Austin and insults

Two things to start - one, I have a parallel blog now... the same sort of thing but with friends from the French department. I couldn't decide how to go about doing both - it is the personal being addressed to you aspect of this blog that makes it interesting to me, the desire to respond to you and have you respond to me. It seems a lot less dry and a lot more fruitful than simply writing notes for myself, and though I feel I don't challenge things you say about your own reading and projects often enough (because I don't find stuff to object to), you do call me out, and I find that helpful. Still, writing about the same reading twice, and describing more or less the same reactions would be a bit tedious, even if when writing to you I'm more likely to connect my thoughts to things you've said or I feel you might said, and I do want to also have the other blog, because, of course, people in the French department having read more of the stuff on Pascal, Baudelaire, Bataille, etc, will be more likely to disagree with my readings and having something to contest. So, I think the more or less straight reading notes will more often than not go into both blogs and often be separate from the entries I write specifically to you or in response to what you're writing... there's already been a kind of division between reaction entries and reading entries anyway. What follows is the first shared entry - though this is one that is actually much more likely to get a useful response from you than from my French lit. brethren, since it is on Austin, and that's a subject that you would be more familiar with than they. I kind of hope that you can shed light on a few things - though like I mention later on, I do also expect to read Derrida's text on him next week - which I also hope that you and I can discuss...

It is hard for me to determine which of the past two days I have more thoroughly wasted. Friday I spent a good 8 hours just watching documentaries on Monty Python (compulsively - the way an alcoholic drinks after swearing to himself he wouldn't, constantly telling himself "well, just one more won't make a difference). Yesterday read Austin's "How to do things with words", which I suppose will be the main topic of this post. I have to say that reading Austin was a similar experience to reading Benveniste or certain texts by Jakobson. I had a pervasive sense of "so what?" reading it. With all the categories and classifications he came up with (less numerous or complicated in Austin than in the others I've mentioned, and certainly easier to follow than Benveniste, but not necessarily any more interesting for that), in talking about performative vs. constative speech acts didn't give me any sense whatsoever of telling me anything I wasn't already fully conscious of or providing me with tools I could use to take me own thought further. It would seem that discussions in Descartes and Locke about whether space and/ or matter are infinite should be much less relevant to my thinking than an analysis of how speech is used, since boundaries of space and time are far outside anything that I have experienced or ever could experience and since they are purely speculative, but reading those discussions actually does excite my imagination and gets me trying to conceive models of the universe in my head (as well as thinking about how ideas are form and to what extent ideas like infinity that seem so straightforward that every schoolchild understands them are lacking any positive content - the absence of boundaries puts in our mind a sort of vanishing beyond our mental horizon, but we can't really imagine anything more specific than motion across vast empty space, we can't actually contain infinite space in our minds, not can we answer a question like - if there were no beginning of time and there was a 'forever' behind us as well as ahead of us, since infinity can not be traversed, how would the present moment ever have arrived? God knows why there should be any interest in trying to imagine the unimaginable like that, but personally I get a weird sense of satisfaction... and oddly keep coming up with images of circularity and feel closer to the eternal return, though I realize I'm mixing familiar and comprehensible images [the discovery that there isn't an end of the world that you can fall off of] with a distorted version of an unrelated theory [I'm fairly certain that Nietzsche didn't mean to say that time loops in on itself, that it is shaped like Finnegans Wake] to create a simple and not entirely convincing model which alternates in my mind with other equally unlikely and speculative pictures of the universe - more science fiction than philosophy). I clearly miss something essential in texts like Austin's - whether or not I understand what he is saying, I certainly don't get the implications or the consequences, since I can't imagine what in it inspired others or how this could be developed into something else. There's an Alice in Wonderland citation in the book (there always is when language is discussed): In order to say that Alice thinks a previous statement isn't right she starts a sentence with "I don't think...", at which point she is broken off by the Cheshire cat who