ramakrishna and Vivekananda- both of whom would become internationally famous. Thus, we may say that her maternal family was part of new movements (or fads) in the wider world. Since Vivekananda had been a big success in America, the Bengali buddhijivi came to have a good opionion of that continent. 

Perhaps the detail means nothing. Perhaps there's a story there.

Not really. My grandmoter was named 'Oma' by her eldest grandchild- who had been born in German- and the rest of us followed suit even though we don't know German. 

It makes my heart twist for my mother, for she knew the answer.

The answer is obvious.  

Boronani died between 1929 and 1931, I think. But I want to catch the resonances in the cavern of her mind, between five and eleven - the probable ages when she was married and widowed.

Spivak can't catch shit. She is too stupid.  

I can remember my own life, though selectively, but well, during that period in my own life. At five, I got my first double promotion into kindergarten

Five is the age you leave kindergarten and enter Primary School.  

and met Bharati Mukherjee.

I think women were keener then men to emigrate to the US back then.

At 11, I was in junior year of high school, and received my music degree, since I was precocious.

Spivak does not have a degree in Music.  

I was developing a "nudge nudge" interest in boys.

There is no such think. 'Nudge, nudge' means some salacious type of innuendo. Spivak may have been developing a sexual interest in boys. She wasn't nudging her classmates and saying 'Cor! look at the arse on that bit of crumpet!'  

Since she went into my making, how was it to live through such a different experience?

This is a subject pretty well covered in Indian cinema and literature.  

"Marriage" is a word. I must think marriage differently in order to enter my great grandmother's normality.

I don't have to. Why? I come from India- just like Spivak- and the thing was routine there.  

A tremendous and enviable party for a five-year-old, or perhaps seven; I do not remember exactly what age she was at marriage. And Mother is not there to tell me.

She is also not there to wipe your bottom.  

Her parents loved her. They had researched the family painstakingly, attempting to assure their daughter's future social security. She would have been sent to her husband's parents' extended family house after puberty, but was widowed before that could happen.

She was a child-widow. Then she married a reform-minded homeopath. One of her daughters married Dwijendralal Ray, the father of Dilip Kumar Roy (who was Gayatri's mother's first cousin) both of whom were major contributors of Bengali Music and Literature. 

Did the boy come for a visit sometimes?

He was a grown man. She may have seen him.  

Was there a version of that nudge-nudge feeling toward this designated lover in the restricted public sphere of the extended family? To be widowed in childhood was a terrible fate.

Whereas dying in child-birth was a barrel of laughs.  

I wrote, some years ago, about the devastation of the caste Hindu widow, as an alternative to the visible violence of sati.

Was what she wrote any good? No. It was shit. Incicentally, there was no 'visible violence' in Sati. The victim was doped up to the gills.  

I just looked it up. This is what I wrote, in that quaint wordy prose

shitty prose 

that I fancied 20 years ago, and for which I have been punished all around, from all political spectrums, from the most traditional racist, sexist; and the most energetic anti-racist, feminist. And here it is. I quote: "The woman as widow, by the general law of sacred doctrine, must regress to an anteriority transformed into stasis."

The woman, as widow, must mourn her husband- or pretend to- for some set period of time. She must not start shitting herself and screaming her tits off.  

In other words, the widow's lot was stagnation and a terrible feeling of self-hate.

Nonsense! She completed the period of mourning & remarried if that's what she wanted to do. High Caste Hindu widows could run off with some bloke who took their fancy but prostitituion too was open to them. Sadly, a lot of them preferred to live a nun-like existence.  

In that very essay that many, many people seem to resent, I also congratulated the collaboration of Indian and British reformers for criminalizing sati

There were about 500 cases a year before the thing was criminalized circa 1830. After that there were virtually none.  

and commented on how it did not necessarily rearrange the women's desires,

changes in the law don't rearrange the desires of cats, dogs, plants, women, etc.  

as did the class marked access to colonial subjectship.

All people in the colony were equal subjects of the Crown.  

Rearranging desires. That is how I understand my task, as a teacher. I am no one's mother, but many people's teacher.

They are as stupid & shitty as you.  .

