The Use and Abuse of Speech-Act Theory in Criticism

Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
The Use and Abuse of Speech-Act Theory in Criticism

Author(s): David Gorman
Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 93-119
Published by: Duke University Press
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The Use and Abuse of Speech-ActTheoryin Criticism
David Gorman
English,NorthernIllinois
Abstract Speech-act theory, brainchild ofJ. L. Austin, has been widely hailed and
widely utilized in contemporary literary theory, where it has taken its place as one
of the canonical modes of theory and criticism. However, almost all of the responses
by literary critics to Austin's How ToDo Thingswith Wordshave been selective and
arbitrary,and the applications of terms or themes from Austin to issues in the theory
of literaturehave been unreflectiveand unhelpful. After this diagnosis of the eccen-
tric reception of Austin in the literary humanities, some guidelines in the form of
maxims are offered for a discerning approach to Austinian speech-act theory. Many
of the shortcomings in the uses to which speech-act theory has been put in literary
studies are exemplified by Sandy Petrey'sSpeechActsandLiteraryTheory(1990),which
has begun to be cited as the standard reference in this area. A critical discussion of
it can therefore stand in place of a complete survey.
There would be universal consensus, I assume, on the proposition that the

theory of speech acts has been a major influence on recent literary theory.
A symptom and example of this would be the fact that the recently pub-
lished eighth volume of the CambridgeHistory of Literary Criticism- on mod-
ern criticism From Formalismto Poststructuralism-devotes one of its thirteen
chapters to speech-act theory (Rabinowitz 1995), alongside chapters on,
for example, semiotics, deconstruction, Marxist and psychoanalytic struc-
turalism, and reception theory. In short, speech-act theory is a recognized
category of current literary theory. It has become one of the standard
methodological options presented to graduate students in literary studies.
This is not in itself very unusual, perhaps, because, like most of the
Poetics7oday20:1 (Spring 1999). Copyright ? 1999 by the Porter Institute for Poetics and
Semiotics.

94 PoeticsToday20:1
accepted programs in literary study, speech-act theory is a philosophical

byproduct (compare the headings just mentioned from the Cambridge His-
tory). One of
peculiarity speech-act theory, which will occupy us a good
deal in what follows, is that it stands alone among these programs in deriv-
ing from the analytic tradition of philosophy; such continental schools
of thought as phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction have
clearly proven much more suggestive for theorizing about literatureduring
the past thirty years than anything in modern Anglo-American philoso-
phy, with the single exception of speech-act theory.
Because recent literary theory borrows so much from philosophy, the
problem arises of the preparedness of theorists to work with material from
philosophy, which after all is a different discipline. Reading through con-
temporary theoretical criticism, we can find many learned discussions of
thinkers such as Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, or Heidegger, discussions that
provide the background for speculative literary analyses of many kinds. By
contrast, it is rare to find extensive commentary on thoughts or thinkers
that belong to the tradition of analytic philosophy: Although the likes of
Frege, Carnap, or Quine will be cited from time to time in the literature of
theory, the application will almost always be local and immediate -that is,
the reference will be to a particular work or idea, and there will be no ex-
tended discussion of the interpretation or significance of the material cited.
(I have enlarged upon this in Gorman 1990, reviewing Dasenbrock 1989.)
This is not a merely notional problem, but is exemplified by the whole
history of the attempted utilization of themes and techniques from speech-
act theory for the purposes of literary study by the likes ofJonathan Culler,
Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Shoshana Felman, Stanley Fish, Wolfgang
Iser, BarbaraJohnson, J. Hillis Miller, Christopher Norris, and Richard
Ohmann.' The interest of all these critics and theorists in such a narrow
branch of analytical philosophy might seem surprising in itself, though it
is not really so: the subject of speech-act theory is the contribution that
contextual factors make to the significance of a piece of discourse, and this
would also constitute a fair definition of much literary criticism. What is
genuinely surprising, and very troublesome, given the elective affinity be-
tween criticism and speech-act theory, is the sheer badnessof the attempts
at utilizing the theory made by these critics, who have written virtually
1. This essay does not attempt to survey all that critics have written in connection with
speech-act theory, but only to explore the reasons for the unfortunate results of the literary-
critical encounter with speech acts so far. For good essay-length surveys, however, see Straus
1987 and Rabinowitz 1995; both provide bibliographical guides as well, as does Petrey 199o
(on the substance of which book see below).

Gorman* The Use andAbuseof Speech-ActTheoryin Criticism 95
nothing about it that is even reliable, much less illuminating.2The unfa-

miliarity of most literary critics with the tradition of thought from which
speech-act theory emerges offers one possible explanation for the cata-
strophic inadequacy of their treatment of it. In what follows, I will explore
this and other possible factors in a general consideration of the reception
of speech-act theory to date within literary theory.3
Two preliminary remarksare needed. First, the following discussion will
be confined to the literary-critical reception of the thought of J. L. Austin
and, to some extent, of John Searle, whose work in the philosophy of lan-
guage is unavoidably bound up with Austin's. This will exclude any con-
sideration of the work of Paul Grice, whose ideas about nonconventional
meaning and conversational implicature represent a significant extension
of (or even an alternative to) Austin's model of linguistic activity. Thus
although a number of literary theorists have been interested in Gricean
pragmatics, I will not be discussing them here.4 A separate treatment of
Grice and literary theory is certainly needed, however. Second, any discus-
sion of speech-act theory in the context of literary study risksrunning afoul
of the treacherous reefs constituted by Derrida's interrogation-for lack of
a better word-of Austin and, subsequently, of Searle. Shipwreck threat-
ens here because so many literary theorists have such a big investment in
Derridean thought that they come to the work of Austin and Searle, and
to any issues connected with this work, committed in advance to the view
that (1) whatever Derrida says about it constitutes the final word on the
subject-except, of course, for endless exegesis-and that (2) in any case,
Derrida's comments on or around speech-act theory are eo ipsoby far the
most important comments that anyone has ever made -or ever can make.
Thus one is hard-pressed, on the one hand, to offer anything that will
be taken as a fair assessment of Derrida's contribution to the debates in-
volved, and equally hard-pressed, on the other hand, even to touch upon
the question of Derrida and speech-act theory without being forced to de-
vote an excessive amount of attention to works like Derrida's "Limited
2. Exceptions to this generalization are Altieri 1981 (ch. 2: 53-96) and Harris
1988 (ch. 2:
33-62). Significantly, Harris's own survey of "Speech-Act Theory" (1992) makes no refer-
ence at all to literary theorists' responses to, or adaptations of Austin, Searle, or Grice.
3. Of course I use the phrase "to date" provisionally, since work in this area is steadily forth-
coming. An example is Henkel 1996, which appeared too late for me to take any account
of it.
4. In addition to Altieri 1981 and Harris 1988 previously cited, Pratt 1977 will be conspicu-
ous by its absence. Moreover, a number of the items I will discuss deal with both Grice and
Austin/Searle, and in these cases I will only be commenting on them in connection with the
latter.

