Thauma
Volume 1
Article 1
02-11-2016
Language Games and Pornography
Carly Schnitzler
Recommended Citation
Carly Schnitzler (2016) “Language Games and Pornography,” Thauma: Vol. 1, Article 1.
LANGUAGE GAMES AND PORNOGRAPHY
Carly Schnitzler
It is a familiar claim in feminist philosophy that pornography silences and subordinates
women. The word “pornography” implies this in its very etymology, pornographos from
Ancient Greek pornē meaning “prostitute” and graphein meaning “to write” – literally means
‘writing about prostitutes,’ where literacy and writing in Ancient Greece was a predominately
male sphere while prostitution was and remains a predominantly female sphere.1 In the
composition and history of the word itself, male controls female. Rae Langton and Caroline
West, in their “Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game” propose their own thesis
that pornography, specifically violent pornography, subordinates and silences women
through the operation of a perverted language game. Placing these well-known claims – that
pornography subordinates and silences women – onto David Lewis’s framework theory of
language games and scorekeeping enriches and gives argumentative direction to Langton and
West’s thesis. The linguistic scorekeeping that takes place in pornography validates or
invalidates what is socio- sexually permissible. The violent and degrading treatment of
women shown in violent pornography is then validated and reinforced, subordinating and
silencing women.
This essay will focus on the necessity of classifying works of pornography, specifically
violent pornography, as speech acts. I will ultimately provide a conciliatory account of
Langton and West’s thesis with Jennifer Saul’s ostensibly foundational objection that works
of pornography are not speech, focusing in on violent pornography and the stronger
silencing claim and enabling the arguments to meet in the middle.
The premise that works of pornography are speech acts is a fundamentally important one for
the soundness of the claim at stake in these arguments. This premise is assumed by Langton
and West and is expounded on by their application of Lewis’s framework in “Scorekeeping
in a Language Game” to violent pornography, demonstrating how violent pornography
subordinates and silences women.2 Lewis claims conversation and language function
similarly to a game of baseball. To play correctly, one must use the established rules for
correct play and function according to established rule-governed moves as “permissible and
impermissible courses of action” depending on the theoretical score.3 Under the rules of
baseball, what is considered correct play after two strikes is not the same as what is
considered correct play after three strikes. Likewise in a language game, truth-value of a
statement partially depends on the score at a certain time: correct play after a heated personal
1
Allison Glazebrook and Madeleine Mary Henry, Greek Prostitutes in the Ancient Mediterranean,
800 BCE-200 CE (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin, 2011), 68
2
Rae Langton and Caroline West, "Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game,"
Australasian Journal of Philosophy 77.3 (1999), 304
3
David Lewis, "Scorekeeping in a Language Game," Journal of Philosophical Logic 8.1 (1979),
345
argument is typically not the same as correct play after a mundane remark about the local
news. In both baseball and conversation, each move made by participants can – and, more
often than not, does – change the score of the game. From this, we see that what counts as
correct play often depends on the theoretical score. What becomes an acceptable move in
baseball or conversation depends then, in part, on what has preceded that move in that
game. Truth-value in conversation and, more broadly, acceptability of play in both baseball
and conversation, thus depends on the score at the time of a move within the respective
game.
However, conversation and the language game have greater capacity for evolution than does
baseball and this is where the analogy between baseball and conversation partially breaks
down. Rules of accommodation are built into language games, but not baseball – “language
games are different. ... Conversational score does tend to evolve in such a way as is required
in order to make whatever occurs count as correct play.”4 Presuppositions in conversation
demonstrate that correct play depends on the score and also the rules of accommodation
that separate the games of language from baseball. The presupposition that I have a sister
comes straightaway into existence with the statement “My sister lives in North Carolina”
under this rule of accommodation, unless another participant in the conversation challenges
it. From that point on, then, talk about my sister counts as correct play – the conversational
score has changed with this presupposition’s entry into the realm of collective and
acceptable knowledge. Permissibility within conversation also functions according to the
rules of accommodation. With this, the boundaries of the permissible range of conduct are
shifted to make true whatever is said about them.5 Permissibility has a great deal to do with
which participant (or participants) in the conversation have the authority to shift these
boundaries. Lewis terms this the master/slave relationship and this concept is later taken up
by Langton and West in their own work. The master in the conversational relationship has
the relevant authority to change permissibility within the conversation and the slave must
follow in accordance with these defined rules – adhering to what is permissible and
impermissible in the conversation.
Since Lewis provides the theoretical framework for Langton and West’s claim that
pornography subordinates and silences women, we will now begin to apply his framework to
their claim, beginning with permissibility under rules of accommodation. Langton and West
begin this application with their ostensibly Pavlovian example of an experimenter that has
“created a mild boot fetish in heterosexual male students by pairing slides of sexually
provocative women with a picture of a pair of black knee-length women’s boots” (Langton,
303). By including boots in an otherwise sexually exciting set of pictures, the experimenter
introduces into the conversation both the presupposition that boots are sexy and the
permissibility to appropriately find them as such.6 The boot fetish is now conversationally
correct play.
