edenism

We begin with J.L. Austin's famous work “How to Do Things With Words,” which, despite its titular resemblance to “Why We Should Not Make Mean Log Of Wealth Big Though Years To Act Are Long,” does contain polysyllabic words, among which we find Austin's division of the “acts” of language. Austin defines these types of acts in opposition to the philosophy of language of the time, arising from Frege's notion of sense and reference. To the function of speech described by sense and reference (what we might first think of as the “meaning” of speech), Austin assigns the term locutionary. Then, as a manner of pointing out the incompleteness of this model, Austin introduces two new types of acts, illocutionary and perlocutionary, with which he hopes to classify the “otherness” of linguistic effects falling outside of the sense-reference model. For our purposes we can consider illocution and perlocution as one, calling it exlocution, since we intend to execute it through locution, and revealing the dichotomy within Austin's trichotomy. The first question we may ask of this locution/exlocution dichotomy is this: since the original model was found to be incomplete (sense-reference), what justification is there for defining a new model as an extension of the old, rather than building one anew? Luckily for patients, the medical establishment has not corrected the deficiency in bloodletting by sorting patients into “curable by bloodletting” and “not curable by bloodletting.” To examine this question we will watch how language squirms under the light of the model. Consider the Hollywood cliche: an adolescent girl, listening to Nirvana, is asked by her mother whether Tony will be coming over for dinner. “Yes,” the girl yells through her music, with audible sarcasm, “my boyfriend loves listening to you and dad fight.” Dissecting this in terms of locutionary acts and exlocutionary acts is simple. The locutionary act is in the girl's description of her boyfriend legitimately enjoying listening to here parent's quarrels. The exlocutionary acts are various: causing her mother to feel guilty, indicating that Tony will not come over for dinner, etc. This is an analysis with much intuitive appeal. But how does the girl use sarcastic intonation? Arguing that it is merely her anger seeping through is unsatisfactory: why would emotional variations alone reverse the meaning of the locutionary act? In fact, intonation patterns are not biologically innate, they are linguistic (or else tonal languages could not exist). Just as we are aware that this girl is an embodiment of a “sarcastic teen” cliche, she is also aware of the meaning, efficacy, and appropriateness of sarcasm through her own exposure to language. Similarly, her mother has had exposure to sarcasm as a linguistic artifact sufficiently to be aware of her daughter's intent (and in fact, if the mother is not an experienced English speaker, she might be confused by her daughter's retort). If we consider the mother's experience in interpretation we see that the locutionary content is not actually considered. Although a naive assessment might conjecture that the mother considers the hypothesis that her daughter's locutionary act is true and rejects it, these mental gymnastics are simply not necessary in working communication. Any mother with competent language skills will know from the first words of this sentence, from the tone alone, that Tony will not be coming to dinner. This is not merely through empathy, or an understanding of her daughter, but because sarcasm is a linguistic convention, used, stolen, and cliched like any other. We see in that example how some properties of speech are “privileged” in that they have locutionary content (e.g. the words used), whereas others are “deprivileged” in that they have purely exlocutionary content (e.g. intonation). This is an indication that the locutionary/exlocutionary model is not blind to the medium. It is worth noting that the vernacular for locutionary content is “literal meaning,” but even though this is a common word, it is worth investigating its meaning further. Let us hypothesize for a second, in light of the locutionary privilege of diction over intonation, that the locutionary content, or “literal meaning,” of speech is the meaning of the speech as it as written. This is suggested to us by the etymology of the word “literal,” which comes from the Latin litteralis (which means “of or pertaining to letters or writing”). The problem, of course, is that not all writing is actually literal, as readers of satirists like Swift and Twain can attest to. We could try to argue that it is not the speech as it is written, then, but the “conventional meaning” which determines the locutionary act. As we have seen, though, not all conventions (e.g. sarcastic intonation) are privileged in this way. We posit, then, that the notion of a locutionary act survives not as an orthogonal component of speech that is helpful in interpretation, but rather as an ideal of language, and more specifically an ideal of writing. The question, then, is of the origin and function of this ideal. To help elucidate how, exactly, the idea of literal meaning is really an ideal of literal meaning, we will consider a thought experiment. Imagine walking into a library, finding two canonized works of literature, and attempting to read one in the tone of the other. For instance, one might try to read “The Sun Also Rises” in the tone of “Lolita.” The task is not just impossible, it is meaningless and absurd. The tone of each work is inherent and unique to it (at least with respect to each reader). There is no such thing as “the bull of my life, the sun of my loins.” Similarly, reading any of these works in the “literal tone,” whatever that may be (perhaps the closest thing is that of a newspaper), is meaningless. To then consider any novel's acts as being a) that when read like with a particular tone and b) all other acts, is to use a taxonomy that is clearly very arbitrary. To return to the question posed above, what then is the origin and function of this ideal tone, the “literal tone?” To address this question we invert the world in which we work: instead of language dependent on philosophy we consider philosophy dependent on language, and we find that Philosophy (as an institution and a body of text) depends on its ability to unify the meaning of its works in pursuit of truth. If texts have irreconcilable meanings, then they are useless in concert. This is analogous to law (take contract law for example): the codification therein relies on its ability to have a single meaning determined by convention. To reiterate, we find that it is not that philosophy, by allowing us to extract the locutionary content from a text, gives us insight into how we interpret that text, but rather that Philosophy relies on the selection of some way of assigning meaning to a text with as little ambiguity as possible. This, then, makes clear the true scope of the function of the literal word: it is the bricks upon which the academy is built. This is why words are privileged over intonation: they can be written and are less ambiguous. We find here the opposite of Derrida's “phonocentrism.” This is graphocentrism; text is considered first by its usefulness with respect to the academic ideal and only secondly for its other effects.