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Serious students need fear not (at least not yet)
Michael Bérubé has published his review [PDF] of Theory's Empire, for those who may be interested. It is blessedly short, lucid, responsible and well-aimed, including (but hardly limited to) the jibes at Baudrillard, IMHO. It is to be compared, if you like, with that of the conservative Peter Berkowitz, who seems to spend most of his time bloviating rather mundanely, and proving––at least to himself or to some imagined choir––and beyond any reasonable shred of doubt, that he has neither a sense of humor about Nietzsche nor any familiarity with Derrida's oeuvre. In any event, an occasion to update that Theory's Empire page yet again, I suppose. [Hello, that's odd. The page--and that page only--seems to have been lined-out, at least under Firefox and Netscape, though it's still clear in IE. I wonder why that is...any ideas anyone?]
By Matt | February 11, 2006 in Academia, Literary Theory, Reviews | Permalink
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I can't believe he tried to counter Searle's criticism of Derrida by saying that when actors recite words, they really are not using them but citing them. That's such an obvious failure to understand Searle's distinction, you have to wonder what the editors were thinking. Something else, I suppose.
Lit Crit was much cuter when it was on the offensive, when its wild leaps and mad weakness for puns could be sharp, even elegant. On the defensive, it is surly and lazy, and always seems to fall apart at the slightest push.
Posted by: TCO | Feb 11, 2006 11:17:04 PM
Maybe Searle's distinction isn't helpful.
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Feb 12, 2006 10:07:15 AM
TCO, you aren't trying to be cute, are you? Because you sound kind of surly and lazy, sitting there in the peanut gallery watching the ol' freak show, perhaps mumbling to your pretty hands about missing your favorite magician (though you still reassure yourself, after each show, of your own precious, inherent superiority to the spectacle).
Posted by: Blip | Feb 12, 2006 12:59:44 PM
"So time catches up with the poetry! And that's OK because, in the end, nothing substitutes for "close reading," which needn't be arid New Critical exercise at all, but just the habit of paying attention to the words and sentences on the page or on a CD-whatever. I will sound like an Old Wolf in kvetch clothing when I say it's a practice that has been largely lost. So afraid are teachers and their students of actually looking at a text, so fearful that they will be endowing that text with "autonomy," that crucial things get missed."
Posted by: Fig Leaf | Feb 12, 2006 5:15:47 PM
Searle distinguishes between citing a word, as when I say "The word "paralelepipedo" is hard to pronounce" and when I use the word "O paralelepipedo esta sujo". It is obviously possible to cite a word without using it, as in the case of the English sentence, which is different from using it, as in the Portuguese sentence.
What to make of this? Not much, unless someone were to say that the possibility of performing plays in Portuguese renders the distinction doubtful. Then, the fact the distinction is very clear and indeed trivial does do some work: it shows the suggestion to be false.
I mean, I couldn't really care less about Theory's Empire - but this sort of thing really shows the terminal stage 'theory' seems to be in. There is a huge literature in philosophy that discusses the Searle (and Austin's) work, it is unclear, difficult to estblish who is right and wrong. Then in waltzes Berube, pokes the camel in the ass and calls it a cow. If it were done with a little more humour and a lighter touch, I think it would be valuable and entretaining. As it is, it is just kind of embarrassing.
And who let the monkey into the room?
Posted by: TCO | Feb 12, 2006 6:54:11 PM
I can't believe he tried to counter Searle's criticism of Derrida by saying that when actors recite words, they really are not using them but citing them.
But I didn't say that, you silly old camel.
Posted by: Michael Bérubé | Feb 12, 2006 7:27:17 PM
“If you know anything about literature, you know that Derrida’s claim is not “obviously false”: when Prince Hal opens his soliloquy [blah blah blah] the actor playing Hal is not, in fact, telling us that he is well acquainted with the carousing of his fellow cast members. He is not using words in that sense. Rather, he is (re)citing them without quite “mentioning” them (he does not do the “scare quotes” bit with his fingers) while using them in a way that suspends their immediate use…”
Searle would argue, I believe, that reciting plays is plainly a use of language, and that the ‘scare quote thingy’ you dismiss (after calling him glib…) is in fact the citation form he’s interested in. That’s the relevant distinction, and though someone could perhaps suggest it is not absolute, it is certainly unharmed by the observation that someone could use language in a play.
