Letter 65 Let our Words be Acts of Love(Concerning Derrida on Austin on Action)
I.
The first objection against metaphor which Saint Thomas Aquinas considers himself obliged to answer, in order to justify its use in holy teaching, is that metaphor is base. Sacred knowledge is the highest among all the sciences, tenet locum supremum, while the use of images, similes and symbolic expressions is proper to the lowest of teachings, infimae doctrinae, and especially to poetry, quae est infima inter omnes doctrinas (which is lowest among all teachings). The more noble, the sublimior, is closer to the divine; the more base is farther from the divine. (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, Question 1, Article 9. Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1964.)
It would appear that in St. Thomas's writings on metaphor we have in emblematic embryo a manifestation of the metaphysics of presence, which Jacques Derrida has named, delineated, and tirelessly labored to expunge. We have the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible - metaphor employing the sensible, while the literal truth is the intelligible - and this distinction controls, Derrida tells us, "metaphysics in its totality." (Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. p. 13) We have hierarchy: the literal is high, the metaphoric low. If Saint Thomas had known about Saussure, he himself might have written the words composed seven centuries later by his illustrious successor at the University of Paris: "As the face of pure intelligibility, it [i.e. Saussure's signifie HR] refers to an absolute logos to which it is immediately united. This absolute logos was an infinite creative subjectivity in medieval theology: the intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the word and the face of God." (Ibid.) The intelligible, the non-metaphoric, is, for Saint Thomas, the logos, the very logos chastised in Derrida's anti-logocentrism; behind the logos is the voice (especially the voice of God the Father), the very voice chastised in Derrida's anti-phonocentrism - anti-phonocentrism being another name for Derrida's attack on the metaphysics of presence.
Before moving on to Derrida's critique of Austin, a commentary on which will be my main pretext for bringing out what I want to show in this Letter, I will fill in some background for the picture I shall be painting by setting out in a little more detail St. Thomas's argument on metaphor at the beginning of the Summa Theologiae.
Against the use of metaphor and symbolic expressions St. Thomas poses three objections. The first, already mentioned, is that metaphor is low. The second, succinctly stated, is that similitudes using physical things (corporalium rerum) hide the truth (veritas occultatur.) Third, if any of the properties of creatures are like God, they should be the more excellent ones [presumably the intellectual or spiritual properties HR] not the low ones.
St. Thomas then replies that holy teaching ought to make use of metaphor for two reasons:
1. We humans need metaphor because it is our nature to reach the intelligible by means of the sensible (per sensibilia ad intelligibilia veniat).
2. And since sacred teaching is for everybody, spiritual truths are fitly expressed through bodily likenesses which the uneducated (rudes) can grasp.
To the three objections initially posed, Thomas answers: First, that poetry uses metaphors to make representations (representationem), which to human nature is delightful (naturaliter homini delectabilis est). [The editor of the Blackfriars edition, Father Thomas Gilbey, notes that this is an implied compliment to poetry, delectabilis being a noble term which implies that the delight of poetry fulfills ends toward which human nature is divinely ordered.] Holy doctrine finds metaphor necessary and useful. Second, sense imagery does not veil truth; instead the images lift (elevet) the mind to knowledge of the intelligible (cognitionem intelligibilium). Third, in fact the scriptures fitly express the divine with lowly figures (sub figuris vilium corporum) - not because the divine is low, but because it is so high that we avoid confusion by avoiding associating God with what is merely humanly high.
The one comment I want to make before moving on is that here the relationship between the literal and the metaphorical is the reverse of what much modern common sense deems it to be. Our culture is such that many people suppose that the literal meaning of a word is the physical object to which it refers, while its spiritual meaning - if it is anything at all - is poetry. For St. Thomas, on the contrary, the literal, intelligible, truth is spiritual. Corporalium rerum are sources of metaphors for truth; truth itself is incorporeal.
II.
As a further preparation for my comments on Derrida's comments on Austin, I will mention a strikingly different example of the metaphysics of presence: the soi-disant anti-metaphysical logical positivism of the young A. J. Ayer. I bring Ayer's work into consideration not only because of its own specific appeal as an approach to thinking about words and what to do with them, but also because Ayer fittingly represents broad and deep currents of modern thought.
Even if it be not quite true to say that logical positivism was, "...the logical outcome of the empiricism of Berkeley and David Hume," (A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic. London: Victor Gollancz, 1953 [first published 1936]. p. 31.), it is at least true that logical positivism was in key ways typical of a series of empirically-oriented "scientific" philosophies which were influential from the early 17th century through the middle of the 20th. According to Owen Barfield "positivism" (either "logical" or neat) is the philosophical name for the belief more widely known as "materialism." (Owen Barfield, The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1977. p. 11) Although the number of logical positivists, strictly so called, was never large, logical positivism constitutes a not unrepresentative sample of the many modern philosophies consciously at odds with a medieval worldview. It is part of the series of permutations through which in modern times the elements of western discourse successively reorganized themselves - in interaction with the successive reorganizations of practice through which feudalism eventually became the capitalist global economy we live in today. It was a point of departure for the philosophy of John Austin.
In Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic, the intelligibilia of St. Thomas have become tautologies. Necessary truths are analytic and a priori; they achieve certainty at the cost of telling us nothing about matters of fact. (Language, Truth and Logic, chapter III). Truth is a function of the means through which propositions are validated, and the criterion through which (genuine) propositions are validated is, apart from tautologies, whether the propositions enable people to anticipate future experience. (Id. p. 99) The sensibilia of St. Thomas find echoes in logical positivism in the form of the phenomena experienced - the sense-contents, through whose presence or absence empirical hypotheses are validated or refuted. Symbols stand for sense-contents, and a sign is just one more sense-content (or a series of them), whose special function is to convey literal meaning, i.e. to refer to the presence of sense-contents. (Id. p. 64, 63) The error of the metaphysicians (in whose number St. Thomas certainly stands) is, according to logical positivism, that they produces sentence which have no literal meaning, i.e. they cannot be verified by confrontation with something like what Thomas would have called sensibilia. (I say "something like" because for Thomas the sensibilia were physical things, while for young Ayer, although not for all positivists, physical things themselves were "literally" congeries of sense-contents.)
Those propositions which lack literal meaning are not genuine propositions and are nonsensical. (Id. p. 38. Perhaps Ayer had in mind the German term sinnlos, which perhaps more than the English "nonsensical" carries the connotation that to be "senseless" is to lack a grounding in "sense" experience.)
Ayer's purported elimination of metaphysics by logical analysis of the requirements of literal meaning does nothing to abate Derrida's critique of the metaphysics of presence. Derrida would say it lives on in logical positivism - here I extrapolate from what he has said concerning Condillac and others (e.g. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988. pp. 4-6) since to my knowledge he has not written on Ayer. Admittedly the psychoanalytic considerations that lead Derrida to associate presence with the Voice of the Father are less conspicuously relevant here than in the works of St. Thomas, but nonetheless the full presence of the referent is a sine qua non that logical positivism cannot do without. It is required, for example, in Ayer's theory of physical objects, according to which a physical object is a logical construction out of sense-contents. All sentences referring to, say, a table, must be translatable (according to Ayer) into sentences referring to sense-contents. (Id. e.g. p. 123) The presence of a sense-content, the referent of the sign, is a presence; it betrays the operation of what Derrida calls the metaphysics of presence, what he sometimes calls the Empire of the Sign. The same Empire rules the presence of the Voice of the Father, the presence of the table, and the presence of the sense-contents out of which the table is allegedly constructed.
Moreover, in logical positivism hierarchy returns with a vengeance, in the form of the invidious distinction between genuine propositions and nonsense.
III.
John Austin's work was part of a movement in philosophy which declined to rest content with logical positivism's tendency to demote to the low status of "nonsense" the great majority of words human beings utter. "...the continual discovery of fresh types of nonsense, unsystematic though their classification and mysterious though their explanation is too often allowed to remain, has done on the whole nothing but good. Yet we, that is, even philosophers, set some limits to the amount of nonsense that we are prepared to admit we talk; so that it was natural to go on to ask, as a second stage, whether many apparent pseudo-statements really set out to be 'statements' at all." (J.L. Austin, How to do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962, p. 2.)
Austin shows - why did anyone ever doubt it? - that non-statements are not necessarily nonsense.
For example, to say, "I do," when one is bride or groom at a marriage ceremony, is significant but not literally true. Nor is it literally false. It is not a metaphor. As Austin rather picturesquely puts it, saying "I do" is not reporting on a marriage but indulging in it. (Id. p. 6)
Austin proposed a framework for the systematic classification and study of non-statements, especially those he called "performatives." When words are used performatively, the aim is not as much to state a truth as it is to do something - to marry, to make a bet, to baptize a child, to christen a ship, to promise, to buy, to sell, to bequeath....
Once Austin started thinking in terms of performatives, it was inevitable that the list of acts one performs in speaking would be extended until it came full circle to include the speech acts the concept of "performative" was originally designed to distinguish: to describe, to state some fact, to assert, to deny, to report on a marriage .... (Cf. Id. p. 162) "Describing," like "marrying," is a performance. Stating a literal a fact, asserting, and denying are also human acts, performances. For that matter "writing a summary of theology" is a human performance, an action or series of actions, as are "(purportedly) eliminating metaphysics through the logical analysis of language," and "considering in one's William James Lectures at Harvard in 1955 some cases and senses in which to say something is to do something; or in which by saying something or in saying something we are doing something." (cf. Id. p. 12)
The theory of "speech acts" thus turned out to be a very comprehensive theory. Furthermore, Austin hinted that the study of speech acts might itself be a part of, or overlap with, a comprehensive study of "ceremonial" acts, whether the performances be done with words or with, for example, ritual motions. (Id. p. 25)
In order for one of the performatives first considered by Austin; or, by extension, any kind of speech act; or, one might plausibly suppose by a further extension, any kind of ceremonial act; to be successful (as Austin puts it, "happy") it is required that, first and most importantly:
"There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include [except in the extension I have supposed to ceremonies without words HR] the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances...." (Id. p. 14, cf. pp. 26-34)
I quote the way Austin here links speech acts to the existence of social conventions because I will rely on this link in what follows. By naming "speech acts" as a comprehensive category, one implicitly names as also fundamental what speech acts require to succeed: existing accepted conventional procedures. Further, Austin includes "uttering words" in the wider classification of "...all acts...which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts:...." (Id. pp. 18-19) I think the key role thus given to the conventional lends support to one of my erstwhile claims which lies in the background of what I will say below, namely that one of the most useful distinctions philosophers can make is a nature/culture distinction. (It is a dangerous distinction, but so are all distinctions - so are all words.) "Culture" might be defined as a set of "existing accepted conventional procedures". Calling the nature/culture distinction fundamental, in turn, lends support to my related claim, which also lies in the background of what I will say below, that cultural anthropology and history ought to be regarded as more comprehensive disciplines than politics or economics, the latter being usefully conceived as sub-fields of anthropology and of history pertinent to only to western and westernized cultures.