In the violent pornography Langton and West are concerned with, we see similar
presupposition and permissibility at work under rules of conversational accommodation. Just
as it is presumed that I have a sister when I say, “My sister lives in North Carolina,” it is
4
Lewis, “Scorekeeping in a Language Game,” 347
Lewis, “Scorekeeping in a Language Game,” 347
6
Rae Langton and Caroline West, "Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game," 311
5
presupposed in works of pornography that whatever sexual acts being shown are sexually
arousing and enjoyable for the participants. Thus, in violent pornography when women are
raped and sexually degraded, the presupposition is that women enjoy being raped and
sexually degraded. The depiction of these acts in pornography by the pornographers as the
culturally relevant authority on the matter thus expands “the boundaries of the permissible
range of conduct” to make these actions and presuppositions ostensibly permissible.7 The
conversational score in violent pornography now accepts the rape and sexual degradation of
women as correct play.
Thus far, this essay has reconstructed the application of Lewis’s scorekeeping framework to
the violent pornography Langton and West are concerned with, showing the outcomes of
considering pornography as speech and how this operates within the pornography itself. I
will now turn to the claims that this kind of pornography can silence and subordinate
women in the wider socio-sexual arena, first by identifying the problem of silencing,
followed by a discussion of violent pornography’s illocutionary force in relation to this
problem.
Silencing is the stronger of the two claims and will be the claim in focus for this essay – the
silencing of a group implies their subordination to the silencers. Ishani Maitra gives a concise
and comprehensive definition of silencing that aligns with and enhances Langton and West’s
claim in her paper “Silence and Responsibility.” She states:
“a speaker is silenced if the following conditions hold: (i) The speaker makes her
communicative intention ‘plain’, in the sense that she literally says what she means in a
normal tone of voice; (ii) Her intended audience hears and pays attention to the words she
utters; (iii) Her intended audience knows the conventional meanings of the words she
utters; and (iv) Her intended audience fails to satisfy her communicative intention.”8
In their paper, Langton and West generally term this silencing phenomenon “illocutionary
disablement,” under the definition that speech acts with illocutionary force are speech acts
that perform an action and require the correct authority to perform that action. The
participant with less authority (the slave, as it were) remains able to communicate, but not
effectively or to their advantage. The presuppositions introduced into the conversational
language game shift the boundaries of what is considered correct play in favor of the
participant with more authority (the master). Moves in language games, of which violent
pornography is one, are highly sensitive to the “relative power and authority of speakers” in
that language game.9 Men and pornographers, from the normative Western socio-cultural
perspective, are often “comparatively powerful” in, and the masters of, sexual language
games, while women are “often comparatively powerless,” the slaves of these language
games.10 Pornography works in conjunction with these norms to introduce and reinforce this
power dynamic, bridging the gap between the language game of pornography and the sociosexual arena in which it more largely exists. Thus, depictions of rape and degradation of
women in violent pornography and the change in the conversational score that follows from
these depictions hold comparative salience in the “introduction and reinforcement” of the
7
Lewis, “Scorekeeping in a Language Game,” 347
Ishani Maitra, "Silence and Responsibility," Philosophical Perspectives 18.1 (2004), 193
9
Rae Langton and Caroline West, "Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game," 323
10
Rae Langton and Caroline West, "Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game," 323
8
silencing of women.11
For this paper, I have been focusing specifically on works of violent pornography and will
continue to do so in my examples now, though the same case for non-violent pornography
can be and has been argued about. That mentioned, the culpability of violent pornography
for silencing women, then, can problematically shift or reduce the blame from men who
deny women their own sexual consent in the real world. We can easily imagine instances of
women who says “no” to sex, but are illocutionarily disabled by men who cannot hear them,
turning their “no” into a “yes.” This problematically sets up rape that results from denial of
consent – that turns “no” into “yes” – as more the fault of violent pornography than the
fault of a man himself. The pornography, on this view, holds primary responsibility for
silencing women, while the actual silencers of women (in this circumstance, male
perpetrators of sexual violence) are held secondarily accountable.
Jennifer Saul implicitly maintains the primarily culpability of perpetrators of sexual violence,
as opposed to placing the blame on pornography at large. Works of pornography, even
violent pornography, for Saul, cannot be held responsible for the silencing and
subordination of women because they have no illocutionary force, on her view. In her essay
“Pornography, Speech Acts and Context,” she argues that “it does not make sense to
understand works of pornography as speech acts,” as only utterances in contexts can be
speech acts.12 She restructures Langton and West’s argument, then, so that it falls away from
classification as speech and thus the linguistic scorekeeping structure, but keeps pornography
merely as works that can be placed into various contexts.
