But there is an ambiguity in this argument that is fatal to its valid- ity. The two phenomena operate on quite different principles. We can always consider words as just sounds or marks? The type-token distinction, together with the physical realization of the signs makes quotation possible; but these two features have nothing to do with previously mentioned special features of graphemes. It rests on a simple confusion of iterability with permanence. T have left the most important issue in this section until last.
Do the special features of writing determine that there is some break with the author's intentions in particular or with intentionality in general in the forms of communication that occur in writing? Does the fact that writ- ing can continue to function in the absence of the writer, the intended receiver, or the context of production show that writing is not a vehicle of intentionality? It seems to me quite plain that the argument that the author and intended receiver may be dead and the context unknown or forgotten does not in the least show that intentionality is absent from written communication; on the contrary, intentionality plays exactly the same role in written as in spoken communication.
What differs in the two cases is not the intentions of the speaker but the role of the context of the utterance in the success of the communication. To show this ask yourself what happens when you read the text of a dead author. To the extent that the author said what he meant and you understand what he said you will know that the author intended to make a statement to the effect that on the twentieth of September , he set out on a journey from London to Oxford, and the fact that the author is dead and all his intentions died with him is irrelevant to this feature of your understanding of his surviving written utterances.
The first is the illusion that somehow illocutionary intentions if they really existed or mattered Would have to be something that lay behind the utterances, some inner pictures animating the visible signs. The sentences are, so to speak, fungible intentions. Speaking and writing are indeed conscious intentional activities, but the intentional aspect of illocution- ary acts does not imply that there is a separate set of conscious states apart from simply writing and speaking.
To the extent that the author says what he means the text is the expression of his intentions. It is always possible that he may not have said what he meant or that the text may have become corrupt in some way; but exactly parallel considerations apply to spoken discourse. And understanding the sentence apart from any utterance is knowing what linguistic act its utterance would be the performance of.
When we come to the question of context, as Derrida is aware, the situation really is quite different for writing than it is for speech. In speech one can invoke all sorts of features of the context which are not possible to use in writing intended for absent receivers, without ex- plicitly representing these features in the text. In conversation a great deal can be communicated without being made explicit in the sentence uttered.
Derrida has a distressing penchant for saying things that are obvi- ously false. But this is a simple confusion. The relation of meaning is not to be confused with instantiation. In this example it is not used to mean anything; indeed it is not used at all.
Thus in what follows Derrida ties his discussion of Austin to his preceding discussion of writing; in both he emphasizes the role of the iterability and citationality of linguistic elements.
I believe he has misunderstood Austin in several crucial ways and the internal weak- nesses in his argument are closely tied to these misunderstandings. In this section therefore I will very briefly summarize his critique and then simply list the major misunderstandings and mistakes.
I will conclude with an—again all too brief—discussion of the relation between inten- tion and iterability in speech acts. Derrida notes that Austin distinguishes between felicitous and in- felicitous speech acts but does not sufficiently ponder the consequences arising from the fact that the possibility of failure of the speech act is a necessary possibility.
More to the point, according to Derrida, Austin excludes the possibility that performative utterances and a priori every other utterance can be quoted. He bears almost no relation to the original. We do not, for example, hold the actor re- sponsible today for the promise he made on stage last night in the way that we normally hold people responsible for their promises, and we do not demand of the author how he knows that his characters have such and such traits in a way that we normally expect the maker of a state- ment to be able to justify his claims.
The existence of the pretended form of the speech act is logically dependent on the possibility of the nonpretended speech act in the same way that any pretended form of behavior is dependent on nonpretended forms of behavior, and in that sense the pretended forms are parasitical on the nonpretended forms.
But the history of the subject has proved other- wise. But the terms in which this question can be intelligibly posed and answered already presuppose a general theory of speech acts. Related to the first misunderstanding about the status of the exclusion of parasitic discourse is a misunderstanding of the attitude Austin had to such discourse.
