JAC Volume 14 Issue 2

I found the interview with Donald Davidson in the winter JAC to be both enlightening and provocative. In the fall edition, Reed Way Dasenbrock’s response to the interview did much to place Davidson’s ideas in a context in which rhetoric and compositionists can see more clearly the issues that are at stake as we continue to ground our teaching practices in workable theories.

 There are two issues I want to address in this response: the first has to do with Dasenbrock’s dismissal of speech-act theory as relevant to the teaching of composition; the second is an observation about conventions which I hope will lead to a more refined and instructive Davidsonian approach to the teaching of writing.

Although speech-act theory has proven to be useful in various fields, Dasenbrock calls attention to its limitations in the composition classroom: “Classic speech act theory postulates ‘uptake’ or a full understanding of the ‘conversational implicature’ as essential to communication. That seems much less easy to posit as a norm for writing than for conversation” (524). If we hope to import elements of speech-act theory into the composition classroom, Dasenbrock’s observation must be acknowledged. The value of speech-act theory, however, can be much broader than Dasenbrock is allow­ing, and its pedagogical significance does not depend on a congruence between speech-acts and writing-acts; indeed, my claims rest on the assump­tion that compositionists can do more toward enriching students’ under­standings of what language does and how it does it by focusing on issues that are not textual but still have bearing on considerations that will ultimately become textual: how we conceive of language broadly—theoretically—will inevitably impact specific uses of language.

I think many of us involved in the teaching of writing work from the hidden assumption that students come to us devoid of any theoretical positions regarding language and communication whatsoever. We some­times view them as tabula rasas in this area, despite the fact that they have spent many years using language for various purposes. In my experience, the predominant theory that guides students in their workings with language is some variation of representationalism: words (re)present preexisting ideas that are simply named or labeled by words as needed. When speaking of “theory” in this context, I do not mean to suggest that students come to us with a full-blown and coherent theory of language or meaning. On the contrary, the fact that they don’t is what poses a problem; students (and people generally) construct theories expediently, as they are needed (Davidson calls these “passing theories”), but the specific “needs” that crop up can also lend spurious credence to various forms of representationalism.

The danger of representationalism lies in its tendency to diminish the importance (and obligation) of being self-conscious about language use, and this includes both speaking and writing. If ideas are simply “out there,” and language serves only to transfer these already-in-place concepts, the value of studying language, practicing writing, and engaging in classroom discussions about meaning is dubious since these activities deal only with the packaging of concepts, not with concepts themselves. Discussions focusing on language and words (meaning, diction, style, voice) can be too easily dismissed as “semantics” (in a pejorative sense)—one step removed from life and all that really matters.

 I have come to believe that some form of representationalism under­writes what I can only describe as a kind of magical thinking in which intention is imbued with an unquestioned status and power while the hazards of actual language use are suppressed. Such positions tend to manifest themselves in classroom discussions which involve interpretation, most often, in workshop settings. Several semesters ago, my students and I were participating in a workshop, and one of the papers we were going over included the term “bitchy.” I was provoked by this word and curious as to its sexist implications; as far as I knew (and know), the word is reserved exclusively for women, and I could not think of an adequate synonym used to describe male character. We spent some time trying to ground the term and its possible meanings, and after four or five students had offered interpreta­tions, one of my students, in a state of mild exasperation, concluded: “bitchy can mean whatever you want it to mean.”

My student’s claim hardly constitutes a theory of meaning, but it has relevance as a passing theory; that is, the theory was invoked to cope with a particular speech occasion, one in which an acceptable stabilization of meaning was clearly impossible given the diverse interpretations offered. A more general rendering of this theory might be something like, “words can mean whatever you want them to mean.” The making of meaning conceived of in terms of reading an audience and consulting conventional meanings is replaced by a trust in wants, wishes, and intentions. My student took refuge in the reassuring position that intention will somehow burn through the obfuscations, ambiguities, and interpretive difficulties that always surround language use. This position is grounded in representationalism to the extent that it assumes an inordinate cleavage between word and concept. Words only “stand for” ideas: if you want to communicate something in using the word bitchy, and you are also aware of the interpretive difficulties posed by the word, an appealing recourse is to take refuge in what you want to mean.

Speech-act theory provides a useful way to approach representational­ism and its variants —any theory that regards language as a collection of words that name independently existing concepts. In How To Do Things With Words, J.L.Austin works through his now classic distinction between constative and performative utterances: simply put, constative utterances describe a state of affairs; performative utterances actually do something; they perform an action. “I saw him mowing his lawn yesterday,” is a constative utterance; “I promise to take you to the hockey game,” is a performative: the utterance is coincidental with the establishing of a contract.

