that commits him to A."[11] But it is only true
that the speaker cannot consistently {il}locute an
utterance of this form; the same utterance,
considered in its {per}locutionary aspect may
depend precisely on its illocutionary failure. A
speaker may find it advantageous to appear to
commit himself to A, when his real
commitment is to
craft utterances which do just this. I have heard
in public debate the following:
(a) I respect the religious views of those
who disagree with ballot initiative X,
(b) and they should vote against the initiative;
(c) at the same time, I request that they
not impose their morality upon others.
I have tagged the three parts of this
performative (a), (b), and (c). In context, it was
implied that to vote against the initiative was
exactly to impose one's morality on others;
The initiative was put on the ballot to promote
a practice that some had moral objections to.
Why does this counter-performative work so
well? (b) is consistent easily enough with (a);
but (b) is radically incompatible with (c). If (c)
is accepted as sincere, (a) cannot be. Respect
for another's commitments involves admitting
those commitments to deliberation and debate;
(c) is precisely an attempt to rule those others'
commitments out of order. (b) implies a
directive, "vote against the initiative". In this
implication, the conjunction (b)&(c) is
precisely of the form "do A & don't do A." My
conjecture as to how this performative works
is that (a) allows those potentially in
agreement with the initiative X but not yet
firmly convinced to see themselves as not in
the sort of disagreement that actually requires
a difficult decision. Instead, they are offered a
compromise that ought to satisfy both parties,
by offering to their opponents all that their
opponents could reasonably ask for (which by
implication does not include allowing their
opponents to vote their consciences). Such
potential supporters of the initiative could then
in easy conscience vote for what the speaker
hoped they really wanted all along anyway.
When this sort of counter-performative occurs,
(b) is usually ommitted, in as much as it tends
to give the game away.
15
This utterance can have different
strategies for its two classes of hearers. It is
probable that while the apparent intended
hearers (i. e., those to whom it was addressed)
were those opposed to the initiative (they were
requested not to impose their views on others),
the real intended hearers were those potentially
in favor of it (the context was a public debate),
and they were implicitly encouraged to
conclude that they could give all they owed to
their opponents and still vote for the initiative.
16
A more bald example is provided in
legends of the city politics of Cambridge,
Massachusetts, where the dividing issue is
rents, and the parties landlords and tenants.
Occasionally a politician tries to promise to
lower rents for tenants and raise rents for
landlords. It is reported that this platform
meets more success than one might expect in a
city of such sophistication. A
counter-performative of the form "do A and
don't do A" can be quite effective if the
speaker faces conflicting demands from
different constituencies; if he can appear to
satisfy one, or at least neutralize its opposition,
he can later gratify the other.
17
Applications of this form are hardly
limited to politics, but politics and even court
decisions seem to be particularly rich in them.
Antonin Scalia, in a dissent in Johnson v.
Transportation Agency, alleges that the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 has been converted by
court decisions "from a guarantee that race or
sex will {not} be the basis for employment
determinations, to a guarantee that it often
{will}."[12] Merits of the case and of the opinion
aside, this is a clear charge of a
counterperformative interpretation of the law.
That the law was even susceptible of such an
interpretation raises the question whether not
only the Court's opinion but also the statute
itself is counterperformative. It has been
informally observed that canny legislators,
who know that the final determination of the
meaning of a law will come only in the courts,
from friendly and activist judicial review,
insert contradictory material into the
legislative history of a bill, planting grounds
for judges to rewrite or even reverse the sense
of the act as passed. In another example,
Congressional appropriations for the Tellico
Dam (which would have destroyed the habitat
of the snail darter on the Little Tennessee
River) continued while Congress deliberated
on and passed the Endangered Species Act; the
resulting counter-performative implications of
the several acts taken together had to be
resolved in court.[13]
18
Are there other reasons why a speaker
could issue a performative that is implicitly
and covertly of the form "do A and don't do
A"? It relieves him of responsibility, no matter
what the hearer does. Which member of the
counter-performative conjunction is concealed
will be chosen so as to maximally conceal the
speaker's responsibility. If A is dangerous, and
S does not want responsibility for harm to H, it
is easy to imagine a plausible context for such
a counter-performative.
19
Related to this is "I {dare} you to do A." It
appears to be a directive, coupled with a
disavowal of the responsibility that goes with a
directive. This is, at a minimum, a somewhat
peculiar illocutionary force. But how can a
directive be issued without committing the
speaker to some responsibility for his
injunction to the hearer? It seems unlikely to
me that a single word could in its own intrinsic
explicit illocutionary sense be a
counter-performative, but this verb raises such
a suspicion. Certainly the prudent hearer is
well-advised to treat it as a
counter-performative.
