Convention and Meaning: Derrida and AustinJonathan Culler, 2008 / read July 20for Saussure things...

Convention and Meaning: Derrida and Austin
Jonathan Culler, 2008 / read July 20

• for Saussure things got their meaning by differnetation, contrasts
• but this cant give a complete account: if you say ‘Could you lift that box?’ it might be a request, an abstract question of capability, or a rhetorical question about how hopelessly heavy it is
• so where does it get the meaning?
• we risk going back to saying that the meaning resides in the consciousness of the speaker
• but a structuralist would ask: what makes it possible for them to mean these several things at once?
• so we account for the meaning of 'utterances’, different from sentences, by analyzing a different system: that of Speech Acts
• so Austin is thus repeating Saussure’s move: describing the system that makes 'signifying events’ (parole) possible
• Austin wont let us locate meaning in the speaker’s mind - there isnt an 'inner act of meaning’ which goes on when you mean something
• it gets its meaning through certain conventions – if I say 'I promise to return this to you’, indicating an item I will borrow, you understand that I am making a promise, but when I just wrote it you understood that this is not a promise bc it lacks the context
• so Austin offers a structural explanation of meaning which avoids 'logocentric premesis’ – but in his discussion of it he reintroduces the problems he just overcomes. This is what Derrida tries to deal with in Signature, Event, Context
• in How To Do Things With Words, Austun wants to get over some narrow views of language his milieu had; to have a theory adequate to statements which had been discarded as meaningless or 'psuedo-statements’ for not fitting their critera [which were: either a description, or a statement of fact - and could be either true or false]
• he distinguishes two types: constitutive statments (descriptions of statements of fact), and performative statements (which enact what they say)
• there is a surprising conclusion here: if I say, 'I affirm that the cat is on the matt’, I’m performing my affirmation. But a crucial aspect of performatives is that they can have the explicitly performative part removed: 'I will pay you tomorrow’ is still a promise. But removing the 'I affirm…’ gives us, 'the cat is on the mat’ - I still affirm it, performatively - but the statement I make is also an emblematic constitutive statement
• Culler notes that Austin’s argument here is a 'splendid’ instance of the deconstructionist 'supplementarism’ here, in its inversion of the old formula: what had been seen as merely secondary or inessential becomes the most primary – rather than performatives being secondary to constitutives, the constitutives are a special case of the performative
• “The conclusion that a constative is a performative from which one of various performative verbs has been deleted has since been adopted by numerous linguists.” [how used is this in linguistics?]
• this allows us to solve the problem of a single statement having multiple meanings: its actually a performative statment from which the performative has been deleted. 'I ask you to lift the box’, 'I inquire if you could lift the box’, 'I despair at the box’s weight’
• Austin doesnt argue this and would be skeptical of it; he argues that illocuctionary force (meaning) does not necessarily derive from  grammatical structure
• he instead proposes a distinction between locutionary and illocuntionary acts
• so when I say 'the chair is broken’ I perform the 'locutionary’ act of making an utterance, and the 'illocutionary’ act of 'stating, warning, complaining…’, whatever performance
• linguistics accounts for the meaning of the locutionary act; speech act theory accunts for the meaning (or 'illocutionary force’) of an utterance
• explaining illocutionary force means explaining the conventions that make it possible
• we might find out what these conventions are by looking at how these performatives can go wrong, might not actually enact the promised performance [I think eg. a bigamous marriage would prevent the 'I pronounce you man and wife’ from really marrying the couple]
• so Austin doesnt treat failure as something alterior to performatives, accidental, not part of how they really work, but an integral part of them - performances can go wrong – something cannot BE a performative unless it CAN go wrong [continental philosophers like him for this reason: he really grasps the 'negative’ (Culler puts it in these terms later)]
• this accords with semiotics: a statement couldn’t signify if it couldnt be said falsely
• Austin argues that performing acts - like marrying or betting - must be described as something like 'saying certain words’ rather than performing some inward action which the words reflect
• …enter Derrida
• Derrida argues that despite saying this, Austin reintroduces this inward action as the force of the performance
• Austin, worrying about jokes etc., perhaps because it would involve a description of an inward act of meaning, says that only 'serious’ speech acts can be analyzed, but doesnt argue for it. He actually puts 'serious’ in scare quotes, as if the argument itself was a joke [Deconstructionists love that stuff…]