Part of the merit of the nature/culture distinction is the role it plays in Paulo Freire's concept of conscientizacao (consciousness-raising). Conscientizacao is humanizing because it is the deepening of a human being's awareness that she or he is a co-creator of culture, not a thing of nature. Through conscientizacao one emerges as capable of joining with others in transformative praxis to change culture by overcoming oppressive political and economic structures. The oppressive structures are in reality, contrary to what one accepted before one's consciousness was raised, part of culture, not part of nature. (Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1990. Chapter Three. Conscientizacao is defined at pp. 101 and 112)
IV.
I welcome speech act theory for my own reasons, which probably do not altogether coincide with anyone else's. They do not much coincide with Austin's own appreciation of his accomplishments. Some of them are:
1. Seeing speech as action harmonizes with conceiving social behavior as drama, which, in turn, implies humanistic methodologies for psychology and the social sciences. (The logical links among speech, action, drama, and social science methodology are well worked out in Rom Harre and Paul Secord's The Explanation of Social Behavior. Totowa, N. J.: Littlefield, Adams. 1973.)
2. Seeing speech as action lends itself to a naturalistic worldview. Think of speech acts as a type of ceremonial action. Think of "speech ceremonies" as action characteristic of the behavior of humans as a social species (cf. Max Weber's identification of social action with action meaningfully oriented toward others. Economy and Society. New York: Bedminster Press, 1968. Vol. I, p. 23). Now, I believe, it is easy to see the uniquely human forms of communication as further evolutionary developments moving beyond - but not sharply divided from - the ritualized signaling behavior observed in other animals. (See R. A. Hinde, Biological Bases of Human Social Behaviour. New York: McGraw Hill, 1974, Chapters 5-10)
3. The concept of speech as action, and the related idea that typically human action is action guided by speech, can be transposed into speaking of discourse and praxis. From this transposition flows the concept that discourse is practice - that discourse is not a disembodied contrary of practice. Further, the idea of praxis implies that true human practice includes deliberation and reflection - it includes both participation with others in making group decisions, and what Plato called "the discourse of the soul with itself." The idea of praxis contributes to articulating a rationale for cultural change, for cultural structures are the symbolic structures which guide the processes of deliberation and reflection, which guide action. (Letters 10, 26, 38, 63, "Introduction" to Volume II.) Human work, as praxis, is to be distinguished from alienated labor - and this distinction leads in turn toward the conclusion that we ought to be building a society in which labor will no longer be alienated.
4. Seeing speech as action comports with seeing history as the rise and fall of a series of cultural structures. Each culture has its "metabolism" (Marx's word for the culture's exchange of matter and energy with the environment), its ceremonial acts (its accepted conventional procedures), its structural mechanisms for self-defense (See Letter 37) and its structural mechanisms for self-reproduction. (Cf. Pierre Bourdieu and J.-C. Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture [using the term "culture" more narrowly than I use it]. London: Sage, 1990.)
5. Drawing a nature/culture distinction in a way harmonious with speech act theory helps to dissolve what I call "the metaphysics of economic society," which might also be called "the a priori framework of capitalism." In my view the logische aufbau der Welt of Carnap, Ayer, Russell, Frege, the early Wittgenstein and others, was a rarefied version of the Cartesian-and-empiricist framework (i.e. in one of its central versions: a Cartesian plane on which equations can be mapped showing the impacts of variables on each other) which gave the modern world its intellectual charter (what in Cambridge in the 17th century was called the "new Logick"), which dovetailed with its social institutions, its ethics, and its approach to nature. It is hard to transform the latter without also transforming the at-root mechanistic "Logick" which for classic liberalism defined thought itself - but, fortunately, late Wittgenstein and Austin have transformed the "Logick;" they have demoted it from the status of a priori framework into which every locution must be translated to qualify as meaningful, to the status of one historically-given set of language-games among others. (See Letters 8, 19, 24, 46-48, 50-52)
6. For related reasons speech act theory helps to dissolve "economics" conceived as the a priori framework of any possible society; the term "economics" is seen to be more usefully employed to refer to features of the social conventions of the modern European world-system, which has become the global economy. (See Letters 62,63)
7. Partly but not only because logos is God (John 1:1), speech-as-action-and-as-guiding-action favors interpretations of tradition which make it not-just-nonsense and not-just-wrong-science. The software with which traditional cultures have been guiding action for millennia are sources to which people of the 21st century can look for wisdom to help society "back into the future." (Letters 18, 22-25, 57).
