Dimitar Vatsov THE FORCES OF SPEECH A Radical Pragmatics 1 Contents INTRODUCTION 1. What is radical pragmatics? 2. Radical pragmatics in a nutshell 2.1 Performatives 2.2 Metaphors and metaphorical effect 2.3 The course of speech 2.4 Meta-performatives Part I PERFORMATIVES Essay 1 Sovereign Power Instead of Resistance 1.1. J. L. Austin 1.2. Discovering the field of performativity 1.3. Actual utterances in the first person 1.4. Rejecting the value/fact dichotomy 2. Jacques Derrida 2.1. Against the ontological priority of “speech” over “writing” 2.2. Against the privileging of “normal” over “parasitic” uses 2.3. Citation 2.4. Event instead of act 2.5. Deconstructing “context” 3. Judith Butler 3.1. Agency and the subversive power of performance 3.2. Resistance against sovereignty 4. Performatives: micro-sovereignty instead of resistance 4.1. The irreversibility of performances 2 4.2. Evaluation and subject-centring Essay 2 Demiurgic Effect 1. Points of departure 1.1Jürgen Habermas’s mistake: “validity claims” 1.2John Searle’s mistake: the “illocutionary force/propositional content F(p)” distinction 1.3Why are they mistakes? 2. Declarations and the demiurgic force of performances 2.1Jacques Derrida’s “Declarations of Independence” 2.2Indexicality and demiurgic effect 3. The demiurgic effect and its institutionalizations 3.1The web of possibilities available prior to performance 3.2The short-circuit between some possibilities 3.3Institutionalizations and division of labour 4. Excursus 4.1Benjamin, Schmitt, Derrida: violence and legitimacy 4.2Demiurguc effect and affirmative citizenship Part II METAPHORS AND METAPHORICAL EFFECT Essay 3 Metaphorical Effect 1. Donald Davidson: “What Metaphors Mean” 1.1. Metaphor and repetition 1.2. Metaphor is not substitution 1.3. Radical anti-representationism? 1.4. Metaphor is not an elliptical simile 1.5. But neither is it an oxymoron 3 2. The metaphorical effect 2.1. “The metaphorical is” 2.2. Opening up conventional meanings 2.3. Indistinguishability of metaphorical expressions 2.4. Metaphorical potentiality and conventional potentials for meaning 2.5. Nonsense, metaphor, literalness 3. On the physics and metaphysics of potentiality 3.1. Aristotle’s dunamis and energeia revisited 3.2. Metaphorical dynamics 4. Conclusion Essay 4 (Appendix) Albena Hranova and Dimitar Vatsov, Event and Immortality in Two Concepts, in Two Plots and Two Readings 1. 2. 3. 4. Around Revival Around Slavery Around “Hadji Dimitar” Around “Hadji Dimitar” further on Part III THE COURSE OF SPEECH Essay 5 Context and Indexicality 1. The lost context 1.1. The loose “contextual dependence” 1.2. Event instead of context: a further blurring of the concept? 2. Indexicality and routine 2.1. What is indexicality? 2.2. Errors, habits, and indexicality 4 Essay 6 The Course of Words and Things 1. With Donald Davidson on the problem of errors 1.1. Speech errors 1.2. The third dogma of empiricism 1.3. Passing theory 1.3.1. Passing is a marker of actuality 1.3.2. Passing is a marker of the absence of alternatives 1.3.3. “Passing” and “getting away with it” 1.3.4. Passing through experience with William James 1.3.5. The course of words and things (an initial sketch) 2. The course of words and things 2.1. What is literal meaning? 2.2. Why course and not theory? 2.3. Why course and not intention or sense? 2.3.1. Michel de Certeau’s itineraries 2.3.2. A course is not an intention (consciousness-of…) 2.3.3. A course is not an intention (correlation between actual and potential) 2.3.4. Neither is it a sense 3. What, then, is a course? 3.1. Course, repetition, rule 3.2. Actual and conventional course, literal and conventional meaning 3.3. Course and usage 3.4. Formalization and reversal of courses 4. Courses and their indexical paths 4.1. Demiurgic effect and indexical reference 4.2. Indexical shift of focus 4.3. The energy terrain of the locality 5. Conclusion: the duck and the rabbit 5 Essay 7 Understanding and Course 1. A general note on understanding 2. Three close-ups 2.1First close-up: Martin Heidegger 2.1.1 State-of-mind 2.1.1. The fore-structure of understanding 2.1.2. The as-structure of interpretation 2.2Second close-up: Ludwig Wittgenstein and grasping 2.3 Third close-up: Donald Davidson and his “passing theory” revisited 3 To understand means to hold the course 4 For a new realism Part IV META-PERFORMATIVES Essay 8 “I Know That…” With Ludwig Wittgenstein on Saying “I Know” 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Wittgenstein on the depth grammar of the verb “know” “I know!” between certainty and uncertainty Against George Edward Moore’s “Proof of an External World” The witness’s position as a primitive meaning of “I know!” “I know!” as a prohibition of further argumentation “I know!” as a means of blocking doubt “I know!” as a meta-performative Summary 6 Essay 9 “It Is True That…” With Donald Davidson on Truth and Indexicality 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Davidson between formal analysis and contextual uses Davidson’s theory of truth An attempt at formalizing and taming demonstratives Demonstratives go wild An attempt at formalizing indirect speech Demonstratives go wild, again Summary: Indexicality and radical pragmatics 7 INTRODUCTION 8 1. What is radical pragmatics? This book gradually builds a relatively coherent network of old and new terms and concepts, which – without forming a closed system – sets out the paradigmatic contours of a comprehensive philosophical conception. This conception allows an overarching view of language usages and proposes some new tools for their direct analysis. I have called it radical pragmatics! Radical pragmatics is based on the assumption that the meanings of words, grammatical rules, as well as the other social norms governing communication, are formed and become relatively stable in actual linguistic practices that are intrinsically unstable. Thus, pragmatics in the linguistic sense has priority over semantics and syntax. For language is not a cage or a structure whose walls speech keeps running against, nor is it a labyrinth whose corridors speech is compelled to follow blindly. Indeed, speech most often follows well-trodden linguistic paths, more or less fixed itineraries. Yet even so, the forces of speech are the ones that immanently regroup themselves and, each time anew, set out on a unique course and change the terrain of language at least in part. 9 Thus, the radicality of this project consists, first of all, in that it does not allow for anything that is not pragmatics – it does not allow for language beyond speech.1 The radical adherence to the immanence of speech allows for neither transcendence nor transcendentality: there is nothing that is beyond, above, or after speech practices, nor is there anything that is below or prior to the latter – that precedes them as their unconditional condition.2 As will become clear in this book, in a certain sense speech is a sovereign. The method that unlocks the door of radical pragmatics here is ordinary language analysis. This, however, is not to say that radical pragmatics is solely and only a philosophy of language. It is just as much a dynamic ontology because it treats “the whole, consisting of language and the activities into which it is woven” (Wittgenstein, 2009, PI, §7/p. 8e).3 Thus, pragmatics is not only radically immanent but also radically holistic: not only semantics and syntax but also ontology – every ontology, every picture of the world! – are its derivatives. Although it is an authorial project, radical pragmatics is not autochthonous, of course. Sometimes a constellation of historical fortuities, once it has come about, frames the future and projects possibilities and even necessity in it. For radical pragmatics, such a fortuitous but fateful constellation was brought about by three nuclear events, three radical thought experiments conducted by three great thinkers immediately before and after the Second World War: the later Wittgenstein at Cambridge, John Langshaw Austin at Oxford, and Willard Van Orman Quine at Harvard. The three knew little about one another, and only from hearsay; nor did they cite one another. It was as if they inhabited different worlds.4 Their approaches are different, often practically incommensurable. Of course, the appeal to ordinary language, done by different routes by Wittgenstein and by Austin, as well as Quine’s appeal to pragmatism – combined in the three of them with an inclination towards a radical anti-metaphysical critique – are important things they have in common. Despite this basic commonality, however, and despite some The general argument which asserts that, after J. L. Austin’s discovery of performativity, “pragmatics [has become] the presupposition behind all of the other dimensions” (of semantics and syntax) as well as that it has become “impossible to maintain the distinction between language and speech” can be found in Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 78). I agree with them. My work further on, however, is not directly related to their works. 2 “Transcendental” is a rather broad term. Here I insist that radical pragmatics is not transcendental in a strictly defined sense: prior to speech practices, there are no universal frameworks or structures that are absolutely independent from actual language-use and that play the role of their unconditional condition. Of course, actual practical repetitions lead to the formation of linguistic habits (semantic and syntactic ones) that anchor and practically stabilize actual uses. Still, they never fully subordinate speech: speech remains a sovereign that can always depart from, or refuse to repeat, the old rules and create new ones. 3 Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Philosophical Investigations, and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics are hereafter referred to as TLP, PI, and RFM. 4 In fact, only Quine, who outlived the other two by decades, refers to them in his later works in a rather detached, often even ironic, manner. 1 10 serious attempts at synthesis (by Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell, among others), radical pragmatics is yet to be developed. It is a systematic effort at a radical translation between the vocabularies of the three great philosophers of language of the mid-twentieth century as well as between the vocabularies of many others who have experimented upon and after them. In the essays that follow, radical pragmatics often stages, in an attempt to constitute itself, proxy dialogues with the three as well as with some of their critics and interpreters. It must be noted, though, that Quine’s voice is heard little if at all in this book because he has yielded the floor (not entirely voluntarily!) to his more radical pupil, Donald Davidson. Speaking of the founding fathers at the beginning of this book, though, we cannot but pay tribute to Quine “without whom not”.5 In fact, this book is a collection of essays written in the last twelve years. I have ordered them conceptually, not chronologically. Where necessary, I have edited them to clarify some conceptual points, to highlight the connections, and to set out the skeleton of radical pragmatics. To this end, I have renamed some of the essays and, most of all, I have restructured them into subchapters and paragraphs. As a result, the conceptual skeleton of radical pragmatics is laid bare in the analytical contents of the book. If I had gone as far as to build a completed system, however, this would have been self-defeating: it would have been in contradiction with the very idea of a radical pragmatics, which does not allow for acontextual universalism. The result would have been “wooden iron”, an oxymoron similar to Jürgen Habermas’s famous “universal pragmatics”. Furthermore, pragmatics, albeit radical, presupposes calmness: trust in ordinary language, slow and careful description of uses, not rash advancement of “theses in philosophy” (Wittgenstein 2009, PI, §128/p. 56e). To avoid rash gestures and hollow universalism, I have left the essays their relative autonomy: each one of them is a relatively autonomous theoretical essay on a given problem, each follows its own course of exposition. Still, the courses of the essays mapped out repeatable routes that turned out to be mutually reversible and, in the final analysis, together formed a still incomplete and insufficiently detailed map of radical pragmatics. Here I will try to take you on a preliminary tour of this map by telling you the history of its formation. This will be more a conceptual than a biographical history, although sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between the two. In it I will try to maintain two things at once: the moment of historicity, of occurrence and formation of the relevant problems, concepts and solutions, and on the other hand, 5 Davidson dedicated his book Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (2001) “To W. V. Quine without whom not”. 