How Not To Do Things With Words

Rae Langton is an America feminist philosopher who wrote a paper, Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts, in which she used some ideas of J L Austin to defend the view that, despite the rulings of the Supreme Court, pornography should be actively banned by the US Federal Government. Unsurprisingly those ideas just won't get us to the required conclusion, and it's half-interesting to see why. Her argument is that exposure to pornography makes it impossible for men to hear a woman refusing their advances. She can say the words, but the meaning just doesn't get across. The same happens when she tries to give testimony during a rape trial: she can use the words, but the jury just don't get it. It's important to understand that Miss Langton is not saying that the female refusal and testimony is ignored. If something is ignored, it's at least heard. She's saying that pornography so alters the meaning of women's speech that they cannot find any words successfully to express sexual refusal. Run over that again and see if it makes sense to you. Let me try to explain why someone once thought it would.

Remember the bit in Blazing Saddles where the sheriff says “You'd do it for Randolph Scott” and the whole town removes its collective hat and says reverently “Randolph Scott!”? Well, quoting J L Austin's name in philosophical circles has the same effect – or is supposed to. Around about the same time as Wittgenstein was developing his ideas of language games, Austin developed his ideas of speech acts in a famous essay called How To Do Things With Words. The idea of both thinkers was that, pace the logical positivists, we use words to do more than describe the real world. We do things like recommending, promising, insulting, praising, instructing, suggesting, inspiring and so on. Austin called these illocutionary acts: what we do in saying something. Uttering the sentence itself is the locutionary act. The consequences of the illocutionary act are the perlocutionary acts. The terminology varies from writer to writer: your Mac dictionary will tell you that perlocutionary acts are those which intend to influence the actions of others, but are not themselves actions: in this sense, recommending, suggesting and persuading are perlocutionary, while promising, warning and prescribing (medicine) are illocutionary.

Langton's thesis is that though women can say No (locutionary act) they cannot express refusal by so doing (illocutionary act) because men who have seen pornography have been deafened to the possibility of female sexual refusal. According to Langton, women can speak, but in a culture with pornography their words carry no meaning. So pornography should be banned.

Refusing is an illocutionary act. When I say “no, thank you” (locutionary act), I am refusing (illocutionary act) with the intention that you cease trying to sell me double-glazing (perlocutionary act). What has gone wrong if you don't stop? Perhaps my locutionary act failed: you didn't hear me. Let me say it again louder. Did my illocutionary act fail? Did I fail to express refusal? I expressed it just fine: “no thank you” expresses refusal in a polite manner. Perhaps you failed to recognise it. Let's try “which part of 'get lost' didn't you understand?” and see if you go on talking. If you do, it's pretty clear that you are rude and persistent and I can close the door in your face with a clear conscience.

However, you explain that you have been trained to regard any remark like “no thank you” not as a refusal, but as an “objection” and your sales trainer has taught you a number of hokey tricks to “overcome” the objection. What left me as a refusal arrived with you as an objection. This might sound convincing, except that the very reason you are taught to regard what I say as an “objection” is exactly because you and your sales manager know very well it's a refusal. If you didn't, you wouldn't need to be trained to “overcome” it.

When might an illocutionary act fail? In other words, given that I have not mis-spoken, but used words that under the circumstances would be deemed by other people to convey my wish, can I still fail to refuse? Well, perhaps if I go to an Arab bazaar things might be a little odd. English is a curt language used by a blunt people: we say things once and expect to be understood halfway through the utterance. Other languages belong to more verbose and courtly cultures, and in those cultures it may be normal to express what in English would be a refusal but is actually a response to see how serious you are about selling to me. If you are, you will ask again, to see how serious I am about refusing. You change your sales pitch slightly and lower the price. I shake my head but do not move away. Last chance. If I refuse this time, we're over. If I don't understand that you come from such a culture, we are going to have a communication problem: what leaves me in English as a refusal, arrives with you in Arabic as a possible opening move of a negotiation. I need to find different words to express my intention: I need the Arabic for “I really, really am not interested, stop trying to sell me your damn carpets”. Or maybe I just have to say it three times.

A poorly-phrased locutionary act can fail to express my intentions, and thus express an illocutionary act I did not mean to express. But that's the point: the rest of the world hears my (ill-chosen) words and deduces my illocutionary intentions from those words. That's why it's my fault if I get the words out wrong. The illocutionary act is tied to my words, not to some mysterious inner state of mine. If I get the words out right, it's your fault (of commission if you ignore me or omission if you haven't bothered to learn the rules) if you don't understand it as a reasonable, educated speaker of the language would understand it. This is why a man who tries to defend himself by saying he didn't think she meant it is onto a loser: it isn't what he thought she meant, or even what she thought she meant, it's what she said that matters.

Now we have an empirical question. Has anyone ever re-wired the language of refusal? As far as I know, while various cultures have made "bad" come out "good", no-one has ever made No mean Yes. “Get away from me”, “get your hands off”, “let me out of the car now”, “it's time you got a cab home”, “what the …. do you think you're doing?” - these words mean only one thing. Anyone who thinks they mean “carry on trying your luck” is just hoping to con the jury. No (locutionary act) means NO (illocutionary act). No-one can change that, let alone a guy with a video camera, Devon Lee's number and a day's rent of a studio in the San Fernando valley.

However, Miss Langton may be thinking of, and at one point her discussion suggests she is, the more appalling excesses of the High School Entitled Jock. It's just possible that Entitled Jocks really do believe that No means Try Harder and a study of the collected works of Annie Cruz have been a part of gaining that belief. We call them Entitled Jerks and send them to jail if they behave like that: because they have such faulty illocutionary hearing and poor judgement they commit crimes as a result. High School is not the Marrakesh bazaar: Entitled Jerks are not culturally different, but culturally ignorant.

Langton conflates understanding what someone says with accepting the wishes it expresses and so makes success part of my illocutionary act. According to that, I haven't refused, or been heard as refusing, if you go on pitching your double-glazing at me. Which is convenient for you, as you are no longer a rude oaf for carrying on, but merely someone who has chosen the meaning of the words they hear to suit their purposes. And that brings us right back to it: if you had to choose the meaning you needed, it was because you knew that the meaning I intended did not suit your purposes. You knew darn well what I meant by “no thank you”. You just chose to ignore it and then hide that rudeness behind a philosophical theory of language. Why a feminist philosopher would devise that theory is beyond me, unless she was trying to argue something that really doesn't want to be a conclusion.