That said, a work of pornography is not an utterance in a context, and thus, for Saul, it
cannot be a speech act. Pornographic works can be used in many, varying contexts – for this
reason, a work is not a singular utterance in a singular context and cannot be considered a
speech act on this view13. Saul narrows the reach of works of pornography to pornographic
utterances – viewings or makings of pornography in different, isolated contexts. The same
work of violent pornography can be viewed by a man seeking sexual pleasure in his home or
by scholars at a feminist anti-pornography convention. These two discrete viewings in very
different contexts, then, cannot reasonably have the same illocutionary force – one viewing
(man at home) clearly has more authority over its viewers than does the other (scholars at
convention).
To Saul’s point, these two discrete viewings have different amounts of illocutionary force,
given their dramatically different contexts. In the case of the work of violent pornography
being viewed as an abhorrent example in the context of the anti-pornography feminist
convention, the viewing does not have the illocutionary force necessary to silence women,
because the audience does not give the viewing of the work any authority. In the case of the
violent pornographic work being viewed by a man seeking sexual pleasure in his home,
though, the pornographic utterance does have the illocutionary force necessary to silence
women. The viewing performs an action of, say, rape and degradation in the name of sexual
11
Rae Langton and Caroline West, "Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game," 324
Jennifer Saul, "Ix*-Pornography, Speech Acts And Context," Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 106.2 (2006), 230
13
Jennifer Saul, "Ix*-Pornography, Speech Acts And Context," 236
12
pleasure and has the requisite authority to perform that action in the context of the man
turning to the work specifically for sexual pleasure. This prescribed context-sensitivity of
pornographic utterances provides a charitable reconstruction for Langton and West – that
most, but not all, viewings of pornography are acts of subordinating women.14
With Saul’s point though, we must be careful not to let the argument spiral into contextual
relativism, in which a work can theoretically mean whatever the context wants it to mean.
There remains some stability in the meaning and consequences (the context-sensitive
illocutionary force) of works of violent pornography simply because of their production for
a normative audience. So, even though violent pornography shown at an anti-pornography
feminist convention does not have the direct illocutionary force necessary to silence women,
it is still, theoretically, being shown in this context as an example of sexual violence and
degradation towards women that ultimately has negative socio-sexual and socio-cultural
consequences when viewed by a normative audience. A normative audience for violent
pornography is the audience that will most widely financially support production of this type
of work. Normal viewings of this type of pornographic work are ones in which the viewers
are watching violent pornography to become sexually aroused. A normative audience for
violent pornography views violent pornography to get turned on and thus gives it the
illocutionary force necessary to silence women, under Saul’s charitable reconstruction of
Langton and West’s thesis.
We can bridge the gap between Langton and West’s argument and Saul’s argument, then, by
applying Lewis’s framework to viewings of violent pornography in a normative audience.
Here we must make the concessions to both sides that become necessary to make the two
arguments satisfactorily meet in the middle. Langton and West’s thesis must concede to
Saul’s that viewings of violent pornographic works, instead of the actual works themselves,
are what have illocutionary force in a normative context. Saul must concede, and she hints at
her willingness to make this concession in her work, that a viewing of violent pornography
in a normative context has the illocutionary force to silence women.15
From this, we are able to broaden Saul’s initial thesis – scorekeeping in the pornographic
language game is still at work. Taking into consideration the communicative authority of
works of pornography in a normative context (viewing porn to get sexually aroused) and its
intended production for viewings in this context, Langton and West, as modified by Saul, are
correct in their classification of viewings of pornography as speech. Their use of Lewis’s
framework demonstrates that viewings of violent pornography do, in fact, silence women.
When the intended audience of a work of pornography views violent pornography, the
presuppositions introduced into the conversational language game shift the boundaries of
what is considered correct play in favor of the participant with more authority. Sexual
violence towards women becomes correct play in the pornography – this translates into the
real-world socio-sexual arena by its harmful perpetuation of a power dynamic that introduces
and reinforces the silencing of women.
14
15
Jennifer Saul, "Ix*-Pornography, Speech Acts And Context," 239
Jennifer Saul, "Ix*-Pornography, Speech Acts And Context," 247
References:
Allison Glazebrook and Madeleine Mary Henry, Greek Prostitutes in the Ancient Mediterranean,
800 BCE-200 CE, Madison, University of Wisconsin, 2011.
Rae Langton and Caroline West, "Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game,"
Australasian Journal of Philosophy 77.3 (1999): 303-19.
David Lewis, "Scorekeeping in a Language Game," Journal of Philosophical Logic 8.1 (1979):
339-359.
Ishani Maitra, "Silence and Responsibility," Philosophical Perspectives 18.1 (2004): 189-208.
Jennifer Saul. "Ix*-Pornography, Speech Acts And Context." Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 106.2 (2006): 227-46.