Invitations to commit a counter-performative
20
In a common multi-speaker
counter-performative, it is a grave strategic
mistake to give a telephone salesman reasons
for declining his offer. Who has not had a
telephone salesman call, offering "Eight weeks
of the {Tri-Valley Gossip} free, you pay only for
the Sunday edition . . . "? After declining the
offer, the recipient will next hear, "{Why} don't
you want our bargain trial subscription offer?"
It is a fatal mistake to give reasons at this point
-- because the respondent (who received the
call) and the speaker (the salesman) will treat
the reasons quite differently. The salesman can
always treat reasons as an offer to bargain, and
reply with counter-reasons, and
counter-demands for more reasons. But the
respondent presumably has no intention of
bargaining; he (or she) just doesn't want the
paper, but he also wants to be polite. (Note the
performative intentions!) But to give reasons at
all is to presuppose that under some
conditions, the recipient of the call would
subscribe. When the recipient has initially
declined the offer, the salesman's move in
asking for reasons is to get the recipient of the
call to concede exactly this presupposition. In
effect, he has asked the recipient to treat his
own refusal not as the starting point of a chain
of practical reasoning, but as its end point. Out
of politeness, the recipient usually obliges. But
from the new starting point implicit in
whatever reasons the recipient gives, the
salesman can twist reasons to his own desired
end point, a sale. In the end, if the recipient
really doesn't want to subscribe, he has to say
so, without giving reasons. The direct
approach is so rarely taken with telephone
salesmen that it tends to produce stunning
results: "I'm sorry, I don't give reasons."
21
The salesman is inviting the recipient of
the call to commit a counter-performative: that
is, in giving reasons, to offer to bargain, when
the recipient has no intention of bargaining at
all. The logical form of such a request is,
"please justify your starting point." This is to
construe an argument {from} X as an argument
{to} X. By definition, it is not possible to justify
a starting point. Consider, for example, some
of the commitments inherent in doing science:
openness to criticism, empirical encounter with
the world as it is (rather than with some
platonic ideal world), science open to all and
for all. These are not things that could be
justified; least of all justified from the fruits
they bring. Yet one could answer the question
"Why these commitments?" by citing their
fruits. Another could then interpret such an
answer as an argument of expediency {from} the
benefits of science, rather than as the
confession of one whose commitment to
science is axiomatic, and to whom these other
benefits have been given in addition. But an
argument of expediency can be modified or
suspended at convenience. (It would have been
better not to answer the question at all.)
22
To guess the structure of the
self-defeating speech acts in this sort of a
conversation, the problem appears to lie in the
illocutionary force of the reasons given by the
respondent to the salesman. The salesman is
asking the respondent to make a commissive
whose force is ambiguous, and so can be
twisted: a confessional commissive has a force
crucially different from that of an offer to
bargain. My suspicion is that confessional
speech acts (as in confessions of faith), have
features which, despite all the attention they
have attracted, still leave room for significant
work.
23
At this point, we have seen clear
examples of two sorts of illocutionarily
self-defeating speech acts which are
nevertheless quite effective as perlocutions, so
long as their working can be concealed. The
welfare worker engages in the appearance of
making an offer, a commissive, while
effectively issuing a coercive directive; in this
context, the two illocutionary points are
incompatible. (It {is} possible to combine a
commisive and a directive in compatible
ways.) The politician can find it rhetorically
very effective to appear to come down on both
sides of an issue (inconsistent propositional
contents). The problems in the encounter with
the telephone salesman arise in the subtleties
of the illocutionary strength of the speech-act
of giving reasons. Rather than exhibit
examples of the remaining ways in which the
illocutionary forces of members of compound
speech acts can be inconsistent on analytic
grounds, grounds of the {form} of the speech
acts, it seems more economical simply to note
the remaining possibilities for trouble, in as
much as the problems which do arise usually
do so only with respect to context; that is, they
are not evident simply on the form of the
speech acts, but the pathology shows itself
only after knowledge of the pragmatic context.
24
The mode of achievement may be at
stake in conflicted ways when an assertive
takes on the color of a directive, and the
role-authority of the one speaking is in
question. Such problems arise in the
psychological literature, especially as it treats
dysfunctional family systems.
25
Speech acts presuppose a psychological
state on the part of the speaker, and this too
can be the locus of inconsistency. Searle's own
definition is a most economical example:
"Finally, an illocutionary act whose preparatory
conditions cannot be presupposed
simultaneously with the expression of the sincerity
conditions of another illocutionary act is also
relatively incompatible with that other illocutionary act.