11 the moment of analysis, of establishment of coherent connections between them. I will also demonstrate some problems that have emerged in the course of research but that have not been investigated yet. The conceptual history of the formation of radical pragmatics is in fact a summary of this book. But although it summarizes what has been accomplished to date, it outlines new problem fields, too, and is therefore also a research programme. 2. Radical pragmatics in a nutshell When, many years ago, I was entering the field of philosophy of language, I came from a background in political philosophy, and more specifically, in critical theory. I hoped that by analyzing ordinary language, I would discover a critical instance that was immanent to social and linguistic practices and had transformative might and power. Something like the “instituting power” of Cornelius Castoriadis or Antonio Negri, but also something very different. I was looking for an instance that was not merely a speculative construct, but that had very concrete and objectifiable manifestations. Moreover, I was looking for an instance that was not necessarily bound to some revоlutionary collective subject, as is usually the case in postMarxist critique – an instance that allowed for individualization. The obvious contender was: 2.1 Performatives There already was a contender – Judith Butler’s project had become quite influential. In Butler’s reading, however, the transformative power of performatives was too weak, and their normative force practically non-existent. In her reading, they could only negatively subvert and ironically resignify normative identity positions imposed from the outside. Resistance reduced to self-seeking transgression! For performatives to become a real critical instance, it was necessary, therefore, to restore their active force and power because of which Austin had originally called them “performatives”: the power to do things with words. That is also why the first essay, “Sovereign Power Instead of Resistance”,6 reconstructs and reconceptualizes the term “performative”, starting from Austin’s concept and layering and 6 The original version of this essay was published as follows: Vatsov, D. 2010. Performativat: suverenna vlast vmesto saprotiva [Performatives: sovereign power instead of resistance]. Critique & Humanism, 32 (2), 159–178. 12 maintaining upon it the deconstructive critiques, especially those by Derrida, while trying to keep for performatives certainly not absolute sovereignty but at least a micro-sovereignty. By “micro-sovereignty” I understand the minimal, weak, fragile and contestable but nevertheless active force that is to be found in every performance and which allows performances not only to repeat but also to change and revoke laws (linguistic, social, and often natural laws as well), to disorganize and reorganize the state of affairs by introducing exceptional legislation.7 In fact, the analyses that follow show that in certain clearly distinguishable aspects, the illocutionary force of performatives is their micro-sovereign might or power. Incidentally, before we turn to the sovereign power of performances, we must underline that this turn is not an attempt at metaphysical restoration. On the contrary: here Derrida’s deconstruction of performatives is accepted as a convincing reconstruction of the concept of “performative”, correcting and supplementing Austin’s theory. In agreement with Derrida: (1) There is no need to privilege speech – textual performances (reading, writing) as well as thinking silently (not aloud) are also utterances, performatives; (2) A strict distinction between “serious” and “fictional” speech is impossible, therefore any exclusion or neglect of fictional speech is unfounded – and that is so because no speech is serious and authentic enough to be a self-source, every speech proceeds as a repetition of previous speeches, as an iteration; (3) There is no subject prior to speech, that is, performatives are not an act (a “speech act”) but a medial event, a performance that leaves the subject after itself as a signature, an imprint, a trace; (4) It is dangerous to naturalize “context” and to represent it as a condition for the felicity of performatives, because the latter would thus turn out to be determined by the context and would lose the power of their illocutionary force. Those things ought to be accepted: they expand and specify our understanding of performatives. In fact, Judith Butler also accepts them. What is interesting is that if we accept them, the problem formulated at the beginning becomes even more problematic. If performatives are a subjectless medial event that always already repeats previous The general categorial structure in my understanding of “sovereignty” through “state of exception”, as the above formulations indicate, has been borrowed from Carl Schmitt (2014; 2005). Although this is not elaborated in detail here, I would like this book to be read as a systematic implicit critique and revision of Schmitt: it does not attempt to consolidate and absolutize sovereignty through a political theology, as Schmitt does, but, conversely, to disperse sovereignty in speech and, by doing so, to democratize it. The second essay (“Demiurgic Effect”) ends with an explicit critique of the mystical way Derrida conceives of the force of performatives through Schmitt’s concept of “sovereignty” and Benjamin’s concept of “divine violence” – that is also where the idea of dispersed microsovereignty is sketched out, along with the idea of an affirmative citizenship. In any case, “micro” in the compound word “micro-sovereignty” plays the role also of a critical cancellation and fracture of all absolutist claims – admittedly, from a Schmittian perspective “micro-sovereignty” is a contradiction; but here, from the perspective of the wealth and plurality of speech, any Schmitt-style assumption (even if it is quasi-transcendental) of “absolute sovereignty” is a contradiction. Radical pragmatics opposes political theology. 7 13 matrices and contexts, then how can it have a force, power of its own? For Butler, performatives do not have force, power, sovereignty in the proper sense – every performance has agency insofar as it is a repetition; and only insofar as it repeats pregiven positions of subordination, it has the weak force to change them by ironically inverting their meanings. Of course, Butler’s project is premised also on a paranoid post-Marxist hyperbolization of the power of social norms. They are unequivocally identified as instances of ideological coercion: every normatively given position is always already a position of ideological interpellation, and hence, of subjection. Thus, every performance is trapped a priori – and since it cannot escape from the trap, it is doomed to helplessly circulate within it.8 Yet even beyond the paranoid conception of ideology following Marx and Althusser, the problem still remains: if every performance only repeats previous random matrices – linguistic, social, cultural ones – then what force of its own does it have? It is easier, as Thomas Clément Mercier did recently, to answer this question by maximally deconstructing “force” to the point where it turns out that “force, at bottom, remains non-ontologizable and incommunicable” (Mercier 2016, p. 32). It is more difficult to provide ontological, shareable evidence of the force of performatives. The first essay demonstrates three such empirically objectifiable characteristics of performances, which are direct manifestations of the latter’s momentary and fragile but nevertheless (micro-)sovereign might to rearrange and re-evaluate things. The first characteristic is their irreversibility. Every utterance, even when it repeats the most banal and repeatable relations, proceeds in an unrepeatable and irreversible way: you either say “A is bigger than B” or you say “B is smaller than A”, but you never say both things at once. Irreversibility is not a defect of repetition, it is an effect of the own power of performances to rearrange the things they repeat. Second, irreversibility in the arrangement of the elements of an utterance, of their rearrangement over and over again, also entails their immediate re-evaluation. In the course of its actual occurrence, the performative – every performative – immediately re-evaluates the points of its trajectory. This means that in the course of its actual occurrence, every performative has – albeit only momentary – sovereign evaluative power. 8 Here I have in mind the well-known “paradox of the subject”, discussed in more detail in Vatsov 2017. 14 Third, I agree with Derrida that at the basic level, every performance is a subjectless event where the subject is an effect (not a cause). I also agree with Butler that the subject positions of utterances are always already partly (albeit not unambiguously) codified by linguistic, social, and cultural norms. Yet even so, the subject position is always a highly privileged point that (almost9) every utterance actually throws above and behind itself as a source. Utterances almost always – explicitly or implicitly – centre themselves in an “I” or “we” – in the first person, even when the first person is not articulated. But the first person is an effect of the utterance, not something that precedes it: the subject is in fact a super-ject – a point thrown by the utterance at the beginning of its trajectory. It is precisely from that high point that all other points of the trajectory are rearranged and re-evaluated. Thus, performance is a medial event which, however, most often objectivates itself as a subject perspective: as an act, as a performative. Or, as Stanley Cavell says, defending Austin against Derrida’s critique, although utterances leave their subject position as a signature, they thereby also create responsibility: “the inability to be insincere, an inability not to be signed on to your words and deeds” (Cavell 1995, p. 61). Utterances make themselves dependent on their subject – on their first person – insofar as they indexically point out the latter as the source of what is said. These three characteristics of sovereignty – (1) immediate privileging of an own subject point from which things (2) are rearranged and (3) re-evaluated upon every utterance – are fleeting and fragile. They always can be, and practically are, rearranged and inverted upon every subsequent and reciprocal utterance. That is why we say that performatives do not have absolute but very little – microsovereign power. For (almost) every performative imposes its own perspective in a sovereign way. This imposition of perspective, however, is weak because every reciprocal performative takes away the sovereignty and inverts the perspective of the preceding one, only to lose them in its turn. Thus, every utterance practically entails momentary expropriation and personification of the sovereign force of speech. To say something means to declare oneself a sovereign in the first person! Thus, sovereignty flares up but then quickly flickers out because upon every other or subsequent utterance the first person flares up elsewhere. It seems that in speech, sovereignty is intrinsically dispersed, plural. And no one has monopoly over it – no one is an absolute sovereign – because no one has a monopoly over speech. Speech does not have an absolute “I” or “we” that articulates it; on the contrary, some singular “I” or “we” At a later stage of the analysis, it turned out that some performances – for example, explicit metaphors – do not fix a distinct subject point, that is, the perspective in them is uncertain. 9 15 flashes forth in every utterance, only to quickly flicker out as another flashes forth. Thus, speech is multitude. The intrinsic dispersion of sovereignty in and through speech, not the theories of the rational choice of individuals, is a far better premise upon which social contract theories can be founded. The dispersion of sovereignty is the own legitimating foundation of democracy. It is also the premise of the idea of affirmative citizenship, sketched out at the end of the second essay. The second essay, however, begins by demonstrating that perspective in performances – their centring in the first person – is not the only nor even the main manifestation of their sovereignty. Their sovereignty is manifested even more distinctly as a “Demiurgic Effect”.10 We cannot understand the phenomenon I have termed “demiurgic effect” unless we dispense with two interconnected prejudices. The first one is that there is a clear, sharp boundary between language, thought, and reality. The second is that there is a clear, sharp boundary between act (intention, speech act) and state of affairs (propositional content). Those more general and quite old prejudices are attacked here through a critique of two influential theories regarding performatives: Jürgen Habermas’s “universal pragmatics” and John Searle’s “speech act theory”. Habermas is among the thinkers who follow Kant in distinguishing, and even allowing for an insurmountable chasm, between language, on the one hand, and the world and thought, on the other. This is most evident in the general term “validity claims” (Geltungsansprüche), which is central to universal pragmatics, and hence, to communicative rationality. Let me remind the reader that according to Habermas, utterances raise “validity claims” – a claim to correspondence to reality (truthfulness), to correspondence to the speaker’s feelings and intentions (sincerity), and to correspondence to intersubjective norms (rightness). As a critical thinker, Habermas is entirely right in ruling out the possibility that those claims can be validated through some positivistically understood direct verification – in his view, immediate access to the “facts” of nature, of consciousness, or of social norms is impossible. Hence – here I repeat what is well known – validity claims can be validated only if all parties concerned reach agreement on them in a process of open communication. The essay “Demiurgic Effect” was originally published in Bulgarian as follows: Vatsov. D. 2010. Performativat: nasilie i demiurgichna vlast [Performatives: violence and demiurgic power]. Sotsiologicheski Problemi, special issue, 265–292; and in English as: Vatsov, D. 2010. Performatives: Violence and Demiurgic Power. Critique & Humanism, 35 (special issue), 229–254. 