says, "then you shouldn't speak". I feel like a large part of his book is making the extremely obvious point that the Cheshire cat's response wasn't appropriate. Who isn't aware that we select words from a preexistent vocabulary to convey a certain meaning (and why do we need the words 'phatic' and 'rhetic' to separate the choosing a word and conveying a meaning?), and yes it is obvious that there is a difference between what an utterance accomplishes by convention and intention (Illocutionary - promising, pleading, arguing) and what the eventual consequences of an utterance might be whether intended or not (perlocutionary -convincing, offending, etc). Furthermore, it is very clear that the circumstances of an utterance should generally be taken into account, and that while the truth-value of some statements can and should be considered apart from the context in which they appear, quite apart from the judgment of true or false with most statements, or rather utterances we consider what the utterance is meant to accomplish... and in this last statement, I even feel I'm going beyond what Austin says, since he never explicitly questions why a statement is made. Though he clearly says that very few utterances really are purely constative, he generally avoids statements and sticks with classifying his various sorts of performatives - verdictives, expositives, etc. There is something vaguely interesting that to say "I promise" is to promise, that certain words enact themselves, but beyond this what does Austin tell us? I ask in all seriousness, because I sincerely hope that someone can explain to me what the relevance or importance of the text is. I ordered Derrida's Limited Inc. and am expecting it to come later this week, and I'm looking forward to reading what he has to say about it - hopefully this might give rise to more discussion.
I will bring up one thing that did interest me in the text. I'll preface this by saying that, though the topic itself is interesting to me, sometimes the content of what a person says is less interesting than the importance the person places on it - the fact that a certain idea becomes an object of fascination, is perhaps even fetishized, suddenly changes the idea itself, whether you suddenly start looking for what it is in the idea that can illicit that level of fascination or what it is in the writer or text that draws it to that idea that leads it to find the idea so important. This is not something that Austin can be said to fetishize, but he does mention a number of times at a certain distance (though only in the first half of the book), the fact that there is not a performative "I insult you", which admittedly is an interesting idea. I suppose insults would fall into three main categories: 1) The most effective insults in terms of the effect they have on other people are those that call attention to something true or partially true, or that is at least a source of insecurity for the person being insulted. This would probably include most breaking of taboos, since something like a racial slur only works if the person being insulted really does have a self-conscious sense that people do judge him because of his race, religion, orientation, gender or what have you. 2) Inventive insults, at least in my experience, rarely come from people who are beside themselves with rage, and are rarely truly hurtful, they're usually competitive or exhibitionist and used to show off. These are the most fun. 3) Purely conventional insults can work as ready made words that can be invested with as much anger, indignation or what have you as required when the more hurtful truths and sore spots don't present themselves. These usually serve largely as a valve, a way of letting out anger - the words themselves don't have much effect since they don't really mean anything though people might respond to the emotion behind them. But since 'fuck you' basically doesn't mean anything more than "I want you to be insulted", it s worth asking, well, why can't we just say, "I insult you". There is once again a sort of taboo with curse words, though it isn't so much in effect in a lot of circles. A normal response to someone saying, in effect, "I want you to be offended" would be a calm, "well I refuse to be offended", and I think that attitude often can really piss a would-be offender off. If the purely conventional 'fuck you' gets a reaction very often, it is kind of worth asking why. I believe there is still a certain code of honor involved in terms of calling a person out, where not responding to a challenge implied in 'fuck you' (or a mother insult if it's taken seriously, or whatever else) is taken as somehow backing down or admitting defeat. That being the case, if neither side genuinely wants to come to blows and neither side manages to bring the insults to the level of a creative insult competition, there's an obligation to just sort of repeat your insults while walking away or making an excuse not to shift over into some more serious form of confrontation - which brings us back to the fact "I hereby insult you" would work just as well if convention accepted it. In a footnote, Austin mentions an old German practice in which 'Beleidigung' actually was used this was.