8. The extended use of the category "act," or "action" favors ethics, because the word "action" carries the meaning that our actions are what we deliberate about and what we are responsible for.
V.
Having reasons for being happy about certain of John Austin's major contributions to philosophy (cf. besides the above, Letter 19), and being also rather happy on the whole with Jacques Derrida's contributions (Letter 50), I feared at first that Jacques Derrida's trenchant critique of Austin's work would compel me to undergo a severe attitude adjustment. I have since concluded that for the uses to which I want to put it, speech act theory is more advanced than retarded by Derrida's engagement with it.
Derrida's study of Austin occurs in a paper given at Montreal in a symposium on "Communication." Derrida considers himself obliged to begin by resisting a certain temptation which represents a proclivity of contemporary common sense. A tremor, a shock, can be physically "communicated" from place to place, and one can also say that in underground labyrinths one cavern "communicates" with another by means of a passage or opening. The temptation is to say that the literal meaning of "communicate" is found in such physical applications of the word, while the application of the term "communication" to meaningful human speech is a metaphor derived from primary and literal physical applications. (Jacques Derrida, "Signature, Event, Context," in Limited Inc. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988. pp. 1-2. The same essay was previously published in Marges de la Philosophie. Paris: Minuit, 1972, in the English translation of the latter, and in Glyph I, 1977)
Derrida's has two interesting reasons for not thus distinguishing between the "literal" and the "metaphoric" meaning of the word "communication."
1. First, because the whole notion of distinguishing the true, literal, meaning of a word from its metaphoric meanings is nowadays problematic.
If this first reason is valid, it levels not just this proposed conceptual hierarchy, through which the "primary" physical significance of "communicate" is ascribed a higher rank (as, perhaps, "hard data") than the merely metaphorical significance of the same word. It levels every conceptual hierarchy which depends on a literal/metaphorical distinction. In particular, the distinction St. Thomas encountered and worked with, between the literal spiritual truth (the baptism) and the physical image (the water) is leveled. And in particular Ayer's distinction between sentences with literal meaning (those which refer to sense-contents, directly or indirectly), and nonsense (all other sentences except tautologies) is leveled.
[It should be said at this point that Derrida's remarks are always subject to a qualifying complication which is, I believe, the same as a qualifying complication which needs to be appended to all of the late Wittgenstein's remarks. It is that "of course" after Derrida has finished his critique of "metaphor," of "presence," of "intention," of "voice," etc. people will go on using these terms as before, and rightly so. As Derrida writes at one point, in the kind of conceptual scheme he advocates "...the category of intention will not disappear ; it will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance." (Id. p. 18) The same can be said of the literal/metaphoric distinction, and of "presence." Derrida does not want to outlaw the proper and legitimate uses of the terms which from time to time become his targets; rather he "deconstructs" the "authority" with which they are said to "govern." The parallel with late Wittgenstein is that Wittgenstein wanted to say that terms have legitimate employment in everyday life and in the sciences, but are taken out of their functional contexts, and given a general "metaphysical" meaning uberhaupt by philosophers. For both Derrida and Wittgenstein philosophers are culprits; the qualifying complication is that it is to be understood that once "deconstruction" or "complete clarity" eliminates philosophical error, then ordinary citizens are to be allowed to go on making proper use of, for example, the distinction between the literal and the metaphoric meaning of a term. See Stanley Cavell, "On the Availability of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy," in George Pitcher [ed.] The Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964) ]
2. The second reason Derrida gives for not construing its application to physical objects as the "literal" meaning of "communicate," and its semiotic use as the "metaphoric" meaning of "communicate;" is that the very idea of "metaphor" already presupposes a notion of "displacement," or "transport." "Displacement" is the more general notion, which is constitutive for the idea that a tremor "is communicated" when motion is displaced from one place to another; and also constitutive for the idea that the meaning of the word "communicate" has been displaced from its allegedly literal application to the communication of tremors from the epicenters of earthquakes, to its allegedly metaphorical application to the communication of ideas from mind to mind.
Hence according to Derrida what we really need is not a decision about which sense of a word is to be regarded as the literal one, but rather an account of how "sense" begins in the first place through "displacement," and through that which is indexed by other terms which Derrida presses into service in order to characterize the primary process through which meaning gets started: "mark," "trace," "the structure of locution," "spacing," differance, "ecriture," "the graphematic in general," "iterability." I believe that any attempt to talk about talk, or write about writing, in Derrida's or in late Wittgenstein's way is bound to be deucedly frustrating, because any term one uses to express oneself with (for example "express," "oneself," and "with") is already language, and is already part of the communicative process one is trying to cleanse of misunderstandings - is already overlaid with a history full of the millennial errors one is trying to exorcise. I will not work here with "displacement," which Derrida does not further develop in the context of his comments on Austin, but instead mainly with another horse from Derrida's stable, "iterability," which is the term of art he uses most in commenting on Austin.