10 16 Thus, the problem is not in that a “validity claim” prohibits any first-instance validation of utterances – on the contrary, this is a good thing. The problem is that through this term utterances are intrinsically represented as devalidated – as critically contested and split a priori. By saying that utterances raise validity claims, it seems that every utterance has always already been deconstructed in advance through a series of questions: “Is that exactly what the speaker means?”, “Is that really true?”, “Is that right?”, and so on. In ordinary communication, however, such explicitly critical questions are quite rare. Everyday comprehension relies on the basic positivity of speech which is not yet subjected to critical contestation or interrogation – it relies on the non-thematic self-evidence of what is said. But Habermas – revising Husserl and Schutz – makes the mistake of ascribing this basic self-evidence not to utterances but to experiences and to thought which, in his view, are a pre-linguistic sphere. By doing so, he not only allows for parallelism between thought and language but also deprives language – he deprives speech articulation which, in his view, is a transformation of the prepredicate know how into a predicate know that – of any self-evidence and positivity of its own. He remains blind precisely to the demiurgic effect of speech. Before we proceed to discuss the demiurgic effect, however, let us look at the other distinction which Habermas and many other scholars dealing with performatives have inherited from John Searle: the distinction between illocutionary force and propositional content. Although it was cursorily introduced already by Austin, this distinction, which follows the Cartesian-Husserlian tradition of distinguishing cogito from cogitatum, has been canonized as the logical skeleton of every performative in Searle’s speech act theory. According to Searle, every performative can be represented through the formula F(p) – an act whose illocutionary force (the function F) varies and is expressed through various performative verbs (“claim”, “suppose”, “promise”, “request”, and so on), and propositional content (the variable p), which also varies and is expressed through various states of affairs introduced by “that/to” subordinate clauses after performative verbs. Without denying that Searle’s distinction between illocutionary force and propositional content has heuristic value allowing him to develop his well-known (intuitively convincing, insofar as it is typologically appropriate11) taxonomy of Searle’s typology (assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations) is appropriate, but it is not a typology of performatives in general – it is a typology only of some main types of meta-performatives, that is, of the ways we sanction and re-modalize ex post a given former performative that we now place in the subordinate clause after “that”: “I think that…”, “I promise that…”, “It is true that…”, and so on. We most often say “The door is closed!” without specifying whether we are “asserting” or “presuming” that it is closed – “specification” (modalization) usually proves to be necessary only ex post, after some doubt has arisen and we have to specify in what way and to what extent we stand by our previous statement. But this ex post is also valid for performatives 11 17 speech acts, we must nevertheless say that this F(p) formula is wrong if it is taken as the logical skeleton of performatives in general. That is because, in a close description of linguistic practices, such a distinction most often cannot be made, at least not without a forced reduction. For example, third-person utterances only ad hoc imply the first person they are uttered by, and most often do not allow distinguishing and determining ad hoc what “the act” of the utterance is. Whether an actual utterance such as “The protest is mighty: a huge multitude is flocking into the square” is an assertive (a neutral descriptive statement), an expressive (an expression of a psychological state), a commissive (an attempt at selfcommitment), a directive (a propaganda expression aimed at persuading), or a constitutive declaration (of a spokesperson for the protest) – such a “judgement” as to what “the act” was can be made only ex post, after some hesitation, possible discussion or, most generally, after a secondary assessment of the situation of the utterance. In other words, in the first utterance – and this applies to the majority of everyday utterances – “the acts” are undistinguished and undistinguishable from the content of the ongoing utterance. Accordingly, the identification and classification of “the act” is always a meta-performative that comes after the performative itself – ex post in relation to the first utterance. And this metaperformative, which defines ex post the “the act” of the first utterance, in fact does not reconstruct but transforms the first utterance – it imposes the form of a “specific act” upon it, a form the first utterance did not have at the moment of its articulation. That is precisely why dispute about how to classify a given former utterance – sometimes literally a struggle for its definition as one type of act or another – is not only possible but also commonplace; and this sort of dispute can never be settled unequivocally, except through temporary hegemonic imposition of one point of view or another ex post. This, however, is not valid for third-person utterances only. Already Austin noted that distinguishing and defining “the act” is difficult and outright impossible in the case of some first-person utterances, too – in fact, in the case of all first-person utterances that are not explicit “meta-performatives”: because, according to Austin, whether “I shall…” is a promise, an expression of intention, or a prediction can be determined only ex post. In other words, explicit performative verbs (“think”, “suppose”, “promise”, “swear”, and so on) are in fact devices for producing metaperformatives: it is precisely through them that “the act of articulation” is actually distinguished from a former utterance which, however, has now been deactualized, which, according to Searle, are future-oriented – directives and commissives. For ex post is a logical rather than practical temporal operator – the performative “the door is closed” may not have been articulated at all at the time of the situation in question, but when I say “Please close the door!” I rely ex post on the fact that everyone has heard and knows what “the door is closed” means, so I am now modalizing a future relation to a former performance that has been deactualized and reduced to a known state of affairs. 18 introduced by a subordinate “that” clause, and transformed into a “proposition” vis-à-vis which a subject’s relation is now modalized. This problem will be further elucidated here in Part 2.4, Meta-Performatives, of the Introduction. The conclusion up to this point, however, is that the F(p) formula is not a universal tool. It rarely helps – only with regard to meta-performatives – and more often hinders the analysis of performances because it rashly imposes on them the distinction between subject and object, between intention and state of affairs. 12 Now that we have overcome the old splits between language and world, and between act and proposition, we can go on to see how words do things without being opposed to them: we can proceed to analyze the demiurgic effect of speech. This effect is most visible in a particular type of performatives: in declarations. Once again following Derrida and his analysis of “Declarations of Independence”, the second essay in this section shows that the main function of declarations is precisely demiurgic: by virtue of their articulation itself, the things that are declared become real – they become a fact without existing prior to their articulation. For example, the 1776 Declaration of Independence is a series of declarative utterances constituting political representation such as did not exist before; what is more, they constituted the American people which, prior to the Declaration, was not a unified political body such as was the new country, the United States of America, that emerged at that time. But the demiurgic effect is to be found not only in constitutional acts. It is also visible, already in Austin, in more everyday declarations by which a marriage, war, or verdict is declared. By virtue of their very articulation, the marriage, war, or verdict become a fact. Upon further analysis, it turns out that the demiurgic effect is not limited solely to declarations. In fact, it can be found in every performative at a more basic, primitive level. For actual performances activate it at the level of the separate sign, that is, at almost every point of their trajectory. In fact, the demiurgic effect is an indexical effect, but it is a specific indexical effect because, as we will see, indexicality is a broader phenomenon. By “demiurgic effect” we have in mind a specific indexical miracle which, however, is so banal that it usually goes unnoticed: upon its actual articulation, 12 Perhaps further study may demonstrate how intention appears and how different intentions are distinguished as an effect of the work of meta-performatives. For I first say “The glass is on the table” and this utterance carries a positivity and self-evidence of its own; it is only after this self-evidence has been thrown into doubt that we secondarily attempt to stabilize it by specifying (modalizing) our relation to the state of affairs: “I see…”, “I know…”, “I suppose”, “I hope…” that “the glass is on the table”. It may be that intentions are a supplementary stabilizing mechanism of speech. 19 (almost13) every sign indexically indicates exactly “which” thing in the world it refers to (which is the referent) as well as exactly “what” the thing it refers to is (what its meaning is). When in an actual situation I say “The plate is on the table”, I have in mind (and usually everyone understands it) precisely this plate (not “that” one) which is precisely a plate as a piece of crockery (and not “plate iron” or “window-plate”). Among the many conventional meanings a sign has, and among the many referents each of those meanings can be potentially ascribed to, upon actual usage signs as if instantly choose precisely this here referent with precisely this here meaning. In other words, it is actual usage which indicates, in an entirely sovereign and demiurgic way, what the sign really (literally) refers to as well as how this reality should be understood – what is its specific meaning. In other words, the demiurgic effect is the effect of speech where speech momentarily unites a specific referent and a specific meaning in the focus of the sign – and thus produces what we usually call “literal meaning”. Practically in all utterances, including in questions and contestations, at some point or other, sign, meaning, and referent are conjoined into one – and precisely when there is such conjunction, we speak of literal meaning of signs. Producing literal meanings in a demiurgic manner, speech as if actually declares, each time anew, precisely which are the things in the world and how they should be understood. The literal meaning of a word or phrase is precisely the momentary triunity of sign, meaning, and referent. Of course, this momentary triunity is very fragile – every subsequent utterance not only can but practically does call it into question, displaces, inverts, or even contests it directly, each time anew. In other words, speech ex post, always and unavoidably, “edits” its own former demiurgic effects. Still, it is precisely the momentary demiurgic effect which makes possible subsequent understanding, including questioning, doubting, and even explicit critiquing of previous utterances. For the demiurgic effect allows us to understand exactly what we are told – it constitutes the literal meaning of what is said. The fragile indexical miracle of literal meaning is the elementary basis of practical understanding. It is also the starting point of critique. For critique is nothing other than ex post deconstruction of the triunity of sign, referent, and meaning – destruction of literal meaning – through subsequent questions, indirect displacements, or direct contestations.14 But those subsequent questions, displacements, and contestations, 13 It seems that conjunctions (for example, logical connections) and prepositions do not have a referential function. I am leaving this question open. 14 In fact, the very distinction between sign, meaning, and referent is secondary in relation to the demiurgic effect. It is only because we call into question or contest some utterances ex post that we split the sign from the meaning or the sign from the referent, that is, we produce a difference between them that did not exist before. And now we have to say that the demiurgic effect “conjoins” sign, meaning, and referent only because we have already internalized 20 insofar as they are actual performances, also produce a demiurgic effect – they again forge literal meanings.15 Thus the demiurgic effect, without being a self-identical metaphysical instance, in fact serves as a natural barrier to any attempt at sceptical regression. But that is not because the coincidence of sign, meaning, and referent is absolute and impenetrable: on the contrary, this momentary coincidence is fragile and brittle, it can always be called into doubt, in any case. Yet although in every concrete case we may call into doubt one coincidence or another, we always do so ex post – the demiurgic index, the literal meaning, must have already taken place for us to start doubting it. Furthermore, by doubting it, we produce literal meanings over and over again. In fact, we set out to find a positive instance of social critique, but it turns out, apparently, that we have discovered something else, too – the natural positive basis of epistemology. 