Austin introduced the distinction between constatives and performatives to clarify philosophical muddles endemic to assessments of meaning that dwelled on whether a statement is true of false. Constative utterances are subject to such evaluations; performatives are not. The most fundamental accomplishment of Austin’s distinction is that it forces a broadening of our understanding of what language does, what we do when we use words in various situations. In the writing classroom, introducing performative utterances leads students to consider aspects of language that are clearly incompatible with any strain of representationalism. When someone says, “I forgive you,” the utterance is not a statement of fact but an action. When you say, “I apologize,” it is difficult to conceive of analyzing the “meaning” of this sentence by speculating on a specific concept it represents or transports. When language overtly performs an action, questions of meaning become more clearly questions of use.

I do not mean to suggest that introducing students to performative utterances will somehow lead them to a sophisticated theory of meaning, but in more optimistic moments, I hope that my students, in having to account for the performative utterances instrumental in their own daily activities, are inspired to see language and meaning more in terms of self-conscious employment and less in terms of wanting or wishing a word to mean a preexisting idea. I hope, that is, that the claim “bitchy can mean whatever you want it to mean,” will be recast into a more valuable passing theory: “bitchy can mean various things to various people, so assess your audience and the likelihood that your meaning (intention) will be clear to them.” This may be a formidable task, but posing the problem in this way involves students in an inquiry into the meaning making process that does not rely on the assump­tion that meaning is entirely a function of wanting to mean something or meaning to mean something.

Voice, Conventions, and Meaning

My second point is intended to encourage and further discussions about conventions—what they are (or might be), and their usefulness in the teaching of writing. It is unfortunate, I believe, that Austin’s legacy is most visible in references to How To Do Things With Words and the constative/ performative distinction. Discussions of Austin’s work become less produc­tive the more they assume that Austin was proposing or assuming a theory of language; as Stanley Cavell remarks, the work “does not for Austin yield a theory of language; on the contrary, he takes this work to show how far we are from anything he would regard as a serious theory of language” (Themes 35).

Although the constative/performative distinction is valuable (with no­table limitations), Austin’s more striking insights occur when he is engaged in painstakingly working out subtle distinctions of ordinary language, as he does, for example, in “A Plea For Excuses.” Following the essay along as Austin refines distinctions between and among “excuses,” “justifications,” “mistakes,” “accidents,” “inadvertence,” “unintentional,” and so on, I feel that I’m rediscovering or relearning the ways in which we explain, excuse, and justify human action. Cavell characterizes Austin’s procedures and their effects in this way:

The positive purpose in Austin’s distinctions resembles the art critic’s purpose in comparing and distinguishing works of art, namely, that in the crosslight the capacities and salience of an individual object in question are brought to attention and focus.... In Austin’s hands, I am suggesting, other words, compared and distinguished, tell what a given word is about. To know why they do, to trace how these procedures function, would be to see something of what it is he wishes words to teach, and hints at an explanation for our feeling.., that what we learn will not be new empirical facts about the world, and yet illuminating facts about the world. (Must We 103-04)

The power of Austin’s work lies in what Cavell calls the discovery of “illuminating facts about the world,” but I am particularly interested in how such work, such procedures and their results, may challenge what we mean when we speak of conventions, especially when we speak of them in terms of their significance and application in the teaching of writing. At one point in his response to Davidson’s interview, Dasenbrock posits a particular rela­tionship between voice and conventions: “We attain our own voice, a Davidsonian approach to usage suggests, not by slavishly following nor by desperately avoiding received conventions, but by playing off against them. The more radical our departure from received conventions, the more we risk unintelligibility; but the more we respect and follow received usage, the more we risk boredom” (525). As Dasenbrock casts the problem, the chief task involved in cultivating a personalized voice is navigating between unintelli­gibility and boredom, but Austin’s work suggests to me alternatives to this characterization. His most challenging and illuminating work involves the exposure of conventions, but I would hardly describe the results of his enterprise as boring. I am not suggesting that Austin’s philosophical voice fails to challenge conventions; indeed, one of his trademarks as a philosopher is his routine employment of striking and original examples, a skill that distinguishes his philosophizing. Those of us who find Austin’s work uniquely clarifying, however, would not likely attribute this power to the thwarting of the conventions of philosophical discourse but to specific Austinian demonstrations which remind us of the forgotten power of con­ventions to demarcate conceptual boundaries with astounding precision. It is usually when hidden capacities of conventional usage are brought to light that questions surrounding conventions become both more urgent and more difficult. What are conventions? How can we characterize our investment in them? Conventions are often characterized as arbitrary, mere collective choices, but Cavell takes issue with Stanley Fish on this matter and exposes the limitations of explaining conventions in terms of agreements:

But Fish’s words here make this agreement seem much more, let me say, sheerly conventional than would seem plausible if one were considering other regions of Austin’s work, for example, the region of excuses, where the differences, for one small instance, between doing something mistakenly, accidentally, heedlessly, carelessly, inadvertently, automatically, thoughtlessly, inconsiderately, and so on are worked out with unantici­pated clarity and completeness but where the more convinced you are by the results, the less you will feel like attributing them to agreements that are expressible as decisions. How could we have agreed to consequences of our words that we are forever in the process of unearthing, consequences that with each turn seem further to unearth the world? (I don’t say there is no way). (Themes 40)

 The problem may be that Austin is revealing something, but we don’t quite know how to characterize these revelations; in displaying conventions in the ways he does, are we to view them as agreements, shared meanings, or some kind of elusive solidarity, something akin to what Wittgenstein calls “forms of life?” Whatever the answer may be, it is clear that work such as Austin’s urges us to clarify what we can meaningfully convey by “conventions,” since they must be something more (or something more difficult to explain) than mere agreements.

Part of my difficulty with Dasenbrock’s notion of “voice” as something to be struck by negotiating between unintelligibility and boredom may have to do with the incongruity which characterizes the options: is one’s voice likely to be less boring the more it approaches unintelligibility? Is intelligi­bility the aspect of writing (or language use in general) that is most at risk in efforts to circumvent boredom? To what extent does risking boredom and following received usage assure intelligibility?

The question of intelligibility generates questions of meaning, and conventions are certainly an issue here, especially if we characterize them as established ways of making meaning; it seems more difficult, or a different kind of task altogether, to specify what is at stake, what is missing, what is present, when a voice “bores.” Although I find myself willing to evaluate voice in terms of its reliance on or deviation from accepted conventions, I think it unlikely that a voice which does nothing to challenge conventions will necessarily be boring. Whether or not a voice is “boring” or “engaging” (I do not think there is an exact antithesis) strikes me as a different question altogether, one that will involve me in the act of criticism, the results of which may or may not include an indictment (or praise) of conventions.

Seeing the cultivation of voice in terms of pushing the envelope of conventional usage seems to me to be a misrepresentation of the issue and one that fails to account for the surprises of learning that often accompany encounters with the conventional, and these surprises are not limited to those with philosophical training. Indeed, my suggestions here grow out of a larger conviction that conventions themselves can serve as the very source of a philosophically-oriented rhetoric. A semester ago, a student of mine wrote an essay in which he analyzed the various ways and contexts in which he employs the verb to know. Among his discoveries was the realization that the grammar of knowing (grammar in the Wittgensteinian sense of the word) is multifaceted. The most striking example my student used was a scene in which his mother told him, “you’ve got to clean up your room.” His response was, “I know,” but he went on to explain in his essay that in claiming to “know,” he did not communicate to his mother an acknowledgment of the fact that his room was untidy, nor did he intend to; “I know,” in the context in which he used it, meant something more akin to “leave me alone,” or “I’ll take care of it later.” This is a case in which a conventional expression—a claim of knowledge—is used for a specific, context-bound rhetorical effect. I see my student’s efforts at working through these different uses of “I know”—his inclination to talk about the use of a word in terms of intention, grammar, and consequence—as the beginnings of a way of thinking about language that is philosophical, and I believe such discoveries are just as valuable to students as learning about the ways in which conventions con­strain voice.

In mapping out the applications of Davidson’s ideas for teachers of writing, Dasenbrock writes, “In emphasizing the mutability of our prior understanding, Davidson establishes creativity and innovation at the very heart of communication” (525). I close with two questions: first, “prior understanding” of what, exactly? Second, do “creativity and innovation” necessarily mandate a challenge to conventions? My reading of Austin’s work and Cavell’s characterization of its results, and my conviction that the study of conventions (their limits and peculiar powers) is valuable and inherently philosophical, suggest that creativity and innovation can just as often be a case of calling to mind (being reminded of) the depth to which and the particular ways in which conventions determine what we say and mean and what we can say and mean.

Works Cited