Ordinary Literature Philosophy

Lacanian Literary Performatives between Austin and Rancière

Jernej Habjan

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350086081
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Language in Philosophy

The first extended Lacanian reading of J. L. Austin's ordinary language philosophy, this book examines how it has been received in the continental tradition by Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière and Oswald Ducrot. This is a tradition that neglects Austin's general speech act theory on behalf of his special theory of the performative, whilst bringing a new attention to the literary and the aesthetic. The book charts each of these theoretical interactions with a Lacanian reading of the thinker through a case study. Austin, Derrida and Butler are respectively read with a Hollywood blockbuster, a Shakespearean bestseller and a globally influential May '68 poster – texts preoccupied with the problem of subjectivity in early, high and postmodernity. Hence Austin's constatives (nonperformative statements) are explored with Dead Poets Society; Derridean naming with Romeo and Juliet; and Butlerian aesthetic re-enactment with We Are all German Jews. Finally, Rancière and Ducrot enable a return to Austin beyond his continental reception. Austin is valorised with a theory as attractive, and as irreducible, to the continental tradition as his own thought, namely Jacques Lacan's theory of the signifier. Drawing together some of the giants of language theory, psychoanalysis and poststructuralist thought, Habjan offers a new materialist reading of the 'ordinary' status of literary language and a vital contribution to current debates within literary studies and contemporary philosophy.

1

Literature as parasite: Austin excludes poetry as a parasite of speech acts

J. L. Austin is a key figure of Anglo-American analytic philosophy whose work crucially inspired such proponents of continental thought as Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler. The results, however, were quite unexpected, as the inspiration travelled across the epistemological sea. If Austin’s speech act theory constitutively bracketed off literary and other etiolated performatives, Butler decided no less than to ground her theory of performativity in just such etiolations. In the process, literature was painstakingly expelled, by Austin’s nomothetic (or, in Giambattista Vico’s language, critical) science, from the notion of the performative, only to be equally painstakingly elevated to the level of the very notion of the performative by Butler’s idiographic (or topical) philosophy. This begs the question of how something that started as a theoretical intervention in the nomothetic ideology of logical positivism could end up as an idiographic ideology of cultural performativity. In this book, I will try to answer this question by drawing, like Butler, from an eminently scientific research programme of the humanities themselves, anti-humanist structuralism.

I will address this continental reception of Austin by applying his own procedure of ‘bogging, by logical stages, down’,¹ that is, of refining given concepts in order to develop their contradictions and thus to replace them with subtler concepts. Since Derrida, continental close readers and critical theorists have adhered to Austin’s bogging down of his own theorization of speech acts, but only so as to reject all the more fundamentally his dismissal of aesthetic speech acts as etiolations. As a result, they have themselves become liable to bogging down: to a project of demonstrating how their blurring of the ordinary/aesthetic distinction rests on their blurring of the distinctions among Austin’s, and even Derrida’s, key concepts. Hence, the bogging down continues and increases, leading to Butler’s belief in the subversive force of etiolations. Whereas Derrida recognizes etiolations without analysing the institutional conditions of their social recognition, Butler even conditions their social recognition on the destruction of their institutional conditions, arguing for atomistically reappropriated, etiolated performatives. I will propose a conception of etiolations as empty signifiers, or rigid designators, which can be subversively appropriated only beyond the horizon of Butler’s atomized addressee. This beyond, far from any mysticism, was delineated by Austin himself when he forsook logical positivism’s subject/object pair for an intersubjective model of communication.

But first we need to pose the following question: Why does Austin abstain from conceptualizing literature at all, if literature has since the famous Chapter 9 of Aristotle’s Poetics figured beyond the true and the untrue, that is, precisely in the realm that Austin discovers as he rejects the presuppositions of logical positivism and develops the idea about utterances as acts? We can venture a reply once we notice that etiolated performatives are not the only thing that Austin expels from his theory of speech acts: besides etiolations, he explicitly excludes the subjectivating dimension of ‘half-way houses’ between constatives and performatives,² while also ignoring constatives themselves. And like the exclusion of etiolations, these two cases of exclusion persist through Austin’s key step in his avowed bogging, by logical stages, down, namely the transition from the special theory of the performative to the general theory of speech acts. The problem is thus not just simply that of excluding literature, the exclusion condemned by the continental reception of Austin and ignored by the analytical one. The problem is much more interesting, and it begins with the question of the common ground for the three expulsions. An outline of this common ground, the trait that excludes all three speech phenomena, is something that, as I will argue, the Lacanian theory of the signifier can help us provide.