2.2 Metaphors and metaphorical effect According to Darin Tenev (2013, p. 281ff.), performatives are not and should not be thought of as a singular act or even as a singular event. That is because, in his view, every illocutionary act also triggers, by its very articulation – eo ipso, ipso facto – a perlocutionary act which indirectly, non-thematically reaffirms the common conventional horizon in which the utterance is articulated. The perlocutionary force by which conventional expectations are indirectly reaffirmed is different from the immediate illocutionary force of performances. Thus, performatives no longer appear to be a singular act; they are realized as a “cluster of acts”. It also seems that the different forces at work in performatives are not intrinsically synchronized: at times, they enter into convergence, at others, into tension; and they often unfold alternative times. I agree with Tenev. If radical pragmatics has a chance of being developed further, then analysis of perlocutionary effects (following Austin) as well as of the forms of collateral reaffirmation of shared normative horizons, identified by Tenev, will probably become a separate subfield of study. critique as such – only because we have become accustomed to calling into question and contesting utterances. But the demiurgic effect is demiurgic precisely because it reveals a level of speech at which such a difference has not yet emerged. 15 In fact, it now also becomes clearer what are declarations. It seems that they are a special speech device – a special meta-performative – through which the basic demiurgic effect is raised to the second power, and is thereby strengthened, legalized, and institutionalized. 21 What is more, the idea that there always already has been “more than one force at work within the framework of the [speech] act itself” (ibid., p. 289) is fundamental. Analyzing the forces of speech by gradually and carefully disentangling the cluster in which they are intertwined – in separate utterances but also in longer speech forms – has become a long-term task for me, a task only partially fulfilled in this book. In order to resolve it, right after I had described the micro-sovereign force of performatives through the demiurgic effect (which, I repeat, is nothing other than an effect of momentary literalization of meanings), I set out in another direction. I had to see what is the thing that tradition most often regards as the opposite of literal meaning – namely, metaphor! And what are the forces that work through metaphor? Thus, in the third essay, “Metaphorical Effect”,16 I have taken as my point of departure the 1970s debate on metaphor17 and, in particular, Donald Davidson’s radical essay “What Metaphors Mean”.18 Crucially, Davidson rejects the two main concepts of metaphor inherited from tradition and elaborated in multiple variations: (1) The Aristotelian thesis that metaphor is “transference”, substitution, saying one thing in terms of another; and (2) The leading thesis in structural linguistics – namely, that a metaphor is an elliptical simile. Davidson’s arguments against those two concepts are reconstructed and accepted unconditionally. However, a revision is made of the conclusion drawn by Davidson on the basis of his critique of tradition: namely, that metaphor is a specific type of use that does not and cannot mean anything. My revision of Davidson is along the lines proposed already by the early Nietzsche and developed by Richard Rorty: the meanings of words in everyday vocabulary, but also of terms in scientific vocabulary, are nothing other than banalized metaphors. That is to say, upon their initial articulation explicit metaphors do not yet mean anything, as Davidson insists, but upon a certain type of repetition, 16 The original version of this essay was published as follows: Vatsov, D. 2012. Kak znachat metaforite [How metaphors mean]. Sotsiologicheski Problemi, special issue, 7–33. 17 The 1970s can be called “metaphoromachia”. That is when the biggest names in linguistics, literary theory, philosophy, cognitive science, and so on, attacked the problem of metaphor in heated battles that ended with emblematic publications, albeit without consensus. Among the participants in the 1970s debate on metaphor were Roman Jakobson, I. A. Richards, Max Black, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, Donald Davidson, Richard Rorty, Paul de Man, John Searle, and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, to name but a few. Two of the most emblematic 1970s publications presenting the heated battle between different views are New Literary Theory, 6 (1), On Metaphor (Autumn, 1974), and Critical Inquiry, 5 (1), Special Issue on Metaphor (Autumn, 1978), where most of the scholars mentioned above published their works. The 1970s and the early 1980s also saw the publication of a number of monographs, the best known among which are The Rule of Metaphor by Paul Ricoeur (1977 [1975]) and Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980). 18 The original title of my essay in Bulgarian obviously paraphrases that of Davidson’s essay. Davidson asks: What do metaphors mean? His answer is: Nothing. I agree with him at the basic level, but I show how, after certain periphrases and paraphrases, metaphors begin to mean, after all. 22 through a series of periphrases and paraphrases, they become trivialized and acquire conventional meaning. An eloquent example are the so-called dead metaphors.19 To make this interpretive correction, however, it is necessary – since the traditional concepts of metaphor have been rejected – to say, what is metaphor? This is something which, by the way, Davidson does not do. Initially, on the basis of an analysis of exemplary literary metaphors, we arrive at the conclusion that they are performances upon which the conventional meanings of the words and phrases articulated in them make a specific short-circuit whereupon their conventional meanings open up and begin to blend into one another, without yet forming one – new or old – meaning. This infinitivity of speech is called here “metaphorical effect” or “metaphorical is”: this term denotes the force of speech to unbind words from their conventional meanings; what is more, the force of speech to open up their conventional potentials for meaning by giving them potentiality of a higher order and rank: it opens them up to the possibility of meaning more than they conventionally mean, but it also opens them up to the possibility of meaning nothing – of fading into nonsense. Further analysis finds that the metaphorical effect is not just a specific characteristic of the language fragments we accept as exemplary metaphors; it is a basic characteristic of speech, even of the most banal performances. However, it is more difficult to demonstrate this in the case of banal performances. In my essay this is left, to some extent, as an implicit assumption, but because of the critical questions I received, I will explain here: a demonstration of the metaphorical effect in trivial expressions, where this effect has become “invisible”, can be made through an analytical technique of the type of Kant’s regressive synthesis. 20 Here is how: We have demonstrated the demiurgic effect through the trivial utterance “The plate is on the table”. We said that the demiurgic effect consists in that the word “plate” instantly indexically indicates a referential focus – precisely this plate here (not The “neck of a bottle”, “leg of a table”, “mouse of a computer”, and so on. Here I do not intend to rehabilitate transcendentalism in its classic form, but to use Kant’s regressive synthesis as an analytical technique in an entirely pragmatist mode: for the purposes of practical demonstration. This demonstration will show that the demiurgic and the metaphorical effect, the force of indexical fixation and the force of metaphorical opening up of meanings, actually co-operate and, by doing so, make each other possible: the one is impossible without the other – those forces are co-constitutive to speech. This, however, is certainly not to say that the one force is a “condition of possibility” for the other in a Kantian sense: for neither of the two frames the other, neither of the two maps out the positions in the field where “it is possible” for the other to manifest itself. The demiurgic and the metaphorical effects determine each other only insofar as they grant each other an entirely open space where they can unfold. Although they are co-constitutive, however, these forces are not in perpetual, natural equilibrium: as we shall show, the one often prevails over the other (but without ever eliminating it completely). 19 20 23 any other); this indexical indication is, at the same time, an indication of a conventional meaning – plate as crockery (and not, for instance, “plate iron” or “window-plate”). The same applies to the other word, “table”: upon its actual articulation, it indexically indicates this table (not “another” one) in this meaning – table as a piece of furniture (not in another – for example, “multiplication table”). I am repeating the demonstration of the demiurgic effect in order to pose the Kantian question: How is the demiurgic effect possible? How is it possible for words to demiurgically choose, upon their actual articulation, which one of their meanings to attach themselves to? The answer is obvious: in order to be able to attach themselves indexically to one (not to another) conventional meaning, to one (not to another) referential focus, words must be detached beforehand from all their meanings and from all referents – they must be let free, so to speak. Precisely this is the function of the metaphorical effect: actual articulation first uncouples words from their conventional meanings and then metaphorizes them at least minimally so as to enable them, in the concrete situation, to indexically fix one conventional meaning or another, to one extent of accuracy and triviality or another, and to literalize this meaning in relation to one referential focus or another. To put it otherwise, the metaphorical effect is a condition of possibility for the demiurgic effect. Of course, if we change the analytical perspective, we will have the opposite: there is nothing words can be unbound from, there is no way their meanings can be metaphorically opened up if they have not been indexically fixed many times and if their fixations have not been trivialized beforehand. Thus, the metaphorical and the demiurgic effect, the forces of opening up and of indexical fixation of meaning, operate in synchrony in speech without necessarily being synchronized. They, as we have just seen, determine each other although their vectors often diverge: they are in tension in every utterance, the one force often practically prevailing over the other. Incidentally, science and art – let us take the liberty of offering this “remake” of Nietzsche21 – are nothing other than spheres institutionalized in a way that allows the discourses produced in them to tolerate utterances in which one of the two forces dominates: the forces of fixation of meanings in science or, conversely, of their intense metaphorical opening up in art. It might not be an exaggeration to say that the metaphorical effect is the element proper of the fictional; but it is also the element without which literal meaning is impossible. 