For example, a speaker cannot both recommend that the
hearer carry out a certain course of action and
simultaneously complain under the same aspects that he will
carry it out because one cannot consistently both
presuppose that a course of action is good and express
dissatisfaction about it under the same aspects
and for the same reasons."[14]
But people do this all the time! As an
illocution, such a speech acts are inconsistent,
but as a perlocution, they can be surprisingly
effective. The challenge is in dissecting from
the conversation the ends to which it is
effective. That virtually always depends on
context, and it usually also turns on
interpreting "under the same aspects" in
apparently analogous but in fact conflicting
senses.
26
By far the richest occasion for
counter-performatives lies in the required
presuppositions for speech acts. One can assert
a description by presupposition, and so conceal
the assertion. And one can insinuate, by
presupposition, that the world is such that it
can be {treated} as it is in the ensuing speech
acts. Analogies may be distorted, one party
may co-opt the position of another,
maintaining the other's speech acts, but to
quite opposed ends, and one party may put out
a "conceptual Trojan Horse," which the other
party accepts at its own risk. Obviously, these
tend to be multi-speaker speech acts of
considerable complexity, in addition to being
intricately context-dependent.
27
Non-philosophers have had to deal
informally with counter-performatives for
some time, as the psychological literature and
oral tradition in politics and law can amply
testify. And philosophers other than speech act
theorists have recognized the problem:
Instead of aiming directly at propositions
believed or practices performed in order
to challenge their truth or value, suspicion
is aimed at the individual or community
who believes and performs in order to challenge
their integrity. It looks for that
discrepancy between professed meaning and
actual use which renders life ironical;
for it is the essence of the ironical (speech)
act that it performs a function quite at
odds with its surface meaning. Thus an ironical
compliment functions to express a
criticism. For this reason suspicion is less
interested in the official meaning of
beliefs and practices than in their operative
meaning, the clue to which is the
life-world from which they arise and which,
in turn, they legitimize.[15]
Searle's and Westphal's philosophical
outlooks are worlds apart -- showing that
Searle and Vanderveken's typology of
illocutionarily self-defeating speech acts is a
useful and precise analytic tool in dissecting
perlocutionarily counter-performative speech
acts far beyond its original philosophical
home. It is surprising that Vanderveken's
original insight has not found more use.
Notes
[1] {How To Do Things With Words} 2nd ed.,
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Pr., 1975).
[2] {Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy
of Language} (London: Cambridge Univ.
Pr., 1969); {Expression and Meaning}
(Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979);
Terrence Tilley's {The Evils of Theodicy}
(Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1991)
was my guide to some of this literature,
and Tilley has been helpful in private correspondence.
[3] "Illocutionary Logic and Self-Defeating
Speech Acts," in John R. Searle, Ferenc
Kiefer and Manfred Bierwisch, eds.,
{Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics},
(Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980), and John
R. Searle and Daniel Vanderveken,
{Foundations of Illocutionary Logic}
(Cambridge University Press, 1985), esp. pp.
148 ff.
[4] When Searle analysed irony, in "Metaphor"
(in {Expression and Meaning}, esp. pp.
112-116), he defined it from the hearer's
knowledge in context that the speech act
is to be interpreted in a sense {opposite}
to its ostensible meaning.
[5] George Lakoff, "Performative Antinomies,"
{Foundations of Language} 8 (1972) 569.
[6] Herbert Fingarette explores the paradoxes
of having an "unconscious" policy of not
spelling out an engagement with life in
{Self Deception} (London: RKP, 1969).
[7] "Indirect Speech Acts," in
{Expression and Meaning} (Cambridge University
Press, 1979).
[8] This and following types of pathology are
from Searle and Vanderveken, pp. 148-152.
[9] Contextual implications may be further
complicated by the fact that one or both of
the speaker and hearer are able to deal
practically with the context in life (though
maybe not happily so), but are unable to
spell out all of its revelant features.
[10] {Wall Street Journal} cxxvii, #110
(1992/12/03), p. 1.
[11] Searle and Vanderveken, p. 153.
[12] 480 US 616, at p. 658.
[13] See TVA v. Hill, 437 US 153; the chronology
of events can be found at pp. 153 and
197. I am indebted to Phillip E. Johnson
for notice of these cases.
[14] Searle and Vanderveken, p. 150.
[15] Merold Westphal, "Phenomenologies and
Religious Truth," in {Phenomenology of
the Truth Proper to Religion}, ed. Daniel
Guerriere, Albany, SUNY Press, 1990;
p. 120.