Derrida introduces the neologism "iterable" as a synonym for "repeatable." "My communication must be repeatable - iterable - in the absolute absence of the receiver...." (Id. p. 7) A few lines later "iterable" serves as a synonym for "readable." "A writing that is not structurally readable - iterable - beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing." (Ibid.) At the same place he suggests that the Latin root iter probably is derived from the Sanskrit itara, which means "other."
Then, in a remarkable precis of the complex and subtle remarks on "communication" which contain his critique of Austin, Derrida writes: "...everything that follows can be read as the working out of the logic that ties repetition to alterity." (Ibid.)
Some pages later, Derrida tells what he wants to say, "Above all." "Above all, at that point [i.e. at the point where the category of intention, as in vouloir dire, no longer governs the entire scene and system of utterances, but rather takes its place "democratically," so to speak, among its fellow categories. HR] we will be dealing with different kinds of marks or chains of iterable marks and not with an opposition between citational utterances and singular and original event-utterances on the other." (Id. p. 18) The "citational utterances" are those utterances which, Derrida finds, Austin had demoted to the status of parasites on normal usage; some of the examples Austin had given were quotations, a speech in a play, words introduced in a poem, words spoken in soliloquy, and mention of the locution as an example in a grammar lesson. The "singular and original event-utterances" are those utterances to which, Derrida finds, Austin had accorded the higher status of "normal" or "serious."
We are entitled to take Derrida at his word. Everything he says in his comments on Austin is the working out of the idea of "iterability" conceived as a logic that ties "repeatability" to being "other." And, whatever else follows from this "working out," Derrida wants it surtout to level the hierarchical opposition ranking what Austin once called the "serious" and "normal" use of language, above what Austin called its "parasitic" mention. "The `non-serious,' the oratio obliqua will no longer be able to be excluded, as Austin wished, from `ordinary language.'" (Derrida, Id. p. 18.) (See also Austin, op. cit., How to do Things with Words, p. 22)
It takes eleven pages in the English translation for Derrida to move from the definition of iterability to the consequence that the so-called "parasitic" is every bit as essential to language as that language Austin called "ordinary." (Id. pp. 7-18) Derrida asks whether a secret code, known only to two people, would still be writing if both died. Yes it would, he answers, and the case serves to illustrate the general point that a code - "organon of iterability" - (Id. p 8) is in principle communicable, transmittable, decipherable, and, in a word, iterable, for any possible user, and hence - by the same token - in the absence of any given user. "To write is to produce a mark that will constitute a sort of machine which is productive in turn, and which my future disappearance [disparition] will not, in principle, hinder in its functioning...." (Ibid.) Writing "as an iterative structure" (Ibid.) does not essentially depend on the presence of any given sender, receiver, writer, reader, addressee, or signatory.
A minimal characterization of the classical concept of writing would define it as: (1) a mark that subsists, one that can be reiterated in the absence of its producer; (2) a sign that breaks with its context - readable even if the whole context, including the writer and what the writer wanted to say, are lost; (3) spacing, separating one mark from other marks. (Id. p. 9)
But these characteristics are true of all language, spoken as well as written. In speech, "Through empirical variations of tone, voice, etc., possibly of a certain accent, for example, we must be able to recognize the identity, roughly speaking, of a signifying form." (Id. p 10) But the unity of the signifying form is constituted by its iterability. Hence there is such a thing as a grapheme in general, whether written (in the classical sense - Derrida expands the scope of the concept of "writing"), or oral, or gestural, or what-have-you. The grapheme can be weaned from its referent, from its producer, from its receiver, from its signified, from the intentions of its producer, from its context.... (Id. pp. 10-12)
If we ask now where Austin went wrong in How to do Things with Words, the answer is that all Austin's difficulties have a common root in his failure to take account of the "graphematic in general." (Id. p. 14)
Derrida proposes to demonstrate how Austin's errors stem from his neglect of the graphematic in general (constituted by its iterability, Id. p. 10) through a discussion of the role context plays in Austin's analysis. (Id. p. 14)
At this point I think I need to back up to bring into the discussion certain of Austin's remarks on context. Austin had written: "The total speech act in the total speech situation is the only actual phenomenon which, in the last resort, we are engaged in elucidating." (Austin, op. cit. p. 148)
Speaking of the criteria for determining the success or failure ("felicity" or "infelicity") of a putative speech act, Austin had written:
Speaking generally, it is always necessary that the circumstances in which the words are uttered should be in some way, or ways, appropriate, and it is very commonly necessary that either the speaker himself or other persons should also perform certain other actions, whether "physical" or "mental" actions or even acts of uttering further words. Thus, for naming the ship, it is essential that I should be the person appointed to name her, for (Christian) marrying, it is essential that I should not be already married with a wife living, sane and undivorced, and so on; for a bet to have been made, it is generally necessary for the offer of the bet to have been accepted by the taker (who must have done something, such as to say "Done"), and it is hardly a gift if I say "I give it you" but never hand it over. (Austin, op. cit. pp. 8-9)
Derrida objects to Austin's way of so dealing with the "total speech situation," saying that it requires the conscious presence of the speakers and receivers in the totality of the operation; that Austin can allow no "residue" left over escaping the horizon of the unity of meaning; that the context must be exhaustively definable for Austin's analysis to work; that it requires absolutely meaningful speech master of itself; and a free consciousness present to the totality of the situation; and, above all, that the organizing center of Austin's "context" is the conscious intention of the speaking subject. (Id. pp. 14-15)
It might be interesting to speculate on how Austin might respond, if he could speak to us from his grave, at this barrage of unreasonable opinions posthumously attributed to him. While alive Austin declined to express himself through terms of art, like "presence," "horizon," and "totality," derived from continental philosophical traditions, and he might be surprised, perhaps piqued, to be told that his remarks on the circumstances which determine whether the christening of a ship or a marriage ceremony is valid implied that he, Austin, was taking certain philosophical positions that Derrida had correctly formulated in a terminology that Austin himself assiduously avoided using.