21 The Apolline and the Dionysiac in The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche 1999) or the rational man and the intuitive man in “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (Nietzsche 1979). 24 Here the metaphorical effect should not be confused with indirect speech. It must be noted that the metaphorical effect is a condition of possibility not only for the demiurgic but also for perlocutionary effects. There is no way you can say something directly or imply something if the conventional meanings of words have not been detached from them beforehand. In this sense, the metaphorical effect also makes possible the collateral reaffirmation described by Tenev, irony, and all other modes of indirect expression. But if the metaphorical effect is such a basic function of speech, what, then, are metaphors? It is obvious that they are not one among the other rhetorical tropes: rather, the other rhetorical tropes are quasi-logical or quasi-grammatical forms through which a metaphorical effect is usually achieved. This also explains why metaphor is so difficult to distinguish from synecdoche, metonymy, or simile: in the essay we give some examples of similes that are pure metaphors. That is so because the metaphorical effect does not have its own logical or rhetorical form: it can be and is achieved through the above-mentioned as well as through all other tropes. In fact, that is also why it is impossible to come up with a strict criterion for distinguishing metaphorical from non-metaphorical expressions. Thus, we call “metaphors” language and visual fragments that differ in form, that have one grammatical and rhetorical form or another, in which, however, the metaphorical effect stands out more prominently than usual, and which we canonize – we keep and repeat them – in a paradoxical attempt to capture the infinitivity of the metaphorical effect. In fact, exemplary metaphors are situated, in a strange way, in-between nonsense and literalness. We call “nonsensical” expressions in which the metaphorical effect unfolds in a way that does not allow us to grasp even a proto-potentiality for meaning: that is why we let them fade away without continuation. Literal expressions are those in which some trivialized and stabilized meaning – like an echo of much-repeated periphrases and paraphrases – is directly indexically fixed to a referential focus. Exemplary metaphors, in turn, are expressions which have gone, as it were, a step beyond nonsense but are still in the antechamber of sense-making – they are just about to acquire, but do not yet have meaning – the old meanings of words have been weakened, a new meaning has not yet been stabilized, and the referential function works at random. Hence, a special task facing radical pragmatics is to investigate the different types of repetitions through which the metaphorical effect, sedimented in various expressions, is reworked secondarily, whereby the expressions are canonized as fictional exemplars, literal descriptions, or even as exact terms and concepts. Only a first approximation – or rather a starting point – for solving this large-scale task 25 is offered here in the essay “Event and Immortality in Two Concepts, in Two Plots and Two Readings”, co-authored with Albena Hranova, which I have added here as an Appendix in order to underline that with the inclusion of another author’s voice, Essay 4 offers a departure from the monological discourse of the book.22 In fact, our joint essay summarizes primarily results of Albena Hranova’s monumental two-volume study, Historiography and Literature: On the Social Construction of Historical Concepts and Grand Narratives in 19th- and 20thCentury Bulgarian Culture (Hranova 2011). However, the social construction of the concepts “era of the Revival” and “Turkish slavery”,23 whose precisely documented genealogy is traced in Hranova’s opus magnum, is analyzed here in the methodological mode introduced by Rorty and developed by me: they are viewed intrinsically as metaphors, with a concrete analysis of the types of institutionalization and literalization which, in the last two hundred years, have turned those metaphors into key concepts of Bulgarian historiography and literary theory. Also analyzed is the way in which an exemplary work/metaphor, the poem “Hadji Dimitar” by Bulgarian revolutionary and poet Hristo Botev (1848–1876), has been institutionalized in Bulgarian literature and literary theory. In fact, those three examples are used to identify three ideal-typical ways of institutionalization of metaphors. First, the institutionalization of a metaphor as a routine, effective scientific concept is traced. Such is the case of “era of the Revival”. The phrase itself, had it not been most banalized, would have been an exemplary metaphor, at the very least because it paradoxically combines “revival”, which usually presupposes a cycle, awakening, or rebirth of something that has already existed, an eternal recurrence, with “era” which, in its turn, presupposes some epochal event, the occurrence of something hitherto unheard of and unseen, a landmark ushering in a new historical period. Hranova shows that in Bulgarian nineteenth-century writing – from Georgi Sava Rakovski (1821–1867) to Zahariy Stoyanov (1850–1889) – “revival” is used with mutually irreducible meanings; hence, its referential basis also varies wildly. The different periphrases and paraphrases of “the revival”, however, were gradually layered over one another, being intentionally ordered and assembled into 22 This co-authored essay is the only one reprinted in this book under the same title and without any editing of the original text. It is a paper delivered at a conference at Sofia University and published in the eponymous collection: Kamburov, D. et al. (eds). 2013. Sabitie i bezsmartie (literatura, ezik, filosofiya, nauka) [Event and Immortality (Literature, Language, Philosophy, Science)]. Sofia: St. Kliment Ohridski University Press, pp. 211–235. 23 “Era of the Revival” is a specific phrase referring to the processes of enlightenment and modernization of life as well as to the struggles for national self-determination and liberation of the Bulgarian population in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – a time in which the Bulgarians were under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. For its part, Ottoman rule is commonly referred to as “Turkish slavery”. 26 a single whole by different institutional speakers. Thus, at the end of the nineteenth century in Bulgarian historiography and as late as the 1960s in Bulgarian literary theory, “the revival” began to play the role of a stable historical category, with an established meaning and stable referents. The metaphor was literalized as an effective concept. Second, a quite different case is the institutionalization of “Turkish slavery” – a metaphor which, although it was institutionalized in Bulgarian historiography and literary theory after the country’s 1878 Liberation from Ottoman rule, nevertheless remains a hollow concept without a stable, established meaning and with an unclear referential basis. Hranova distinguishes two meanings of “slavery”: (1) literal – the well-known legal status characteristic of Antiquity, of colonial times, but also of the Ottoman Empire, whereby an individual is owned by another individual; (2) metaphorical – the meaning coming from the neo-Roman theory and from the French Revolution, according to which “slavery” is every external and therefore unjust rule/power and coercion. In the writings of the Bulgarian nineteenth century, “Turkish slavery” is used precisely in its metaphorical meaning. Its periphrases and paraphrases, however, were layered over one another through synonymization (not through sequencing and accumulation), thereby turning it into a semantically poor (“every and any rule/power”) but thematically predatory metaphor: everything – all sorts of referents – can be represented as slavery. Slavery has become an “ultimate” or “total metaphor”: totalized to the point where it means everything and nothing. This metaphor played a positive propaganda role in the Bulgarian revolutionary struggles, but upon its institutionalization in Bulgarian historiography and literary theory it turned into a hollow, totalizing concept. The case of “Turkish slavery” is an example of pseudoliteralization of a metaphor as a concept: in fact, the concept cannot stabilize its referential function, it cannot be literalized in a regular way. The third case, the poem “Hadji Dimitar”, is a case of institutionalization and canonization of a metaphor as an exemplary metaphor, albeit once again an “ultimate/total” one. The life and death of the protagonist of the poem enter into a metaphorical short-circuit, whereby their meanings begin to wildly spill over into one another, in a tension that pulsates between synonymy and contradiction. This short-circuit is reproduced in the same way in the periphrases of Botev in poetry and literary theory. In this type of repetitions, “Hadji Dimitar” also assumes the role of an ultimate/total metaphor that means everything and nothing. Here, however, there is no attempt at stabilizing the meaning and referential field as a concept. The poem has been canonized as an exemplary metaphor but also as a centre of the Bulgarian literary canon – in a certain sense, as its “transcendental signifier”. 27 2.3 The course of speech Before we proceed to discuss the course of speech, we must point out an entire field we have passed by several times without inquiring into it. In this book, there is no special analysis of yet another phenomenon that is basic to radical pragmatics – that of the questions, remarks, notes, glosses, and direct contestations by which we more abruptly or more softly interrupt the routine course of speech, problematize more or less the positivity of what has been said before us, and sometimes directly block or reject the demiurgic effect of some former utterance or of a series of utterances. Such speech devices for problematizing what has been said are, of course, the explicit questions by which we ask, most generally, “Exactly what does someone mean?”and “Is this true?” Those are specific questions that do not require additional information, unlike the majority of conventional questions (Who? Where? Why? etc.); they are questions that break up the demiurgic unity of sign, meaning, and referent in some former utterance, create a distance between the sign and the meaning in which the sign was used, or between the sign and reality (the referential focus the sign indicated), and ask ex post whether there is correspondence between them. Their main function is precisely this: to break up the original unity in order to cast doubt on – to call into question – the correspondence between sign and meaning, or between sign and referent.24 They are harder or softer interrupters of the routine flow of speech which, however, at least formally leave a chance, after subsequent questions and clarifications, for confirmation and continuation of speech in the original direction. More heavy interrupters of routine and direct breakers of the demiurgic effect are the direct contestations: “You’re wrong!”, “You’re lying!”, “This isn’t true!”, and so on – that is, all speech sanctions, let us call them accusations of “untruth”, “wrongness”, and “lying”. Of course, in everyday speech such sharp devices – explicitly problematizing questions and direct accusations – tend to be rare: most of the time in everyday Habermas’s validity claims, discussed above, have captured three types of questions that problematize the demiurgic effect: Is a given utterance sincere? Is it right? And is it true? Here it seems to us, rather, that the basic lines of problematization are two: regarding the meaning and regarding the referent; the rest are variations, subtypes. Thus, the problematizations of sincerity and truthfulness call into question the correspondence between sign and referent, but suspect there is a different “reason” for the possible lack of correspondence – conscious intention or ignorance. This, however, merits special investigation. 