* * *

As noticed by such thinkers working across the analytic/continental divide as Stanley Cavell and David Gorman, Austin rejects, not literature, but the metaphysics of logical positivism.³ Indeed, in his famous Harvard lectures of 1955, which appeared posthumously as How to Do Things with Words, Austin proposes an alternative to logical positivism. He discovers a class of utterances that, far from reproducing the metaphysical gap between subject and object, produce relations between subjects. Where logical positivism sees only utterances that are true or untrue, Austin notices also utterances that act. Adding such performative utterances about subjects (like ‘I am running’) to constative utterances about objects (like ‘I apologize’) allows Austin to break with logical positivism.⁴ But far from simply adding performatives to constatives, Austin discovers that, like performatives, constatives themselves can under certain conditions perform an act simply, and only, by saying something. Hence, he degrades his opposition between constatives and performatives into a ‘special’ theory of the performative within his ‘general’ theory of speech acts.⁵ According to this ‘general’ theory, each utterance has the locutionary force of uttering a sentence, the illocutionary force of producing intersubjective relations by this utterance and the perlocutionary force of influencing subsequent utterances. Depending on the illocutionary force (which the special theory designated with the notion of the performative), Austin classifies speech acts as verdictives, exercitives, commissives, behabitives and expositives.⁶

The scope of views on Austin’s theoretical practice can be said to be delimited by Austin himself, on the one hand, and J. Hillis Miller, on the other. Austin sees his work as the process of producing the special theory of the performative followed by the general theory of speech acts.⁷ Miller, on the other hand, regards Austin’s work as the process in which the constative/performative pair is undone by the locution/illocution/perlocution triplet, which in turn is undone by the verdictive/exercitive/commissive/behabitive/expositive quintuplet, which finally is itself undone by Austin’s resignation.⁸ The supplement of the general speech act theory is recognized by both the author and the authoritative commentator, but whereas for the former this supplement finishes a construction, for the latter it starts a deconstruction. But it seems that no matter how many shifts there really are, they all entail the expulsion of literary speech practices from the class of utterance in question; in Austin, a literary utterance can produce neither a performative nor an illocutionary speech act, even when such an act comprises as many as five classes.

Indeed, the exclusion of literary speech acts from all the classes of speech acts that make up ordinary language can be seen as Austin’s theoretical practice at a zero-degree, as it persists both in his special theory of the performative and in his general speech act theory. This exclusion implies that Austin deems literary speech acts either superior or inferior to ordinary language, from which he excludes them. But this leads us to a dead end, as we can give arguments for both.

Inferiority seems to be implied by Austin when he treats literature as an etiolated use of ordinary language, language whose complexity is said to be underestimated by theory: ‘In real life, as opposed to the simple situations envisaged in logical theory, one cannot always answer in a simple manner whether [a constative] is true or false.’⁹ Yet all Austin says here is that ordinary language is complex, and that literature is a form of its etiolation – which is not to say that etiolated language is less complex than ordinary language. As for the hypothesis that, for Austin, literature is superior to ordinary language, there may be some support for it in a certain thesis and a certain testimony by Cavell: the thesis that the theory of those speech acts that Austin had dubbed ‘etiolations’ in 1955 was developed two years later in Austin’s article ‘Pretending’, but inadequately; and the testimony that Austin himself was not satisfied with the article.¹⁰ However, the empirical fact that Austin has conceptualized literature later and, by his own standards, less successfully than ordinary language cannot verify the superiority hypothesis.

Neither inferiority nor superiority of literary speech acts to ordinary language can be grounded theoretically; the dilemma is pre-theoretical. For the inferiority hypothesis forces upon us the question whether Austin excluded literature because he did not want to analyse it (since it did not present a worthy challenge) or because he was not able to analyse it (and with it ordinary language itself, since the hypothesis claims precisely that ordinary language is even more complex than literature). And the opposite hypothesis necessarily confronts us with the question whether the reason that Austin failed to refine his speech act theory with a theory of literature lies in his untimely death or perhaps in the theoretical inadequacy of speech act theory itself.

