What Does It Mean When I Feel I Love Giving Judgements?

Freedom is perhaps the least freeing thing to think about. It makes a piece of swallowed stone out of all of us. I’m saying this in retrospect because there was a period in my life during which I had this very weird, but giddy, feeling about something, which I left unanalyzed for years. Then, only after a little less than a decade, I understood that this feeling could be made sense of only if freedom were understood in terms of being bound in certain ways. I want to describe what this means, because I want my giddiness to spread.

My tertiary education has consisted primarily of training in generative linguistics, both at undergraduate and graduate levels. There is an easy way to demonstrate what generative linguists spend their time on to people unfamiliar with this field. I will do that with the two pairs of sentences here:

1. Who do you think you will invite?
2. Who do you think that you will invite?
   
3. Who do you think will invite you?
4. Who do you think that will invite you?

Out of these four sentences, most English-speakers — let’s say they all belong to Group A — have been observed to find that only (1), (2), and (3), but not (4), are acceptable sentences in English. There is decades-long research in generative linguistics on this specific kind of contrast between (1), (2), (3), on the one hand, and (4), on the other, but we will concern ourselves with none of that. Our only concern now is that this contrast exists. And it exists, not in any grammar book, but in the minds of English speakers of Group A. This feeling of contrast — between acceptability and unacceptability — in the mind of a speaker of a certain language is what generative linguists refer to as judgements. Generative linguists stare at similar sets of facts and come up with generalizations that seem to accurately describe all the facts in front of them. When they do come up with such a generalization, they might find more facts that show that their generalization is wrong, in which case, they need to find a better, smarter, more insightful generalization. For instance, for some reason, (5) is felt by the same group of English speakers to not be as awful as (4). These feelings — which, from now on, I will always call judgements — can and do vary. That is, some might be less willing to condemn (4) than those in Group A. They will then be in Group B. But the point of positing Group A is that, within Group A, the contrast between (4) and (5) — and maybe others that are yet to be discovered — exists.

5. Who do you think that, with a lot of reservation, and, possibly, grudge, will invite you?

So, judgements come from the speaker’s body; they have the structure of bodily constraints. My first language is Bangla. So, obviously, I have been asked about my Bangla judgements countless times throughout my time as a linguist. When I first started self-eliciting judgements, I had a tingly, euphoric feeling in my head I couldn’t describe. It’s a pity I will never be able to feel that again due to how I numb I’ve become in the past nine years to the feeling of having judgements about sentences, but back in 2017, I almost erupted in my mind, when I realized that I had always known that, in Bangla, it’s acceptable to say something like “I have seen the book/the tree/…” to mean I have seen the book/the tree/…, but, it’s not acceptable to say something like “I have seen the man/the cat/…” to mean I have seen the man/the cat/…; instead, one must say “I have seen the man-ke/the cat-ke/…,” where ke is a dedicated marker that must be used to signal whether something is alive.¹ That was my first encounter with the feeling of finding out that I didn’t know that I knew something.

But what was the reason behind this euphoria? Of course, everyone reading this must be having an intuitive sense of the pleasure I’m describing, but then, I’m asking them: what is it that we’re enjoying, what is it that we’re receiving from (the idea of) such a thing, that makes us happy? The answer to this will be our — all of our — encounter with the feeling of finding out that we didn’t know that we knew something.

What do we mean when we say things like This flower smells nice? It says something about a certain source of pleasure for us. What does that source include? Obviously, the flower. Unfortunately, we tend to stop there. Here’s the (incomplete) list of things that we’re actually saying we find nice when we say This flower smells nice:

• I like being able to smell things.
• I like that my brain responds the way it does when I inhale the smell of the flower.
• I like that that is the only way my brain responds when I inhale the smell.
• I like my brain’s inability to respond in a different, random, manner when I inhale the smell.
• I like that I’m constrained by the mechanisms of my body in such a way that the feeling of a nice smell arises there.
• …

