“Only Worlds - Looking at Pornography through the Lens of Linguistic Phenomenology”

1. “Only Worlds - Looking at Pornography through the Lens of Linguistic Phenomenology” (working title for paper proposal at IV International Meeting of Assoc. of Forensic Linguists)

2. What I want to do in this talk: • Point out the problem of action in current linguistic descriptions of language use (pragmatics) and why it is a problem worth bothering about • Provide a reasonably coherent statement of action in Austin and Searle • Hint towards a solution; perhaps elaborate in future talk

3. Where I’m coming from. . . . the anthropology of visual communication

8. Actual v. ‘Virtual’ Identity Society establishes the means of categorizing persons and the complement of attributes felt to be ordinary and natural for members of each of these categories. Social settings establish the categories of persons likely to be encountered there. The routines of social intercourse in established settings allow us to deal with anticipated others without special attention or thought. When a stranger comes into our presence, then, first appearances are likely to enable us to anticipate his category and attributes, his "social identity" to use a term that is better than "social status" because personal attributes such as "honesty" are involved, as well as structural ones, like "occupation". . . We lean on these anticipations that we have, transforming them into normative expectations, into righteously presented demands. (1963: 2)

10. My Virtual Identity Hypothesis (Celis 1995a) . . . it is part of the meaning of speech act verbs to project a virtual microsociological order - what Goffman called the "interaction order" - and in this way, contribute to the management of the identity of not just the speaker, but also the addressee. I label my hypothesis the Virtual Identity Hypothesis (VIH), drawing upon Erving Goffman's notion of Virtual, as opposed to Actual, Social Identity, where Virtual Social Identity amounts to a characterization made "in effect."

11. Exposition: • Brief review of speech acts • A case study: MacKinnon on pornography • ‘The problem of action’ or the linguistic-sociology interface • Where the action is in Austin • Where the action is in Searle (if time permits) • A first pass at a testable linguistic formulation of the Virtual Identity Hypothesis • A first pass at the semiotics of the Virtual Identity Hypothesis

12. A working definition of a “speech act” • A speech act as 'a function from contexts into contexts'. Thus an assertion that  is a function that changes a context in which the speaker is not committed to justifiable true belief in  into a context in which he is so committed. A permission to do is a function that changes a context in  is prohibited into one in which  is permissible. And so on. [From Gazdar 1981]

13. Gazdar on why we (linguists) should study speech acts In the first place (a), a theory of speech acts is needed as part of a theory of utterance meaning. (The rest of such a theory will include at least a theory of conversational implicature and a theory of presuppositions.) (b) Conversationalists must be able to recognize and interpret utterances as, for example, assertions, questions, orders, predictions, and so on, if they are to be able to respond appropriately to them. Simply knowing the conditions under which a statement is true is not sufficient to allow a response to be made. (c) Finally, a theory of speech acts is the crucial ingredient of any theory of the truth conditions of utterance reports [Gazdar 1981]

14. A preliminary pass at the "non-constative" uses of utterances constative - True or false statements; not to be confused with "descriptions". The original statement: Austin in How to Do Things With Words

15. A big to-do started when the view was formulated that a statement of fact ought to be "verifiable". Practicioners of this view soon came to see that many things that looked like statements, and which should have been verifiable, were in fact really pseudo-statements. Issue of verifiability

16. Kant pointed out that despite an unexceptionable grammatical form, many apparent statements are really pseudo-statements. Kant on pseudo-statements

17. Kant also demonstrated that many utterances which look like statements are not really statements at all, and are either not intended to at all, or only partially intended, to record or impart straightforward information about the facts. For example, "ethical propositions" are perhaps intended, solely or partly, to evince emotion or to prescribe conduct or to influence it in special ways. Ethical Propositions

18. “It has come to be shown that many specially perplexing words embedded in apparently descriptive statements do not serve to indicate some specially odd additional feature in the reality reported, but to INDICATE and not REPORT the circumstances in which the statement is made or reservations to which it is subject or the way in which it is to be taken and the like.” Austin’s suspicions:

19. Utterances which ‘ape’ statements of fact: ‘Performatives’ Characteristics of these creatures: • They all have humdrum verbs in the first person singular present indicative active • They do not "describe" or "report" or constate anything at all, are not "true or false"; • The uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as, or as "just", saying something.

20. Enter the domain of linguistic phenomenology “. . . words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can re-look at the world without blinkers.” John Austin, A Plea for Excuses

21. The domain of the law “What matters for a legal system is what words do, not what they say . . .” Edward J. Bloustein Holmes: His First Amendment Theory and his Pragmatist Bent “Law’s proper concern . . . is not with what speech says, but with what it does.” Catharine A. MacKinnon Only Words

22. “In pornography, pictures and words are sex. At the same time, in the world pornography creates, sex is pictures and words. As sex becomes speech, speech becomes sex.” The Data: Catharine A. MacKinnon, Only Words, p.26

23. “Society is made of words, whose meanings the powerful control, or try to. At a certain point, when those who are hurt by them become real, some words are recognized as the acts they are.” Catharine A. MacKinnon, Only Words, p.30

24. “Converging with this point from the action side, nothing that happens in society lacks ideas or says nothing, including rape and torture and sexual murder. This presumably does not make rape and murder protected expression, but, other than by simplistic categorization, speech theory never says why not. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Only Words, p.30

25. “Together with all its material supports, authoritatively saying someone is inferior is largely how structures of status and differential treatment are demarcated and actualized. Words and images are how people are placed in hierarchies, how social stratification is made to seem inevitable and right, how feelings of inferiority and superiority are engendered, and how indifference to those on the bottom is rationalized and normalized.” Catharine A. MacKinnon, Only Words, p.31

26. “Speech Acts. . . . Acts Speak” Catharine A. MacKinnon, Only Words, p.30

27. Speech versus Action: Prising language off the world according to Austin in HTDTWW

28. On locutions

29. The act of "saying something" in the “full normal sense”. And just what is the Full Normal Sense? The utterance of certain noises, the utterance of certain words in a certain construction, and the utterance of them with a certain "meaning" in the favored philosophical sense of "meaning" meaning sense and reference.

