Performative Rhetorics

E 387M, Spring 2006

In the beginning was the deed.
    –Goethe Faust

Speech is in fact a gift of language, and language is not immaterial. It is a subtle body, but body it is.
   –Jacques Lacan, "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis"

Valerie Solanas, who took no prisoners, took pleasure in the injurious effects of language and, with Lacanian precision, understood that words are bodies that can be hurled at the other, they can land in the psyche or explode in the soma. A hurtful utterance can give you hives, make you want to throw up, put a dent in your appetite, or summon up any number of somatic responses and physical collapses.
   –Avital Ronell, "Deviant Payback: The Aims of Valerie Solanas"

Course Description

In his 1955 Harvard lectures, published posthumously in 1962 as How to do Things With Words, J. L. Austin outlined the basic tenets of speech-act theory in its contemporary form, offering a tentative but perhaps necessary distinction between the "constative" and "performative" functions of language. While the constative utterance offers a statement that describes or articulates "what is," the performative utterance produces, transforms, institutes. Austin for the most part located performative language within the realm of intentional consciousness and limited his analyses to instances of "relative purity," excluding citations of performative speech (e.g., those by "an actor in a play")—a position Derrida famously deconstructs. Nonetheless, Austin's lectures demonstrated that performative utterances collapse the distinction between saying and doing, severely problematizing the conception of language as a transcendental structure of meaning (what Saussure calls langue). Again. What currently goes by the name speech-act theory, in other words, can be understood as the latest articulation in a centuries old debate between philosophy and rhetoric. What's in question, to paraphrase Nietzsche, is whether there is any (transcendental) being behind concrete acts of saying (what Saussure calls parole). Whereas John Searle attempts in Speech Acts to systematize Austin's subversive insights within a logical framework, arguing that "an adequate study of speech acts is a study of langue," many of the most influential contemporary thinkers have resisted this effort, situating Austin's lectures on the side of (sophistic) rhetoric, as a re-affirmation of the awesome and undeniable positing power of language (as parole).

In this course, we will zero in on rhetoric's substantializing effects, on its capacity for concrete manifestation via, for example, hate speech, (psycho)analytic speech, poetic speech, and political speech. We won't attempt any sort of comprehensive approach but will instead begin with Gorgias and Plato, leap ahead to Austin and his contemporary interlocutors, and then spread out into linguistic avenues not so explicitly associated with speech-act theory. Freud, for example, had his own theory of performative linguistics, as did Althusser.

Probable Requirements:

Semi-Weekly Talking Points: Informal notes analyzing/exploring key issues in the readings.
One short paper, to be read aloud and then handed in, which will explicate the "cultural artifact" (a text, a theory, a philosophy, an architectural style, etc.) you have chosen for the semester, across which you will read the texts of the course
Summary/Response Papers: Formal, one-page, single spaced, beautifully polished, and terribly insightful papers that are interested less in opinions than in relationships and that summarize the assigned text and then "read" it across the cultural artifact; to be read aloud in class and handed in

Potential Readings:

Gorgias. "Encomium of Helen" (rhet as drug)
Plato. Phaedrus (rhet as seduction)
J. L. Austin. How to do things with Words. Lectures 1-3 & 10
John Searle. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language.
Jacques Derrida. Limited Inc.
Lloyd Bitzer. "The Rhetorical Situation"
Richard E. Vatz. "The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation"
Barbara Biesecker. "Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation"
Michelle Ballif. "Seducing Composition."
Victor Vitanza. "Concerning a Postclassical Ethos."
Kenneth Burke. Selections from Language as Symbolic Action and Rhetoric of Motives
Louis Althusser. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (on the hail)
Judith Butler. Excitable Speech
Avital Ronell. "Deviant Payback," "On the Unrelenting Creepiness of Childhood: Lyotard Kid-Tested" (on the call), and "The Sujet Suppositaire"
Foucault. Fearless Speech (maybe)
J. Hillis Miller. Speech Acts in Literature
Paul de Man. "Autobiography as Defacement"
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. "Postulates of Linguistics" from A Thousand Plateaus.
Sigmund Freud. Three Case Histories and Studies in Hysteria
Jacques Lacan. “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.”
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen. “Analytic Speech: From a Restricted to a General Rhetoric.”
Ruth Leys. “Freud and Trauma.”
Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters. Selections from Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria.

Possible Others:

John Cyril Barton. "Iterability and the Order-Word Plateau: 'A Politics of the Performative' in Derrida and Deleuze/Guattari." Critical Horizons 4.2 (Sept 2003): 227-264.
Gregory Ulmer. Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy. NY: Longman, 2003.
Gilles Deleuze. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. University of Minnesota Press, 1989.