96 PoeticsToday20:1
Inc.," at the expense, ultimately, of attention to works like Austin's How to

Do Thingswith Words.However, in what follows I am determined to give
the Derridean response no more than a proportionate amount of atten-
tion, and critical attention at that.
LiteraryTheoristson Austin:MajorThemes
Peter Rabinowitz (1995: 350) is right in calling How to Do Things with Words
a "truly cryptic" book. This aspect of Austin's William James lectures
for 1955 has perhaps exercised a vague magnetic pull on literary critics
and theorists, but, judging by the bulk of the commentary on Austin and
speech-act theory written by critics, it has not posed anything like a problem.
On the contrary, the impression given by the pertinent writings of Culler,
Johnson, Ohmann, and the others is that not only are the scope and sub-
stance of Austin's project in the lectures clear enough, but so are its limi-
tations and weaknesses. Although Austin covers a bewildering amount of
ground in these twelve lectures, there are just two elements in them which
have provided occasion for the great bulk of the literary-critical response.
One is the infamous passage in the second lecture where Austin ex-
cludes certain kinds of utterance from theoretical consideration to begin
with because they are "void" or "hollow"-and where it turns out that
what Austin has in mind are utterances spoken, for instance, in drama or
poetry: thus literature itself is left out of consideration, as a category of
discursive "etiolations"which are "parasitic"upon "ordinary"usage (1975
[1962]: 21-22, cf. 104: "Walt Whitman does not seriously incite the eagle
of liberty to soar"). That this passage has had the effect on critics of the
proverbial red rag waved in front of a bull is clear from the fact that al-
most everything written by critics on speech-act theory involves a long,
serious discussion of this passage. Critics seem to take it as a denigration,
on Austin's part, of what they study--as if to let it pass without challenge
would constitute a blot on the honor of literature and criticism. But this
is a ludicrous reaction. Austin's aim is very large in these twelve lectures:
namely, to understand something about the workings of language. To con-
struct any theory of this kind, you have to start somewhere; and you have
to do some preliminary bracketing. Everyone who studies language agrees
that it is an extremely complex phenomenon, so that to try to take all of its
elements and functions into account when first developing a theory would
be impossible, or at least fatal to the elaboration of a theory of any sub-
stance. This does not seem like a hard point to grasp.
However, if any literary critics want staunchly to maintain that an ade-
quate theory of language must begin from a full recognition of such liter-

Gorman * The Use and Abuse of Speech-Act Theory in Criticism 97
ary phenomena as figurality, fictiveness, or dramatization, it is incumbent

upon them to show how this approach can be developed and applied to
the explanation of such phenomena as literal, or factual, or serious uses of
language. The challenge is, then, to show that a theory that does not start
from "ordinary"language can still account for ordinary characteristics of
language better than-or even as well as-a theory of the usual sort in
analytic philosophy of language (of which Austin's is only one example),
which begins with "ordinary"usage as the object of explanation, and then
aims to extend the range of the theory beyond its (admittedly quite nar-
row) bounds. None of the literary critics who go after Austin for his sup-
posed disrespect for literary language has attempted anything like this, or
given evidence, for that matter, that any of them has a sense of bearing
some obligation here. (A standardmove that literary theorists have used to
deflect anything like this challenge is to deny one or more of the distinc-
tions involved: figurative/literal, fictional/factual, dramatic/serious, ordi-
nary/literary. But that road is closed, at least if the aim is to vindicate the
status of literature and criticism. For the effect of claiming that there are
no significant distinctions here is not simply to put the categories of the
"factual,"the "ordinary,"and so on, in doubt-though this is certainly the
intention-but equally much to dissolve the category of literature itself.
What these literary theorists want to berate Austin for, they have done
themselves, much more completely.)
The second theme from How to Do Thingswith Wordsthat has preoccu-
pied literary critics to the virtual exclusion of anything else in Austin is
his hypothesization of performative utterances, which has been simplified,
enlarged, and otherwise misinterpreted by literary theorists as the now-
familiar shibboleth of "the performative."It seems especially strange that
this term, out of all those used in the James lectures, should have become
the object of appropriation for literary theorists. Not only is it, as I just
said, hypothetical, but Austin expressly refutesthe hypothesis of a consta-
tive/performative distinction in the first seven lectures of the series, up
to the point, that is, where he announces -significantly, one would have
thought-"It is time then to make a fresh start on the problem" (ibid.: 91).
The way in which he starts over is to introduce quite a different distinc-
tion, between locutionary and illocutionary acts.
I will return to Austin's handling of the problem further along. Now I
want to consider the reasons why theorists have been so hypnotized by the
phantom concept of the performative, and why they have almost with-
out exception ignored the locutionary/illocutionary distinction that ex-
pressly supersedes it in Austin's program. One attraction that the consta-
tive/performative distinction holds for deconstructors in particular seems

98 PoeticsToday20:1
obvious: It is that this "opposition" collapses so easily (since after all it

was pretty much designed to do that). This quality provides the critic who
needs it with a cheap and easy way of reading any work as a deconstruc-
tive or otherwise "self-consuming" artifact: the recipe is simply to assign
some elements of the work to the constative rubric, some to the perfor-
mative, and then reveal the equivalence or mutual interdependence of the
two. Another hypnotic quality of the notion of the performative for liter-
ary theorists lies in its theatrical connotations, specifically its similarity or
proximity to the concept of performance. Much hay can be made with this
analogy, obviously: Judith Butler has led the way here (see now her Excit-
ableSpeech[1997]), while the title of the recent anthology edited by Andrew
Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Performativity and Performance (1995),
makes the equation explicitly. In all such work, Austin is repeatedly cited
as an inspiration or precedent, but the unasked question is always whether
there is any actual basisin Austin's thought for using such a generalized
notion of performativity as a tool of analysis.
Austinand Speech-ActTheory:Some Guidelines

What has been said so far may seem like an unduly sweeping dismissal
of literary theorists' responses to, or appropriations of, speech-act theory.
In order to support my blunt assertion that most of the work that literary
critics and theorists have done so far in this area is bad, I will suggest four
maxims to serve as signposts warning enthusiastic amateurs of speech-act
theory against some of the pitfalls that it involves. In outlining these proce-
dural suggestions, I will also take the opportunity to comment on several
of the best-known cases of theorists' engagement with Austin's legacy.
Maxim 1: Do Not UnderrateSpeech-ActTheory

The most common failing among theorists in the humanities who have
professed an interest in Austin's work and its aftermath has been the ten-
dency to treat it as something essentially already familiar, and thus redu-
cible to established concepts or practices. Derrida was perhaps the first,
and certainly one of the worst offenders along these lines. Here, despite
my professed desire to tread circumspectly around the issue of the Derrida-
Austin relationship (to avoid becoming embroiled in the sort of mindless,
nasty recrimination that has characterized the response to the encounter
between Derrida and Searle over Austin), I have to step forward and en-
dorse at least one main element of Searle's complaint against Derrida in
"Reiteratingthe Differences" (Searle 1977).That is, Derrida simply did not
take Austin seriously enough to study his work as a whole and to think

about the James lectures' place in the context of that work, as is clear from
Derrida's "Signature Event Context" (1977 [1971]).(Henceforth I will fol-
low Derrida's own practice in referring to this essay as "SEC.")And if stat-
ing this puts me in the camp of what Reed Way Dasenbrock (1989: 8) has
called the "Derrida-bashers"as opposed to that of the "Searle-bashers,"so
be it. Ideally, however, I would hope to escape the depressing prospect of
a choice so stark, between options so stupid.5Perhaps I can do so by for-
mulating Searle's complaint in an alternative way.
What I want to suggest is that the extent of Derrida's failure to do justice
to Austin in "SEC" can be measured by the standardsimplicit in Derrida's
own best prior work. For me what is unsatisfactory about Searle's critique
of Derrida lies not in the content-after all, I have just endorsed at least
one of Searle's major objections-but rather in its tone, conveying as it
does the suggestion that Derrida is a charlatan of some kind (no wonder
the choir of aggrieved acolytes has howled).6Unlike Searle, I have been as
deeply impressed as anyone by Derrida's earlier work-by which I mean
the studies up to and including the publications of 1972: Positions(1981a
[1972a]), Dissemination (1981b [1972b]), and Margins (1982 [1972]) ("SEC" is
included in the latter). What is so impressive about Derrida's early writ-
ings, however, is precisely the sense they convey of total intimacy with
the writings that they address-be it, for instance, those of Plato, Aris-
totle, Leibniz, Rousseau, Saussure, or Husserl-joined with a surprising
but convincing articulation of the rhetorical qualities of these writings,
and of the conceptual consequences of those qualities. Read against this
context, "SEC" seems brisk and inadequate, or at least the portion of it
devoted to Austin does. Actually the essay begins with a further consider-
ation of works and authors belonging to that constellation which Derrida
had previously addressed so influentially: Aristotle, Condillac, and Emile
Benveniste. But when in the second half of his essay Derrida turns to How
5. Here is a splendid example of the kind of thing that I want to avoid: "In the late 1970s
Searle wrote a 'reply' to Derrida's deconstruction of Austin, assuming that Derrida was at-
tacking 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 Der-
rida 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" (Robinson 1994: 685). I include this
citation lest it be thought that I am speaking too harshly. On the Searle/Derrida conflict,
see Dasenbrock's helpfully annotated bibliography in his anthology (1989: 247-53).
6. Rabinowitz suggests that Searle was "tempermentally unsuited" to engaging Derrida on
the issues involved (1995: 367). Perhaps so; but that cannot of course absolve us from the
need to think through the issues without being prejudiced by things such as Searle's tem-
perament-or Derrida's rhetorical style, for that matter.