Looking at this more carefully, in fact, I sort of suspect you in fact share more of Searle’s position than you think. For Searle would certainly concede that there are dozens of possible uses of language other than literally speaking about objects in trite “The book is on the table” sentences. His point is that this doesn’t alter the fact such uses are uses of words, whereas a citation of a word is something else. Whatever the value of that, it does
On the general tenor of the review, I agree with the criticism that the book seems hastily chucked together and some of the articles are really kind of hysterical Zmag-style denunciations of pomo; your excursion into Searle I found unecessary more than anything else. In fact, I am not sure what’s at stake there, which is why I reacted to it with astonishment. I do think, however, that the advice to students to take a hostile attitude towards what is by now the hegemonic discourse of humanities is good advice. I sort of think it is silly to create a new cannon to replace the old, which seems like what Theory’s Empire is all about, really it is a sort of a palace intrigue. I also don’t know how wise it is to tell people to wait until they know before they start criticising: specially if you are one of those who have the power to determine when the student has attained knowledge. If people systematicaly come up with “I really don’t get this”, maybe there is nothing to get. I think there really should be a principle of noncharity.
You ask, how in the world could such nonsense have infected so many disciplines. You write that you think “it is a curious intellectual phenomenon that one can gain the moral and political high ground in institutions of higher eudcation by being vacuous, contemptuous of argument, and dismissive of critical interlocutors.” . I thought this rather disingenuous. To me it would be startling if it were otherwise; there are very good reasons why a system of ideological power would reward these values.
Posted by: Tapir, Not Camel! | Feb 12, 2006 10:14:56 PM
hey all,
Can someone please tell me where exactly I can find the texts of the so-called "Derrida-Searle debate"? I'm very keen on Austin, not least because he writes like he's wearing tweed.
I haven't read any of the texts in question here, but I do want to say that, Thiago, the use/citation distinction strikes me as needing to be clarified:
One could cite a Portuguese word, or recite a line of Heidegger, as part of an attempt at the perlocutionary act of intimidating one's fellow discussants. Another person could then say the same thing, reciting the first (re)citing, in order to perform the illocutionary act of mocking the first speaker, or the perlocutionary act of making the first speaker feel like a fool or a jerk.
At the same time, though, it seems very clear to me that an actor on stage is not citing a word, but doing something else that acts like citation does (perhaps solely) in that it, as Berube puts it, "suspends their immediate use".
Have you by any chance read the book Deconstruction As Analytic Philosophy, by somebody Wheeler? I think it sets out to be what Rorty begged for for a long time, the 'Derrida for Davidsonians' book.
take care,
Nate
Posted by: Nate | Feb 12, 2006 11:14:19 PM
Oh but why stop there, Tapir? I for one am simply startled, startled! that anything of self-critical intellectual worth emerges from universities at all. Next thing we know, they'll be wanting the ear of politicians, wondering why all the experts on Rupert Murdoch's Tevee are always so damn dumb. In any case as a matter of systematicity you might say, I blame Heidegger.
But then, politically macho times are culturally weak, so is it really any surprise that cultural studies should be feeling some returnal pressure?
How you leap to understanding what Bérubé doesn't himself know that he knows about Searle, when he's only responding to an all-too-common, sweepingly inaccurate claim about Derrida in the first place, I don't understand. (If only someone, or someones will second my motion to misunderstand, then I'm afraid I'll be forced to conclude, Tapir, that there is nothing there to understand, if it's all the same to you.)
Posted by: Blip | Feb 12, 2006 11:52:35 PM
Nate, I the difference, I think, is clearest not at the level of speech acts but rather of grammar. When I mention the word "paralelepipedo", I am naming the word. When I make sentence like "o paralelepipedo acertou a cabeca do professor", I am not naming the word, but using it as noun.
