Grammars of Refusal

In one of Wittgenstein's examples in Philosophical Investigations, a so-called "aberrant pupil," instructed to add by twos, does so for a long while and then begins to add by fours. The question posed is whether the pupil has mastered the rule (such that he can confidently innovate on it) or whether he failed to understand it (suggesting he errs when he adds by fours but has been instructed to add by twos). Hannah Ginsborg has recently argued that it is precisely by innovating on the provided rule with a new one of his own that the student shows not a failure of understanding but a profound understanding of how to "go on."3 But there is a third possibility. Might the aberrant pupil be a figure of refusal, neither following nor abandoning the rule, but actively flouting it?

Refusal is a mode of going on whose success is its failure to follow the rule. But refusal may be hard to read: when the refuser flouts the rule, he may do so subtly or overtly. In the case of work refusal, for example, a worker may steal time at work covertly, as Turkey and Nippers do in Melville's great short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener." Or refusal may take more overt forms, like the kind introduced by Bartleby, to the lawyer's office where Turkey and Nippers (don't) work. Bartleby's work refusals come with an explicitly verbalized "I would prefer not to" that soon infects others in the office and ultimately leads to its undoing as well as to Bartleby's own untimely demise.

What might a refusal reading of Wittgenstein's aberrant pupil example look like? To pinpoint the aberrancy of it, we might attend to the specific innovation in Wittgenstein's example: the move from twos to fours. The twos may be taken to reflect the example's own origination in the Investigations' scenes of instruction, which center the couple of teacher and child, recalling Stanley Cavell's cinema of remarriage, in which the male tutors the female back into coupledom.4 The aberrant pupil's shift from twos to fours may show he is ready to move beyond the teacher-student couple (because he knows what he is doing), or it may show he is unready (because he is just erring). But it may also show he is refusing the couple form, as such — and not only the tutorial variety but perhaps also the matrimonial. To move from twos to fours in the matrimonial couple context is to refuse the hegemony of heteronormativity's twosome, which promises happiness and tolerates improvisation but is committed, all the same, to rampant reproduction. To move from twos to fours is an aberrancy that trades in the pairings of the Biblical ark for the herds that are decimated, first, by a catastrophic flood and then, later in the Genesis stories, by fire. Moving from twos to fours, aberrancy improvises. It rejects the promised "pursuit of happiness" on behalf of the "radical art of undoing" that is celebrated by Saidiya Hartman precisely as an extraordinary list of improvisatory acts that perform "the undoing of the plot."5

Posing the question of refusal's grammars, we do well to consider Wittgenstein's grammar alongside that of Hortense Spillers.6 In her renowned essay, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe? An American Grammar Book," Hortense Spillers allows the hope that some new, creative forms of kinship might arise in the wake of the monstrous destruction of kinship wrought by American slavery. The abandonment of the human that slavery engineered might just turn out to be patriarchy's undoing, Spillers says. Humanism is itself a kind of adding by twos that responds to the destruction of kinship by supporting the household-based state. But we can improvise past humanism, finding our own version of adding by fours. We need not reproduce the rule of some over others that the couple form provides. If, as Spillers says, "the feeling of kinship is not inevitable," if it describes a relationship that appears "natural," but must be "cultivated" under actual material conditions," then a way is opened to improvise something new.7

Spillers builds on the experience of the African American "female [who] stands in the flesh, both mother and mother-dispossessed. This problematizing of gender places her," Spillers says, "out of the traditional symbolics of female gender, and it is our task to make a place for this different social subject." In place of the violated maternal, itself a scene of instruction, Spillers proposes a social subject "less interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness than gaining the insurgent ground as female social subject." To make such gains means "actually claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the potential to 'name')." This is in place of the patronym system and it means writing "a radically different text for a female empowerment."8 It means something like stopping, without explanation, to add by twos and starting, without explanation, to add by fours. It means aberrancy.

Both Wittgenstein and Spillers study grammar and embrace the kind of teaching that "points beyond" given examples, but it is Spillers who presses us past Wittgenstein's view of the given as a refuge, Spillers who confronts the monstrousness of the given and the possibility and necessity of its refusal. Her hope is to spur us all to imagine its radical beyond. Where Wittgenstein's aberrant pupil invites us to examine the human innovation in going on, Spillers cannot imagine going on without innovating on the human.

I cannot help but think about Spillers' argument alongside the story of the bacchants told by Euripides in his great tragedy, the Bacchae (405 B.C.).The bacchants also try to innovate on the human. They explore post-patriarchal ways of life outside the city of Thebes on Cithaeron. They abandon their children in the city and nurse wild animals in the field. They experiment with pleasures and kinships that the city does not allow. And then: they kill the King. Their violent regicide illuminates what is at stake in the question of aberrancy's refusal. In A Feminist Theory of Refusal I argued that Euripides's bacchants were not mad, or at least no more so than any other regicides so often admired in democratic theory.9 I would now say that the bacchants' refusal can be seen as a proleptic response to Spillers' call: the bacchants de-gender femaleness, seeking out the insurgent ground of a new female social subject. When they do so, we might say, they stop adding by twos in order to explore the rewards of fours. They are aberrant and this improvisation is their effort to go on, inventing the grammar of refusal as they go.

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Bonnie Honig (@bonnie_honig) is the Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown University. She is author of several books, including, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell, 1993), Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, 2001), Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, 2009), Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (Fordham, 2017), A Feminist Theory of Refusal (Harvard, 2021) and Shell Shocked: Feminist Criticism After Trump (Fordham, 2021).

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