J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words
Part 2

2,111 words

Jacques Derrida

(Part 1 here)

Still confining ourselves for simplicity to spoken utterance.
-J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words
Also the epigraph to Jacques Derrida’s Signature, Event, Context

***

Last week, I looked at J. L. Austin’s 1962 book, How to Do Things with Words (HDW). Austin is an exemplar of English philosophy of language, and I suggested that he could not differ more from the flamboyant French philosophe, Professor Jacques Derrida. And yet Derrida’s 1972 essay, Signature, Event, Context (SEC), which is largely about communication, specifically deals with Austin’s book in its second half. Given the general attitude of English philosophers to modernism, existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism and, latterly, post-modernism, it is intriguing that it should be French philosophy that made the pour-parlers. I write “intriguing” because, were I to describe Derrida’s work in one word, that is the one I would choose. Derrida’s work is an intrigue, and is intended to be.

I was engaged by Derrida’s writing once I had got my BA and MA in philosophy under my belt in the mid-1980s, and this was partly due to the fact that my PhD supervisor at the University of Sussex was Professor Geoff Bennington, a friend of Derrida’s and a translator of his work into English. Professor Bennington noted my interest and suggested I might use one of Derrida’s central concepts to look at the history of the mind/body problem in Western philosophy. For “mind”, you can read “soul”, “spirit”, nephesh, ψυχή (psuche, which becomes “psyche”), “breath”, or any one of the other terms in the matrix (which I hope I isolated in my doctoral thesis) of that which is not the body. Always, however, and whatever the oppositional term, the body remains. A shadow which keeps us company, as Plato calls it. Derrida’s analogy is to pair the soul (or whatever) with speech, and the body with writing. This is the thread I pulled, and the reason for the title of my thesis: “The Body of the Text; The Text of the Body”.

You’ll find it in the British Library, should you have time to kill on a wet London afternoon. Tell them I sent you.

Derrida is seen by the right as some sort of trickster god, part-charlatan, part-Marxist, part-post-modernist, all French and pretentious to boot. I could not disagree more. Derrida is one of the most brilliant philosophers I have read (and I appreciate the problem of translation), and his work can’t really be seen in the same disruptive light as the rest of the rogues’ gallery: Foucault, Lacan, Baudrillard et al. I reviewed Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense (also translated as Intellectual Impostures) recently here at Counter-Currents, and if you read it you will see that Derrida escapes with a mere flesh wound when you take into consideration the bullets flying elsewhere in this great work of philosophical debunking. Derrida is not actually a pretentious writer. To be pretentious means to pretend to something with which you have little or no acquaintance. That more accurately describes Derrida’s critics, the majority of whom I suspect have not read a word of Derrida, in any language. No, Derrida did not claim that a text can have any meaning you want it to have. A lot of Derrida’s critics have read about him rather than engaging the texts.

So, Derrida is one of the go-to names for the radical right when they need a scapegoat for the influence of post-modernism on our current situation. Derrida writes of the scapegoat, the pharmakos, in his essay Plato’s Pharmacy; the man beaten, scourged and expelled from the city in order to expiate its sins. Thus Jacques Derrida for the radical right (as British organization HOPE Not Hate rather flatteringly refer to us). I always fancied myself as a bit of a radical. One thinks of George Eliot’s political novel, Felix Holt, Radical. Love that comma.

I confine myself to Derrida’s earlier philosophical work (roughly, and in the chronology of English-translation publications, from Derrida’s work on Husserl, Speech and Phenomena, to Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles) and most of the terms and concepts usually linked with Derrida are to be found there in their formative phases. “Deconstruction” is the term usually associated with this Algerian Jew Professor, but those using it rarely understand it. Derrida famously refused to define deconstruction, and this seems evasive. But deconstruction – and Derrida’s other famed word, différance (which apparently can’t really be translated wholly meaningfully from French to English. I wouldn’t know, having only conversational French) – are entirely valid within the context of the Western philosophy whose texts Derrida rigorously examines.

I have reviewed Derrida’s Of Grammatology here at Counter-Currents, and I would refer you to that both as an accompaniment to this piece and an overview of my opinion of the Frenchman’s early work. Derridean deconstruction works via its application, not any theoretical construct as to what it might or might not “be”. Derrida works by the application of an undefined and undefinable methodology, and he works on specific philosophical texts, or literary texts whose philosophical pulse he takes. What makes me most suspicious about Derrida’s critics is that they often dismiss him without saying (or rather writing. The distinction will become apparent) anything to show that they have any formal philosophical grounding themselves. If you are unused to philosophy, I shouldn’t bother trying to pick up Derrida to have a good sneer. You won’t understand it. If you are reading Derrida and you lack a basic grasp of Heidegger, Husserl, Freud, Nietzsche, Marx and others, you are reading a map without directions. The idea that “woke” academics, diversity officers, the co-ordinators of drag-queen story hour, and people like Owen Jones and Ash Sarkar kick back in the evenings with a copy of Margins of Philosophy or Writing and Difference is laughable.