100 PoeticsToday20:1
to Do Thingswith Words,his approach contrasts as sharply as possible with

the kind of patient textual unraveling based on a minute familiarity that
typifies his work on Rousseau in the Grammatology (1976 [1967]), or in Plato
in "Plato's Pharmacy" (1972 [1968]), to cite just two examples. Yet in the
second part of "SEC," it seems obvious that Derrida is interested solely,
and reductively, in the fact that Austin's lectures can be shown to fit a cer-
tain pattern already established by Derrida as exemplified in the whole
tradition of Western thought about language and representation. And it
may indeed be that much of what happens in Austin's lectures-with their
obvious valuation of speech over writing, their apparent dismissal of "non-
serious" (= literary) uses of language, and so forth-does fit this pattern,
in a striking way. The point remains that, in doing nothing more than
fitting Austin's text to a preestablished grid, Derrida is routinizing his pro-
cedure-turning it into a set practice-in exactly the way that the most
hostile critics of deconstruction have blamed it for doing.
In noting this I do not mean to deny that much of Derrida's best work
has been produced since "SEC," but rather to suggest that the essay marks
a change in Derrida's style, and an opening toward an easier sort of work,
toward a kind of reading for much lower stakes than Derrida himself had
accustomed us to. I would add as well that, although Derrida has returned
on several occasions to Austin in subsequent writings, he has done nothing
to improve on the deficiencies of "SEC."7
Fish is another theorist who, independently of Derrida, has taken the
line that speech-act theory can be slipped neatly and without remainder
into some larger conceptual frame (supplied, of course, by Fish), so that
where Austin makes points agreeable to Fish's line (or at least interpret-
ableas such) he can be cited in support of Fish's position; and where not,
this simply shows Austin's blindness to the import of his own best ideas.
An example of the latter would be Austin's mythical belief in ordinary
(as opposed to extraordinary-read, literary) language. An example of the
former would be the example that Austin (1975 [1962]: 143) uses in his
eleventh James lecture, of the utterance "Franceis hexagonal."8
7. Among these writings are (of course) "Limited Inc" (1988 [1977]), his "Afterword"(1988b),
to the reprint of the latter in LimitedInc, (l998a), as well as Memoires:ForPaul de Man (1989
[1986]) and "Some Statements" (1990). No doubt there are others, which would be known
to more avid readers of Derrida.
Although enthusiasts generally treat "Limited Inc" as the last word on the problems
which occupy Austin and Searle, and as something that simply supersedes their work, it is
not clear that Derrida articulates a position in this text that is either comprehensible or co-
herent. For two friendly but by no means unskeptical accounts, see Wheeler 1986 and Beam
1995. The next step would be to start from their reconstructions of Derrida to see whether
Austin or Searle have indeed been left in the dust.
8. Fish's discussion in "With the Compliments of the Author" (1981-1982) is summarized in

Is this statement true or false? Austin's point is that the utterance's

truth-value depends on who is evaluating it: for a geographer it would
be false, but a teacher in an elementary-school class might well see fit to
present it, or take it, as true.9What Fish (198ob: 198) then wants this point
to mean is that what is true or false is not naturally given, but socially
constructed: "What Austin discovers . . . is that all utterances are perfor-
mative . . . and therefore that all facts are institutional. . . . This means
not only that statements about an object will be assessed . . . according
to the conditions of their utterance, but that the object itself, insofar as it
is available for reference and description, will be a productof those condi-
tions." Unfortunately, Austin's example neither shows nor means any such
thing. It would be too time-consuming to go into all the fallacies in Fish's
discussion, so I will confine myself to two that crop up in the short pas-
sage quoted. First, nothing in Austin's example suggests that it is somehow
the case that, for the geographer or the teacher, it is anything other than
the way that the world is which decides whether the statement is true or
false. The verdicts may be different in the two cases, because the criteria
employed by the teacher and the geographer differ (that is where the ele-
ment of social construction does come in); but that by reference to which
they are evaluating the statement-namely, the shape of France-is iden-
tical (the existence of a natural, nonconstructed reality does not somehow
evaporate).'1Another fallacy lies in Fish's announcement that, in demol-
ishing the constative/performative distinction, Austin has discovered (but
failed to recognize) that there are only performatives.The problem is that
the two types were defined relationally: if the idea of the constative goes,
so does that of the performative. Fish's repackaging of speech-act theory,
like Derrida's, may leave literary theorists feeling much cleverer than phi-
losophers like Austin, but the insight offered is delusory.
the headnote (198ob) added to the reprint of "How to Do Things with Austin and Searle"
(1977)in Is Therea Textin This Class?(1980a).
9. I have changed Austin's example slightly for the sake of simplicity, using a schoolteacher
in place of a "top-ranking general" (ibid.).
o1. The unconvinced may compare this case to that of a sheet of multicolored spots viewed
by a normally sighted person, a colorblind person, and a cat. In the case of any particular
spot, the question as to what color it is may be decided differently by the person with nor-
mal sight (who can discriminate blue from, say, red), the colorblind person (who cannot tell
blue apart from other colors), and the cat (which can descriminate much finer shades than
the normally sighted human can at the red end of the spectrum, but is effectively colorblind
at the blue end). They may each give a different verdict as to the color of the spot in ques-
tion because their optical equipment differs; but to recognize this is not to dissolve the very
idea of the intrinsic (that is to say, given-and-not-produced) color of the spots on the sheet.
Indeed, no explanation of the verdicts as to color can avoid making reference to the color
that the spots areand how this affects the optical equipment of the viewer.

