“Le vert est ou”

Austin and Literature

The notion that when we speak we are performing actions that our words refer to and that these utterances are neither true nor false, must have been obvious when people heard themselves being called “Heretic” during the Spanish Inquisition. The horror they felt was due to the fact that once declared a heretic, one became one regardless of the ‘truth’ of the matter. Unfortunately, this declaration was often in Austin’s terms a ‘felicitous’ performative. However, the notion that all language is performative is new and really quite frightening for me.

If one applies Austin’s theory to literature, the implications for the reader are serious for literary language is also performative; it is not true or false, and it creates/makes real the world it ‘speaks’ of. This means that it also brings to life the ideas, morals, ideology that lie within the text. In other words, literature helps to shape/perform the world. And the repetition of Western ideology over centuries would then only serve to ensure that certain ideologies are deeply entrenched in communities where texts ‘perform’ acts. We have seen this before in Althusser, for example.

Literature creates reality to override other realities. Therefore, when texts ‘speak’ of women and men, the idea of woman and man is performed. This suggests that gender is a construct of literary language. In other words, there is no woman or man as such outside of the text. We are female or male animals whose social performance is just that, a performance constructed in great part by language and the society that language performs. This might apply to any cultural construction of human beings. Extrapolating further, literature can transform reality. Then text might not construct female and male human beings but discover many possible varieties of individuals.

Questions:

1.  What is felicitous and infelicitous literary language? Perhaps felicitous literary language is literature that uses language and form to successfully engage its audience in a ‘conversation’ that stimulates reflection on human experience. Infelicitous literary language would fail to do this. But then a lot of what we call non-literary texts becomes literature.

2.  Where does meaning come from, or where is the subject in language? Austin claims that the speaker’s words and not her/his intention are performative. This means that you mean what you say/do, not what you think. However, when I say, “I love you” to my great-grandmother my intention is to tell her how much she means to me, so my intention is embedded in my words/actions, isn’t it?

Similarly, if I say, “I love you” to a partner I am thinking of breaking up with to delay the inevitable, my words ‘perform’ my intention as well as the ‘infelicitous’ illocutionary act of falsely declaring my love for the other person.

3.  Why are the words of an actor not performative? (I asked this before I read the next text)

“Percussion in mis major”

Limited Inc. is very difficult to follow, and I really can’t pretend to understand it all. However, I did at least grasp the tone, and I couldn’t help chuckling when I read what looks like a rant against poor Austin.

His argument owes a lot to Austin’s concept of performative language, but for Derrida the theory is flawed for several reasons:

1.  The writer does not have to be present. Searle says a shopping list and notes to a colleague during a lecture require the author’s presence. Derrida’s argument still holds as the shopping list and notes can be used repeatedly at other times. I have no problems with this idea, For example, once at an airport, someone behind a double glass wall wrote a message for me on the glass. I am sure that the glass was cleaned that day, and neither the writer nor I ever saw it again. However, it was quoted several times in many other contexts, resulting in different meanings each time. Therefore, even when a text is destroyed, its language can live on.

2. Requiring a speaker to be sincere suggests that there is meaning outside the text, but all meaning is in the text.

However, Derrida is addressing Austin (Sarl) and his ideas were formed over the course of his education in France. Doesn’t his resistance to traditional readings of texts come from his engagement with theorists from Plato on?

Searle argues that intentions do not always need to be conscious and sees no need for the separation of intention from the expression of intention. I agree that the two converge at times, and I don’t see how this convergence contradicts Derrida’s idea that texts infinitely defer meaning. Borges’ texts will be interpreted with and without consideration of his intention, but it is difficult to believe no trace of Borges remains in his work. When we read, we are discovering more of the world, and Borges remains in it through his writing. As we have discussed in class, the point of literature is to generate conversation on the human experience, not to arrive at a single possible meaning. The text keeps the dialogue going because meaning is elusive (even its origin!) The phrase, “Le vert est ou” repeated (used) in certain academic circles has and will have various meanings each time it is repeated. It might speak of Searle’s argument, of Derrida’s theory, of an example bad grammar, etc…

Also, I cannot help thinking of testimonial literature, and I worry that excluding the author and her/his history might be silencing Others. When women in South Korea write stories of their double oppression in a patriarchal society under a totalitarian regime, they use a certain voice and form to change the world. Yes, their text is performative, but if we don’t acknowledge their authorship, can we say that we are listening to their voices? They are writing to change the present world as well as any number of worlds in the future. If someone cries, “Help”, don’t we need to know whom it is in order to respond?

When a narrative about past events subverts oppressive discourse by creating a plurality of perspectives, the author and readers recuperate the past to inform the present. In this case, the text is dependent on realities outside and inside its language.

3.  “Parasitic” or “Non-serious” language utterances are no different form any other utterance.  And although signs appear before speech, and not the other way around as Austin claims, all language is performative. Searle claims that Austin’s exclusion of “non-serious” language was temporary. This seems odd. Derrida’s attack on Austin’s exclusion of “non-serious” utterances makes sense to me. If you have a theory about language, why exclude such a large portion of the language we use? Derrida claims that all utterances are repeatable and it is this very iterability of language that makes it performative.

4.  The iterability of written language in the absence of the writer makes it performative for with every iteration there is a break with a previous perfomative context to perpetually defer an ultimate meaning. Searle claims that Derrida is confusing iterability with permanence, but reprinted texts are read differently each time, and thus iterative.

I like the idea that literature’s performativity and iterability perpetually defers meaning so that texts can transform the world. However, I don’t see how the absence of the writer permits us to disregard all traces of her/his voice in the text. Yes, any sign can exist without the sender and/or receiver, but controllers at a Pan American Airways station might have saved Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan if they had known the signals they were picking up were coming from their plane!