Derrida-Searle

por opmartinez

Too bad Austin didn’t live to see the heated debate his ideas aroused between Derrida and Searle. Furthermore, he could have explained to these guys what he actually intended when he wrote How to do things with words.  But no, wait, his intentions should be evident and clearly conveyed in order for his writing to be effective.  Is that so? Or is writing supposed to communicate and replicate itself without regards for an author a reader or a fixated context?

This is two opposing ideas are what I understood Searle and Derrida respectively defend essentially in their texts. And they both use Austin’s text as a source of support for their ideas. Derrida is first attracted to Austin’s propositions they separate from the classic notion that language is only a sign and its significance and it is essentially use to deliver a meaning and it is irremediably anchored to some kind or referent. The idea that a part of language is not sense but action and that it cannot be valued through a true/false dichotomy, as Austin presents with his performative utterances, profoundly seduces Derrida. However, he is quickly disappointed when he realizes that for Austin these performative qualities of language can only function when certain very specific conditions are met; that is, the performative is anchored to context. This sparks Derrida’s criticism that then Searle, in a confrontational manner, calls a misreading of Austin’s ideas.

In Searl’s response I was particularly “conflicted” by the importance of intention. Every utterance has an intention behind, it can be conscious or not, I will not argue that, but intention cannot be how one values the effectiveness of a text. “To the extent that the author says what he means, the text is the expression of his intention”. How can we know for sure what the author meant with what he wrote? If one fails to understand a text as it was intended does it make it hollow? Wasn’t that exactly what happened between Austin’s text and Derrida according to Searle? And in the case of perfomative expressions such as “I promise”, isn’t it possible to say such thing with a further intention than just a promise, like fooling someone into trusting you? Does that make the expression an infelicity? It seems like there should be some kind of moral responsibility between what one says and one does for performatives to be “happy”.  Are performatives with hidden intentions parasitary then?

In Derrida’s response I have a lot of trouble understanding the relation between the signature and truth. When he says that if Searle believed what he wrote was “obviously true” then he should not have signed it, does he mean that truth doesn’t belong to anyone? (Something I agree with) But it seems like he is saying that writing doesn’t belong to anyone, because writing exists in itself it is a code one uses but doesn’t own. Or is it that everything one writes and says is a repetition, even one’s signature?  If something is “obviously true” you are also obviously not its author because it is only a product of the iterability of language. So can we claim ownership over ideas? Apparently, for Derrida this would be futile since this idea in its written form will detach from you and reiterate by itself. I don’t know what I think about this.

So many ideas going back and forward from one author to the other have produced more confusion than clarity in me, as it is evident in my previous paragraphs. But it is definitely exciting to start to ponder language especially written language away from conventional formal considerations.