Maxim2: Do Not OverrateSpeech-ActTheory

This shortcoming, inverse to the one previously mentioned, has been at
least as common; indeed it may be universal among literary critics who
have taken up the topic. This is hard to decide, however, because over-
rating speech-act theory is not a problem that lends itself to exemplifi-
cations as spectacular as those offered by Derrida or Fish in underrating
the theory. This is because, while underrating speech-act theory manifests
itself in some positive activity (of reducing Austin, as I have suggested, to
familiar parameters), overrating it consists instead in the negative fact of
simply failing to consider what the reach of Austin's (or Searle's) analysis
might be. Any amount of reflection on this should quickly lead to the real-
ization that the scope of speech-act theory is limited at best.
In saying what I have said so far about the mostly unsuccessful attempts
of theorists in the humanities to appropriate speech-act theory, I have not
wanted to present myself as an outraged defender of some orthodoxy. This
is the role in which Derrida, in "Limited Inc.," attempts to cast Searle, for
his temerity in taking issue with Derrida's comments on Austin in "SEC."
But this was a completely unfair characterization of Searle, whose work
on speech acts starts from a criticalresponse to Austin's ideas (and this is
another aspect of that wider context of work on speech acts that Derrida
ignores-or is ignorant about)." However, I will say that fDerrida's com-
plaint were justified, it would amount to a very serious criticism. There is
no place for orthodoxies in philosophical or theoretical work of any kind.
The point that I am coming round to is that, in criticizing literary theorists'
dabbling with speech-act theory, I do not by any means want to imply that
I see the theory as something that ought to be held immune from inter-
pretation, application, revision, or reflection. In fact I doubt that Austin's
theory as such will stand up to very much reflection. My criticisms here
are directed at half-baked or reductive interpretations or applications, on
the principle that if we are going to address a theory in some way, even a
bad theory deserves careful attention.
What, then, are some of the limitations of speech-act theory?
One is that speech-act theory concerns itself with only one aspect of
human language use--namely, what it is that people do with the sentences
and other expressions that they employ to communicate linguistically,
given that they are able to formulate expressions such as sentences in lan-
11. For an example of Searle's critical revisionism with regard to Austin, see his essay on
"Austinon Locutionary and Illocutionary Acts" (1968)- though in fact no one who bothered
to read through SpeechActswould think that Searle has some kind of investment in defending
Austin against all comers (the kind of investment, I mean, that some literary theorists have
in Derrida).

guage in the first place. But this ability, which speech-act theory simply
takes for granted, constitutes the major issue for the philosophy of lan-
guage,'2in comparison to which the communicative nuances focused upon
by theorists like Austin and Searle are secondary. Secondary but undeni-
able, certainly-and this limitation of speech-act theory to the framework
of the human use of language would be nothing worse than a limitation
if so many theorists in the humanities did not seem to assume that, once
we understand what speech-act theory (or pragmatics generally) shows us
about language, we have understood everything that we can or need to
about language. G. J. Warnock (1991[1989]: 151),at the end of his excel-
lent study of Austin, makes this point as it pertains to How toDo Thingswith
Words,noting the surprising but true fact that:
aboutlanguage [the book]has almostnothingat all to say.Austinis interested,
to use his own phrase,in "the total speech-actin the total speech-situation";
but he simplytakesit for grantedthat, as a basicresourcefor his performance
of speech-acts,a speakerhas a languageat his command,a vocabularyand a
grammar,enablinghim to producesentenceswhich express"whathe means"
and which will (he hopes)be appropriatelyunderstoodby his audience....
[Austin]was willing simplyto assumethat we have "got"a language,with a
view to gettingon to the question:whatdo we dowith it?
For a philosophical account of language, however, the question more basic
than Austin's-however significant that may be as well-is, what is a lan-
guage, and how is it that anyone can possess or "command"it well enough
to express whatever that person might want to mean? This problem con-
stitutes the conceptual iceberg hidden below-but also supporting-the
slender gray spires of Austinian pragmatics.
An even more fundamental limitation of speech-act theory is that it
arguably takes what is simply a misguided approach to the question that it
does address, of what language-users do in using the languages that they
possess. The notion of illocutionary force, which Austin's successors have
taken to be his most significant theoretical contribution, seems
particularly
vulnerable here. Austin hypothesized, on the evidence of the
dictionary,
that there were something on the order of several thousand distinct
types
of illocutionary force, this being the rough number of verbs that describe
actions the accomplishment of which may (but need not) involve some
verbal components, such as excusing, insulting, threatening, and
warning
12. As Donald Davidson asks at the

beginning of a collection of his essays on the philosophy
of language, "What is it for words to mean what they do?" (1984: xiii). There are of course
many other philosophical questions that can be asked about language, but the answers to
any of those obviously depend on the answer that we give to this question.

(1975 [1962]: 150). But this does not give us a good basis for a theory, for
at least two reasons. The less important but still significant one is that the
sheer number of elements that the theory is called upon to account for
discretely in this way is simply too large. In this respect, it is significant
that the tentative classifications outlined by Austin in his final James lec-
ture, and by Searle in his essay, "A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts" (1975),
though differing widely in details, have it in common that they begin by
proposing the assimilation of the thousands of different potential speech-
acts under a much smaller number (just five) of what I might call master
speech-acts. The more telling objection to Austin's piecemeal conception
of linguistic activities, however, is that we cannot, and surely need not,
learn several thousand different patterns of action as part of acquiring a
mastery of a language. Michael Dummett has explained this point clearly
in his own William James lectures (for 1976), The Logical Basis of Metaphysics:
We should beware of distinguishing too many varieties of [sentential] force.

Austin's criterion for there being any given kind of what he called "illocutionary
force" was whether one could say that someone had performed a certain action
by uttering certain words. By this criterion, giving a warning is a species of illo-
cutionary force. But you do not have to have the concept of a warning in order
to understand a warning, in the way in which you have to have the concept of
a question in order to understand a question. If you understand the sentence
"The steps are very slippery,"and you know that someone uttering it is making
a serious assertion, you do not have further to grasp that he is giving you a
warning: you already completely understand what he is saying. (1991:120)13
Other problems with Austin's program could be raised. But for the
present let these two objections to the whole approach serve to justify the
maxim against overrating speech-act theory.
Maxim 3: Be Sure That You Understand the Theory before Trying to Use It
Of course most of what I say in this essay falls under this maxim. Aside
from wanting to restate it explicitly, however, I feel a greater need to em-
phasize the maxim given the blithely revisionist efforts of Derrida, Fish,
and others, and their treatment of objectors like Searle as mere obstruc-
13. Dummett takes up the same point in a 1987 interview with Joachim Schulte: "Austin
takes as the basic question, 'How many different things can one be said to do by uttering
some sentence or phrase?' He then proceeds to list all those verbs that expess an action
that may be performed by uttering certain words, and considers that to each of them corre-
sponds a certain type of illocutionary force. But that is not the right question to ask in this
connection. The right question is, 'What forms of speech act do you have to know about in
order to understand an instance of them? Which practices must you have learned?' I do not
think that it is necessary to learn specifically what warnings are in order to ... understand
what someone means when he says, 'Look out! " (1994: 180-81).

tionists. It is not meant to forestall creative misinterpretation (which may

be very valuable) but to draw attention to appropriations of speech-act
theory which, if they aremisinterpretations, must then depend for what-
ever value they have precisely upon their creativity-that, is, their coher-
ence, plausibility, and suggestiveness.
The most obvious instance here has already been mentioned, namely
the recurrent seizure by literary theorists upon Austin's constative/perfor-
mative distinction, to the exclusion of the locutionary/illocutionary dis-
tinction which supersedes it in Austin's own presentation. Of course it
might always be that Austin was wrong to reject the framework of consta-
tives and performatives-but if you think this, and want to use "constative"
or "performative"as terms of analysis, then you are obliged to makethecase
for the justifiability of these notions. But I do not know of a theorist who
has done so, among the many who simply help themselves to the terms.'4
Though overreliance on the constative/performative dyad is the most
familiar error of literary theorists who want to do things with Austin or
Searle, it is not the only one. I will cite an example from Sandy Petrey,
whose SpeechActsandLiteraryTheorywill concern us in the next section. At
present I am turning to his previous book, Realismand Revolution,and in
particular its first chapter, "The Revolution Takes a Name" (1988: 17-52),
in which Petrey makes some exceedingly heavy going out of the fact that
the National Assembly whose convention in 1789 inaugurated the French
Revolution had first to nameitself. Beginning from Austin's analysis of the
conditions and conventions necessary to the felicitous performance of an
utterance such as, "I name this ship the QueenElizabeth"(from the first
14. In defense of this practice, a theorist might cite Benveniste, and indeed this linguist's use
of the performative/constative distinction to frame his essay on "Analytical Philosophy and
Language" seems to have been taken by literary theorists as a license to bypass Austin's sub-
sequent replacement of it by an analysis of the action of speech in terms of locutionary and
illocutionary force. But let us recall what Benveniste (1966 [1963]: 234) says: "We have taken
from this article [Austin's "Performative-Constative,"summarizing the relevant aspects of
the James lectures] only the most salient points of the line of reasoning and those arguments
in the demonstration which touched upon facts which are properly linguistic .... Whether
or not [Austin] was right to set up a distinction and then immediately go about watering
it down and weakening it to the point of making one doubt its existence, it nonetheless re-
mains true that linguistic matter serves as a basis for analysis in this case, and we are all the
more interested in it because we have ourselves independently pointed out the special lin-
guistic situation of this type of utterance." Benveniste does not attempt to make a case, as I
have put it, for even raising a doubt about Austin's critique of the constative/performative
distinction: his sole justification for pursuing the distinction is that it fits linguisticanalysis
better. Here the real motivation for literary theorists' preference stands revealed, I suspect.
If your interest is in the language of literature, an approach via performatives simply lets
you "do more things" than does one via illocution-no matter that the former notion is dis-
credited. For more on this, see below.