I chose bilingual examples to underline this gramatical difference. There is no such English sentence as "The paralelepipedo hit the teacher's head", at least not until cobblestones are renamed and fundamental changes take place in English phonetics. But there are sentences like ""paralelepipedo" is the Portuguese word for a regular coblestone", which are good English. Why is that? What accounts for the gramaticality of one but not the other?
To look at this from the perspective of speech acts, imagine the situation in which one student says "the nothing is nothinging nothing through Baywatch", and the other student giggles and mocks him,taking up this phoney profundity: "the nothing is nothinging nothing through Baywatch (sniggles)". According to Berube and Derrida, as I understand them, that's somehow halfway between citing and stating. But is it? Or is this a qualitatively different kind of thing you can do with words - mimicking? If that is the case, the result is that Searles' distinction is preserved, not contradicted.
Austin is one of my favourite philosophers. I am sure he was made of tweed. Searle much less so. Mostly he is made of hay.
Posted by: Tapir, Not Camel! | Feb 13, 2006 12:41:34 AM
or straw perhaps?
(to hear my comrades tell it)
Posted by: squibb | Feb 13, 2006 12:59:27 AM
Searle would argue, I believe, that reciting plays is plainly a use of language, and that the ‘scare quote thingy’ you dismiss (after calling him glib…) is in fact the citation form he’s interested in.
Yes, I called him glib for foolishly likening Derrida to the undergraduate who liked Shakespeare because there were so many quotations in the plays. Hence my line about the scare quote thingy. I really hope we don't have to have a discussion of "context" here! That would be kind of tedious.
Now, of course the recitation of plays is a form of language use. No one said otherwise. The question is whether speeches in plays, when spoken by actors, are well understood in terms of the use/mention distinction as speech-act theory formulates it. Not every form of language use is a "use" in that sense, as you must surely know. (Let's not play games with words!) Austin's sense that utterances in plays are "parasitic" on real utterances may be problematic, but at least it observes the distinction between "blah blah blah" when uttered on stage and "blah blah blah" when uttered in life, whereas Searle (again, foolishly) blurs the distinction in the course of what is otherwise a pretty good essay on Derrida and late Wittgenstein.
But I think I'm beginning to see why you don't think it is wise it is to tell people to wait until they know before they start criticising.
Posted by: Michael Bérubé | Feb 13, 2006 5:33:30 AM
Nate,
Try Derrida's Limited Inc. -- it has both of Derrida's articles from the exchange. Searle wouldn't agree to let his article be printed with them, but it also contains the reference so you can track it down.
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Feb 13, 2006 10:13:14 AM
My apologies for writing why you don't think it is wise it is to tell people. It would seem that infelicity haunts every speech act, especially when you're typing too damn quickly. Please ignore the second "it is," unless, of course, you think it improves the diction.
Posted by: Michael Bérubé | Feb 13, 2006 2:20:06 PM
A most entretaining thread so far, though I can't seem to find that best of blog introductions to "Signature Event Context" to link to; maybe this will have to suffice.
Posted by: Matt | Feb 13, 2006 6:52:47 PM
Fuck, Thiago, you're a bad influence. You've got me wanting to go finish the Davidson books I never finished.
I think your resort to grammar weakens your argument, which is about speech acts, not grammar. I understand you mean the point by analogy, but I don't think it's a helpful analogy unless you're going to make a more clear intermediary step ("here's the grammatical example, here's the speech act example" and if you can do the latter then just do the latter).
As for whether "The paralelepipedo hit the teacher's head" is an English sentence or not, that seems to be going the wrong direction (ie, toward legislating proper sentences rather than diving headlong into pragmatics). The question would be whether or not that sentence is understood or misfires (or some admixture - partial success and partial failure - or indeterminate case). If it succeeds, then it is a meaningful utterance. If not then it's not. For instance, "Thanks for the tasty enchiladas, abuela, they were muy excelente." is not an English sentence, judged narrowly, but is a type of sentence spoken in many cities in the US without any kind of misfire. One could talk about what kind of sentence that is and what it belongs to, an emerging dialect perhaps, but that strikes me as less interesting (especially given that in some sense all speakers have unique idiolects, though they do of course have tremendous amounts of things in common with many other idiolects, and a lot less with others), in that, among other things, it takes the conversation back to sentences instead of speech acts, utterances.