Whatever else Austin might say, he would surely deny that his doctrine that a speech act occurs in a total speech situation implies that the person performing the speech act has perfect knowledge about that situation, such that he could state everything there is to be known about the situation exhaustively and with incorrigible verity. (Cf. J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia. Oxford: University Press, 1962. Chapter X)
But I digress. My question is not whether Derrida has been fair to Austin - a question whose answer is, in any event, comparatively unimportant in the great scheme of things - but rather how Derrida's work contributes, indirectly through improving our conceptual tools, to diminishing the pain of living and increasing the joy thereof. What Derrida wants to do with the opinions about a free consciousness present to the totality of a context etc. which he (rightly or wrongly) says Austin should have held in order to bring his presuppositions to consciousness, is to say that Austin would not have held them (or would not have held presuppositions that implied them) if he (Austin) had not been blinded by a certain philosophical move. (Derrida, op. cit. p. 15)
The move which, according to Derrida, imprisoned Austin in the belief that the context of the speech act is fully present in the consciousness of the speaking subject, was a taking a focus on the normal and successful performative speech act, which failed to comprehend the consequences of the fact that every speech act is a risk. It might fail. Austin, "..in the name of a kind of ideal regulation... excludes that risk as accidental, exterior, one which teaches us nothing about the linguistic phenomenon being considered." (Ibid.)
Given that Austin had made it clear that he was aware that any speech act (indeed any act which relies for its efficacy on ceremonial conventions, with or without speech) ran the risk of failure (for example, a marriage, for example, might fail as a performative act because it is void due to bigamy; its voidness might subsequently become apparent when it is discovered that the groom was already married at the time of the ceremony)(Austin, How to do Things with Words, op. cit. pp. 18-19) one must ask what deep and far-reaching consequences of the risk of failure Derrida thinks Austin did not sufficiently appreciate.
First, Derrida says, Austin fails to appreciate, "... a certain conventionality intrinsic to what constitutes the speech act itself, all that might be summarized rapidly under the problematical rubric of `the arbitrary nature of the sign,' which extends, aggravates, and radicalizes the difficulty. `Ritual' is not a possible occurrence, but rather, as iterability, a structural characteristic of every mark." (Derrida, Id. p. 15)
Second, Derrida says, Austin failed to consider the risk of failure as a "necessary possibility," the very law of language itself.
The only way I have been able to make sense of Derrida's assertions is to suppose that he is saying that if Austin had been sufficiently aware that every ritual act, and a fortiori every speech act is as iterability radically conventional, then he would not have thought what Derrida thought he thought: namely, that speech acts occur in total contexts totally present to speakers. He would have realized that contexts cannot possibly be exhaustively defined, and he would have seen the repeatability and alterite of the speech act as connecting it essentially with its own repetition, but only non-essentially, loosely, with lots of slippage, with plenty of room for error, with plenty of risk of failure, to whatever might be present in the context.
Hence Derrida can ask of Austin, "...what would be meant by an `ordinary' language defined by the exclusion of the very law of language ?" (Id. p. 17) Austin makes the mistake, according to Derrida, of taking an ideal case, the paradigmatic successful performative (for example, the successfully performed marriage) as the clear and central case, which defines what it means to perform a speech act, and then to cast everything supposedly abnormal to one side, as "failure," "parasite," "non-serious," "quotation," "mention without use,"..... But if the very law of language is to be iterable, then it is the ritual, the radically conventional character, of the speech act which makes it speech - not any similarity to a paradigmatic case of successful performance.
I believe that although Derrida exaggerates Austin's naivete, it is true that Austin does not deconstruct the speech act as radically as Derrida does. Derrida is right to describe himself as having "passed beyond" Austin's theory of the performative (Id. p. 13) inasmuch as he insists more than Austin does on the conventional character of the elements speech acts are made of, including, in addition to those specifically discussed above, the "intention" of the speaker, the "person" who does the action, and whatever might be meant by "consciousness."
What Derrida has worked out as consequences of iterability is all to the good from the point of view of those of us who want to work with a nature/culture distinction, and to reconstruct culture in order, as Gramsci says, to adjust it to physical functions, all to the good. The transformation of the global economy into a humane and sustainable mosaic of ways of life can only benefit from realizing that even the "ordinary" and "serious" language-games have a ritual character, and from realizing that even such categories as "intention" and "person" are socially constructed and can be reconstructed. (On such grounds I criticized Habermas for "pretending to be real" in Letter 7.