James lecture (1975[1962]: 5, which as we will see below is a favorite with

Petrey), it is not difficult for him to generate a whole budget of paradoxes
out of the fact that no sociolinguistic conventions were in place under
which the Assembly could name itself in the way described by Austin: the
whole significance of the situation, after all, lay in the fact that it was revo-
lutionary; with no antecedently constituted authorities being recognized,
the National Assembly's task was to establish its own authority, political
and otherwise.
But the paradoxes that Petrey generates from the situation by using Aus-
tinian notions are solely the product of his misunderstanding of both the
scope and content of those notions. To begin with content: the action per-
formed when someone (under the right conventional circumstances)utters
the words, "I name this ship the QueenElizabeth,"thereby giving that ship
the name, is not the act of naming--and here Austin may be at fault for
his characteristically loose phraseology-but one of christening. Of course
"christening" should be taken in its secular sense here as applying to any
ceremony or other set of ritual conventions for publicly labeling a person
or object with a name. The point is, however, that the act of christening
presupposes, not only the existence of conventions, but that of names. (The
justification for this would be that it will always make sense to ask, of any
christening ritual, "How did they know what name to christen him/her/it
with?"). When the National Assembly adopted the term "National As-
sembly" for itself in 1789, it was not christening itself, but namingitself. No
paradox is involved. This brings me to Petrey's failure to understand the
scope of speech-act theory, a scope which, as I noted in connection with
the previous maxim, is quite limited. If as I have suggested christening in-
volves antecedently established conventions but naming does not, it then
might be asked how we do name things or people. The answer is that all
that is involved is usage and conformity to usage. Any group of people sit-
ting in a room could, like the National Assembly in 1789, decide to call
themselves something as a group, say N: if the individuals involved subse-
quently apply the term Nto themselves as a name, and especially if others
follow this usage of N, then the group has effectively named itself X; and
if not, not. Nothing more is involved, and certainly nothing that pertains
to speech-act theory. Another way of putting the point concisely would be
to say that speech-act theory is concerned with the things that people do
with their language (including christening), but that names and naming
are part of any language and thus are among the concepts that Austinian
pragmatics must take for granted.

Maxim4: Begin by Asking Whatthe Point Is of Using the Theory

Many of the literary theorists who have taken up speech-act theory seem
to have something else in mind in doing so. When this further goal is
deemed to be larger in significance than speech-act theory, this maxim
falls under the first maxim against underrating the theory. But a separate
maxim is needed because it is not always clear that speech-act theory is
being subordinated to some other kind of theory, but only that its charac-
teristic aims and methods are being neglected in favor of that other. Sho-
shana Felman's The Literary SpeechAct (1983 [198o]) typifies this syndrome,
in that it announces itself as a book about Austin, but turns out to be one
about Jacques Lacan. Lack of attention to the point of utilizing speech-act
theory, then, constitutes a further reason why so many literary-theoretical
attempts at appropriating Austin seem to go so wide of the mark.
Perhaps this diagnosis provides us with the kind of last word on the
Austin-Derrida-Searle controversy that Stanley Cavell clearly aspires to
speak in his lecture "What Did Derrida Want of Austin?", in which he ex-
presses his dismay that the controversy
has helped to perpetuate the thought that Austin underwrites some idea that
language contains a general, unified dimension of effect that can be called one
of performance and that he advances a general contrast between ordinary lan-
guage and literary language. These ideas alone are sufficient to destroy any
contribution Austin's distinctiveness might lend in such discussions. (l995b:
44-45) 15
Cavell goes on to explain his sense that
while Derrida found Austin philosophically interesting, even congenial, and

Searle had found Austin useful and worth defending against this treatment,
neither really felt that Austin's is a philosophical voice whose signature is dii-
cultto assess and important to hear out in its difference. (ibid.)
An important qualification suggested by Cavell's complaint is one that

should perhaps have been made at the start of this discussion, namely that
"Austin" is not merely synonymous with "speech-act theory." Cavell him-
self shows hardly any interest in Austin's speech-act program, but advo-
cates a broader response to Austin's thought, which seems to him to have
15. In his presentationat the Seminarsubsequentto his lecture,Cavell(1995:69) addsthese

importantremarks:"Inthe casesof DerridaandAustin,we havefigureseachof whomtakes
himselfas representativeof, or a productof, a more or less coherenttraditionof thinking
withinwhichtheirown viewsare marginalor eccentric.Eachof them writesas presentto
somethingthat is to be undone.... So the questionfor me becomes:Why does Derrida
not see the way in whichAustinis at oddsas muchwith his traditionas Derridais with his
tradition?"

been neglected by those-Searle and Derrida alike-who have been eager

to elaborate or appropriate this (single) theory of Austin's. There is not
only a question, in other words, as to what point Austin may have had
in mind in developing his theory of speech-acts, but also a question as to
whether, in asking after that kind of point, we run the risk of missing other
philosophical points that the whole body of Austin's work might suggest.
Speech Acts and LiteraryTheory:A Critique

Rather than attempting to review the whole subliteratureon critical theory
and speech-act theory, I want to focus my attention on a single book,
which is intended to provide an authoritative survey of this area (and may,
unfortunately, be received as such by unsuspecting critics), namely Sandy
Petrey's SpeechActsandLiteraryTheory.While it does offer useful summaries
of most of what literary theorists have written on and around Austin's work
on speech acts, Petrey's book also epitomizes the shortcomings of com-
prehension and response that blight these writings. As such Petrey's may
reward more extended critical scrutiny than unsuccessful books usually do.
In what follows, I will consider its main limitations under three headings.
UnderstandingAustin'sThought
The most striking problem with Petrey's study is that he simply does not
understand Austin well. Some features of Austin's work, no doubt, are
harder to understand than others. One real difficulty lies in grasping the
overall aim and development of Austin's thought, because he wrote so
little, and published less; what remains is a scattering of essays and post-
humously edited works, of which How toDo Thingswith Wordsis by far the
best-known. However, in addition to this slim base for any attempt to form
a picture of what Austin was up to, there also exists an unusually large
body of testimony by students and colleagues regarding his methods and
outlook.16One measure of the weakness of critical theorists' approach to
Austin is their lack of familiarity with, much less interest in, all or most
of this contextual material, and Petrey's book provides a vivid example of
this. Some of his predecessors at least looked at Austin's Philosophical Papers
(1979 [1961]) and Sense and Sensibilia
(1962), if to little effect, whereas Petrey
deals solely with the James lectures, and compares them only to the work
16. Much material of this sort is contained in Fann's Symposium on . L. Austin(1969), which
Petrey does not cite. The limitations of Austin's output have much to do with his conception
of his task as pedagogical, and this is the kind of thing that needs to be taken into account,
to start with, by anyone hoping to "do things" with Austin; literary theorists have not.