Gayatri, I say to myself - you are writing a memoir; go back to your great grandmother; forget the historical analysis. Barahini's father, Biharilal Bhaduri, was a friend of Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, one of the chief proponents of widow remarriage among caste Hindus, in 19th century Bengal. Since I mentioned the uneven relationship between reform and class mobility, let me also mention that Vidyasagar's challenge to Thomas Babington Macaulay's infamous Minute on Indian Education (1842),

1835. Macaulay was echoing the views of Roy & Tagore. Vidyasagar agreed with them & introduced English & Bengali instruction in the Sanskrit College.  

as distinguished from his involvement in caste Hindu women's liberation,

Nobody was trying to liberate them. Hindus realised that they would be at a demographic disadvantage if child-widows weren't married off.  

is now split a few ways in the history of class formation.

In Bengal, that history had to do with land-tenure.  

Will people stop reading this if I quote from a long footnote on Martha Nussbaum?

They will think you are silly. Nussbaum isn't Indian. You are. 

Here, Toni Morrison gave me courage. My agent had said - don't make it too theoretical; this is a memoir.

And sweet and wonderful Toni said to me - tell her it's Gayatri Spivak's memoir.

(laughter)

it is fiction of a boring type. 

Not just a memoir! So here is a bit from my footnote. I quote myself now. "The point I am trying to make is that, whereas Vidyasagar's literacy activism, aware of the detail of rural education, applies to the subaltern classes even today - his feminist activism applied to the metropolitan middle class to which I belong."

Vidyasagar was a Civil Servant who agreed with the Missionaries & the 'Utilitarians' that Hindus customs needed to be reformed by law. He was the main native supporter of the Widow remarriage Act. Following the 1854 Wood's Dispatch, he urged the Government to first improve education for the upper classes before seeking to help the rural poor. 

Did Vidyasagar play a big role in shaping the bhadralok? No. They didn't give a shit about Sanskrit. Still he helped Michael Madhusudhan and was considered a learned man.  I suppose his own interest in homeopathy brought him closer to Gayatri's maternal ancestors. 

Turning to Gayatri's mother's father- Pratapchandra Mazumdar (1851-1922), more material is available to reconstruct the likely details of his domestic life

He was not a rich young man. He had put himself through medical college by cooking for a family - a cook in a domestic family.

As a Brahmin, he would have had to cook for himself or else employ a Brahmin cook.  

My brother located his name in the records of the Royal College of Surgeons as having become licentiate of the medical faculty - an LMF degree holder, rather less than an M.D. or an FRCS, of course. But still, an achievement in 1865.

The LMF was only offered in India. It is plausible that he got it at the age of 14.  But he soon converted to homeopathy. 

Did the wedding take place before or after this?

Much after wards.  

How did he get to London?

He may have visited at a later time in connection with his interest in homeopathy. 

Was there an unofficial dowry?

There would have been some 'stree-dhan'- i.e. gold or other ornaments given to the bride by her family. 

I should say, since I'm not getting there, my father did the unbelievable thing of refusing a dowry - a very poor man refusing a dowry in 1928.

I too refused a dowry of ten billion dollars from Beyonce. I let her rape me for free. The odd thing is no relative of mine boasts of the great nobility I displayed in this connection. 

That story . . . all I can say here is that we were brought up to despise the rich.

Her Mummy was Che Guevara. Her Daddy was Lenin.  

Was there an unofficial dowry?

It was perfectly legal to give dowry back then.  

As far as I know, Biharial Bhaduri was not a rich man either.

He was affluent and lived in a substantial house on Cornwallis street. His daughter, in later life, opened a pawn-shop. The family had no objection at all to earning money. 

Boronani was from my mother's father's side.

from a family long settled in Calcutta  

Thakuma was from my father's side.

She was a tall big-boned rustic woman 

Now I come to my mother's mother's side.

My grandmother, Raseswari Debi, had two sisters - Saileswari and Bhubaneshwari. The youngest one killed herself at 17. It is her story I tell in "Can the Subaltern Speak?" In order to show, that whereas the British Indian reform of sati is much celebrated, when a young, single girl attempted to write resistance in her very body, she could not be read.

Nonsense! Brahmins know that if an umarried daughter hangs herself while on the rag, she is reproaching her father for having committed the sin of 'pindalopa' (were menstrual blood pollutes the oblation to the ancestors) by neglecting to marry her off. 

Spivak thinks the girl was actually a Ninja Assassin. 

