"One will not be able to exclude, as Austin wishes, the 'non-serious', the oratio
obliqua from 'ordinary language'." Jacques Derrida (1)
In his lectures included in How to Do Things With Words J.L. Austin seeks to
exclude from his analysis of performative speech all utterances that do not fall under his
notion of "ordinary speech".(2) Ordinary speech
that is performative, according to Austin, effects a circumstance by means of the
speaking, e.g. a sailor names a ship or a judge says, "I sentence you to six months'
probation." Often, the desired effect is not produced because of what Austin calls
"extenuating circumstances". But Austin's main concern is for what he refers to
as instances of "relative purity" in which there is less a chance of failure or
"infelicity" (his term) to spoil the intentions of the speech. Also to be
excluded from his considerations are instances of citations of performative speech, as in
a play:
...a performative will be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor
on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in a soliloquy....Language in such
circumstances is in special ways—intelligibly—used not seriously, but in ways
parasitic upon its normal use—ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations
of language. All this we are excluding from consideration. Our performative utterances,
felicitous or not, are to be understood as issued in ordinary circumstances. (3)
Austin adds that the performative utterances cited in a play are to be considered
"hollow or void". Derrida, in his analysis of these passages, suggests that for
Austin this region of danger that surrounds language like a void is "a kind of ditch,
a place of external perdition into which locution might never venture, that it might avoid
by remaining at home, in itself, sheltered by its essence or telos."(4)
Derrida turns Austin's notion of the void as a precinct of language or as
a parasite on language into a necessary condition for all performative speech, a condition
which Austin himself was to acknowledge later in his career as the "impurity" of
all performative utterances. "Successful" performatives require citation in the
form of iterability in order to work at all.
This makes reasonable sense. However, we must consider the possibility that there
exists a political need for maintaining a clear distinction between the utterances of
Austin's "ditch" and a certain kind of legal performative enacted by the state.
That is, regard the possibility that there exists a real need for Austin's distinction,
never forgetting Derrida's point about iterability and the necessary "impurity"
of all performatives, but that unlike Austin we refuse to jettison the speech of the actor
on the stage from our consideration. We cannot reject such speech from our consideration
of performative utterances, not only for the reasons which Derrida provides, but also
because such speech has political implications which have been ignored in both accounts.
Against Austin, I wish to argue against the jettisoning of the actor's speech and for the
consideration of the ditch of poetic utterance and its relation to so-called
"pure" performatives. Against Derrida, I wish to argue the impossible, i.e. for
the maintainance of the distinction between the "home" of the "pure"
performative in certain legal utterances of the state and "the place of external
perdition into which locution might never venture"(5).
I wish to argue that this distinction must not only be thought, but must be enacted and
maintained in certain instances. Here I want to say maintained "as a fiction",
but the problem with saying this is that the ditch whose separation we wish to establish
is the arena of fiction, itself, and the decree by which we constitute the distinction
between "home" and "ditch" is a performative decree. Moreover, our
desire here is confounded by the fact that we wish to make a performative decree for
political purposes and are using two poetic tropes to achieve that very purpose. Thus,
this performative is already contaminated by the parasite of poetic speech as soon as we
lable it a fiction and employ poetic imagery. We are speaking poetically to establish the
arena of poetry. But we are getting ahead of ourselves in this conundrum. We must first
ask what are the consequences of a failure to maintain the distinction between literal
state power and the phantasmatic. In other words, why do we desire this distinction and
what approach do we take regarding its impossibility?
Austin's Ditch and Aeschylus' Underworld
Is it possible to make a separation between the discourse which expresses the literal
power of the state and the discourse which expresses (or attempts to express) sexual or
racial identity? This is a question which is tied to the wish to produce a state which has
no sexual or racial bias, an extention of the same desire, originating with the
Enlightenment, which seeks the separation of church and state. But before the question can
be answered it must itself be questioned for its presumption of such entities as
"literal state power" and racial/sexual identity. Both notions, literal state
power and identity, are indeterminate regarding their referents, but we nevertheless
presuppose their difference when we imagine a state that is fair regarding its treatment
of the "races" and the "sexes". That is, marking this desired
difference between identity and state power is necessary to the Enlightenment's legacy of
the pursuit of happiness in a fair and just society.