• so after remarking that philosophers wrongly excluded utterances which werent true or false, he excludes utterances which aren’t serious. Instead of arguing for it as a 'rigorous move within philosophy’, its a customary exclusion 'on which philosophy relies’
• later on he describes these 'unserious’ uses as 'parasitic on’ the normal use; so Austin introduces a new constitutive & supplementary distinction, after getting away from one
• Searle defended this to Derrida saying that we ought not *start* our investigation by considering these parasitic discourses [we feel, and have perhaps been primed to feel by Culler, that this misses the point that Austin makes his intervention by uncovering the way these 'supplementary’ excess cases are core to the working logic of speech acts, and this might be another such case - although we might not feel it to be necessarily the case that *all* supplementary things are likewise constitutive, although perhaps Derrida 1. argues that *this* supplement is constituive, but also 2. that all supplements are constitutve of what they are supplemental to, as a matter of a thing being a thing, elsewhere]
• actually Derrida’s case is moreso that setting aside these uses as secondary from the beginning is begging the question; the theory has to be able to account for them – Austin deals with an 'ideal language’ here, not the one really used (which includes uses by actors on a stage, in jokes… Derrida here appears as an ordinary language philosopher!)
• So Searle argues that its parasitic because its not possible for an actor to make a promise in a play if we didnt make promises in real life; but Culler says, why see it this way around? Perhaps it is only possible to make a promise in real life if it could be made in a play. For Austin, an utterance is only possible because there are formuals and procedures that we can follow to do so - so for me to do it irl, there have to be iterable procedures that could be acted out…
• so Derrida asks: could my performance succeed if it didn’t conform to an iterable model? – for it to succeed there needs to be a model, a representation, and the actors representation of it is just such a thing
• ~footnote: some commentary on Searle’s disagreement… he brings up a use/mention distinction - performatives use utterances, while actors just mention them. Derrida argues that this distinction requires us to go back to making use of intentionality & the inner act that meaning depends on, what we were trying to get away from: if I mention something instead of use it, it can only be because I intend to mention it…
• Culler gives an example that is very ambiguous w/r/t use/mention - “His colleagues have said his work was 'boring’ and 'pointless’ ” – have I merely mentioned the words boring and pointless (since I’m just quoting others who have said it) or have I used them (since I do imply that his work is really boring and pointless)? To tell you would have to decide which one I intended to express.~
• so, to repeat Austin’s move on the core/marginal distinction that Austin reintroduces: the so-called serious performance is actually a special case of the parasitic - its an instance or reenactment of this iterable representation
• so imitation is a condition of possibility of signification
• eg., for there to be a recognizable original 'Hemmingway style’, there must be some style which can be imitated, repeated, etc. [This seems very convincing to me]
• so, the performative is from the outset structured by this possibility for iterability, citation, performance-of…
• the reason that Austin reintroduces this flawed core/supplementary model is to solve a problem for speech act theory:
• if you explicate all the conditions that make a particular performative possible (which is the goal of speech act theory), say– 'I pronounce you married’ is perforative only if there is a marriage license, a licensed officiary, etc. - one can *always* imagine a further scenario that would cause the performative to fail (say, they’re all actors in a play…)
• Austin tries to resolve this by ruling out instances where the speaker is 'not serious’ - but this requires us to appeal to the intentions, etc…
• so to make performatives and 'performance’ coextensive is to maintain a version of the theory that can really discard intention etc., but at the cost of being unable to explicate the conditions of possibility of a given performative - because it gets its meaning only via context, and the number of contexts is infinite
• … [skipping a nice section that we dont really need to note]
• for Austin, a signature is the equivalent in writing of a performative utterance, 'I hereby…’
• on this idea, Derrida ends Signature, Event, Context, by writing his name twice, and indicating one is a counterfeit of the other. The joke being: is this counterfit, citational second signature not a signature, because he wasnt being serious? or does it function as a signature, because a signature is signing your name?
