Performativity or Discourse? An Interview with John Searle

The idea of ‘performativity’ will be familiar to TCS readers primarily through Judith Butler’s work on gender, and Michel Callon’s and Bruno Latour’s notions. John Searle is the author of Speech Acts (Searle, 1969), in which the idea of performativity first became widespread. The notion was already of course present in the pioneering work of Searle’s teacher, John Austin, in How to Do Things with Words (Austin, 1975 [1962]). What motivated this Searle interview is that, on closer inspection, in many ways Searle’s notion of performativity is largely opposite to Butler’s and Callon’s/Latour’s versions of it. Callon often refers to the performative intervention of economic discourse in the everyday economy (Callon, 1998) and Butler, in her analysis of speech acts and gender, often speaks of formal abstract discourses that intervene in everyday life (Butler, 1990). Searle, in contrast to Butler and Callon/Latour, is talking about the language of everyday life.

Thus Callon’s idea of the perfomative may have more in common with Foucault’s idea of discourse, that is, of theoretical discourses in the natural and human sciences, where Searle is referring to the informal and highly unscientific language exchange in everyday life. It was this disparity that motivated having a TCS interview with Searle. I have been engaged in research on the Chinese economy. There you see very little effect from the formal discourse or performativity of economists in the economy. Instead performativity in the Chinese economy can be better understood along the lines of Searle’s everyday language. Searle’s idea of performativity has to do not with formal but with natural language. In this sense, it has a special relationship with Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1953).

The conversation with Searle began at Festival Philosophia in Modena, Italy, in September 2012 and continued in Berkeley in February 2013. In Modena my first question to Searle was if he thought ‘speech acts were predications’. To this he intriguingly answered: ‘Philosophers think so.’ For Searle this is also partly the case for thinkers like Habermas. Habermas’s ‘communicative rationality’ or ‘ideal speech situation’ in this sense has little to do with Searle’s or Wittgenstein’s idea of natural language, or language that is embedded in forms of life.

The implication of Searle’s initial irony of course was that speech acts and performatives were very much not predications: that is, not like the subject-noun-qualifier formal language of logic that philosophers since Aristotle have used to describe the world. The obvious point was that, say, the first Wittgenstein of the Tractatus (Wittgenstein, 1922) understood philosophy in a predicative mode whereas in Philosophical Investigations we are talking about not the language of predication but instead of ‘natural language’: of language games, forms of life and performatives. Bruno Latour was also a speaker at Festival Philosophia. Searle’s statement seemed to underscore that ‘performativity’ in science and technology studies and the cultural theory of, for instance, Judith Butler was, to say the least, problematic. What became apparent was that their idea of performativity was not a question of natural language or forms of life at all. At stake, indeed, was not performativity but instead discursive intervention. Thus for, say, Michel Callon, economics as a discourse becomes a discursive intervention into the economic practices of everyday life. In this sense for them, and indeed for Michel Foucault for whom such discourse was a question of power and domination, this was not at all the performativity of natural language but the language of scientific predication.

But there were a few twists to come. TCS editor Mike Featherstone and I spoke about this prior to the interview and we agreed that Searle himself had forsaken the natural and embedded language of performativity for much more formal and rule-bound notions of speech acts that were then disembedded from forms of life. But the interview below shows that Searle’s thinking is much more complex than this. First, his speech acts are nothing like apodictic knowledge. In his exchanges with Jacques Derrida, Searle observed that Derrida’s assumptions were at one with Husserl’s assumptions on apodictic knowledge or truths. Apodictic knowledge, whose origins are again in Aristotle, concerns propositions or judgements that are logically certain and provable. Derrida of course delays and displaces such truths through différance. The point, however, is that Searle never started with any idea of such certainty of judgements for there to need to be such a spatio-temporal delay.

Below we will be introduced to Searle's more recent and less sociological theory of normativity. His exchanges with Habermas show that Searle's normativity is nothing like the normativity of the ideal speech situation that is a foundation for today’s Frankfurt University Cluster of Excellence. Here now the fourth generation of German critical theory hosts its ten-year and then permanent Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Centre on ‘The Formation of Normative Orders’. Searle’s use of the notion of performativity is less of an ethics and focuses more on the use of language in everyday life. This said, Searle also vehemently disagrees with the second Wittgenstein's assumptions about the impossibility of theory, of a general theory. Searle indeed wants to give us such a general theory. At the basis of this theory are intentional (though not in Husserl’s sense) human beings whose differentia specifica from other animals is communication. This is not technological communication in Shannon and Weaver’s sense. As communicating animals we are different from other animals in that we do not do just as we please. It is institutionally situated norms that do not let us do just as we please. These norms make communication and social life possible.