Hence, both hypotheses ultimately ask the same question: Is the absence of a theory of literary speech acts contingent or structurally necessary? In the first case, we get a theory of speech acts, but one that cannot serve as a theory of literary speech acts. In the second case, we accord Austin’s expulsion of literary speech acts – the gesture that started the superiority/inferiority dilemma – the dignity of a necessary operation, but we derive this necessity from a fatal deficiency of speech act theory. The question raised by the two hypotheses is therefore a false alternative that forces us to choose between a diminished theory and a non-existent one – just like, for example, Lacan’s armed robber forces us to choose between existence without money and non-existence when he greets us with ‘Your money or your life!’¹¹ The question therefore has to be rejected, and Austin’s line between ordinary and etiolated language moved. Only once we do this can we ask why literature is absent from speech act theory at all, given that literature has since Aristotle been placed beyond the ordinary/etiolated line, which is precisely in the field that Austin entered when he refuted the presuppositions of logical positivism and started to approach utterances as acts.¹²

Let us then see how Austin treated those rare cases of literary utterances that he did actually treat. For if we do this, we can finally articulate the initial forced choice in theoretical, rather than ideological, terms and thereby leave it behind. We can reject, not simply the presupposition that enforces the choice, but the presupposition that is enforced by the choice itself, the presupposition that Austin discards literature. In brief, lacking in Austin’s object of knowledge is not literature, but signification. The problem of Austin’s relation to literature is merely a special case of the general problem that speech act theory has with the signifying practice. A Lacanian analysis can trace a feature common to all three phenomena ignored by Austin, namely their status of subjectivating signifiers. The reason that Austin rejects etiolated performatives is that he rejects subjectivation, bracketing off the subjectivating effect of the performative and the constative as well as the ‘absurd’ ‘half-way houses’ that he finds lurking between them.

* * *

The special case of this problem, namely Austin’s bracketing off of literature, can be demonstrated by following Rastko Močnik’s idea of projecting Austin’s five illocutionary forces of speech acts onto Roman Jakobson’s famous six functions of speech events: Austin’s verdictives (such as ‘I find’) correspond to Jakobson’s referential function (such as ‘This is cold’), commissives (‘I oppose’) to the emotive function (‘Huh?’), exercitives (‘I urge’) to the conative function (‘Eat!’), behabitives (‘I welcome’) to the phatic function (‘Here we are then’), and expositives (‘I mean’) to the metalingual function (‘Do you know what I mean?’) – but, as Močnik notices, there is no illocutionary act to match Jakobson’s poetic function, the function of language that predominates precisely in literature.¹³

As for the general problem, namely Austin’s ignorance of the signifying dimension of any speech act, not just those that we find in literature, this can be conceptualized only with a theory that is stronger than Jakobson’s classification of the functions of language (where, as Močnik himself notes, the poetic function, the one function of language that has no match in Austin’s classification of illocutionary acts, ‘might be just a structuralist oversimplification on Jakobson’s part’).¹⁴ This kind of theory will be sought, in what follows, in the direction of the Lacanian theory of the signifier (which was the main source of Močnik’s analysis as well).

From this new perspective, we can see that Austin not only subsumes literary utterances under etiolations but also gives short shrift to ‘absurd’, or ‘rude’, utterances as well:

Even if we take as half-way houses, say, ‘I hold that …’ as said by a nonjuryman, or ‘I expect that …’, it seems absurd to suppose that all they describe or state, so far as they do this or when they do, is something about the speaker’s b eliefs or expectations. To suppose this is rather the sort of Alice-in-Wonderland over-sharpness of taking ‘I think that p’ as a statement about yourself which could be answered: ‘That is just a fact about you’. (‘I don’t think …’ began Alice: ‘then you should not talk’ said the Caterpillar or whoever it was). And when we come to pure explicit performatives such as ‘state’ or ‘maintain’, surely the whole thing is true or false even though the uttering of it is the performing of the action of stating or maintaining. …

… That is, to say ‘I state that he did not’ is to make the very same statement as to say ‘He did not’: it is not to make a different statement about what ‘I’ state (except in exceptional cases: the historic and habitual present, &c.). As notoriously, when I say even ‘I think he did it’ someone is being rude if he says ‘That’s a statement about you’: and this might conceivably be about myself, whereas the statement could not. So that there is no necessary conflict between

(a) our issuing the utterance being the doing of something,

(b) our utterance being true or false.¹⁵

As our main problem with Austin will be his ignorance of the signifying dimension, and with it the context, of utterances, let us look at some of the text surrounding ...