> It'd be worthwhile reading _Postulates of Linguistics_ if you haven't
> already! as DnG engage explicitly with Austin. It doesn't mention
I think that's a useful parallel: Postulates vs. "Signature Event
Context." My "off the cuff" response to the difference between the two
would involve what's "at risk" in the performative.
For Derrida, there's always the possibility of failure: the "condition of
impossibility" at the heart of performative acts (the possibility of
misfiring). Derrida's is concerned with the indeterminable nature of what
Austin calls "the total speech act in the total speech situation."
Citation/iterability/grafting being a condition of language entails for
Derrida that every speech act has a tenuous relation to context. He
concludes with a play on (illocutionary) force: that force of a speech
act actually holds in check everything that threatens its felicity.
For D+G, speech acts are positioned between machinic assemblages of
bodies and collective assemblages of enunciation on one axis, and de/re-
territorialization on the other. Each axis reveals a difference in how
D+G understand speech acts and the performative:
1. D+G want to keep bodies in the picutre. Hence, illocutionary force
becomes incorporeal transformation: a force immanent to language but
having material consequences on social/corporeal relations.
2. D+G want to find within the order word, riding as it does between de-
and re- territorialization, what lines of flight are possible: not to
destroy the order-word per se, but "to elude its death sentence." Derrida
sketches out the aporetic border between normal/parasitic speech,
felicity/infelicity; D+G try to identify what within the performative
might allow for transgressive, minor flights.
Hope that's of some help--it has been for me. I've been thinking along
these lines lately, but this is the first time I've tried to write it out.
--mark
> already! as DnG engage explicitly with Austin. It doesn't mention
I think that's a useful parallel: Postulates vs. "Signature Event
Context." My "off the cuff" response to the difference between the two
would involve what's "at risk" in the performative.
For Derrida, there's always the possibility of failure: the "condition of
impossibility" at the heart of performative acts (the possibility of
misfiring). Derrida's is concerned with the indeterminable nature of what
Austin calls "the total speech act in the total speech situation."
Citation/iterability/grafting being a condition of language entails for
Derrida that every speech act has a tenuous relation to context. He
concludes with a play on (illocutionary) force: that force of a speech
act actually holds in check everything that threatens its felicity.
For D+G, speech acts are positioned between machinic assemblages of
bodies and collective assemblages of enunciation on one axis, and de/re-
territorialization on the other. Each axis reveals a difference in how
D+G understand speech acts and the performative:
1. D+G want to keep bodies in the picutre. Hence, illocutionary force
becomes incorporeal transformation: a force immanent to language but
having material consequences on social/corporeal relations.
2. D+G want to find within the order word, riding as it does between de-
and re- territorialization, what lines of flight are possible: not to
destroy the order-word per se, but "to elude its death sentence." Derrida
sketches out the aporetic border between normal/parasitic speech,
felicity/infelicity; D+G try to identify what within the performative
might allow for transgressive, minor flights.
Hope that's of some help--it has been for me. I've been thinking along
these lines lately, but this is the first time I've tried to write it out.
--mark