In other words, every time we report a sense of pleasure with the implication that we would enjoy having more of that pleasure, we’re expressing an equal, if not even more intense, fundamental pleasure, that we derive from being unable to have felt in various other ways. We know that pleasure is possible only through prior constraints and limits. I don’t say this in the “vulgar”² dialectical sense, which is, “How would someone know what pleasure is, if pain is not a concept?”. I say this in a sense that is less likely to be dismissed as a conceptual fancy, because it is a structural claim about pleasure: a nice smell is given to us by the olfactory system we have — not another possible hypothetical one. The condition of one olfactory system — the one we have — is that we won’t have other possible kinds of olfactory system — the ones that we can imagine, but don’t have, the ones which might, for instance, make a flower smell like feces, due to their internal make-up. The condition of having anything is that we won’t be able to have other things. (We might later, but never at the same moment, because that moment is gone.) Every actual pleasure — and by extension, everything — that we experience exists because of, and not despite, this moment of exclusion of alternative, counterfactual pleasures.

Assuming freedom traces pleasure — because we tend to demand the right to do things that we think will please us, make us happy, etc. — it must also trace pain, in the sense that, freedom must feed the exclusionary constraints that lead to our senses of pleasure. That is, when we say things like, “I want the freedom to pursue my aspirations,” we’re not saying something like, “Drop me in a desert alone; as long as no one’s in my way, I’ll be fine.” We’re saying, on the contrary, “Please don’t drop me in a desert alone; in fact, don’t just drop me anywhere: give me a house; give me food; give me water; give me medicine; give me everything that will keep my body going, so that I can pursue my aspirations; give me the resources to keep the constraints in my body functioning, so that agency can emerge from those constraints.” When we ask for freedom, we ask to be kept unfree in this specific sense; the rest, we’re often happy to take upon ourselves.

This is supposed to be counterintuitive, because we’re used to being told that the more constraints there are, the less freedom there is. I’m not saying there’s no truth in this intuition; this, of course, gets right the way we feel once we’re done being “unfree in [that] specific sense,” and have taken it upon ourselves to “pursue our aspirations.”³

Perhaps, for this reason, after spending a certain amount of time as a linguist, I observed that giving judgements made me happy, but couldn’t understand why that was the case. The tagline of my thought about this was: what is there to be happy about in confessing that I’ve no option but to find certain sentences unacceptable? After all, when I make these confessions — that is, give judgements — I’m telling people that there are certain thoughts that I’m not able to express in certain forms. That is, these are confessions of a certain impotence, inability.

Well, maybe that’s it? Maybe that’s all freedom is and we all actually know it. Maybe I’ve always known — since before I was able to render this account — that, sometimes, we get a giddy, tingly feeling in our heart, when we get opportunities to say that we’re helpless to not feel in certain ways. Because we all know that, when we say such things, we’re actually saying that someone else — or, maybe, another, hypothetical version of ourselves — has the right to be helpless to not feel in certain other ways. We know that, because we’re unfree in certain ways, we get to be free in the only way that matters.

To put it in other words, having freedom means desperately loving and wanting some things that put me in chains long ago, without my consent. Actually, even saying this is misleading, because it’s not really the case that I am put in chains. Rather, the chains organize themselves in a certain way, and the gaps between various parts of those chains are what collectively emerges as me. So, this emergent being is now desperate to maintain the organization of these chains, so that the gaps remain exactly as they do, and, as a result, it remains. This desperation translates as our desire to eat when we’re hungry, to drink when we’re thirsty, to sleep when we’re sleepy, to bathe when we’re dirty, to heal when we’re injured, etc. Life means constant love and care for what represses us. Peace means feeding the war that is waged by a void, against a void, leading to a void that thinks — correctly — that it’s not a void. And it is indeed a war, because it threatens us: “Feed me, or you die, because you are me.” “War, therefore, is congenital to phenomenality, is the very emergence of speech and of appearing.”⁴ Not in any figurative or it-sounds-provocative kind of way, but literally.