SL: Hubert Dreyfus’s pragmatist reading of Heidegger has always intrigued me. I recently reread Heidegger’s texts on ‘tools’ and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. It is interesting how Wittgenstein is talking about words but also about blocks and slabs. And the word ‘tool’ is used a lot. How do you view the relationship between the two philosophers?

JS: Dreyfus and other people point out analogies between Heidegger and Wittgenstein. They both emphasize practicality, and readiness to hand, so there are analogies. But my own philosophy of language is really profoundly anti-Wittgensteinian.

SL: But nevertheless, he has had a profound influence on your work?

JS: Oh yes. There is a sense in which all my work on language is a response to Wittgenstein. He keeps saying that it’s impossible to have a general theory of language, and my response is that it is possible to have such a theory and I try to produce one.

SL: Which of his writings have been more important for your theoretical development?

JS: Philosophical Investigations is a crucial work. The Tractatus reminds me too much of Leibniz. That is to say, it has some wonderful things in it but it’s not a coherent conception of language.

SL: I asked you if speech acts are something like predications and your answer was: ‘Philosophers think so.’ Wittgenstein says, I think somewhere, that mainstream philosophy is a language of predications, and I think this is a wonderful way of seeing things. So we are talking, in fact, not about a language of predication but of a general theory of language that works functionally?

JS: I assume by ‘predication’ you mean ‘representation’. Wittgenstein thought that representing, in the way in which propositions represent states of affairs, was just one use of language, and then there are all these other uses of language. I think the representational use of language pervades almost all uses of language. There are some in which it does not prevail, like ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’. But ‘Congratulations on winning that race’ or ‘I apologise for stepping on your foot’, ‘Thank you for giving me the money’, ‘2 + 2 = 4’, all of those are representational; and all of those have propositional contents. So I think the very essence of language is linguistic representation, even though there are uses of language that are not representational. And my view is profoundly anti-Wittgensteinian. The Tractatus offered a representational account of language, and Wittgenstein reacted against that in the Investigations. He used to say that the Tractatus is like a machine that doesn’t work, a clock that doesn’t keep exact time. But there are some good things in it. In the Investigations he emphasizes the multiplicity of language games, and ‘language game’ is the essential notion in the Investigations and not the sentence or Satz. For me, the representational feature of language is essential to language, but for a much deeper reason than Wittgenstein ever went into. For me, it has to do with the nature of the mind, the intentionality of the mind.

SL: So did your philosophy of mind follow from the research on speech acts?

JS: After I wrote Speech Acts (Searle, 1969), I knew someday I had to pay my dues and give an account of intentionality, or answer the question: How does the mind represent? And then it occurred to me that there is a theory of intentionality, implicit in Speech Acts, staring at me the whole time! In philosophy you often build the foundations after you build the house. So after I wrote Speech Acts, I wrote a book called Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Searle, 1983), which is the foundation of speech act theory and of all the work I have done since. They are all applications of this philosophy of mind. I differ from the tradition where people want to make a distinction between mind and body. Not Heidegger, but people like Habermas and Popper think there are three different worlds we live in. I think this view is a total disaster. To the contrary, I think we live in one world and you have to show how it all hangs together. That is what I am trying to do in analysing the representational character of the mind. Now of course, once you have language, you can do all kinds of things that you can’t do with just the mind. You have all sorts of enormous possibilities in language which you don’t have in pre-linguistic animals.

SL: Was anyone doing serious philosophy of mind at the time that Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus?

JS: Well there wasn’t much philosophy of mind in the sense in which we do it today because it was largely epistemological. People thought we have to get a theory of the mind to explain how we can overcome Cartesian scepticism and cope with Cartesian dualism. Russell wrote a book about the mind, but in the sense of a systematic theory of the mind, there wasn’t much of that.

SL: Why specifically intentionality?

JS: I had to pay my dues. I had to use intentional notions when I wrote Speech Acts. If you borrow this money from the bank, you have to pay it back. If you think you have to explain asserting in terms of expressing belief, you have to tell me what a belief is. There was a theory of belief implicit in Speech Acts and I spelled it out when I wrote Intentionality. It was counter to Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind because he precisely resisted what I was trying to do: a general theory of intentionality. It’s an unfortunate word, but we are stuck with it.