of linguists like Saussure and Chomsky.'7Petrey's basic claim here is that,

whereas linguistics has treated language solely as a system of forms, Austin
had the revolutionary thought that language is a socialactivity.This gener-
alization is typical of the book, both in its innocence of intellectual history
(as if linguistics had been merely a formalist enterprise) and in its con-
ceptual ingenuousness (as if a revolution was-ever-to have been made
by stressing something as obvious as the social nature of language). Even
more to the point, it is entirely misleading to present Austin as if he were
criticizing linguistics.Granted that he might well have taken a critical atti-
tude toward that discipline had he ever concerned himself with it, the fact
is that he did not. What the James lectures criticize is the tradition of philo-
sophical logic stemming from Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein's Tractatus,
and this is the background that must be reconstituted (since Austin barely
alludes to it) if we are to grasp Austin's purpose in the lectures. Though
Petrey's failure even to glance in this direction is not unusual among liter-
ary theorists, it is especially ironic in his case, given how often he describes
Austin's main lessons as being (1)that discourse cannot be understood just
in itself, but only in its context, and (2) that what is important about lan-
guage is not what it means but what it does. Yet Petrey's book neither
conveys a sense of the context of Austin's lectures, nor shows any appre-
ciation of what he was doing in delivering them.
Even failing an adequate knowledge of the background and aim of How
toDo Thingswith Words,it should be possible to follow its general argument,
since Austin presents this clearly enough, and since it does not seem to be a
hard one, the organization of the lectures being one of the less mysterious
features of Austin's work. But just this feature has repeatedly been mysti-
fied by literary theorists, Petrey among them. Austin begins by warning
against the philosophical error of simply equating the meaning of a sen-
tence with the proposition or truth-condition that it states (contra Petrey,
this is not a contextualistic critique of some formalism, but a point about
what constitutes a sentence's content).Austin notes that the significance of
some sentences seems, rather, to derive from the actions that they help to
perform, and so he hypothesizes that there are two categories of sentence,
the constative and the performative. The philosophical job that he then
undertakesis to find criteria for classifying any given sentence as belonging
17. Some kinds of things that a look beyond How to Do Thingswould reveal about Austin:
that he was responding, in his writings, chiefly to the ideas of logicians and philosophers of
a logical-empiricist bent; that he held very conservative views on the concepts of truth and
reference; and that he saw himself as a defender of commonsense views as opposed to vari-
ous kinds of theoretical castle-building. None of these and similar kinds of fact about Austin
sits comfortably with the mythical Austin given us by Derrida in "SEC," say, or Felman.

to one type or the other. But as the analysis continues, a variety of consider-
ations shows the unworkability of such a neat binary distinction, and so
Austin adverts to a more nuanced typology, based not on typesof sentences,
but on aspectsof a sentence's signification, particularlybetween the thought
that it may express and the action that it may be designed to perform or
assist in performing. Hence Austin's distinction between locutionary and
illocutionary meaning.'8Petrey isolates these two moments in Austin's in-
vestigation from each other, and while one might otherwise take it as a
conceit that Petrey first presents the constative/performative dyad without
any reference to Austin's self-critique, he continues to employ these terms
throughout the book, even after discussing Austin's move to the locution-
ary/illocutionary distinction. Indeed, Petrey ends by using both pairs of
terms in intertwined if not indistinguishable ways (so that we lose any sense
that he realizes that they mark distinctdistinctions), and by giving much
greater prominence to the constative/performative pair (so that no sense is
reflected, either, that Austin had some reasonfor changing his terminology).
What legitimates such a bizarre response in Petrey's eyes is his accep-
tance of the deconstructive line on the James lectures, and Petrey's par-
ticular variation on the now-familiar approach goes something like this:
having first identified a rooted conceptual opposition between constative
and performative language, Austin then reveals how the former has im-
plicitly been privileged over the latter, after which he reverses and destabi-
lizes the said hierarchy by assimilating the constative to the performative.
Like all deconstructive readings of How to Do Thingswith Words,however,
this one is mystificatory (at least in regard to the structureof Austin's argu-
ment) in that it ignores the thread connecting the lectures, which otherwise
appear disjoint. Austin was not intending to stage a deconstruction avant
la lettre,but to pursue a philosophical investigation using a method taken
from philology (but shared by all scientific inquirers), namely to formu-
late a theory, test its limits as strenuously as possible, and in light of this to
reformulate the initial hypotheses, so that the evolving theory becomes as
differentiated and responsive to the phenomena as possible. Austin's two
sets of terms belong to different stages in his investigation, and if most of
the lectures are taken up with the middle stage of testing (and demolish-
ing) the earlier terminology, this reflects Austin's commitment to the idea
that, in philosophy as in any kind of inquiry, we stand to learn the most
from mistakes;it just is not, as Petrey and other critics holding too closely
18. Austin's later typology is actually threefold, of course, since he further discriminates a
perlocutionary aspect of sentences, depending on their actual effects in utterance; but since
this category has proven very controversial, and Petrey mentions it only in passing, I will
not discuss it further.

to Derrida's apronstrings will have it, a matter of Austin's setting out to

subvert, through playfulness, the philosophical tradition (though to reject
this mischaracterization is not to deny that Austin could be playful and
subversive-only that he was in other ways).
What really interests Petrey,it emerges, is not any conceptual distinction
at all, but just one term, the performative.This he comes to treat as a gen-
eral label for the social aspect of language, which for him is the crucial one.
Austin's big insight, as Petrey sees it, comes down to this, that all language
is performance, since without the social activity of discourse, language
could hardly exist. (Here the influence of Fish has clearly been equal to that
of Derrida.) There can be no denying this truism, certainly, but in equat-
ing language with performance Petrey has confused, in a way that Austin
could never have done, a necessary condition for a phenomenon with the
thing itself. (Compare: if the atmosphere contained no water, there would
be no weather; therefore weather just is water.) Here is yet another type
of motivation to add to the list started previously to explain why it is that
literary theorists obsess over Austin's notion of the performative, coined,
tested, but then rejected so straightforwardlyin the James lectures.
CriticizingAustin'sThought
A further problem that Petrey shares with many other literary theorists
looking at Austin and speech-act theory is that, even to the extent that
he has understood it, Petrey remains largely uncritical of it. The persis-
tence of this problem among literary theorists is due partly to the fact that,
aside from not taking any interest in the philosophical genesis of Austin's
thought, they have also failed to pay attention to its philosophical impact-
for instance, to the responses of the kind of philosophers at whom Austin
was aiming his essays, lectures, and teaching. Far from making a revolu-
tion, Austin's main ideas have been widely criticized by his peers, and his
work, though acknowledged as a modern classic, has had very few sequels
aside from Searle's SpeechActs:the philosophy of language has evolved in
entirely different directions. Meanwhile, the theory of speech acts itself has
evolved into pragmatics, something quite different from what Austin had
in mind. Now of course it is entirely possible that this evaluation might be
all wrong, since a consensus judgment is not necessarily a true one (a prin-
ciple which Petrey does not always follow, incidentally, as will be noted
below); but anyone arguing for Austin's special significance, as many lit-
erary theorists do, ought to demonstrate at least an awareness of the criti-
cisms made of his thought, as well as a sense of what kind of response such
criticisms might require. Petrey deals with only one of Austin's
many re-
spondents, namely Searle, but even then Petrey sweeps past almost all the

