Cultural Studies
The Politics of Speech Act Theory
CHRIS HEPPLE
Since speech act theory has appeared on the theoretical scene, it has been widely used as a
methodological tool by analytic philosophers of language. This trend neglects the element of
sociological and historical analysis for which a careful reading of speech act theory seems
to call. In fact, the Enlightenment philosophies of language to which speech act theory owes
the largest conceptual debt render the relationship between language and socio-political
context in far clearer terms. In this essay I try to reclaim this genealogy of political utterance,
and, by doing so, suggest how modern speech act theory leads to understanding language as
a properly social—rather than strictly logical—phenomenon.
Speech Act Theory
Some have recently argued that modern speech act theory originates in Enlightenment
philosophies of language.1 Ludwig Wittgenstein’s turn from a logical analysis of the
propositional content of language in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to “language games”
and “meaning as use” in his Philosophical Investigations is an important indication of the
increased attention that twentieth century Anglo-American analytic and continental
philosophers began to pay to how social context affects language. Emile Benveniste’s concept
of “énonciation,” and H. P. Grice’s definition of the “Cooperative Principle”2 continued the
trend; both indicate the importance of the social context governing communication. But the
genesis of contemporary speech act theory is usually considered to be the lectures and essays
that J. L. Austin delivered at Harvard in 1955, later published as the volume How to Do Things
with Words.
Analytic language philosophers—the philosophical school with which Austin was
associated at Oxford—tended to investigate the propositional content of language. Austin
calls this kind of strictly referential language “constative.” In How to Do Things with Words,
Austin argues that language is often used in ways that cannot be explained as simply
constative. In some cases, language supersedes the action to which it refers, and in fact
becomes that action. Austin defines “performative” language as language that does an action
rather than simply makes a statement about an action. Austin explains that performative
utterances, or “illocutionary acts,” “do not ‘describe’ or ‘report’ or constate anything at all,
are not ‘true or false,’” and that “the uttering of the sentence is, or part of, the doing of an
action, which again would not normally be described as, or as ‘just’, saying something”
(Words 5). Among Austin’s most frequent examples of performative, illocutionary acts are
NUCB JLCC, 5, 2 (2003), 1–10
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betting, promising, marrying, and naming. In his essay “Other Minds,” Austin explains the
performative nature of the promise:
‘I promise’ is quite different from ‘he promises’: if I say ‘I promise’, I don’t say I promise, I promise,
just as if he says he promises, he doesn’t say he says he promises, he promises: whereas if I say ‘he
promises’, I do (only) say he says he promises—in the other ‘sense’ of ‘promise’, the ‘sense’ in which
I say I promise, only he can say he promises. I describe his promising, but I do my own promising, and
he must do his own. (99)
For Austin, the difference between performative and constative language is represented by the
difference between the act of the promise and the description of the promise. In the case of
promising, language does not simply refer to a promise that occurs outside of language; the
promise itself is an act performed by language.
The original distinctions Austin makes between performatives and constatives become
less tenable as his argument in How to Do Things with Words progresses. He notes at one point
that there is a danger of the “distinction between constative and performative breaking down”
(Words 54), at another that “the performative is not altogether so obviously distinct from the
constative” (Words 67), and later that,
despite the supposed contrast between performative and constative utterances, we found sufficient
indications that unhappiness nevertheless seems to characterize both kinds of utterance; and that the
requirement of conforming or bearing some relation to the facts, different in different cases, seems to
characterize performatives, in addition to the requirement that they should be happy, similarly to the
way which is characteristic of supposed constatives. (Words 90)
Austin proposes that the utterances he originally defines as constative, such as statements, are
actually performative, propositional acts as well, to the same extent that utterances such as
promises are performative. Thus all speech and linguistic meaning can be considered as
speech action.
The Politics of Speech Act Theory
Speech act theory implies a sociological complement to linguistic analysis. As Sandy Petrey
notes, “It shifts attention from what language is to what it does and sees a social process
where other linguistic philosophies see a formal structure” (3). Put rather differently, one
could also say that the formal structure governing speech acts is, in fact, a social process. In
the opening pages of Speech Acts, John Searle argues that “speaking a language is engaging
in a rule-governed form of behaviour” (16). Searle seems to characterize communication as
an abstract structure, but he actually suggests it is a conventional social practice. As Petrey
explains: “Before there can be performative language, there must exist a social body that
recognizes and accepts the conventional procedure in which the language functions. For the
language to function successfully, a social body must apprehend it in the same way” (7).
Searle and Petrey both note the necessity for an illocutionary act to secure what Austin
calls “uptake” in order to succeed (Words 115–18). The addressor must utter a potentially
meaningful phrase; however, the addressee must also take up the phrase and interpret it as
meaningful. If, for example, I make a bet with someone who does not understand the language
in which I phrase the utterance, then the performative act will not succeed; I cannot expect to
claim my winnings. Such unsuccessful performatives are not only caused by linguistic, but
The Politics of Speech Act Theory
3
also socio-cultural conventions. If I am not recognized as having the authority to do so, I
cannot, for example, pronounce two people married, or declare a meeting called to order.