Again, nothing could be further from the truth. The sense in which, for example, fiction is parasitic on nonfiction is the sense in which the defini- tion of the rational numbers in number theory might be said to be parasitic on the definition of the natural numbers, or the notion of one logical constant in a logical system might be said to be parasitic on another, because the former is defined in terms of the latter, Such parasitism is a relation of logical dependence; it does not imply any moral judgment and certainly not that the parasite is somehow im- morally sponging off the host Does one really have to point this out?
Searle Furthermore it is simply a mistake to say that Austin thought parasitic 4, discourse was not part of ordinary language. Austin never denied that plays and novels were written in ordinary language; rather his point is that such utterances are not produced in ordinary circumstances, but rather, for example, on stage or in a fictional text. In what is more than simply a misreading of Austin, Derrida supposes that by analyzing serious speech acts before considering the parasitic cases, Austin has somehow denied the very possibility that expressions can be quoted.
I find so many confusions in this argument of Derrida that I hardly know where to get started on it. To begin with, the phenomenon of citationality is not the same as the phenomenon of parasitic discourse.
There is a basic difference in that in parasitic discourse the expressions are being used and not mentioned. They are, to repeat, cases where expressions are used and not mentioned. But, more impor- tant, parasitic discourse of the kind we have been considering is a deter- mined modification of the rules for performing speech acts, but it is not in any way a modification of iterability or citationality. Every utterance in a natural language, parasitic or not, is an instance of iterability, which is simply another way of saying that the type-token distinction applies to the elements of language.
Derrida in this argument confuses no less than three separate and distinct phenomena: iterability, citationality, and parasitism. Parasitism is neither an instance of nor a modification of citationality, it is an instance of iterability in the sense that any discourse whatever is an instance of iterability, and it is a modification of the rules of serious discourse.
Quite the contrary. He sets aside the problems of fiction in order to get at the properties of nonfictional performatives. Both are instances of iterability in the trivial sense that any use of language whatever is an instance of a use of iterable elements, but the exclusion of the former does not preclude the possibility of the latter. But neither of these points is in any way an objection to Austin. Indeed, Austin's insistence on the conventional character of the performative utterance in particular and the illocution- ary act in general commits him precisely to the view that performatives must be iterable, in the sense that any conventional act involves the notion of the repetition of the same.
But these are quite differ- ent. In the case of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, the relation is one of logical dependency. One could not have the concept of fiction without the concept of serious discourse. But the dependency of writing. Indeed, in mathematical and logical symbolism the relation of depen- dence goes the other way. The spoken, oral version of the symbols is simply an orally communicable way of representing the primary written forms.
Searle clude this discussion by arguing for precisely the converse thesis: The.. The performances of actual speech acts whether written or spoken are indeed events, datable singular events in particular histori- cal contexts. But as events they have some very peculiar properties. Furthermore, hearers are able to understand this infinite number of possible communications simply by recognizing the inten- tions of the speakers in the performances of the speech acts.
The answer is that the speaker and hearers are masters of the sets of rules we call the rules of language, and these rules are recursive. They allow for the repeated application of the same rule.
Iterability—both as exemplified by the repeated use of the same word type and as exemplified by the recursive character of syntactical rules— is not as Derrida seems to think something in conflict with the intention- ality of linguistic acts, spoken or written, it is the necessary presupposi- tion of the forms which that intentionality takes.
NOTES 1. I am indebted to H. Dreyfus and D. In Derrida's essay the limits and implications of the philosophical strategy of J. Austin, the founder of speech act theory, are discussed. In his short reply Searle, himself a speech act theorist, picks out what in his opinion are some of Derrida's obvious mistakes and corrects them in a tone of high disdain. The piece in review is Derrida's response to Searle's "Reply," published simultaneously and under the same title in French and English. In French as a pamphlet, in English as a part of Glyph 2.
In it, with a mocking show of elaborate patience, Derrida exposes Searle's critique to be off the mark in every way. Whereas Searle's essay is brusque and all too brief, Derrida's is long and parodistically courteous and painstaking.
Columbia University Libraries.
0コメント