24 28 life, we are more polite and amicable than in science, where sharpness of problematizations – the truth – has been institutionalized as a rule of the game. Thus, in everyday life we use a far wider range of softer speech devices by which we create one kind of hesitation or another, introduce doubt, modalized in one way or another, as to what has been said: this is done by questions such as “Really?” or “Is that right?”, but also by countless interjections – such as “You don’t say!” “Hmm”, “Yes, maybe!” “Interesting!” “Incredible!” or “I can’t believe it!” – ranging across a scale of countless degrees and nuances between naivety and irony, indifference and excitement, agreement and direct contestation. This whole wide field of phenomena is not analyzed in this book, although it is presupposed by all analyses offered here. It may be that my obsession with looking for positivity in speech in an attempt to build on but also to transcend the negativity of the deconstructive twentieth century drove me to regard critical problematizations as something self-evident and to skip them. Now that I am assembling this book, I realize that this is an omission. For the time being, however, I will only note this omission and turn to the next problem: Why, despite all the interruptions and problematizations, the positivity of speech does not end with the single utterance, why it does not fade away along with its fleeting demiurgic effect, but instead weaves a thread from one utterance to the next, whereby speech forms a common flow – a common course. Essay 5, “Indexicality and Context”,25 has a propaedeutic function – it has to lay the groundwork for the introduction of the new term and concept of “course of speech”. That is why it must problematize the traditional concept of “context” as well as revise the traditional conception of “indexicality”. But why should we problematize the concept of “context”? Someone might say that radical pragmatics is in fact radical contextualism. And they would probably be right. All the more so considering that radical pragmatics indeed has some features in common with approaches such as epistemological contextualism (see Williams 1999; 2001). The problem, however, is that although it works as selfevident in almost all contexts, the concept of “context” itself is in fact very vague and unclear – it is a pseudo-concept. “Context” is an instance through which we explain the sense (meaning) of a given utterance or event – we say that their meaning is “context-dependent”. Context, in 25 This essay was originally delivered as a paper at the annual conference of the Sofia University Cultural Centre in the town of Apriltsi in 2016, and then published as follows: Vatsov, D. 2017. Izgubeniyat “context”! Demonstratsii na indeksichnostta i rutinata v obiknoveniya ezik [The lost “context”! Indexicality and routine: ordinary language demonstrations]. Piron, 14/2017. Available at: http://piron.culturecenter-su.org/wpcontent/uploads/2017/05/Dimitar-Vatsov_The-Lost-Context.pdf 29 turn, is always situational – it presupposes the occurrence of some specific, sensuously tangible, circumstances at a specific place and specific time, under specific rules of the game, and so on. It is through all those “specific things” that we explain meaning. But it is precisely this “specificity” which is problematic: it presupposes certain stability and regularity, but at the same time, eventfulness. Derrida (2000) is right to criticize those who, by referring to context, positivistically petrify the circumstances and rules at play in a particular situation, for, by doing so, they eliminate eventfulness. Yet if excessive emphasis is put on eventfulness, as Derrida is inclined to do, then the concept loses its explanatory force and sinks into the mystique of the Heideggerian Event (Ereignis). Here we propose clearing up the unclarities around context by conceiving of the latter as a point of intersection of two vectors: indexicality and routine. To this end, however, it is necessary at the very least to seriously revise the concept of indexicality. Conventionally, indexicality is conceived of as a property of a particular class of expressions – the so-called indexicals, demonstratives or deictics: personal and demonstrative pronouns, adverbs of time and place, and so on. Hence, indexicality is most often defined as the property of those expressions to change their referent from context to context. Here, contrary to this conventional understanding, indexicality is conceived of as a function not of some but of all words and expressions. What is more, its meaning is extended: indexicality is the function of signs to immediately indicate situationally, upon their actual performance, not only their referent but also what this referent means. Other indexical functions will also be explicated further on. At this point, however, it is important to underline that in this way another relation has also been inverted: it is not context that determines the indexical function, but vice versa – indexicality constitutes context by immediately indicating exactly which are the things and circumstances that comprise it as well as what are the specific regular connections between them. But although it manifests a micro-sovereign (demiurgic) force, indexicality is nevertheless channelled to a certain extent from the outside as well – by habit.26 Visual paradoxes of “the duck–rabbit” type – and in our essay, also a series of examples with tests whose answers presuppose different readings if different habitual matrices of identification are included – show that different habits, different non-thematic modes of repetition cultivated through specific training can channel the demiurgic force of speech in one way or another. The problem is that exactly which habit is at play in a given case is indicated solely and only indexically, in the actual situation. Of course, the forces of indexicality and routine 26 This, by the way, is yet another argument why its sovereignty is “micro”. 30 can often enter into tension, as is clearly demonstrated by the ethnomethodological experiments aimed at thematic explication of habit through intentional indexical inversion of conventional meanings and their referential function. In most cases, however, the forces of indexicality and routine do not work against each other; they relieve the current tensions and cooperate, constituting the context together. In fact, context is precisely a situation of actual interaction between the forces of indexicality and routine. It is a situation in which some sort of regularities, sedimented in the terrain of the locality, direct the flow of the river, but the water spills over here and there, thereby “indexically” indicating precisely which are the regularities that impact it (a hill, tree, rock, and so on) and, in addition, changing them onsite – carving out the riverbed over and over again.27 The question of exactly how this interaction between indexicality and routine works is examined in Essay 6, “The Course of Words and Things”.28 Once again, the investigation of the problem was inspired by Donald Davidson’s work. The essay takes as its point of departure Davidson’s critique of the third dogma of empiricism, by which he shows that routine is not due to any firm (linguistic, mental, or other) prior framework that externally determines the content of speech. In a specific way, this argument is made about speech errors. Davidson shows unambiguously that our prior linguistic competencies – the prior theories we have at our disposal – by no means can explain a concrete phenomenon: how we realize that someone is making a speech error. For had prior theories (as a prior framework) dictated unambiguously the meaning of words, we would have always understood only literally what people say: and every speech error would have been pure nonsense. We would not have been able to realize that someone is saying one thing but intending another.29 This is not so, however: we understand speech errors. How does that happen? In his essay on malapropisms, “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs”, Davidson (2005, pp. 89–107) introduces ad hoc a new term: passing theory. A passing theory, in his account, is not just one of the many possible theories the speaker has in advance, it is the theory that is geared to the occasion: the theory that is actually The motion of fluids – liquids and gases – is an example of undetermined, albeit form-shaping, events. Boyan Manchev (2017; 2019) has strongly intensified this conceptual image in his latest works, written in his newlyinvented genre, philosophical fantastics. 28 Upon its original publication, this essay was – and of course remains – dedicated to Kolyo Koev, with whom it engages in a direct dialogue. It was originally published as follows: Vatsov, D. 2013. Kak neshto izobshto znachi neshto? (Epitaf za g-zha Malaprop) [How does anything mean anything at all? (Epitaph to Mrs Malaprop)]. In: Deyanov, D., T. Karamelska, S. Sabeva & H. Todorov (eds). Chuzhdenetsat i vsekidnevieto. Sbornik, posveten na 60-godishninata na Kolyo Koev [The stranger and everyday life. A collection dedicated to the 60th anniversary of Kolyo Koev]. Sofia: New Bulgarian University, pp. 557–616. 29 In the same way, we would not have been able to understand irony and the other allegorical forms. And metaphors would have been simply impossible. 27 31 at work, the one used by the speaker to make their way through the particular situation. And it is only insofar as the listener grasps the passing theory – “grasps the train of thought” of the speaker – only then can the former realize that the latter has made a speech error, but nevertheless continue to “follow the speaker’s line of thought”. We fully agree that prior knowledge does not work as a static prior framework; it works only insofar as it is geared to the actual situation, becoming a moment of the latter’s “passage”. But the term “theory”, by which Davidson continues to designate prior knowledge, is rather clumsy and static. That is why Essays 6 and 730 elaborate the new term and concept of “course” as a substitute for “passing theory”. This concept is meant to place emphasis on the occurrence, on the progression of speech but also of the situation – prior to the establishment of relatively coherent logical connections (such as the word “theory” presupposes), words and things must first build, ad hoc, between each other eventful connections which are moments in the common course of their actual passage through the situation. And it is only upon actual passage – before there is a map of the locality, that is, a relatively logically coherent theory about the latter – that familiar itineraries, conventional courses of passage are established. Those itineraries can be partly formalized in a map or theory only after multiple repetition and reversal of courses. And even after they have been formalized and theoretically mapped, those conventional itineraries play the role of preliminary navigation upon embarking on a new actual course, in a new situation. Here once again indexicality is the key to the concept of “course”. But we must once again broaden our understanding of indexicality. For indexical is not only the effect of momentary fixation of meaning and referent, which is examined here as a demiurgic effect. Also indexical – that is, having the character of a momentary and non-predetermined indication – is the shift of focus from one word to another, from one meaning to another, and from one referent to another. For words in speech, but also things in the world, do not only stand out in focus – they do not only momentarily fix a point of intensity – they also just as momentarily shift the focus to something else: to other points of intensity. In other words, in addition to indexical fixation or indexical reference, which constitute the demiurgic effect, 30 Essay 7, “Understanding and Course”, is a revised version of a paper delivered at the conference “The Century of Hermeneutics” (New Bulgarian University, 2018) and originally published as follows: Vatsov, D. 2020. Da razbirash znachi da darzhish kursa! (Tri fotouvelicheniya – Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Davidson – i edno dopalnenie varhu problema za razbiraneto) [To understanding means to hold the course! (Three close-ups – Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Davidson – and a supplement on the problem of understanding]. In: Gyoshev, H. & V. Marinov (eds). Vekat na hermenevtikata [The century of hermeneutics]. Sofia: New Bulgarian University. 