If only I could occupy with desire, that singular inscribed body. I have tried to understand how she felt as she waited for her periods to begin, so she could disprove what she knew would be the conclusion drawn from her hanged body - illicit pregnancy.

They would examine her hymen. If she wasn't a virgin they'd think she had been raped by a relative or had been seduced and abandoned by a neighbour. But, for Brahmins, the solution was obvious. The father had committed 'pindalopa' by refusing to marry off the silly moo.  

My modest reputation rests on two items - the introduction to Derrida and the commentary on Bhubaneswari Bhaduri's suicide. I am following that track, still. Why did I not mention my relationship to her, when I wrote of her?

Because it is one thing to say 'I know a bloke who got raped by Beyonce' and quite another to say 'Beyonce raped me after I refused her offer of ten million dollars in return for my hand in marriage'.  

I wanted to see what would happen if she didn't have that certificate of authenticity which would reflect more on the people's approval of me, than on her.

You may believe something absurd about a stranger- e.g. that some bloke was raped by Beyonce- but everybody knows you are lying if you say you yourself are that bloke.  

And I learned a lesson from people's complete neglect of her, except for Abena Busia. Most people did not understand that I spoke on her behalf.

There were no revolutionaries in Calcutta in 1926.  

The extreme reaction came when my dear friend, Raji, said in public - some of you were present there - kindly commemorating the 20th anniversary of the speech that became "Can the Subaltern Speak?", that, had she lived, she would have grown into a fascist, nationalist grandmother - like some character in an Amitabh Ghosh novel.

She could have been a supporter of Subhas Chandra Bose who allied himself with Hitler. However, after Hitler's defeat it was Stalin & then Mao who most attracted the devotion of Bengalis.   

Now, Raji would never have expressed herself so, if she had known the family connection. I was cut to the quick, of course. But the defense I offered was reasonable. Ghosh was representing in fiction a woman who had wanted to stand by the "self-styled terrorist freedom fighters." Bhubaneswari had joined such a group.

There was no such group in Calcutta in 1926. The City was consumed by Hindu-Muslim riots.  

I would like to think that my pacifism resonates with her inability to kill.

She killed herself. I don't suppose her Daddy was thrilled by this outcome.  

Yet, she supported armed struggle.

By killing herself. Go thou and do likewise.  

When recently, in a public conversation with Judith Butler, I said in answer to a question from the audience as to how I could be a pacifist in the face of Palestine,

Just say 'history shows that violence has worsened the situtation there. A peaceful way forward would benefit everybody'. 

that the problem with the situation in Palestine was that politics would not allow me to be ethical,

It is unethical to lie. Spivak's politics causes her to be unethical 

no one in the audience knew that I was thinking, in my heart, that it was a lesson I had learned from Bhubaneswari, who was only 17 when she died. She was four years older than my mum.

In which case, Gayatri's Mum would have been 13 when she killed herself. But that would make her 15, not 14, at the time of her own wedding. Perhaps, the father had learned his lesson and thus married off his daughters rather than forcing them to go to school.  

And it was my mother who told me the story, and what kind of flip is given to a mother's testimony, in terms of veridicality? One doesn't know.

If she told you the story she was either very stupid or else a habitual liar or both. 

In my reading this morning, I cannot tell how it was she who opened up for me that line from the Mahabharata - a description of Queen Draupadi, dressed in her single cloth, stained with menstrual blood,

which shows she isn't preggers. Arguably, a foetus in the womb is itself a slave if its father becomes a slave. Such is not the case. Since a slave can't dispose of a free woman and her husband had becoome slaves before he staked her freedom, she could not be a slave in law. This meant her father would have a casus belli and would invade to claim the throne on her behalf. This meant the safer course was to call the whole thing off. 

I think it was Iravati Karve who started up this availability cascade. 

dragged into the royal court. But I can say that it is perhaps from this single woman, a girl of 17 who engendered my intellectual trajectory, that I get my sense of singularity.

Sadly, Gayatri hasn't topped herself. The truth is she came from an upwardly mobile 'bildungsburgertum' family which subscribed to orthodox Hinduism. Her father was from the East and thus her paternal cousins had to run away from Muslims.  

I repeat in difference, these singular women who are mothers in many different ways, who teach me that reproductive heteronormativity is simply one case among many - like a stopped clock giving the correct time twice a day, rather than a norm that we persistently legitimize by reversal.

