[atreestump]

Before I read any Derrida, I stumbled upon this thinker. John L. Austin was a British Analytic Philosopher of Language. Along with Wittgenstein, he proported Ordinary Language Philosophy – Ordinary language philosophy is a philosophical methodology that sees traditional philosophical problems as rooted in misunderstandings philosophers develop by distorting or forgetting what words actually mean in everyday use.

More on that soon when we tackle this book: https://ontic-philosophy.com/Thread-Derrida-and-Wittgenstein-Garver-Lee

What drew me to Austin was his Speech Act Theory – I am a critic of freeman on the land, or to be more precise, the movement that has taken root on the internet that tries to sell people the idea there are ‘magic words’ that make you immune from the law and so deciphering legal texts becomes a necessity. In doing so, I noticed how philosophical texts and legal texts have lots in common. They have succint definitons that are capitalised and defined in an index before or after the main document, so if an ordinary word is used but it is ambigious, a capitalised version of the word can be used to maintain a single usage that is specific to that document. I came across some terms used by Austin because I was investigating one of the magic words that freemen believe gets them out of trouble, which is ‘overstanding’- which has a historical meaning from Rastafarian cultures and black supremecists, it’s a kind of ‘anti-authority and oppression’ statement, but the other usage was in some Hermeneutic texts using Austins ideas and it was all about how to interpret religious texts that formed religious laws and so they assert, promise and demand etc – these are what Austin calls illocutionary acts.

Austin is best known for his Speech Act Theory – the theory that utterances of words in language not only describe (constantive speech) facts about the world, but they also do things too (performative speech).

Derrida takes this Speech Act Theory to show how certain statements in the Declaration of Independence of America are undecidibly constantive and performative – one can’t say for sure whether liberty is described or created by the speech act.

The most fascinating aspect of this performative turn of linguistics, is that it can combine force with ordinary meaning. An illocutionary force of an utterance is the speaker’s intention in producing that utterance. An illocutionary act is an instance of a culturally-defined speech act type, characterised by a particular illocutionary force; for example, promising, advising, warning.

This explanation of force and meaning through performance radically influenced feminist philosopher, Judith Butler, who introduced the performative turn into feminism too, she shows how sex and gender are culturally articulated norms through repeated performance and combined with Foucaults’ analysis of power, she breaks open the reified structures of our discourse of sexuality and opens up a space for novelty. This superstructural project is much like any other structural project, society, culture, our Unconscious, are all structured like a semiotic linguistic system – that is structured like a language – we are formed from the outside through the accepted rules of language before we learn language itself and this radically decenters us from our experience.

[Author]

Posts