However, if we postpone pondering the details of what this happiness might entail, we
can ponder instead the question of the necessity of constituting a difference between
identity and power. Two tropes that best express this desired difference, the second of
which bears an interesting connection with Austin's ditch, are the image of "Blind
Justice", probably the Roman Iustitia and the Greek Dike, and the Aeschylean image of
the enthroned Erinyes from the conclusion of the Oresteia. The image of Blind
Justice is usually read as signifying that justice as enacted by the state must be fair by
being "blind" to the religious, racial, or sexual identity of the accused. Sight
of the identity of the accused would lead to prejudice on the part of the law.
Therefore, the law must not only not see the identity of the accused in racial or
sexual terms, but the law itself must not have racial or sexual identity since that
identity might also lead to bias. If the law is "white" or "male" its
judgements will place blackness and femaleness in an inferior and vulnerable position. We
have inherited a Graeco-Roman female image to suggest the necessity of a law that is
neither "raced" nor "sexed". Racial and sexual identity is relegated
by means of this image to a precinct beyond sight. In Austin's terms, we are dealing with
performative utterences such as "I sentence you to life imprisonment" and we
desire in the use of such utterences that they be "purified" of contamination by
the possibility of speaking subjects , either on the part of the law or the accused, who
are raced or sexed. By means of this move, racial identity and sexual identity are
imagined as banished beyond the margins of "sight".
It is this desired border between state power and sexual/racial identity that must be
questioned. This border was first suggested by Aeschylus(6)
at the conclusion of The Eumenides, the third play in the Oresteian trilogy, when
he pictured the ordered state as founded upon the removal of the Erinyes from the polis
and their consequent enthronement in the "underworld". The Erinyes, or the Roman
Furies, were black hags whose sole concern was for offences to the "blood bond".
In Aeschylus' play they are wreaking havoc on Athens by driving Orestes' mad for having
murdered his mother on orders from Apollo. For Aeschylus therefore, the polis required for
its stability a clear border between the forces of the "blood bond" and the
forces of legitimate state power. The Erinyes, literally "the angry ones" who
existed primarily for blood vengeance, were to be afforded "golden thrones" in
the underworld beneath the court of Athena. When Athena grants them such thrones, the
Erinyes are appeased and agree to support the polis "for all time to come".
Aeschylus play was first produced in 458 B.C.E., so it may have been that the reforms of
Cleisthenes in 508 B.C.E. were a precident for what Aeschylus expressed in his tragedy.
Cleisthenes had ordered a redistricting of the voting precincts of Athens in order to
break the hold of the aristocratic family-clans on Athenian politics. Nevertheless, early
on in Athenian democracy the necessity of a clear border between state power and the
"blood-bond" of family identity became a preoccupation. In China, at roughly,
the same time, Confucius attempted to break the hold of the aristocracy on political power
by opening up the civil service examination to males of all classes. All these moves
sought to render the "blood-bond" secondary to the needs of the state and to
create a rift or border between state power and at least one form of personal identity.
This attempt to banish the forces of the "blood-bond" beyond the margins of
"the civil" is an attempt to create a divide in the interest of order and
control. For Aeschylus this control was political. For Austin, as Derrida argues in his
essay "Signature Event Context", the control sought by creating a divide between
"the serious" (performative speech-acts intended to work literally) and
"the non-serious" (e.g. the speech-acts of actors and poets) was semantic. As
Austin said, "All this ["the non-serious" ] we are excludingfrom our
consideration....I must not be joking."(7) The
non-serious, for Austin, becomes a blanched, pale, sickly form of speech that operates on
"pure" language like a parasite. Performative utterances that are acted, written
in a poem, or spoken in a joke are merely repeated; they are characterized by Austin as
"etiolations of language".(8) Performative
utterances have real force, and to understand how this force operates, Austin wishes to
exclude from his thinking all utterances that merely pretend force. In response,
Derrida shows that this desire to create a divide between "the serious" and
"the non-serious" is always thwarted, that all speech acts suffer the same loss
of original context and consequent shift in meaning that characterizes writing:
Austin has not taken into account that which in the structure of locution
...already bears within itself the system of predicates that I call graphematic in
general, which therefore confuses all the ulterior oppositions whose pertinence,
purity, and rigor Austin sought to establish in vain. (9)
For Derrida, the "ordinary situations" or "the serious," which
Austin sought as the arena for his considerations, the arena of "the original"
as opposed to the arena of the merely repeated, is haunted by the non-serious as a kind of
necessity that makes language itself possible. He questions the notion of the non-serious
as external to language and suggests that that which Austin would like to see as a ditch
or a parasite on the margins of language is actually "its internal and positive
condition of possibility".(10)
The importance of this for us is that what Austin desired semantically, the
Enlightenment has desired politically. For Austin's formula of performativity to work, as
Derrida shows, a consciousness must be present with a clearly intended meaning and the
speech act must take place in an appropriate context (e.g. in a trial and not in a play):
what is required is "the self-presence of a total context, the transparency of
intentions, the presence of meaning for the absolutely singular oneness of a speech
act...."(11) For Aeschylus and for the legacy he
bequeathed to the European Enlightenment, the same demand is made politically in our own
time: literal state power must be enacted in a context which is "pure" and
"transparent", not contaminated by the parasite of the prejudices of racial and
sexual identity. One hears this demand in the speech of Apollo, god of the polis, to the
Erinyes, goddesses of the blood-bond: "Get out, I tell you, go and leave this house,
from your presence set the mantic chamber free...." (ll. 179-180) But, like Derrida
claims of the "non-serious", the Erinyes will not leave and threaten to
"let loose on the land the vindictive poison" (ll. 781-782).