Because this truth lives in us at this atomic level, it has its appearances in supra-atomic levels. And when the shift happens from the atomic to the supra-atomic level, a remarkable thing happens: we start understanding the other — not just as the repressive bodily frame we’re encased in — but as all of our surroundings. The principle that we apply to our bodily frame, we realize we can also apply to everything else. And why wouldn’t we? Our physiological systems rely on matter from the environment/society, which can mean anything from needing protein from food to needing a piece of mattress to lie or sit on on, so that that protein can be metabolized. I think we know this. I also think that the problem is that we know this too well, that we do these calculations way too well way too fast. So well and so fast, that, even when we’re trained to think critically, we sometimes don’t catch up with our own prowess, and are led to saying things like the following (which is completely okay; in fact, more than just okay):

The baby is no calculating creature. There is at some primary level a recognition that one’s own life is bound up with this other life, and though this dependency changes form, I would suggest that this is the psychoanalytic basis for a theory of the social bond. If we seek to preserve each other’s life, this is not only because it is in my interest to do so or because I have wagered that it will bring about better consequences for me. Rather, it is because we are already tied together in a social bond that precedes and makes possible both of our lives. My life is not altogether separable from the other life, and this is one way that phantasy is implicated in social life.

Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence

Butler, it seems to me, is on the right track, but things seem to go a tad awry, to me, at least, when they draw the line between “it is in my interest to do so or because I have wagered that it will bring about better consequences for me” (calculation) and “we are already tied together in a social bond that precedes and makes possible both of our lives” (tie.) Because, for instance, one could keep insisting to them: based on what are you asking me to believe that “we are already tied together in a social bond that precedes and makes possible both of our lives” (ibid.)? Is it just an intuition or something that feels nice to say? What’s the undeniable principle?

I think the undeniable principle emerges when what Butler understands here as the other — an individual life other than my own — is replaced with a different, more unforgiving, other — the matter that a certain individual is made up of, the systems, the chemical reactions, the physiology inside their body, that is, the chains that repress us, the war “waged by a void, against a void, leading to a void.” This war, its warrior, is no less than an other. It’s perhaps the cruelest other we know: we can, in real life, refuse to feed a hungry child, and instead, feed ourselves; but we cannot refuse the bodily events inside us — no matter how repressive they feel — without refusing ourselves. This seems to be a better candidate for the undeniable principle. The other, understood in this way, already partly matches what Butler describes in the passage cited above. For instance, do we seek to preserve the other’s “life”? Yes, we sleep, eat, bathe, which preserves our body and maintains our bodily functions. Where this diverges from Butler is that, in my opinion, the part of me that does the calculating and the part of me that feels the tie are two sides of the same coin. This is because both are in play in the relationship we have with our bodies: we do nurture it because we ourselves emerge from the nurturing process, and this is the nature of the tie. The more we calculate, the more we feed our body, the more tied we become, the more we need to calculate as a result. Neither precedes nor follows the other. And it’s this relationship with our bodies that proliferates in our minds to various ethical obligations we tend to feel.

Once this is established, it becomes easy to arrive at the level Butler is operating at, because, the connection between me and the systems inside my body and that between me and a hungry child share the same structural principle of dependency. We don’t think about this when we feel the urgency to feed a hungry child, probably not because we are not calculating beings, but precisely because we are; in fact, we probably calculate so well so fast, that we never catch up with what we’re calculating and why — which is probably what led Butler themselves to claim that “[the] baby is no calculating creature” (ibid.).

This is all to say, finally, that, back in 2017, when I had just started doing linguistics, I was probably calculating too well too fast as I just described and, as a result, couldn’t catch up with the reason behind my happiness.

Notes

1. This phenomenon has a name; it’s called Differential Object Marking. ↩︎
2. The description “vulgar” is to be attributed only to me. I don’t believe many would agree with this characterization. But I have little qualms about using this word to describe the tendency to understand dialectics — of whatever kind — in this “synonym-antonym” fashion. ↩︎
3. In reality, of course, this clean break is never there; but let’s put that aside, because all of this is a series of thought experiments. ↩︎
4. Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference (Routledge, 2005), p. 162. ↩︎