All these women got married- Spivak was married twice- or wanted to get married and hanged themselves because they weren't married. Spivak may not have been able to have children or may simply not have wanted them. This was perfectly normal for women of her age and class.  

The entire epic of the Mahabharata is about this insult to Queen Draupadi, who had five husbands.

No. It is merely an incident. I suppose it was brought in because of the 'Gambler's lament' in the Rg Veda.  

And in the beginning of the Mahabharata, because it was an oral formulaic epic and each bard had to know the whole story - the entire story is given in the form of a young boy telling it to the blind king.

Nonsense! Spivak is thinking of the Bhagvad Gita- a short chapter in the Epic- which is recited by the bard, Sanjaya, to Dhritarashtra.  

And in that story, again and again, we hear that all of this disaster happened because a woman was brought into public while she was menstruating; while she was in her feminine nature - stridharma.

Sheer poppycock! The disaster's happen because Yuddhistra, like Nala, is addicted to gambling. If a woman is menstruating, she should not be brought into the assembly hall. Such a thing is inauspicious. Later it is revealed that God is the only efficient cause. By his 'Maya', people become deluded and addicted to gambling, or lustful and unmindful of the rules of religion. 

Stridharma means 'duties of a woman'. Bleeding from the cooch is not a duty. 

She was a queen. The queens, when they menstruated, were taken to a lower chamber and they wore only one piece of cloth until the menstruation was over; then they took their bath - healing bath, I suppose - because they were unclean.

This was also the case in joint-families.  

That's the whole story behind Bhubanehswari also, that I'm asking you to remember. She used this menstrual blood as a way to inscribe her message and was not heard.

That message had to do with the father's duty to marry off his daughters before they started menstruating.  

But anyway, when the five husbands in the epic are playing dice in the main court - they keep losing and finally they wager her.

And so, when they wagered her and they lost, she was dragged up from that chamber downstairs. So the queen comes into the open court wearing nothing but that one white cloth, smeared with menstrual blood. This is the thing that led to the fight.

No. There was no fight because a slave can't gamble away a free woman.  

Now, as to how a feminist reads this, that's something else. This is not a presentation of a feminist reading of the Mahabharata, but I'm just saying that because my grandmother's sister dragged herself into the open court of death menstruating, only earned me opprobrium from people who read quickly, and said - Spivak refuses voice to subaltern resistance.

Spivak wasn't a Naxalite. She was paid to pretend to understand worthless shite. That's what she did in an exemplary manner.  

And I see women every day saying - the subaltern is speaking because I am, and so on. And I say to myself - my mother was wrong. She had said - you are using her name? I had said - ma, no one will pay any attention to her. And I was right.

Nobody bothered to establish that Gayatri was lying her head off.  

So the queen is dragged up. She asks the oldest member of the court, who also has a marriage story - am I a piece of property that can be wagered? And the oldest member of the court, Bhishma, is not able to answer her.

The answer was yes- as is shown from 'the gambler's lament' in the Rg Veda. The problem is tha the men had already gambled themselves away. Moreover, by accepting Draupati as a stake, the Kauravas were estopped from claiming she was already their property.  

This is not a bit from the Mahabharata that's given much popularity. If you have seen Peter Brooks' version, you certainly have not noticed this. But there are female versions of the epics, StriMahabharata, which are very different and in the best-known of them, the entire epic ends, not with the brothers climbing the hill to heaven, but Draupadi laughing in the devastated field of war, somewhere in the empty camps. Draupadi's laughter ends the women's epic.

This is nonsense. What does happen is that the Goddess Kali joins three of the Kauravas in the night-slaughter of the innocents.  

Now, the bard describes Draupadi as nathavati anathavat. Generally, this is translated as - someone with husbands, as if an orphan. Natha actually means lord. I translate it differently.

Perhaps, Gayatri saw Saoli Mitra's play, Nathavati anathavat, back in the Eighties and now thinks her Mummy or her Aunty wrote it. 

AI Ardayism in Africa

The recent Jason Arday scandal has us questioning whether Grievance Studies shite is actually AI generated.