A consequence of Derrida's deconstruction of Austin is that speech acts depend even more radically on socially constructed contexts than Austin supposed, or at least more radically than Austin worked out and demonstrated. Derrida's work is consciousness-raising, in Freire's sense, because it pushes back the perceived boundary between nature and culture, diminishing the realm of what is taken to be natural, and augmenting the realm of that which depends for its existence on human symbolic interaction. It implies that those of us who deliberately set out to reconstruct social reality have more scope; and it implies the same for everyone else too, since everyone is always recreating and being recreated by social reality, guided or misguided by varying degrees and kinds of deliberation. After Derrida, more is action; less is inevitable. Austin showed that to speak is in many ways a performance; it depends on conventions as does acting on a stage. Derrida breaks down the distinction between the "real" performance and the "stage" performance, and helps us to see that in all our performances we participate in social processes which construct the stage we act on, assign us our parts, and write the script.
My response to deconstruction, which I formulated in the jussic subjunctive in the title of this Letter, is to regard speech acts as not different in principle from other acts; not different from other ritual acts; and not different from non-ritual acts or from those whose ritual element is so slight it may be disregarded (if such there be). Conversely, other acts are like speech acts; they do things too, without words.
Concerning any and all acts, I propose to ask what work they do in the material world. Derrida may not follow me here, partly because he may not grant that there is a material world, in which words and other actions have consequences, and partly for other reasons to be discussed below. But I can still derive from him a renewed appreciation of the radically conventional nature of social reality, and I can still respond by trying to improve social reality's practical functioning, whether or not Derrida follows me in accepting that there is a reality beyond symbols (a la Jacques Lacan) or in embracing naturalism (a la John Dewey).
And whether or not Derrida would concur, I agree with St. Thomas that what we should do with words, or with anything, is to perform those acts the saint listed under the heading eleemosynarum. Eleemonsynarum is often translated "acts of mercy." Such acts are, Saint Thomas says, effectus caritatis (effects of love). He lists fourteen of them:
1. Feeding the hungry.
2. Making good drinking water available to everyone. (potare sitientem)
3. Clothing those who need clothes.
4. Providing housing for everyone.
5. Attending to the sick.
6. Freeing the oppressed.
7. Honoring the dead.
8. Sharing knowledge.
9. Giving each other advice.
10. Consoling those who are in sorrow.
11. Facilitating wiser choices for those who choose lesser goods. (corrigere peccantum)
12. Forgiving offences.
13. Enduring people with troublesome and obnoxious personalities. (portare onerosos et graves)
14. Remembering all creatures in prayer. (pro omnibus orare)
(St. Thomas Aquinas, op. cit. vol. 34, pp. 240-41. 2a 2ae Q. 32, art 2. Translations modified.)
St. Thomas concludes his initial discussion of this enumeration of eleemosynarum, before replying to objections, by saying: "...as St. Paul advises, `we who are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak,' (Romans 15:1). And this means not only enduring people whose disordered conduct makes them irksome to us, but also helping them with their own burdens, whatever they may be, according to Galatians, `Bear one another's burdens.'" (6:2)
VI.
It might be objected to my views concerning what to do with words that - quite apart from whether Derrida might or might not personally sympathize with them - that there can be no legitimate grounds for advocating them, in the light of what Derrida has demonstrated in his philosophical work.
I will leave aside here the objection that after deconstruction it is any longer defensible to refer to material reality. I freely admit that although I use words like "the work words do in the material world," I fail to refer to any such world. I take refuge in Lacan's formulation that there is a "Real" which "resists symbolization absolutely," even though, in strict logic, perhaps we can only wave at it, or gesture toward it, or feel it, or make vain attempts to determine its definitive name, and can never make a word or a sentence clearly refer to it. (Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire, Livre I: Les Ecrits Techniques de Freud, Paris: Seuill, 1975. p. 80) I believe that in spite of the logical impossibility of moving beyond signifiers to referents, still, in the end, we need reality more than reality needs us.
The objection I wish to consider here is another one: that deconstruction has dismantled all authority, all hierarchy. It might be said that I am setting up "physical reality," or "traditional wisdom," or "Nature," or "human needs," or "life," or "caring," as an implicit principle of authority, and that whatever one might think of my particular proposals concerning sources to which humans might turn for authoritative guidance, Derrida has shown that no authority whatever is legitimate. He has, it might be alleged, in refuting the metaphysics of presence, shown that nobody should ever obey anything - not even, or perhaps especially not even, love dwelling in the soul as its principle. (c.f. John 14:23, Letter 57, para. 32) For Derrida has written, "Very schematically: an opposition of metaphysical concepts (e.g. speech/writing, presence/absence, etc.) is never the confrontation of two terms, but a hierarchy and the order of a subordination." (Derrida, op. cit. p. 21) Taking Derrida to have shown that through the use of his method all metaphysical concepts can be deconstructed, it might be taken to follow that no subordination to authority can be justified.