30. On illocutions

31. (1) Conventional - Illocutionary acts are conventional acts.

32. (2) Reference to conventions, not consequences "What we do import by the use of the nomenclature of illocution is a reference, not to the consequences of the locution, but to the conventions of illocutionary force as bearing on the special circumstances of the occasion of the issuing of the utterance."

33. (3) Securing uptake Unless a certain effect is achieved, the illocutionary act will not have been happily, successfully performed. This is not to say that the illocutionary act is the achieving of a certain effect - for example, I cannot say that I have warned an audience unless it hears what I say and takes what I say in a certain sense. An effect must be achieved on the audience if the illocutionary act is to be carried out. And what is this effect? This effect amounts to bringing about the understanding of the meaning and of the force of the locution. So the performance of an illocutionary act involves the securing of uptake.

34. (4) Effects vs consequences Although I'm not sure I quite understand the distinction, Austin wants to make a difference between the "taking effect", on the one hand, of an illocutionary act, and the "production of consequences" e.g. "changes in the natural course of events", on the other. The example Austin uses, though I still don't completely get it is: "Thus 'I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth' has the effect of naming or christening the ship; then certain subsequent acts such as referring to it as the Generalissimo Stalin will be out of order."

35. On perlocutions

36. (1) non-conventional Perlocutionary acts are not conventional. This is not to say that conventional acts cannot be made use of in order to bring off the perlocutionary act.

37. (2) non-locutionary means "It is characteristic of perlocutionary acts that the response achieved, or the sequel, can be achieved additionally or entirely by non-locutionary means: thus intimidation may be achieved by waving a stick or pointing a gun.

38. (3) non-conventional means "Certainly we can achieve the same perlocutionary sequels by non-conventional means (or as we say 'unconventional' means), means that are not conventional at all or not for that purpose; thus I may persuade some one by gently swinging a big stick or gently mentioning that his aged parents are still in the Third Reich. Strictly speaking, there cannot be an illocutionary act unless the means employed are conventional, and so the means for achieving it non-verbally must be conventional. But it is difficult to say where conventions begin and end [my emphasis]; thus I may warn him by swinging a stick or I may give him something by merely handing it to him. But if I warn him by swing a stick, then swinging a stick is a warning: he would know very well what I meant: it may seem an unmistakable threatening gesture.

39. Fig. 1 - Saying X and meaningnn it according to Grice OK. I recognize your intention to make an impression on me. I’m flattered! By virtue of my recognition of your intentions, you have succeeded in meaningnn something. I intend for this utterance to produce an effect in you by means of recognition of this intention.

40. Fig. 2 - What Grice really is saying according to Searle I recognize your intention, and therefore, you have produced quite an effect in me of the perlocutionary sort. It may not be meaning, but if it works for you it works for me! It is my intention to produce a certain - how do I put it - “perlocutionary effect” in you. And how, you ask, do I intend to bring about this PE? Simple, by means of your recognizing my intentions. . . Wait a minute! This sounds like behaviorist subversion to me!

41. Fig. 3 - Saying something and meaning it according to Searle Whew, for a while there I thought you were trying to think of me in stimulus-response terms; I prefer our relationship to remain Platonic, thank you very much. Anyway, I recognize your intentions are pure by virtue of my god-given knowledge of the rules governing the elements of T and all that. By uttering this sentence T, I intend to produce in you the “knowledge” (recognition, awareness) that the states of affairs specified by the rules of T obtain. I call this higher state of consciousness I am laying on you illocutionary effect. I intend for this effect to come about through your recognition of my intention. But I intend that you will recognize my intention by virtue of your knowledge of the rules governing the elements of T

42. But the world is still very much with us. . . . perlocution re-examined

43. ”It is the distinction between illocutions and perlocutions which seems likeliest to give trouble. . .” [Austin (109)]

44. Action in Linguistic Phenomenology (cf. A plea for excuses) “In ethics we study, I suppose, the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, and this must be for the most part in some connexion with conduct or the doing of actions. Yet before we consider what actions are good or bad, right or wrong, it is proper to consider first what is meant by, and what not, and what is included under, and what not, the expression ‘doing an action’ or ‘doing something’. These are expressions still too little examined on their own account and merits. . . There is indeed a vague and comforting idea in the background that, after all, in the last analysis, doing an action must come down to the making of physical movments with parts of the body, but this is about as true as that saying something must, in the last analysis, come down to making movements of the tongue.”

45. An adaptionist approach to the encoding of action in pragmatic-linguistic knowledge (Celis 1997)

46. Some support for a theory on the phylogeny of knowledge of actions as encoded in language . . .

47. survival of the fittest . . . • Austin in A plea for excuses: our common stock of words and bodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing and the connections they have found worth making in the lifetimes of many generations. These surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest.

48. trailing clouds of etymology. . . • “It is these considerations that bring us up so forcibly against some of the most difficult words in the whole story of Excuses, such words as ‘result’, ‘effect’, and ‘consequence’, or again, as ‘intention’, ‘purpose’, and ‘motive’.”

49. “. . . a word never - well, hardly ever - shakes off its etymology and its formation. . . there will still persist the old idea. In an accident something befalls: by mistake you take the wrong one: in error you stray: when you act deliberately you act after weight it up. . . .”

50. “Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done.”