SL: Which one, mind or intentionality?

JS: Intentionality. For English speakers it sounds like intending and there is a systematic confusion between intentionality with a ‘T’ and intensionality with an ‘S’.

SL: Who else was writing about intentionality at the time of your book?

JS: Not many people. The standard work in analytic philosophy was the exchange between Wilfrid Sellers and Roderick Chisholm. They had a substantial exchange that was the standard text on intentionality for a time.

SL: Were the positivists in conflict with the notion of intentionality?

JS: They didn’t like it for a number of reasons. It sounded like German metaphysics because of people whose name starts with H: Husserl and Heidegger, etc. They didn’t like it because it wasn’t real philosophy for them. It had associations with really ‘bad philosophy’, like Hegel and Heidegger. There were all sorts of associations to intentionality that made it seem unattractive to analytic philosophy. But I think that we are over that now.

SL: Did anything from Husserl’s writings influence you in any way?

JS: I have to say no. When I was working on Intentionality, many people told me I should read Husserl, so I said: ‘I will read this guy.’ I read the first Logical Investigations (Husserl, 1970) and thought it was dreadful. It wasn’t publishable in that form, it was sloppy. I thought there wasn’t anything in there that was not in Gottlob Frege. Husserl’s theory of intentionality seemed like Frege’s notion of sense and reference applied to the mind. The Frege part is sympathetic to me. My view is that just as Frege made a distinction between the propositional content and the illocutionary force, I make the same distinction for the mind. So I probably think I should have learned more from Husserl. After I read that first book, I just stopped reading other authors about intentionality and started working on my own. I decided I was going to write my own theory of intentionality and ignore the whole tradition. So I never learned anything from those guys. Now it’s true that I knew Hubert Dreyfus and was going to his seminars. I actually taught Heidegger, but Hubert thought this meant I would become a convert. But I didn’t, in the end I thought it was very sloppy. Heidegger had some brilliant insights but it’s not my idea on how to do philosophy.

SL: So what influenced you when you wrote Speech Acts was actually the work of Austin?

JS: I think you can’t understand language if you don’t understand that we use it to communicate to each other. And the mode of communication through language is the speech act. In this respect I follow Austin, because he wrote the original theory of speech acts. He died before he could complete it. His book is more his lecture notes, so I thought there is a need for another book.

SL: To me, your work is more accessible than Austin’s. It’s about how people actually use language.

JS: Well in Austin’s case, these are his lecture notes, just like Aristotle in a way. He would not have published the book in that form. I know this because I asked him in the last two years of his life. I asked him because I wanted to prove that his distinction between the locutionary and the illocutionary is a mistake. I said to him: ‘How soon can we hope that you will publish your William James lectures?’ You never give Austin an opening like that, and he said: ‘You can hope I will publish them anytime you like…’ and he said the text was ‘too half-baked’. He didn’t think it was publishable.

SL: What’s the most valuable part of Austin’s work?

JS: The most valuable part is his general theory of speech acts. Everybody thought he lacked a general theory but was very good at precise little distinctions. I think the reverse was the case. He is often wrong about the distinctions but he had these wonderful general theories. He didn’t publish much in his lifetime, and what little he did publish he thought were mostly popularizations.

SL: Going back to the question of language and communication. This interview, as we said, is for the journal Theory, Culture & Society. Many of TCS’s readers would associate the theory of communication with Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver. Does the work of Shannon and Weaver fit into your philosophy?

JS: I am just reviewing Christoph Koch’s book, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Koch, 2012). He is a colleague of Giulio Tononi, and what they have done is taken Claude Shannon’s theory of communication and tried to turn it into a theory of consciousness. I think it doesn’t work, but they think they have solved the problem of consciousness. Their theory is that consciousness is integrated information and that a mathematical theory of information will give us a mathematical theory of consciousness. I think I can show that this won’t work. I mean, you and I are totally conscious now, this process is entirely created by neuro-biological processes and nobody knows how it works. Those are the most exciting problems of contemporary biology. They are interested in Shannon because he has a mathematical theory of information and, at some level, they are convinced that real science is mathematical. They think that tying a theory of consciousness to a mathematical theory of information seems ideally suited to building a theory of consciousness. If you are right that information is consciousness, then you can have a mathematical theory of consciousness: we can measure bits of consciousness and we can tell you how many bits of consciousness you have. And that is very attractive nowadays.