There's also cases like this: bee leave me, eye wood knot lye two ewe. That's pure gibberish judged on strict criteria of grammatical English. But in many cases sentences like that can appear without any significant misfires. Even more, they can be valuable means for performing some perlocutionary acts. (There are utterance versions as well but I can't remember any, I vaguely remember a Davidson essay called "A Nice Derangement Of Epitaphs", have you ever read that?)
Thinking of it now, I've got a mind to try and do some digging, see if I can find anything on illucutionary and perlocutionary acts with Grice type stuff... it'd be helpful for a project I have in mind to start a provisional taxonomy of the conversational powerplays that come up in the academic workplace in order to make oneself feel good, to make others feel bad, to accrue status, to prevent others from accruing/being able to accrue status, and to steal or devalue others' status. Any recommendations?
take care,
Nate
ps- Adam, thanks for the reference. I'll have to check that book out when I get a minute.
Posted by: Nate | Feb 14, 2006 2:10:30 AM
Sure, there is little point legislating language. Someone could come along and turn "paralelepipedo" into an English word, just as there are speech communities where sometimes even pronouns are borrowed from spanish. But we can describe how language is at a point in time. And right now, "paralelepipedo" is not to my knowledge part of any english communalect. What is interesting is that you can mention words which can't be used. It makes little difference that the language could change so this were no longer true.
I think this is really sort of besides the point, just like the suggestion that really, we should look at the technical details of the use/mention distinction and so on. I doubt much is to be gained by that. Look at the Berube's quote above. Is it even true that when an actor refers to another act, they are not refering to their coroussing? I find even that doubtful.
(***)
The reason one should not make attaining recognised knowledge a condition of making criticism is that whoever has the power to determine when knowledge has been attained can ignore all criticism. It has little to do with bad faith. For it is always possible to say someone hasn't understood you, if they disagree with you and you believe yourself to be right. People often suppress criticism with this intelligentsia's certification, in perfectly good faith. Economists do this all the time. Whenever you point out that the demand slope doesn't derive without absurd assumptions, they throw tantrums and tell you that you don't know the secret Level 2 of the theory, which is hard to explain. But there is no secret Level 2, microeconomics is really, as a matter of mathematical fact, daft. We look at this and think, well, they must all be crazed ideologues, but this is not true. They are honest, scientifically minded people who believe themselves to be acting entirely fairly. They are not.
Posted by: TCO | Feb 14, 2006 7:11:31 AM
Matt, only half that page is lined-out. Maybe it's a problem with your template? Or revenge from Google? Or from someone who doesn't end up looking so good in the comments below (though the comment thread is in fact still visible, I see, now that it's been added to the post)...
Posted by: Bruce | Feb 14, 2006 12:19:40 PM
Thanks Bruce; I'm fairly certain it's just a problem with an old Bill Gates piece of shit machine using certain browsers. No clue though really; weird.
Posted by: Matt | Feb 14, 2006 4:42:52 PM
Matt, I don't know if this is the best blog introduction to "SEC," but it's the only one I know: I wrote it on the occasion of Derrida's death.
And no, TCO, the "I know you all" soliloquy in 1 Henry IV really can't be read as a reference to the carousing of the other cast members. At least not plausibly. About that, even John Searle might agree, though he most likely would continue to insist that the actor uttering the lines is still "using" them. Not a useful sense of the term "use," in my humble opinion.
Posted by: Michael Bérubé | Feb 15, 2006 5:21:17 AM
Thanks Michael, the permalinks had changed; that is the one.
Posted by: Matt | Feb 15, 2006 8:18:38 AM
Well, I see that it's late, and everyone has gone home for tea. So, I guess I'll just have to speak into the air: for a fabulous discussion of the Derrida-Searle debate, you might try (if you can find it!) Niall Lucy's Debating Derrida (1995), second chapter.
Posted by: rob | Mar 13, 2007 1:47:33 AM
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