points where Searle criticizes Austin, in favor of those where the two seem
to agree (see 1990: 69). In the interest of concision, I will focus on Petrey's
unreflective treatment of just one topic.
A typical feature of Austin's thought, and one that has found little favor
among later philosophers, is his tendency in dealing with philosophical
problems to appeal to the notion of convention.Petrey, by contrast, en-
dorses this aspect of Austin's thought with enthusiasm. For him, the idea
that linguistic meaning and communication are constituted by a fabric of
conventions defines the social view of discourse that most interests him,
and he sees this as the lesson that speech-act theory has to teach liter-
ary theory. Now, of course language is a social phenomenon, so that no
adequate theory of discourse should allow us to ignore its social dimen-
sion. But what Petrey has not understood, or failed to reflect upon, is that
treating language as conventional is not the only option for a social ap-
proach, and that to treat language in this way is open, moreover, to rather
obvious objections, ones frequently rehearsed by Austin's critics. Petrey
returns constantly to Austin's "Rule A.1" in How to Do Thingswith Words,
which offers it as the criterion for the performativity of an utterance that
"a conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect," as made
by "certain persons in certain circumstances,"must be part of the context
of utterance (Austin 1975 [1962]: 14, 26). Petrey connects this with Searle's
discussion in SpeechActsof how certain phenomena are institutional in the
sense that they are a function of "constitutive rules," so that the points
scored in a ballgame, for instance, only exist within the understanding
that the participants and observers have of the rules of the game (Searle
1969: 50-53). Yet granted that there are conventional activities involving
language, the objection is that these cannot be taken in turn as modelsfor
language as a whole. The anticonventionalist view articulated by philoso-
phers like Willard Quine and Donald Davidson holds that, for a social
institution or other complex convention to become established in a com-
munity, its members must alreadybe able to communicate with each other:
thus, while language may include various conventional elements, it cannot
coherently be analyzed as constituting, in effect, one big social conven-
tion.'9 If the particular province of speech-act theory is that of linguistic
conventions, therefore, the theory cannot provide a complete account of
19. Standard statements of this position are given in Davidson's "Communication and Con-
vention" (1984 [1982]), and in Quine's Foreword to Lewis's Convention(1969), while Lewis's
book itself attempts to justify at least a chastened form of the conventionalist approach to
so
language. The point is not that the philosophical debate on the topic is closed but that,
far as literary theorists are concerned, it has yet to be opened.

language, as Petrey seems to assume that it actually does.20(An inciden-

tal problem ignored by Petrey is that Austin introduces Rule A.1 in trying
to give criteria for performative utterances; but what happens to it after
Austin shifts the whole problematic along locutionary/illocutionary lines?)
Another difficulty with Petrey's enthusiasm for Austininan convention-
alism is that he treats it as if it amounted to a refutation of intentionalism.
He makes much of Austin's critique of the claim expressed by Euripides's
-
Hippolytus - "my tongue swore to, but my heart did not" and the conter-
claim that Austin offers in the form of an old saw: ourwordis ourbond(Austin
1975 [1962]: lo-11; see Petrey 199o: 84, 108). For Petrey, this contrast pretty
much demolishes any treatment of meaning that tries to highlight the in-
tention of a speaker or writer, and thus justifies the rejection of authorial
intent among so many modern theorists of criticism.2'But this typically
breezy treatment of a complex set of problems will not do. The most that
the Hippolytus example shows is that a certain kindof intention--in this
case, a mental reservation-cannot override the express meaning of an
utterance in its context; it does not at all show that intentions are generally
void or insignificant, even in highly conventionalized forms of discourse
such as oath-taking. Indeed, linguistic conventions belong to the part of
language where the element of intentionality is necessarily very strong,
as Petrey might have realized had he looked, for example, at one of the
standard references on speech-act theory, P. F. Strawson's 1964 essay on
"Intention and Convention in Speech Acts": there the point is made that
part of what it is for a piece of discourse to be conventional is that it must
be intendedto be so. Hippolytus's reservation from his oath may be inten-
tional (because mental), but so is his act of swearing (because conventional).
Doubtless Petrey's mistake here involves a misunderstanding of Austin as
much as a failure to reflect critically on his views, because Austin would
hardly have allowed, for example, that a shotgun wedding was a legal one,
even if all the formalities required by convention were carried through
correctly, and would not have done so precisely because the wrong kinds
of intention would be involved (or the right kinds missing) in such a pro-
cedure; and in general Austin's analyses throughout the James lectures
are cast in strongly intentionalistic terms. Searle's elaboration on Austin's
20. As to the current state of philosophical debate about Austin's conventionalism, see the
exchange-very illuminating if very difficult-between Dummett and Strawson in Sen and

Verma (1995).
21. Anti-intentionalism is obviously a recurrent theme in modern
literary theory, and Petrey
does not mean to offer a blanket endorsement: rather he would presumably reject anti-
intentionalism as motivated by purely formalist considerations (as in New Criticism, for
instance), since the kind that he advocates is motivated, rather, by social ones.

views only aims to bring this emphasis out more clearly, and not, as Petrey
thinks, to replace a communitarian treatment with an individualistic one
(199o: 63). Repeatedly, Petreyjudges theoretical questions by appeal to the
simple dichotomy of community versus individual, treating any view that
emphasizes the first as something good, and the second as something bad,
and in doing so treating the two notions as if they were mutually exclusive.
This kind of reductiveness can only obscure the phenomena, linguistic and
social, that we aim to understand. Certainly Austin's purpose was not to
eliminate the role of intentions in discourse, but to use the concept of con-
vention-probably mistakenly, I have suggested-the better to show the
contribution that they make to linguistic meaning.
Thoughtversus PreconceivedFormulas
There are other aspects of Austin's thought that have impressed literary
theorists in spite of philosopher's failure to hail them, and in the places
where Petrey addresses these topics he follows the standard, uncritical line.
Not to belabor such points, however, I will turn now to discuss a third kind
of failure endemic to both Petrey'sbook and the line of literary-theoretical
work that it represents.The failure has to do not with the interpretation of
Austin or of speech-act theory, nor with how to respond to them, but rather
with intellectual style, and in particular with the extraordinary degree of
vagueness or, less kindly put, confusion evident in Petrey's handling of
concepts and arguments. This problem is so pervasive that there is no way
to generalize about it; instead I have selected a few indicative passages.
Petrey makes much of the famous story about the baseball umpire an-
nouncing, "It ain't nothing 'til I say it is," and treats this as a parable of
speech-act theory. While Petrey concedes that there is a "referentialfact"
about the baseball's trajectory, it is unimportant to him; what matters is
that the umpire has been accorded the social authority to make a state-
ment that will determine what is the case. The moral? "Objective accu-
racy is immaterial to the constative [sentence]'s social power" (1990: 39).
Part of the absurdity of this claim results from the (characteristic)loose-
ness with which it has been formulated: Petrey has failed to show why the
umpire might not then say anythingabout the pitch, which we would have
to accept as true. Yet even if we construe Petrey's claim charitably, to the
effect that, within a framework of socially instituted rules, there may be
some leeway for decision as to the application of a rule (while recognizing
that the umpire's choice is limited to calling a ball or a strike), the thinking
involved remains painfully inexact. Contrary to Petrey's claim, the "objec-
tive accuracy" of the umpire's call is highlymaterial to the "social power"
of his utterance, because partof the institutional frameworkof the game is