• the other implication: which of the two signatures is the 'real’ one? you cant tell in writing – 'the effects of the signature depend on iterability’
• so contrary to Austin, who holds that the signature is an indication of some inner intention (assent to an agreement, etc), the signature can only funtion if it is repeatable, iterable… “The condition of possibility of [its] effects is simaultaneously … its condition of impossibility, or the impossibility of their rigorous function.” [ie. to be possible, it must also be imitable, repeatable… theres a bit of what 'difference & repetition’ is engaging w/ here –
• interesting to comapre w/ Deleuze here - for Derrida, something has to be repeatable in order to be at all because its just a repeatable expression of conditions of possibility. This means its negative is prefactored into its conditions of possibility – the price of having a signature is that the signature can be counterfeited.
• Deleuze is somewhat allergic to 'conditions of possibility’, and also wants to find a system where the negative doesn’t exist. I’m not sure how he might argue w/ Derrida here. Perhaps he would feel that it is the difference between each signature which makes it repeatable… but that doesnt really make sense to me & is probably an overly literal reading. It’s possible the two only disagree in terminology here - what Derrida would call the negative is just another form of difference for Deleuze. I’m not sure.]
• Culler talks about how signatures can be made without the signatory’s presence, in the case of machines signing checks automatically, so that wages are paid without being physically cashed in
• he identifies 'logocentrism’ as seeing these sorts of things as secondary to or parasitic on direct speech where the speaker’s intentions are carried out
• really, such cases could not occur if they didnt belong to the structure of the signing (etc.) already
• so Derrida says that intention will not disappear from a good analysis, but it will no longer govern the entire 'system of utterance’… so while I intend to mean something and thats why I speak, the act of speaking itself introduces a gap between my intention and my words. My attention is the reason I structure things the way I do, why I make use of certain conventions, etc., but my intention is not accessible in the words I use (just as we might say, if I make a necklace, my intention for the necklace to be a gift for my niece is not a property of the necklace itself; the meaning/illocutionary force of a speech act is the necklace here - a speech act is given its meaning by the conventions it uses to generate a meaning, and I employ those conventions to try and say what I intend to say)
• Culler introduces the unconscious here - often we say things and do things for reasons we are unconcious of, so intention is even a little more deflated. My reasons for saying something are not entirely conscious intentions which are transparent and accessible to reflection, but a 'structuring intentionality’ that includes implications that never “entered my mind”
• “Intentions are not a delimited content but open sets of discursive possibilities-what one will say in response to questions about an act.” [nice idea]
• “The example of the signature thus presents us with the same structure we encountered in the case of other speech acts: (1) the dependence of meaning on conventional and contextual factors, but (2) the impossibility of exhausting contextual possibilities so as to specify the limits of illocutionary force, and thus (3) the impossibility of controlling effects of signification or the force of discourse by a theory, whether it appeal to intentions of subjects or to codes and contexts.” [a summary of the whole argument]
• what this means is that meaning can never be *exhaustively* determined, but we are still left with tools to examine speech acts and how they work, etc.
• Culler gives a nice defense that meaning being indeterminable (or not precisely, finally, exhaustively determinable) does not mean that no analysis can or should be done by comparing it with Godel’s incompleteness theorem in mathematics: “the impossibility of constructing a theoretical system within which all true statements of number theory are theorems does not lead mathematicians to abandon their work”