32 here we have discovered a second indexical function: indexical shift of focus.31 Of course, this discovery is not autochthonous; it has its predecessors. Traces of this phenomenon can be found in Russell’s and the early Wittgenstein’s concept of “sense” as well as, very distinctly, in the conceptions of “intentionality” in phenomenology. Essay 6 attempts, rather, to deconstructively remove the metaphysical and deterministic rudiments from the early-analytic “sense” and from Husserl’s “intentionality”, and to move away from them, while Essay 7 revisits, purely reconstructively, some of Heidegger’s concepts (state-of-mind, forestructure of understanding and as-structure of interpretation) that can and should be borrowed and integrated into the concept of “indexical shift”32. It is precisely through indexical shift of focus that we demonstrate how speech – not simply at the level of the single performative but also at that of a series of performances, such as are a text or conversation – flows. Again through indexical shift of focus, we show that such performances do not flow somehow in parallel with, or independently from, perceptions and from reality; they flow together, in a common course of words and things, where things are nothing other than the momentary tangible (referential) foci of words. But they, too, shift the focus to other referential foci – to other things designated by other words. Thus, the actual course of words and things is irreversible: it shifts the focus from one thing to another, swerves in one direction or another, meanders, trips, stops, hurdles obstacles, but in all cases has the character of a flow that makes its way through a concrete locality. Once it has made its way, the latter turns into a riverbed, into a repeatable route along which the flow can run – actually over and over again – in almost the same way, with minimal or more serious corrections of the riverbed. The geological analogy aside, the course of speech – once it has passed through one metaphorical short-circuit or another – begins, through repetitions, to fix its itinerary, to stabilize the indexical fixation and the indexical shift of focus among its elements, that is, it simultaneously stabilizes the semantics and the syntax “Indexical fixation” and “indexical reference” are synonymous: in this book, the term “indexical fixation” is used more frequently in order to emphasize that when the demiurgic effect is at play, not only the referent but also the meaning is subject to fixation. In my previous book (Vatsov 2016), I used the term “indexical reference” to designate the same phenomenon, but now “indexical fixation” seems a more accurate term to me. In my previous book, however, I also identified a third indexical function – “indexical retention” or “indexical re-identification” – which is extremely important but is not discussed here. Put very simply, it is the function of speech – through the definite article but also through many other grammatical devices – to constantly and instantly indicate what of what was said before is the same thing that is being spoken about now. The three functions of indexicality are described in brief in Vatsov 2016, pp. 289–291, and indexical retention is defined and described in more detail ibid., Part III, Chapter 5ff. 32 My concept of “indexical shift” is maybe the closest to Heidegger’s concept of Verweisung – “assignment or reference of something to something” (Heidegger 2001, p. 97). 31 33 (connections) of words. This leads to the establishment of speech itineraries – conventional courses of use of words, of their connection with other words and things. In fact, semantics and syntax are practically inseparable from each other, they are moments in a common pragmatics, aspects of the conventional courses (established in the latter) of use of words. That is because the conventional referential focus of a given word, that is, its conventional meaning (“table as a piece of furniture”), determines the formal (purely grammatical or logical – for example, “table” as a noun), but also typological substantive (“table” as a name for a specific type of objects that usually go hand-in-hand with other specific objects and relations) syntactic roles. In other words, semantics determines syntax – the type of connections by which a given word can be connected to other words. The opposite, however, is also true: we know already from the early Wittgenstein that syntax largely determines semantics. But neither of the two has priority: neither formal semantics (from Russell’s theory of types to Tarski and Davidson to the present day) nor logical syntax (from the early Wittgenstein to Chomsky to the present day) can be the final instance. For indexical fixation and indexical shift of focus, whose secondary stylization are semantics and syntax, always go together, hand-in-hand, in a common pulsation where the one cannot exist without the other. Building on the later Wittgenstein’s understanding of meaning as use, the new concept of “course” thus allows us to go beyond Wittgenstein and to make additional distinctions: for example, we can define the difference between conventional and literal meaning in more detail. Viewed from this new perspective, conventional or typical meanings of words – those that can be found in a dictionary – are not simply more or less instrumental uses or functions; before they are simplified to functions, they are narratives: stories of the itineraries, of the conventional courses by which a given word is connected to other words and things. In addition, if the conventional meaning of a word is a conventional course of proceeding with that word, if it is a recording of an abridged story of former passages, then, as we said, the semantics of a word (its conventional referential application) cannot be separated from its syntax (from the formal and “deep”, but in all cases conventional, rules regarding its connections with other words and referential indices). So to speak, semantics and syntax are intrinsically mixed in the common story of one or other (already typicized) practical journey of a word – mixed in its μῦθος from which the λογος can never be completely extracted in either direction. Hence, a word acquires literal meaning when, upon its actual use, it does not simply repeat – as if “by heart” – its conventional use, its fixed itinerary, but when it makes a short-circuit with the actual course of things. This means that upon its actual use, the word does not simply repeat the semantics (conventional referential 34 foci) and the syntax (conventional ways of indexical shift of focus) intertwined in its typical meaning; the word is guided by the actual indexical foci, that is, by the ways the forces in the tangible field reveal points of intensity onsite as well as by the way they shift the focus from one energy focus to another. To put it otherwise, when and insofar as the conventional meanings of words get stuck indexically to the actually tangible energy field, they become literalized: the conventional course of speech in this case follows, passively or actively bends the actual course of the situation, but in all cases manages to agree ad hoc with the indexical fixations and shifts of focus of the forces in the situation, without dogmatically – and, in fact, futilely – predetermining them formally. Incidentally, Essay 7 ends with an appeal for a new realism that would break with the naive representationist theories of language and, by extent, with the correspondent theories of truth. Whereas in my previous book (Vatsov 2016) I insisted that the main criterion for the truthfulness of an utterance is its indexical relevance, I now supplement my thesis: speech is truthful not when it formally agrees with abstract instances, criteria and procedures, but when it is immediately aligned to the actual course of the forces in the tangible and undetermined energy field in which speech unfolds always indexically – here-and-now. To make sense of the situation, to pick up the thread of a conversation, to be all there, to keep abreast of things, to hold the course – those are some of the expressions that support the basic idea of radical pragmatics every day. Which, by the way, shows that the latter’s new realism is much closer to common sense than any old and dogmatic reassertion of some self-referential facts or of another “reality in se”. 2.4 Meta-performatives Meta-performatives are the performatives that help us when the course of speech is interrupted. Their specific function is to restore understanding: in different cases and upon different degrees of uncertainty and non-understanding that have arisen in practice or that are only anticipated by speakers, meta-performatives must clarify things by lending the conversation one modal inclination or another. Perhaps, for the sake of precision, we should call them “meta-meta-performatives”. That is because they leech off former utterances that have, ex post, been implicitly or explicitly, directly or indirectly called into question – and it is only after they have been called into question that the meta-performative comes as an utterance 35 that modalizes and stabilizes, once again ex post, the meaning of the first utterance. In other words, first there is a first utterance, after it (meta) another utterance that problematizes the first one, and finally – after the second (meta-meta) – a third utterance that stabilizes and re-modalizes the first one. Thus, strictly speaking, we should call “meta-performatives” the contestations, questions and exclamations discussed earlier, through which the demiurgic effect in a given former utterance is more strongly or more mildly problematized. The performatives we will discuss now should be called “meta-meta-perfromatives”. They come – from a genetic and logico-ontological perspective – after a given former utterance, but also after its problematization: they are twice “meta”. In other words, for an utterance of the type discussed now to appear, two conditions should be met beforehand: a demiurgic effect should have taken place first, and then it should have been called into question. Let us imagine a conversation in three steps: A: Your bicycle is in the yard! B: Are you sure? A: Yes, I saw it is there! If the first two steps are the ones quoted above, the third step may be different. For example: А: I think that it is there! Or: А: No, I’m just guessing that it is there! And so on. In all cases, some utterance has been called into question; through a subsequent utterance, it is now introduced by a “that/to” subordinate clause and, at the same time, it is transformed into a state of affairs towards which we now modalize an attitude. To put it otherwise, all performatives that can be represented by Searle’s F(p) formula and which also have already been mentioned above, are meta-metaperformatives. In other words, all utterances in which some propositional content is introduced by an explicit performative verb – be they assertives, commissives, directives, expressives, or declarations according to Searle’s classification – all of them in a certain sense leech off some former utterance that has been called into question but is now transformed into a proposition in relation to which the speaker specifies, ex post, their intention. 36 Of course, this ex post might not take place in real-time. The former utterance as well as its contestation may be merely anticipated. I may say, “I believed that you would succeed!” or “We guessed that we might run into you here!” without my or anybody else practically having said – silently or aloud – “She will succeed!” or “We will run into our friends in the park!”; it is not even necessary that someone has in fact problematized – silently or aloud – those unarticulated utterances. Still, when I say, “I believed that you would succeed!” I behave (1) as if I have said “She will succeed!” (I have thought it!), and (2) as if someone or something has made me hesitate to think so, but, despite my hesitation, I have continued to think so. In other words, the utterances that specify an explicit intention, an attitude of the speaker in the first person (in the singular, but also in the plural) towards the state of affairs – or, in Searle’s terms: the utterances that explicate what the act is, what is the illocutionary force by which a given propositional content is affirmed (or negated; to a different extent and in different modes) – all such utterances are secondary speech devices by which what is said in the “that/to” subordinate clause is re-affirmed33 and re-modalized. In fact, the illocutionary force identified by Austin and Searle is a force of re-affirmation and re-modalization. The reaffirmation and re-modalization in question, however, are secondary because the content that is re-affirmed and re-modalized is (at the very least, anticipated as) something already said and already called into question.34 For the sake of simplicity, however, let us omit one “already” and call this type of utterances “meta-performatives”. In the cases enumerated up to this point, the metaperformatives re-affirm and re-modalize the former utterances “intentionally” – they give the propositional content a different modal inclination insofar as they represent this content as being dependent on different subjective attitudes and, respectively, speech acts of the speaker.35 33 Negation is also a form of reaffirmation, at the very least because you cannot negate something without repeating it or referring to it. 34 Otherwise there would be no point in defining and specifying one’s attitude towards it. 35 If we now go back to the beginning, where we bound the sovereign force of performatives to the subject point they throw above and behind themselves as their source, we must make several qualifications. It seems that the explicit subject point is, in many cases, a late product – we now see that explicit performative verbs in the first person are the product of secondary objectivations and re-modalizations of something said before. In addition, we have seen that the subject point becomes blurred in explicit metaphors. It may be that even in a series of utterances in which the first person is not explicitly articulated, the subject point is a perlocutionary effect: by habit, due to the fact that we have repeatedly re-modalized utterances through a subject point, we begin to indirectly anticipate the latter in every utterance. If we continue this line of argument, we will come to the old problem of the transcendental subject: it will turn out that the subject point is always somehow ghostly because it is never empirically given in actual utterances. Still, such a conclusion is unwarranted. That is because in many utterances, the first person works in a direct and demiurgic way, without