Gorman? The Use andAbuseof Speech-ActTheoryin Criticism 115
that the umpire is required to rule accurately: one who routinely called balls
strikes or vice versa would not be allowed to remain an umpire for long,
and for exactly this reason.
To be sure, Petrey is no hazier on the notion of truth than most literary
theorists who have written on Austin seem to be. For a variety of reasons,
the notion of absolute truth is viewed with suspicion in the humanities
today, with that of truth-in-a-context frequently being advanced as an
alternative; likewise the notion of objective truth is widely denigrated, in
favor of a view of truth as something produced. The rather offhand re-
marks about truth that Austin scatters through How toDo Thingswith Words
have provided a happy-hunting ground for thinkers with such views, and
Petrey is no exception. In regard to the stereotypical descriptive statement
"The cat is on the mat" he comments, "The coordinates of the cat's loca-
tion are only one of a great many components determining the words we
use to say where it is, and an Austinian perspective on language makes it
impossible to privilege one of those components over the others" (1990:
31). Even ignoring the question of how Austinian this claim is, the whole
terminology-widely popular in recent theory-of "privileging" aspects
of discourse only creates confusion. The truth-value (actual, imputed, or
intended) of a sentence, for instance, is not just one factor among others:
to deny this is to obscure the constitutive role of concepts like truth and
falsity in discourse. To take the most obvious case, a great part of linguistic
interaction consists in writing or uttering sentences assertorically, and an
assertion may serve any range of purposes and have any number of effects;
it may belong to a discourse which is fictional or factual and, if factual,
which may be true or false, and, if false, which may be either deceptively
or mistakenly so. Nevertheless the motives and results of assertions-their
function in the language-game- depend on their being produced and re-
ceived as assertions, and it is the defining feature of an assertion that it is a
sentence put forward as true.Petrey wants to hold that discourse first "per-
forms" certain things, and that the truth-value of sentences in discourse re-
sults as one byproduct among many, none of which should be "privileged";
but truth remains a more elemental notion than this, and privilege is not
the issue. Rather, the capacity of language to perform any activity depends
on there being some truth-concept already in place.22As truth goes, so
goes reference-or so it should, logically, since the two notions stand close
22. Assertion is being cited here

only as an example (though doubtless it is the salient one),
but it seems unlikely that other such basic forms of linguistic action as questions and com-
mands could be informatively described without some appeal being made to a (nonrelativ-
ized) truth-concept: questions, for example, are aimed at elicitingtruths, commands at making
what is commanded true. The standard discussion is Dummett's "Truth,"(1978 [1959]).

together (the reference of an expression being definable semantically as the

contribution it makes to the truth-value of a sentence), though Petrey is not
so clear on this as he might be. On the one hand, he deprecates any "real-
ist" or "mimetic"conception of reference as zealously as might be expected
of a contemporary theorist: he borrows from Fish the parodically capi-
talized list "Reality, the Real World, Objective Fact" (and repeats it with
annoying frequency) to refer to all those things that only the theoretically
naive could possibly believe in today. On the other hand, however, "be-
cause speech-act theory thoroughly compounds the linguistic and extra-
linguistic, the referent can't be dismissed out of hand" (199o: 113).Petrey
wants to claim that language does have a referential capacity, but one that
only exists in being enacted,or as he likes to say, "performed"(hence his
fondness for Austin's rejected terminology), as opposed to subsisting as a
static relation between linguistic terms and nonlinguistic entities:
Froman Austinianviewpoint,nineteenth-century Londonandnineteenth-cen-
tury Parisare not some reifiedsubstance,out there,in andof themselves,before
or in frontof our outsiderepresentation.They are the performance,foreverin
process, of those who inhabit them, the collectivitywhose interlockingverbal
and nonverbalrelationshipssimultaneouslyconstituteand representa social
formation. (ibid.)
I offer this as one last instance of how acceptance of current buzzwords
and preoccupations replaces critical thought in much of Petrey's book.
Appeal to the social, the active, and the lived is enormously popular in
critical theory now, and in a sense, it should be: human life is the material
of literature and of history. But such concepts are out of place if taken
as explanatory devices. To paraphrase Marx, they cannot explain them-
selves, they must be explained. No matter what kinds of problem we may
feel that we have run into with referentiality, mimesis, and similar ideas,
simply to redescribe referential phenomena in terms of performance or
activity is rather to veil the problems involved behind a more attractive-
sounding vocabulary than to address them.
I regret having neglected the undeniable virtues of Petrey's survey in the

preceding critique. Although he handles philosophical ideas poorly, Petrey
is on familiar terms with literary criticism, and the bulk of his book offers
a convenient survey,by means of clear, accurate summaries, of the work of
most of the literary critics who have attempted to utilize speech-act theory.
(In this respect, Petrey's book bears a close resemblance to Jonathan Cul-
ler's OnDeconstruction (1982), which likewise frames quite a good overview
of deconstructive criticism within a badly thought-out effort to articulate

Gorman ? The Use and Abuse of Speech-Act Theory in Criticism 117
the philosophical significance of Derrida's work.) I have focused here, with

what may seem harsh exclusiveness, on what is inadequate or mistaken
in Petrey's book-in which respect, I have also tried to suggest, it is only
epitomizing, as well as summarizing, a tradition of unsatisfactory efforts
among literary critics and theorists to "do things" with Austin, Searle, and
so on. But I have done so in the hope of clearing the conceptual deck. To
end on what I hope will be a positive note, where all this leaves us is with
almost everything remaining to be done. In effect, literary theorists have
yet to discover speech-act theory-although some of them have discussed
it a great deal.23
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Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

The Use and Abuse of Speech-Act Theory in Criticism

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There would be universal consensus, I assume, on the proposition that the

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accepted programs in literary study, speech-act theory is a philosophical

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nothing about it that is even reliable, much less illuminating.2The unfa-

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Inc.," at the expense, ultimately, of attention to works like Austin's How to

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ary phenomena as figurality, fictiveness, or dramatization, it is incumbent

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obvious: It is that this "opposition" collapses so easily (since after all it

Austinand Speech-ActTheory:Some Guidelines

Maxim 1: Do Not UnderrateSpeech-ActTheory

This content downloaded from 86.129.160.84 on Tue, 6 May 2014 13:15:01 PM

This content downloaded from 86.129.160.84 on Tue, 6 May 2014 13:15:01 PM

to Do Thingswith Words,his approach contrasts as sharply as possible with

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Is this statement true or false? Austin's point is that the utterance's

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Maxim2: Do Not OverrateSpeech-ActTheory

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12. As Donald Davidson asks at the

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We should beware of distinguishing too many varieties of [sentential] force.

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tionists. It is not meant to forestall creative misinterpretation (which may

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James lecture (1975[1962]: 5, which as we will see below is a favorite with

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Maxim4: Begin by Asking Whatthe Point Is of Using the Theory

while Derrida found Austin philosophically interesting, even congenial, and

An important qualification suggested by Cavell's complaint is one that

15. In his presentationat the Seminarsubsequentto his lecture,Cavell(1995:69) addsthese

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been neglected by those-Searle and Derrida alike-who have been eager

Speech Acts and LiteraryTheory:A Critique

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of linguists like Saussure and Chomsky.'7Petrey's basic claim here is that,

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to Derrida's apronstrings will have it, a matter of Austin's setting out to

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language, as Petrey seems to assume that it actually does.20(An inciden-

exchange-very illuminating if very difficult-between Dummett and Strawson in Sen and

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This content downloaded from 86.129.160.84 on Tue, 6 May 2014 13:15:01 PM

22. Assertion is being cited here

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together (the reference of an expression being definable semantically as the

I regret having neglected the undeniable virtues of Petrey's survey in the

This content downloaded from 86.129.160.84 on Tue, 6 May 2014 13:15:01 PM

the philosophical significance of Derrida's work.) I have focused here, with

This content downloaded from 86.129.160.84 on Tue, 6 May 2014 13:15:01 PM

1976 [1967] Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD:

This content downloaded from 86.129.160.84 on Tue, 6 May 2014 13:15:01 PM

This content downloaded from 86.129.160.84 on Tue, 6 May 2014 13:15:01 PM

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