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students of transformational grammar such as Katz, have attempted to maintain, police and strengthen the opposition in the face of Austin's tricky argumentation.20 (Katz writes a chapter entitled 'How to save Austin from Austin' . . .) I shall be concerned, however, with a general and largely shared principle of speech act theory and, incidentally, of its development into pragmatics and relevance theory21 and how this principle is discussed by Austin himself. For the clarion call that unites speech act theorists is 'the total speech-act in the total speech situation'22. That is, to understand a linguistic utterance, it must be viewed within a context and as a performance: meaning is constituted through 'the total situation in which an utterance is issued'23 (and thus not merely inherent in language). The disembodied, decontextualized linguistic example of the laboratory cannot do justice to the functioning of language. |
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Now with regard to literary criticism and the theory of 'performative language', Derrida, Fish, Felman and others have analyzed at length both the paragraphs where Austin excludes from consideration performative utterances spoken on stage or in a poem because they are 'in a peculiar way hollow'; and also the paragraphs where Austin declares his allegiance to the difficult and ideologically charged concept of 'ordinary language in ordinary circumstances'.24 Furthermore, a series of scholars have ignored Austin's exclusions and made excellent applications of speech act theory to literary texts.25 What I intend to do here with this much introduction is to look at a section of Austin's analysis where he considers what might be implied by the idea of the 'total speech situation'. This largely ignored passage offers an instructive (and witty) comment on the problem of linguistic exemplarity. It is entitled 'the circumstances of the utterance', and begins (77): |
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An exceedingly important aid is the circumstances of the utterance. Thus we may say 'coming from him, I took it as an order, not as a request'; similarly the context of the words 'I shall die someday', 'I shall leave you my watch', in particular the health of the speaker, make a difference how we shall understand them. |
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20 Benveniste (1971); Katz (1977). |
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21 See for a good introduction to pragmatics and relevance theory Sperber and Wilson (1986); Grice (1975) and the other contributors to Cole and Morgan (1975); Levinson (1983) with good bibliography; Searle (1969) is influential in this work. |
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22 Austin (1962) 52. |
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23 Austin (1962) 52. |
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24 Felman (1980); Derrida (1988); Fish (1980). |
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25 See e.g. Felman (1980); Ohman (1973); Pratt (1977); Elam (1984); Rivers (1983). For a fuller discussion of speech act theory and literature see Petrey (1990), and for speech act theory and things Greek, see Martin (1989); Herzfeld (1985). I have not seen Rip Cohen's contribution to this volume. |
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