being bound to any performative verb and, by extent, to any intention: think of utterances such as “I am washing the dishes”, “I am reading a book”, and so on. That is why I am not inclined to abandon the thesis that perspectivity – the subject-centring of utterances – is a basic characteristic of the sovereign 37 The class of meta-performatives is much broader, though. It seems to extend far beyond the utterances to which Searle’s formula is applicable – that is, utterances that explicitly declare the intention or define the act of the speaker through a performative verb in the first person. That is because the same function – secondary re-affirmation and re-modalization of what has been said – can be performed by a significant number of “impersonal” modal operators. It is certain that this can be done by logical quantifiers and by the classic modal categories. Logical quantifiers and modal categories are, in turn, ideal-typical stylizations of the much richer set of devices by which ordinary languages modalize states of affairs. Without engaging in a detailed analysis, we will note that this is because the difference is intuitively obvious between “can”, “could”, “it seems that”, “may”, “might”, “maybe” and other everyday speech operators by which we specify “possibility”, thereby lending the state of affairs one modal inclination or another.36 In fact, “possibility” in logic and science, in its different variants, as well as all other modal categories, are nothing other than an ideal-typical construct meant to grasp the myriad of everyday modalizations. That is also why the analysis of meta-performatives that specify, ex post, states of affairs through impersonal modalizations must be based on ordinary language, from whose rich reservoir of uses all scientific modal terms are reductively extracted. It is precisely by referring to ordinary language that one can and should identify also countless other modal operators through which meta-performatives are constructed. Such are all evaluative (“aesthetic”, “ethical”, “political”, and so on) markers by which we say “It’s good that…”, “It’s well to…”, “It’s inappropriate to…”, “It’s wonderful that…”, “It’s useful to…”, and so on. Through them we modalize one state of affairs or another across perhaps a practically infinite range of scales and modes of “true and false”, “beautiful and ugly”, “good and bad”, “permitted and forbidden”, “clean and dirty”, “healthy and hazardous”, and so on. All those everyday modal operators, which are most often evaluative adverbs and adjectives, can be identified by the fact that they can easily be logically transformed into stronger or weaker normative predicates (such as are, by the way, the above-mentioned predicates framing scales). This, incidentally, is yet another proof that evaluative markers are devices for secondary re-affirmation and reforce of performances. For the time being, I will leave this problem open and propose only a temporary, compromise solution: if not all, most utterances throw, in a direct illocutionary or perlocutionary way, a subject point as their source. Their momentary subject-centring, however, should not be mistaken for the assumption that there exists a stabilized subject to whom utterances are ascribed as acts: on the contrary, as we show through meta-performatives, stabilization of the subject and modalization of former utterances as the subject’s acts is a late speech as well as ontological product. 36 In recent years, Darin Tenev has made an interesting analysis of the different modal aspects at the receptive level as well as at the level of ordinary language. Secondary derivatives of the modal diversity at the micro-level are the modal types derived categorially in the different disciplines. See Tenev 2018b; Tenev 2020. 38 modalization, that is, that they are functionally part of meta-performatives: for all normative predications are made only ex post, after a given state of affairs has been established and called into question. At the risk of turning the study of meta-performatives into an endless task, we must note that their variety will increase further if we introduce additional criteria to distinguish them: not only by type of explicit performative verbs or by type of modal operators but also, for instance, by type of grammatical devices by which the subordinate clause (the propositional content) is introduced. For subordinate clauses may be introduced not only by “that/to” but also by relative pronouns or other devices which, if analyzed carefully, will reveal other similarities and differences as well. It is probably possible to find other criteria for internal differentiation and typologization of meta-performatives, too. In fact, all explicit modalizations – both the “subjective” ones that modalize the illocutionary force in the first person and the “impersonal” ones – are speech devices of the second or meta-order: they are necessary and come into play when a given former utterance has been extracted from its immediate indexical context and called into question, and it is therefore necessary to modalize the relation towards it anew. In fact, I will now formulate my main thesis: all meta-performatives are secondary speech devices through which the cancelled indexicality in some former utterance (its actual indexical fixations and indexical shifts of focus) is objectivated and modalized ex post.37 In other words, modalizations are secondary objectivations and stylizations of indexicality, typical ways of reworking indexicality ex post. In fact, this is particularly evident in those radical meta-performatives which originally aroused my interest and which I have subjected to special analysis: saying “I know!” and saying “This is true!”. They are devices for special modalization: when the indexical positivity (the demiurgic effect) has been lost, when the course of speech has been interrupted, they come as if from the last instance in an attempt to restore the certainty of what they declare “is known” or “is true”. They are assurances of certainty – moreover, they are assurances that attempt to invest maximum certainty in their propositional content. 37 In fact, here radical pragmatics proposes, through meta-performatives, an approach that draws on ordinary language analysis to expand and further elaborate the general programme for a modal ontology proposed by Manchev (2007), as well as Tenev’s programme for a modal analytics (Tenev 2018а; 2018b), which is based precisely on ordinary language analysis. I do not know, however, whether the two authors would agree with me that modalization is secondary work on language fragments whose actual indexicality has been cancelled – and called into question. 39 In the essay “‘I Know That…’ With Ludwig Wittgenstein on Saying ‘I Know’”,38 I follow Wittgenstein’s grammatical notes on the uses of the verb “know” in his book On Certainty (Wittgenstein 1969), in an attempt to further elaborate the primitive meaning of performatives of the type “I know that…” First, they are not some instance of absolute certainty; they are precisely performatives – assurances of certainty. As Wittgenstein says, the primitive meaning of “I know” is similar to that of “I see”: unlike other epistemic verbs (“I claim”, “it seems to me”, “I believe”, I suppose”, and so on), “I know” does not allow for degrees and modulations of certainty. Saying “I know that…” is not merely an assurance of certainty, it is an assurance of absolute certainty. In addition, it is a peculiar type of assurance: it places the first person – the person declaring that they know – in the position of witness. Their point of view is fixed as the centre of the field of vision – the centre of its coordinate system. Even in impersonal uses such as “it is known that…”, the witness’s point of view is stuck to the field of vision: and that is precisely why anyone who takes this point of view will see that which is known. “I know that…” is a radical or ultimate meta-performative – a radical device for blocking an already existing doubt. Such a radical device for blocking an already existing doubt are also the metaperformatives of the type “It is true that…” – they too are assurances of absolute certainty. Their analysis, however, expanded so much that it grew into a separate book entitled This Is True! (Vatsov 2016), which was published meanwhile and which has contributed to the development of the general research programme of radical pragmatics even though it is not part of this collection of essays. Thus, a detailed examination of truth-telling meta-performatives can be found there. Here I will only remind the reader that unlike saying “I know that…”, saying “It is true that…” implies giving an impersonal example, a model that must be followed. Essay 9, “‘It Is True That…’ With Donald Davidson on Truth and Indexicality”,39 adds several points to the above. First, it reconstructs Davidson’s failure in the late 1960s to create a formal theory of truth, in the style of Tarski, that is applicable to ordinary-language utterances. To this end, Davidson hoped to find a reliable way of formalizing demonstratives (indexical expressions), but failed precisely on this point: because truth-telling is a meta-performative whose main function is to deindexicalize (literally, to kill indexicality in) the utterances which are declared to be true. This killing of indexicality presupposes a serious transformation of the already former utterance – it is transformed from an actual utterance into a This essay was originally published as follows: Vatsov, D. 2013. Deklaratsiyata “Az znam” [The declaration “I know”]. Sotsiologicheski Problemi, 3-4, 43–57. 39 The original version of this essay was published as follows: Vatsov. D. 2019. Donald Davidson: Istina i indeksichnost [Donald Davidson: Truth and demonstratives]. Critique & Humanism, 51 (2), 79–94. 38 40 proposition, into a static, generalized state of affairs. This is evident especially upon logical formalization of ordinary-language utterances, whereupon the indexical elements are dropped or transformed beyond recognition. In other words, the truth-telling performative is very different from the already former performative which we say is true – saying that something is true is precisely a meta-performative. What is more, in other essays devoted to “Saying that” and “Quotation”, Davidson discovered, without fully realizing it, that upon saying that something is true it is not only impossible to eliminate indexicality altogether from the utterances predicated as “true”; what is more, the very act of saying that something is true produces its own indexical effects. More specifically, Davidson saw that “Saying that…” (which, by the way, is mutually replaceable with quotation marks as a grammatical device for quoting former performatives) itself is a demonstrative device (as are quotation marks). “Saying that…” is practically synonymous with “It is this that”: the demonstrative pronoun “that” directly fulfils its demonstrative function in “saying that”. Introducing a subordinate clause with “that” is nothing other than directly indicating that we are quoting some former utterance which, however, is now objectivated and re-modalized. But then, saying that “Snow is white” is true is nothing other than quoting a former utterance that is now indicated anew and reaffirmed. Of course, as I have shown repeatedly elsewhere (Vatsov 2016), this quotation is not innocuous, as many deflationists think: its own indexical force is in fact a transformative force because it deindexicalizes the former utterance that is quoted upon saying that something is true, and at the same time, it generalizes (that is, re-modalizes) the former utterance as an abstract proposition. Finally, now that the initial sketch of radical pragmatics has almost been completed, let us draw the reader’s attention to something else too: it seems that not only truth-telling but also all meta-performatives contain an operator of the type “saying that” (or other grammatical devices – quotation marks, relative pronouns – by which subordinate clauses are introduced). In other words, all metaperformatives are in fact quotations. Here, however, we must distinguish quotation from the other linguistic iterations, that is, we must realize a first step in Derrida’s (2000, p. 18) project on constructing “a differential typology of forms of iteration” – a project formulated in Derrida’s critique of Austin, but never realized. It seems that explicit quotation differs significantly from the simple repetition of linguistic or social conventions that every performative does anyway (in order to be understood and accepted, an elementary request, for example, must reproduce certain grammatical and semantic as well as courteous rules). Conversely, “saying that…” – quotation – is a special speech device: it is “reflexive”. It does not simply “realize”, it also expressly underlines that something is being repeated. What is 41 more, through the grammatical tool of the subordinate “that/to” clause or of quotation marks, quotation expressly indicates (underlines) what exactly is being repeated. 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