Is the utterance "I speak" a performative?
Maurizio Lazzarato in his book "Signs and Machines" wrote: " In fact, " I speak" cannot be a performative since the result of the utterance is mere information from which no obligation follows.
It institutes no "right", no convention, no role, no distribution of powers. Even if it accomplishes what it states, it is never dales not a performative". " I speak" is an utterance that communicates something but it does not act on the "other"." Can we consider "I speak" as having just simple communicative function?
It institutes no "right", no convention, no role, no distribution of powers. Even if it accomplishes what it states, it is never dales not a performative". " I speak" is an utterance that communicates something but it does not act on the "other"." Can we consider "I speak" as having just simple communicative function?
Comments (35)
Specific commitments can be negated by the speaker, at least in many cases. (Moore's paradox an apparent exception.) But some commitment?
I doubt you can say anything that couldn't be taken as making some kind of commitment. And that's not irrelevant since having your words taken in a particular way is a key element of commitment.
I would lean toward speaking at all indicating a commitment to a shared framework of communication using language. The trouble though would seem to be defining speech here -- there are uses of word-sounds that aren't exactly speech, and not just among young children, the mentally ill, and parrots. Competent rational speakers use words for signaling too. So my idea appears to be circular. Hmmm.
understanding we need to relate this utterance iwith a concrete situation. But how can we state
that "the result of the utterance is mere information" as Lazzaroto did? What kind of information?
I know you didn't mean it this way, but isn't that true of all sentences?
(I have no idea what Lazzaroto is talking about.)
" I speak" has a special privileged status, different from any other statement; it can support or destroy the whole theory.
What whole theory is that?
Not my area then, and any comment I could make would be uncharitable.
If you haven't read Austin yet, I'd recommend doing so.
I only meant that terms like "performative utterance" and "illocutionary force" originated in a philosophical tradition I know a bit about (Austin, Strawson, Grice) and found a home later in ("as" might be more accurate) the linguistic field of pragmatics, about which I know less.
Since you don't seem to be talking about either of those, I doubt I can be any help.
That's a brilliant example of how crucial context and tone are to the function and meaning of a speech act. 'I speak' be anything from a Dadaist's deliberate inanity to to an announcement of a life-changing development to a risky political declaration.
Scenario 1:
Plantation in Virginia, 1850. Slave owner has been shouting at the slaves 'You will speak only when I ask you to, and you will answer every question with "Sir"'.
A slave steps forward and loudly proclaims
'I speak'.
Scenario 2:
Jess has been mute for two years, following a brain injury. She has just had surgery hoping to rectify some of her problems. She awakes in the recovery room, looks at her father and says in a quiet voice, with tears in her eyes:
'I speak'.
Scenario 3:
A self-help group of people with anger management problems has been discussing what strategies they have been trying to help prevent anger arising or boiling over into violence. Raju says he counts to ten. Fiona says she digs her nails into her palm. Ping says he imagines a majestic mountain with beautiful glaciers. Brunhilde says:
'I speak'.
Short version: the meaning of speech acts cannot be sensibly analysed without context.
Not sure what you mean here. Are you thinking of versions where these are taken to be self-referential? (You'd have to say, because to my ear these both sound more like "habitual present tense" or whatever the right term for that is.)
One thing I was wondering about was whether we're to take your "I speak" as being spoken in a specific language. As I suggested above, I'd be tempted to see any utterance in a living language as also carrying a commitment to a linguistic community, which carries with it certain rights that can be claimed and certain responsibilities that ought to be met. If you want to abstract away the specificity of the language so that no linguistic community is implicated, not even an abstract one, you either want a private language -- and someone will be along shortly to tell you you can't have one -- or maybe a Whitman-like "barbaric yawp". Is a barbaric yawp speech? Unlikely. Is it a signal? I'd like to say unlikely as well, because once signaling became voluntary (on the way to becoming speech) it also became possible to make a noise for the sheer pleasure (or at least sensation) of noise-making. This is plain in small children. But of course we've drifted away from the linguistic now...
infinitely, so some abstraction and generalization is unavoidable.
" To see any utterance in a living language as also carrying commitment to a linguistic community".
Is that possible to pose the problem of " I speak" using resources of your tradition? (Austin, Strawson, Greese) I would like to specify "the language and the linguistic community " following the lead of French thinkers. They tried to broaden the concept of illucative forces, so that "I speak" would become
a powerful and flexible analytical tool.
