Is That Right?
Here’s something I find quite funny. It’s from The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism from the entry for ‘Speech Acts’.
This issue of parasitic language became one of the turning points of the Searle-Derrida debate. In the late 1970s Searle wrote a “reply” to Derrida’s deconstruction of Austin, assuming that Derrida was attacking Austin and rushing to the master’s defense. Derrida then wrote a hundred-page deconstruction of Searle’s reply, more or less savaging Searle and demonstrating both that philosophically Searle is way out of his league and that methodologically Searle and Derrida are not so very far apart. Both Searle and Derrida are analytical philosophers who believe in rational, logical thought; Derrida is merely better at it than Searle, more sensitive to the mind-numbing complexity of analytical issues.
Hmmmm.
This reads as if it were plagiarized from a “D” paper written by a college student for an Intro course on Literary Theory.
That extremely silly paragraph you quote doesn’t appear in the page you link to. Who on earth wrote such childish nonsense? The speech act page seems to require a login for access.
Oops! Sorry, I used the wrong link (well, obviously). Fixed now. Speech act page, as you surmised – about halfway down. It doesn’t require a login from me…hope it works for others.
Guy who wrote it is named Douglas Robinson. Via google, seems to teach lit theory etc – in an English Dept (suprise!) not a Philosophy Dept. Funny how those are nearly always the people who think Derrida can ‘demonstrate’ that ‘Searle is way out of his league.’
Douglas Robinson wrote a book called “Performative Linguistics” which proposes some tantalizingly interesting ideas at times – though Robinson’s field of linguistics is pretty far from my own (I would be a representative of what Robinson calls “Constative Linguistics” and which gets a lot of flak in his book).
Unlike some other linguistic work from a postmodernist perspective, though, Robinson’s writing tends to be clear and understandable.
Ah, thanks, Merlijn; informative (but not, I hope, constative).
“Now we failed to find a grammatical criterion for performatives, but we thought that perhaps we could insist that every performative could be in principle put into the form of an explicit performative, and then we could make a list of performative verbs. Since then we have found, however, that it is often not easy to be sure that, even when it is apparently in explicit form, an utterance is performative or that it is not; and typically anyway, we still have utterances beginning ‘I state that…’ which seem to satisfy the requirements of being performative, yet which surely are the making of statements, and surely are essentially true or false” (How To Do Things With Words, 91. Harvard UP, ’62).
I realize that the tone of the passage quoted from the Johns Hopkins Guide certainly encourages an emotional response from a pro-Searle crowd. I wonder, however, if there is a more substantial criticism of Derrida’s insistence on the difficulty of maintaining the purity of categories like “performative” and “constative,” the likes of which Austin had already encountered, as the above quote makes clear. It seems to me that-—and this touches on Robinson’s indeed unexpected comment that Derrida is as analytic as Searle-—Derrida here is insisting on questioning the very status of categories as such, in a kind of hyperbolically analytic way.
Now, admittedly, I’m no philosopher—-in fact, I’m one of those joke-worthy literary types, I suppose. But I honestly want to understand why Derrida’s rebuttal to Searle is not considered legitimate. After all, Derrida goes through Searle’s text almost line by line, such I would expect that any obvious mistreatment of the latter by the former would be very apparent….
Best,
Chris
PS: the necessary caveat on which Derrida always insists but seems never to register: he does not deny that there are performative utterances: “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)” (Limited Inc, 19)–it’s just that this category cannot be perfectly isolated.