Derrida has perfectly graspable concepts with which he operates. “Logocentrism” is related to a term familiar today, “ethnocentrism”, and the two terms are best understood as analogous and familial. The logos will be familiar to the philosophically inclined reader as a central concept in Ancient Greek thought. Logocentric thinking is a tendency to believe that the grounding concepts of your culture are those of humanity as a whole. Nietzsche often writes about this; One cannot look around one’s own corner. It is, perhaps, the curse of hermeneutics.

Arche-writing is another central concept for Derrida (and indeed the one noted as being suggested to me by Prof. Bennington as I was preparing my thesis proposal). Derrida considers a tradition which sanctifies speech as originary and writing derivative, of a second order. Derrida’s reversal of this founding concept sees the return of a repressed writing, an arche-writing. This is what Derrida means in his (in)famous phrase; Il n’y a pas de hors-texte. “There is nothing outside the text”. This shibboleth of structuralism is over-simplified, and Derrida is saying something more akin to “experience behaves as though it were textual”. Nor is Derrida suggesting that meaning is not constrained, is free to roost where it likes, or where the reader likes. From SEC:

We are witnessing not an end of writing that would restore, in accord with McLuhan’s ideological representation, a transparency or an immediacy to social relations; but rather the increasingly powerful historical expansion of a general writing, of which the system of speech, consciousness, meaning, presence, truth, etc. would be only an effect, and should be analyzed as such. It is the exposure of this effect that I have called elsewhere logocentrism.

Différance, with its conflation of déférer and différer (to defer and to differ), I looked at in the review of Of Grammatology noted above, using the analogy of binary computer coding. Analogy, metaphor, and other linguistic displacements figure significantly in Derrida’s work. He will often pick a small and apparently insignificant point in a text and pull at it as though it were a thread in a garment he wishes to unravel. Which brings us to Derrida on Austin.

Signature, Event, Context addresses Austin specifically, although the Englishman does not make his entrance until halfway through the text (which can be read here). When Derrida does address HDW, it is to examine a problem within language with which Austin struggles. What is the question Derrida wishes to put to Austin?

Derrida begins his consideration of the concept of communication, as he often does, by tangling the web:

I have been constrained to predetermine communication as a vehicle, a means of transport or transitional medium of a meaning, and moreover of a unified meaning. If communication possessed several meanings and if this plurality should prove to be irreducible, it would not be justifiable to define communication a priori as the transmission of a meaning, even supposing that we could agree on what each of these words (transmission, meaning, etc.) involved.

This possibility of ambiguity requires clarification, and the relevance of Austin can already be seen:

It seems self-evident that the ambiguous field of the word ‘communication’ can be massively reduced by the limits of what is called a context.

Context is vital to the Austin of HDW. It limits, defines, and controls the performative in its purest Austinian form as the perlocutionary aspect of language. If a priest baptizes a baby, we deem that baby to be a member of the Church. But if the officiating clergyman is not ordained, the process is void. The ritual and the linguistic utterances may be identical, but the non-ordination of the officiating “priest” is the context which changes the nature of the performative and makes it a “misfire” or “misinvocation”, again in Austinian terms. At this point, Derrida makes familiar moves to destabilize the concept, not from philosophical mischief, but because the concept itself demands this interpretation:

But are the conditions of a context ever absolutely determinable? This is, fundamentally, the most general question that I shall endeavor to elaborate. Is there a rigorous and scientific concept of context?

What follows is a strong example of the supposed anarchic nature of Derrida’s work, the often-alleged free-for-all, intellectually libertine expansion of meaning to include just about anything:

Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the current sense of this opposition), in a small or large unit, can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable.

This instability of communication applies to Austin’s master-term, the performative:

The performative is a “communication” which is not limited strictly to the transference of a semantic content that is already constituted and dominated by an orientation toward truth.

By the end of Derrida’s interjection into Austin’s work (or vice versa), the Frenchman has proposed what he proposes in just about all his philosophical essays, that apparently stable concepts, and thus the philosophical systems they support and fund, are very far from being stable. This is not a free play of meaning, more like the meaning of free play:

By no means do I draw the conclusion that there is no relative specificity of effects of consciousness, or of effects of speech (as opposed to writing in the traditional sense), that there is no performative effect, no effect of ordinary language, no effect of presence or of discursive event (speech act). It is simply that those effects do not exclude what is generally opposed to them, term by term; on the contrary, they presuppose it, in an asymmetrical way, as the general space of their possibility.

I noted in the first part of this essay last week that “Austin does not settle into a dogmatic position, and HDW at times seems to question itself”. I hadn’t read either essay for over 40 years, and I was pleased to see Derrida concur concerning HDW: “HDW is often more fruitful in the acknowledgment of its impasses than in its positions.”

Derrida enjoys impasses, differences, indeterminables, anomalies. He is an entertaining philosopher who gives the sense that he himself is entertained by Western philosophy.

I once went to the famous maze at Hampton Court in England, home to Henry VIII and the Tudors. It was beautifully kept, perfectly manicured hedges impossible to see through. As is the nature of the maze or labyrinth, it was not easy to find one’s way out. The lady I was with declared that we must keep turning left. This we did, right up until we reached a dead end, a cul de sac, as the English still call it using the French term. I wasn’t too bothered about finding our way out. I rather enjoyed being lost, and that is much how I feel about reading Derrida. How to do things with words, indeed.