SL: Information is used in so many different ways, isn’t it?

JS: Yes, and it is hugely important, as we couldn’t have a theory of communication without the notion of information. But philosophically speaking, a lot of the uses of the notion of ‘information’ are confused.

SL: An example of this confusion might be the widely different ways that economists use the notion of information. If you look at economics, a lot of information is about other people’s utility functions, which is quite interesting. Once you have a lot of exchanges, iterated, then you have much higher levels of information-sharing. Such high levels of information-sharing are essential for building trust. Then there is more potential for something like what Elinor Ostrom understands as the commons. Because if there is not that level of iterations and trust, then there’s not that level of knowledge about others and you can’t self-monitor.

JS: My problem is when people use the notion of information without saying what exactly they mean by it. Tononi and Koch say that integrated information has to be conscious.

SL: But have you ever wanted to have a theory of communication?

JS: The question that first got me interested in philosophy was how is it possible that language can work? How can I make these noises through my mouth and produce meaningful speech acts? What happens? There are two aspects to language. How does language relate to reality and how do words relate to meaning? In my theory those are the same question. It is meaning that enables language to relate to reality, and the meaning is imposed by intentional activities of human beings. So the nature of language was the starting point for philosophy for me. That was the most important question of philosophy. However, the more I worked on it, the more I realized that this question is part of a much larger question: What is the nature of human reality such that we can see how it is not just consistent with physical reality but is a natural development? How do you get from protons to presidents and from electrons to elections? That’s the larger question. The bit about language, as it turns out, is an essential part of the answer to the big question. Both of them rest on a theory of the mind.

SL: Doesn’t Wittgenstein mention that at some point? He calls it ‘natural history’…?

JS: Yes. Then the question is, what is the nature of society? But why didn’t social theorists figure it out? It is because they didn’t have a theory of speech acts. It is not an exaggeration to say that all the important figures like Durkheim and Weber, but especially Durkheim, went right up against a brick wall because they didn’t see that language is constitutive of institutions. They just didn’t get that.

SL: I am particularly interested in the disembodied/disembedded nature of the act and your notion of the Background. For example, in sociology we have the theory of action in Max Weber and Talcott Parsons. This is based on the unit act which, for both of these sociologists, becomes a disembedded chain of means and ends. This is entirely purposive and focused. Such a notion of action seems to stand in direct contrast to Wittgenstein’s (and in part your) notions. Here we have not the disembedded and purposive unit act, but a set of embedded background activities.

JS: The whole thing is embedded in what I call the Background. The Background is an essential feature of my theory of language and society and mind, but it’s the least satisfactorily worked out idea.

SL: Say something about it even though you haven’t worked it out.

JS: The point is that in order for us to cope, for example in a restaurant, there is a huge inexplicit Background of practices, capacities, dispositions, ways of behaving, and you can’t cope with the restaurant without the Background. That is what we teach our children. It’s just that I don’t have a satisfactory theory of the Background. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is in large part about the Background.

SL: Harold Garfinkel was an important reference for me. He had a notion of intentionality, and he had a notion of reflexivity. I also admired Erving Goffman, but was he an influence for your work?

JS: Goffman had the idea that we are all putting on an act all the time… well, there is something to that. But you need to distinguish cases when we really are putting on an act, such as when you are playing a game of charades or pretending to be Santa Claus. And Erving couldn’t make that distinction clearly.

SL: Going back to information theory and communication, do you think there is a revival of Shannon and Weaver?

JS: Shannon had little to say about actual communication of thoughts. He talked about bits of data and how they are transmitted. The communication theory that he invented is very important technologically, but it’s of little philosophical interest. The most important difference between Wittgenstein and me is that he didn’t think it’s possible to have a general theory of language. I think it is.

SL: What did he think you couldn’t do?

JS: Wittgenstein thought that there were countless different kinds of uses of language, and that we could not give the sort of systematic theory which would show how all uses of language can be reduced to a very simple set.

SL: Do you consider yourself an empiricist?

JS: Nowadays, we are all empiricists. I think that Chomsky gave many people the impression that the debate between empiricism and rationalism was about language acquisition. But it never was about that, that was more of a footnote, a minor thing. The real debate was about the nature of knowledge, and the empiricists won. We now all think that knowledge of reality has to come from empirical testing. So there is no question on who won the debate. Some people who never read Descartes or Leibniz think that their conception of rationalism was about language acquisition, they think rationalists have won the debate.