Opposition to authority does seem to be a leitmotif of Derrida's work. Thus he attacks the traditional ranking of writing below speech as speech's pale copy as a way to insure the "authority" of a certain historical discourse. (Derrida, op. cit. p. 7) The absence implicit in iterability disrupts the "authority" of the code. (p. 8) Austin is praised for "freeing" the analysis of the performative from the "authority" of the truth value. (p. 13) and for criticizing the "authority" of the code (p. 19). Similarly, whatever is said to "govern" tends to be reckoned to the negative side of Derrida's ledger. (e.g. at pp. 18-19 what is wrong with intention and with the speaker as source of an utterance is that they "govern" "the entire scene" and Austin's analysis, respectively.)
Derrida was asked by an interviewer whether he really meant to say that any specification of linguistic rules and conventions plays into the hands of the police, so that there is something politically suspect in the very project of trying to fix the contexts of utterances. (Interview with Gerald Graff, op. cit. p. 131)
Derrida replied that he certainly does not consider specifying linguistic rules politically neutral. A political evaluation is always called for, even if one's politics elude such simple classifications as "right" and "left." But as to the police, he certainly did not mean to say that the police are always repressive. "A red light is not repressive." (p. 132) The law is not in general repressive, not even when it consists of prohibitions. "Unjust brutality" must be distinguished from legitimate "prohibitive force." And in any event, the law does not consist entirely of prohibitions. (pp. 132-33)
Elsewhere Derrida develops his views on how to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate authority. (p. 156) Thus Derrida recognizes what in any event would be obvious even if he had not felt called upon to say so himself, that there is nothing in the concept of iterability nor in the project of deconstructing the history of western philosophy, conceived as several millennia of logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence, which implies that human groups should not have standards for their conduct.
Nevertheless, Derrida's results do put certain restrictions on the reasons one can give for justifying laws, or, for that matter, for justifying social conventions of any kind. One can no longer use arguments which presuppose the validity of what Derrida has called a metaphysics of presence as philosophical trump cards for justifying a priori the merit everywhere and everywhen of, for example, an ethic of "respect for persons." This does not imply that "respect for persons," to continue the example, is an ideal human societies should not have, although it does imply that Kant's rationale for respect for persons is invalid. Austin may have been naive when he said "Actions are performed by persons;" (op. cit. How to do Things with Words) but then again he might not have been; he might have meant that attributing actions to persons is a practice widely followed, deeply rooted, and it is a good thing, which he recommends to continue. He might also have meant that in some respects, although certainly not in all, the idea of "person" as and "individual human being" is so basic to any conceivable conceptual scheme that it is plausible to say that it must be a feature of any possible culture - drawing on P. F. Strawson's idea that we could hardly get by if we never referred to individuals (P. F. Strawson, Individuals. London: Metheun, 1959) I do not find anything in Derrida that would tell against these things Austin might have meant. In any event, the whole series of discourses and practices around the term "person," could be separated from its certain supposed philosophical underpinnings, revised, improved, and expanded, and quite likely to good effect. To take another example, it does not follow from Derrida's finding that metaphysical concepts have universally been used to justify orders of dominance and subordination, that there should never be any dominance or any subordination. (This conclusion might follow, however, without any help from Derrida, simply from analysis of the word "Dominance," since analysis might show that "dominance" can only be used pejoratively; in that case the argument would have to be recast with a different term, e.g. "Leadership.") For example, it does not follow from Derrida's finding that metaphysical distinctions always imply hierarchy that sex play which takes the form of dominance and subordination is a nasty vice. Perhaps dominance and subordination in bed is a vice; or perhaps social reality ought to be constructed so that it would be a true English sentence to say that it is. Perhaps society would be well served by bringing up the young to shun it, or perhaps not to know about it; it may even be that its public depiction is a form of pornography which should be censored. But no particular conclusion follows one way or the other from Derrida's expose of the metaphysics of presence. Dominating and subordinating may have all sorts of merits and demerits in all sorts of contexts, and there may be all sorts of reasons for subordinating (e.g. to give a child security through a firm sense of parental authority) and on the other hand all sorts of reasons for not dominating (e.g. to help a child learn self-worth) - but neither the merits nor the demerits follow, in general, from Derrida's lifelong deconstruction of the history of philosophy.
What does follow from Derrida's work is that people have been alerted to certain fallacies and deceptions used by traditional discourses which attribute to certain people a right to dominate, and to others a duty to be subordinate, because the former have direct access to what really is, while the latter have access only to metaphors which suggest, but do not literally state, what really is.
My conclusions are two: First, that Derrida's critique of Austin on action is encourages social reconstruction. Second, that Derrida's findings do not rule out projects like mine, which urge that the direction social reconstruction should take is in general toward encouraging the authority of those social ideals which function to meet human needs, and to establish a sustainable relationship with the earth and with the other forms of life which share the earth with us. (I say "in general" because I recognize that a project like mine which encourages an ethic of "love" to meet "human needs" courts the danger of restricting freedom and respect for individuality - and I do not want to overlook such dangers, but instead to encourage a dialogue about ideals, which would consider the dangers and downsides of all proposed ideals, which would never end, and which would, in principle, asymptotically, take everything into account and lead to doing what is best.)
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