Consider the case of -Fainos Mangena who writes in Aeon-

Imagine someone in Harare, Zimbabwe, turning to a large language model (LLM) for life advice, as many increasingly do: ‘I’ve been offered a promotion with a significant raise,’ she writes. ‘But it requires me to move far away from my community. What should I do?’

Try the exercise for yourself. The first answer is general and gives you a framework to evaluate various sorts of costs and benefits which might not be obvious. You can finetune your questions by mentioning your age, gender, religion, culture etc. Thus, the answer I was given- as a Hindu- used Hindu concepts and terminology. If I mentioned I was a Haredi Jew or a Salafi Muslim, the answers would be different.

My point is that AI is not 'one size fits all'. We already have personalized 'Copilots' which learn more and more about your preferences and, going forward, we can expect better, more 'fine-tuned', responses. 

The answer she receives will depend, to some extent, on a certain set of values that informs how the LLM functions.

LLMs are statistical.As the training data increases in size and complexity, LLMs can differentiate between the values of an orthodox Hindu or a committed Western Feminist or a person whose whole focus is on rapid career progression. 

And since artificial intelligence is a Western invention,

Plenty of Asians and Africans have worked on it.  

these values often reflect their creators’ values – clashing with the culture of the person with the query. In the long run, her behaviour may be shaped by an LLM’s values, which she doesn’t intentionally share.

The problem disappears as data relating to people of different types is incorporated into the training of AIs. 

Feedback from users can speed this up.  

The difficulties of using AI in Africa are also linguistic. By the summer of 2025, only 42 languages in Africa were supported by an LLM, out of more than 2,000 found in the continent;

Only 75 have more than a million speakers.  

98 per cent of African languages have no meaningful AI support at all.

100 percent of all languages lacked it just ten years ago.  

If you don’t speak one of the languages supported by an LLM, which includes many millions of Africans, then you are denied the opportunities of AI.

That would be the least of your problems. On the other hand, being denied a Fields Medal is a serious inconvenience for starving people.  

Just as Africa was excluded from the benefits of past industrial revolutions,

They weren't. Theey could buy manufactured goods- e.g. Manchester cotton textiles- from the 1780s. By 1850, there was a regular steamship service between West Africa and UK. Soon there were Nigerian ship's captains & steamboats on African rivers. Railways were introduced into sub-Saharan Africa from the 1860s onward.

I suppose what the author means is tha few Black Africans were industrialists till quite recently.  

so too is it being locked out of the AI revolution.

No. It is included in it at the consumption level but not at the production level where it does not have the capacity to compete with China and US/EU.  

Linguistic and cultural exclusion shape Africa’s relationship with AI.

No. Africa's relationship with AI is that of a consumer. Figuring out better consumer applications of AI can make some Africans rich. Dedicated translators/speech to text apps can raise productivity and thus command a premium.

There is nothing ethically neutral or objective about AI.

Only in the sense that there is nothing ethically neutral about a sandwich.  

Despite the designers’ pretensions toward universality, AI’s ethical framework reflects Western assumptions and biases.

Even if they guys building the AIs are Chinese?  

Deeply embedded in the technology itself are the values of its creators.

No. The values of the creators are wholly irrelevant.  

The growth of AI therefore means the imposition of Western values – very much at the expense of Indigenous frameworks. This is ‘algorithmic colonialism’, in the words of the Ethiopian-born cognitive scientist Abeba Birhane: a new kind of colonialism every bit as destructive as the old.

The old colonialism wasn't destructive. There is no new type because nobody wants to rule over stupid people.  

In order to grasp the seriousness of this new colonialism, we should compare the Western values that undergird AI today with the Hunhu/Ubuntu ethical framework. ‘Hunhu/Ubuntu’ is the name given to the dominant moral tradition of sub-Saharan Africa,

which nobody has ever thought to be ethically or civilizationally advanced.  

expressed in the Nguni/Shona proverb Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu – a person is a person through other persons.

The Shona & the Ndebele certainly spent a lot of time killing each other.  

Known as Hunhu in Shona-speaking communities of Zimbabwe and Zambia, and as Ubuntu in the Nguni languages of southern Africa, the tradition extends across a vast swathe of the African continent.

It is shit. Jason Arday gasses on about Ubuntu. He has had to resign from his Professorship at Cambridge despite being genuinely dark-skinned.  

I suppose people are going to use AI's to screen out AI generated shite. The use of the word Ubuntu is a red flag.