The point with sociology and economics is that, in general, they neglect the Background. You see, economic man only makes sense against a set of background assumptions. Why does a person in Britain retire after making a lot of money and become a country gentleman? Why does someone like Bill Gates want to make another billion? It’s because making money is an aim in itself. Is that rational or not? I don’t know if our traditional theories of rationality can account for it.

SL: Do you have an ethics that is tied to a communicative act?

JS: No, I do not. I think ethics, as a philosophical discipline, is about how rationality constrains our behaviour. When I published my first book on social ontology, it occurred to me that there is a central idea in it about which I was insufficiently critical. The central idea is that all social reality is created as the repeated application of a single formula ‘X counts as Y in C’. At no point did I ask myself the obvious question, what kind of speech act is that? This is institutional reality. Institutional reality is constructed by the application of a single method, whereby you count something as something that it is not intrinsically. But what kind of a speech act is it? It’s a declaration. I then incorporated this idea in my second book on social ontology.

If you look at the history of social philosophy in our culture, everyone takes language for granted. From Aristotle on, if you read Aristotle’s Politics, there is nothing about how language creates politics. It’s a terrible mistake to take language for granted because language is the essential constitutive device for creating institutional reality.

The key element in an institution is: Are you in a situation where your commitment to the fact gives you a reason for acting which is independent of your inclinations? Every institutional fact carries a deontology. It carries a reason for acting such that if you recognize the validity of institutional facts, then you recognize the validity of the reason. All institutional facts are created by the application of the same speech acts, what I call a Status Function Declaration. You make something the case by representing it as being the case.

Why do we do this? It creates power relations. What kind of power is it? Deontic power gives a reason for action independent of your inclinations. All institutional facts are created by Status Function Declarations, and all of these create power relations. A status function is a function that can be performed only in virtue of the fact that there is a recognized status of the object or the person that performs the function. The piece of paper can perform the function of money not in virtue of its physical structure, but in virtue of its recognized status. Only humans do this. As far as I know, no other animals do this. In order to do that, you have to have a way of representing status functions, as they only exist if they are represented.

SL: Are social institutions necessarily normative?

JS: Not all norms are institutional but all institutions are normative. For me, there is an institutional fact only if there is an obligation, right, duty, permission, etc. For example, the obligations of friendship are genuine institutional facts.

SL: One sentence on what you mean by deontology?

JS: Deontic powers create reasons for acting that are independent of inclinations. If you recognize a duty, an obligation, they are deontic. Civilization requires that people have reasons to do things independent of what they feel like at the moment. Animals can’t do that.

SL: Something that intrigued me was your debate with Jacques Derrida. It was a bit disappointing that Derrida didn’t seriously engage in the debate with you. What would have been the major difference had the debate really happened?

JS: It couldn’t have happened because Derrida had an absurd conception of contemporary philosophy. He thought contemporary philosophy was Husserl and contemporary linguistics was Saussure. He knew next to nothing of Wittgenstein or Chomsky, and only a little bit of Austin. In order to have a debate, he would have had to face up to the fact that I didn’t meet his definition of what a philosopher was supposed to believe. He thought I had to be like Husserl. That is, in terms of Husserl’s idea of ‘apodictic’ (or incontrovertible) knowledge.

I said, ‘We all accept that concepts are imprecise and since 1953 we have had good reason for that.’ And he was outraged. He said that we all think concepts have to be precise. It was the logic of all or nothing. The past 50 years hadn’t happened as far as he was concerned. He couldn’t believe that I did not believe what a philosopher was supposed to believe. He didn’t see language as a natural phenomenon, like eating or walking. It had to be a crystalline purity or it was not the real thing.

SL: So for him language is the transcendental reduction of Husserl?

JS: He thought that his great contribution was to show that it could not have the transcendental purity that we all required. The idea that we don’t require this purity in the first place was completely beyond him. Maybe I should write more about it, but it all seemed useless. Derrida was trying to teach them [literary theorists] that all scientists are just as bad as literary theorists, just as big a bunch of fakes as they are.

SL: The one you seemed to have the most time for was Foucault… what was it that you found interesting in what he was doing?

JS: Foucault was a serious intellectual who thought of himself as burdened by living in France… he was very intelligent and he had a lot of good ideas.

Edited by Bogdan Dragos

Note

This interview took place on February 11th 2013, in Berkeley, California, at John Searle's house and at Berkeley restaurant.