As points out, you can coerce it into sounding like a performative in some contexts, but even this strikes me as a rather strained and creative use of language, and certainly not conventionalized (like, say, "I object," or "I resign").
the proposition that states it. It is therefore true, undeniably true, that I am speaking when I say that I am speaking".
indirectly on " I speak".
But I don't think you can build this fortress yourself.
There's an episode of "Barney Miller," an old sitcom, in which an old man is about to be taken off to an asylum because he seems to be babbling gibberish, but Sgt. Dietrich finds another old man who speaks the dialect of Ukrainian the supposed crazy man has been speaking all along.
Also, it looks like Foucault tried to oppose Austin's theory of performative enancuation. In short, in a very simplistic way, his concept is neither linguistic, nor psychological - Foucault's "I speak" is about automization and oppression of Cogito - it is just an appearance of independent self- affirmation.
Then you'll want to say something like this:
Which I would see as directly related to my point that in speaking you accept certain responsibilities to your linguistic community. See Humpty-Dumptyism.
Probably we belong to different linguistic communities.:lol:
Indeed.
Good luck with your work.
You are right that we can never get a perfectly accurate sense of the meaning of a speech act without knowing all possible context, which would involve being the person that makes the speech act. Even that is sometimes not enough, as I often find myself saying things that I did not expect, and I don't know why I said them, let alone what they meant, if anything.
For most speech acts, the context of knowing the events in a short period before the act, in the immediate vicinity, is sufficient. In the examples I gave, the context I provided in a short paragraph was sufficient to understand the significance of each act to a satisfactory level.
An example where much greater context is needed to sufficiently understand meaning would be a bitter argument between people that have been married to each other for many years. In that context, every word and phrase can be loaded with subtext that would be completely lost on an observer, even if they witnessed the whole conversation. That's another situation in which each party will say things whose meaning is buried in their subconscious, and was not intentional.
I suppose I'm saying that I absolutely agree that some generalisation is unavoidable. But that generalisation is done when one feels pretty confident of what was meant. For the sentence 'I would like to buy an Oyster card with a ten pound balance please' I feel confident I know what the meaning is, and am happy to generalise. But if told that some person unknown, in some unknown time and place said 'I speak', I would have no idea and would reply 'I don't understand that. Tell me more.'
If so, it is impossable to theorize and philosophize about language! Yet, individuation and singularization of
each speech act are realized through the set of pre-personal affective forces and post- personal ethico- political forces external to language. It looks like Austinian speech acts theory does not consider all of them.
It is thus with speech too. Although each speech act is unique, in most situations, given a little bit of context, and occasionally even without context, we can make a confident estimate of the intended meaning.
But when we are given a speech act with no context, that has no clear meaning, that skill cannot be applied. So we search for context to try to find a meaning.
A beautiful example of this is Citizen Kane, where the speech act 'Rosebud' keeps occurring throughout the film and only at the very end do we discover the meaning of the speech act (which I won't reveal in order not to spoil it for those that haven't seen it. I'll just say that it's definitely not what one would have guessed).
There are many other examples in murder mysteries, where the detective puzzles over the dying words or writing of the victim, trying to find enough context to enable them to use the speech act to lead them to the murderer (da Vinci Code, A Study in Scarlet, a French TV episode I saw about trying to decode the dying words of somebody that had been pushed off a cliff).
I'm a big fan of philosophy of language, but only as long as it focuses on how and why people use speech acts. Once it gets to looking at word sequences with no human in sight, I think it has lost its way.
Your legal, social and familial status instantly changes. Before you open your mouth you are one thing. By the time you close it you have landed in another world. A particular man and a particular woman say " I do" - their words undoubtedly have personal meaning for them in their hearts! But their personal intension is not responsible for the magical transformation that has changed their lives.
What has brought them to say this words and what makes this words effectively transformative is a complex interplay of laws, customs, social pressure and tax law. The stereotypical nature of the expression is an indication that it is fundamentally impersonal! The subject saying " I do" is not a person, it is a social function."
"One of our examples was, for instance, the utterance 'I do' (take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife), as uttered in the course of a marriage ceremony. Here we should say that in saying these words we are doing something - namely, marrying, rather than reporting something, namely that we are marrying." (Austin, How To Do Things With Words).
Do you have a point to make in this discussion about performatives?
According to Massumi, the subject of enancuation " I do" is the abstract machine.
It is a different interpretation of this performative.