The Political Necessity of the Semantically Impossible
Derrida maintains the necessity of the non-serious. Aeschylus likewise maintains
the necessity of the Erinyes to the welfare of the state, but he also maintains the
necessity of creating a place for the Erinyes beyond the margins of literal state power.
His play concludes with Athena calming the rage of the Erinyes by appealing to the goddess
Peitho (Persuasion) who instructs Athena to provide for the Erinyes in a court of honor
("a place free of grief and pain", l. 893, and "deep-hidden under ground,
that is yours by right where you shall sit on shining chairs beside the hearth to accept
devotions of your citizens", ll. 804-808) just under the court of Athena, itself. The
consequent conversion of the Erinyes, "angry ones", to Eumenides, "kindly
ones", is difficult to believe. The only way this might make sense is to remember
that the Erinyes and Peitho share a special relation to the goddess Ananke
("Necessity")(12) and that Peitho is able to
persuade the Erinyes because she understand this necessity. Aeschylus' imagery suggests
that political stability depends upon this "enthronement" in an underworld that
seems similar to Austin's Ditch for the nonserious, with the important exception that for
Aeschylus the Erinyes are to be regarded. In fact, the very welfare of the state depends
upon this regard:
In the terror upon the faces of these [Erinyes}
I see great good for our citizens.
While with good will you hold in high honor
These spirits, their will shall be good, as you steer
your city, your land
on an upright course clear through to the end.
(Ll. 990-995)
Austin seeks no such regard for the non-serious: "All this we are excluding from
our consideration." Nevertheless, it is helpful to think of Austin's ditch and
Aeschylus' underworld in conjunction with each other, since the state and its
"stability" relies so much on the stability of meaning and intention in
performative utterances. The speech of the judge in the court must be effective, but (and
here is where Aeschylus and his impact on the Enlightenment becomes important) the speech
of the judge must also be free of racial and gender bias. Derrida's critique of Austin
shows the problems in Austin's desire to create the divide between the serious and the
non-serious; what Austin wishes to exclude is the very thing that makes performativity
possible in the first place—iterability, i.e. "citation (on the stage, in
a poem, or in a soliloquy), the determined modification of a general citationality—or
rather, a general iterability—without which there would not even be a 'successful'
performative".(13) All performative speech is
contaminated and "impure" because it depends upon citationality, upon the speech
and contexts of re-enacted rituals.
So what becomes of Blind Justice or of the separation of church and state? Or more to
our purpose, what are we to think about our notion of the necessity of the separation of
state power from racial and sexual identity? We are faced with a necessity and an
impossibility: we need a divide where one is impossible. We desire the fairness of a state
power that creates just conditions by means of performative utterances
"purified" of racial and sexual identity, but we live under a state power whose
utterances are forever contaminated not only semantically because of iteration, but
contaminated politically because of racial and sexual identity that cannot be cordoned
off. What Austin seeks to exclude, "the pretend" or "the poetic", is
the category to which a just society must relegate racial and sexual identity. This
formula demands that racial and sexual justice depends upon the notion that racial and
sexual identity is itself a poetic trope, an indeterminate "parasite" on
Austin's "ordinary speech". This notion is not only possible, but necessary. We
began this essay with the Derridean claim that the non-serious could not be excluded from
our semantic considerations; we conclude by claiming that the non-serious, i.e. the poetic
and indeterminate nature of racial and sexual identity, cannot be excluded from our
political considerations.
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