Austin catalogues these various instances of performative failure as kinds of “infelicities.” He
recognizes, however, that there are some cases in which the “procedure” for a performative
act may not exist, or some in which an infelicitous act may be accepted as legitimate even
though it contravenes established conventions. I could, for example, utter a command and, on
the basis that the addressee considers it meaningful, not according to any pre-existing
authority of my own, it could succeed. The conventions indicating my authority as a leader
do not exist prior to the speech act, but I become a leader because the speech act succeeds. In
such a case I would be, in Austin’s words, “getting away with it”: “we have […] the case of
procedures which someone is initiating. Sometimes he may ‘get away with it’ like, in football,
the man who first picked up the ball and ran. Getting away with things is essential, despite the
suspicious terminology” (Words 30). By comparing linguistic innovation to a football game,
Austin acknowledges the highly conventional structure by which both are defined. Language
games, however, have no referee; the conventions that define speech situations are usually
much less easily identifiable. Certain specialized speech situations are highly conventional,
but generally there is a great deal of play between addressor and addressee; because all
performatives are determined by ultimately arbitrary conventions, every successful
illocutionary act is indeed to some extent “getting away with it.” If speech acts are rulegoverned, then, to the same extent that Searle proposes that one should be able to infer the
linguistic rules that make speech meaningful and illocutionary acts successful, one should
also be able to infer the political conventions that structure the relation between addressor and
addressee that make language meaningful and illocutionary acts successful. In other words,
speech act theory provides an opportunity to understand the importance of social as well as
linguistic conventions to the process of communication.
Austin, Searle, and other speech act theorists acknowledge the social and political
conventions of communication, but they tend to leave them largely undefined. As Mary
Louise Pratt notes in “Ideology and Speech-Act Theory,” “Speech-act philosophers tend to be
very skeptical […] about the theory’s potential for characterizing language as a political
practice. While often acknowledging the theory’s dependence on undeveloped assumptions
about social interaction, they argue that it is impossible to develop these assumptions in any
satisfactory way” (60). Austin, for example, concedes that “It is difficult to say where
conventions begin and end” (Words 118). Despite—perhaps because of—this difficulty, it is
important to understand just how social and political conventions contribute to illocutionary
success. Instances and documents of speech acts—historical, philosophical, and literary—all
have particular political valences, and provide a treasure trove of possibilities for
understanding some of the social conventions that underwrite performative success or failure.
Politics and Pragmatism
In his attempt to establish “felicity conditions”—general rules that determine the success of
illocutionary acts—Austin recognizes the importance of a more context-dependent analysis
of the speech situation: “We must consider the total situation in which the utterance is issued
—the total speech-act—if we are to see the parallel between statements and performative
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utterances, and how each can go wrong. So the total speech act in the total speech situation is
emerging from logic piecemeal as important in special cases” (Words 52). The analytic
philosophical tradition conceives of language based on propositional content, a focus that
privileges the addressor. Speech act theory can shift this bias by posing the question of active
intelligibility in addition to constative referentiality. A speech situation includes both an
addressor and an addressee, a “total speech situation,” and, in order for a speech act to
succeed, it must be intelligible to the addressee. The success of speech action relies in some
ways more on the addressee than the addressor, a fact the French philosopher Jean-François
Lyotard notes when he writes that: “The question is to know whether, when one hears
something that might resemble a call, one is to be held by it. One can resist it or answer it, but
it will first have to be received as a call, rather than, for instance, as a fantasy” (107).
Intelligibility and uptake is a precondition for judgement. According to Stanley Fish:
Speech Act Theory is an account of the conditions of intelligibility, of what it means to mean in a
community, of the procedures which must be instituted before one can even be said to be understood.
In a great many texts those conditions and procedures are presupposed; they are not put before us for
consideration, and the emphasis falls on what happens or can happen after they have been invoked. It
follows that while a Speech Act analysis of such texts will always be possible, it will also be trivial, (a
mere list of the occurrence or distribution of kinds of acts), because while it is the conditions of
intelligibility that make all texts possible, not all texts are about those conditions. (“How To” 1024–25)
I would counter that those texts (and utterances) that are not “about” the conditions of
intelligibility are precisely more important to understand because of the way they imply
conditions of intelligibility. Speech act theory can be used to understand what social
conventions make a “distribution of kinds of acts” intelligible. Searle explains that:
The mastery of those rules which constitute linguistic competence by the speaker and hearer is not in
general sufficient […], there must exist an extra-linguistic institution and the speaker and hearer must
occupy special places within this institution. It is only given such institutions as the church, the law,
private property, the state, and a special position of the speaker and hearer within these institutions that
one can excommunicate, appoint, give and bequeath one’s possessions or declare war. (“Taxonomy”
18)
Given the success of a speech act, and assuming the speaker and hearer share a general
linguistic competence, one can ask critically: What are the conditions necessary for its
success? Speech act theorists can infer certain aspects of the social relation between addressee
and addressor according to the relative success of speech acts.
For Pierre Bourdieu, the tendency for illocutionary force and performative success to
vary in proportion to the existing social inertia of a speech situation is a result of what he calls
“linguistic capital.” In Language and Symbolic Power he writes that:
although it is legitimate to treat social relations—even relations of domination —as symbolic
interactions, that is, as relations of communication implying cognition and recognition, one must not
forget that the relations of communication par excellence—linguistic exchanges—are also relations of
symbolic power in which the power relations between speakers of their respective groups are
actualized. (37)
For Bourdieu, linguistic relations are always defined by power. Addressors with linguistic
capital tend to make successful utterances, whereas those without linguistic capital tend to
make less successful utterances. Addressees with linguistic capital are much less likely to
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5
have their speech situations asymmetrically underprivileged, and vulnerable to the whims of
addressors keen on getting away with it. Bourdieu terms this dynamic “intimidation”:
“intimidation, a symbolic violence which is not aware of what it is (to the extent that it implies
no act of intimidation) can only be exerted on a person predisposed (in his habitus) to feel it,
whereas others will ignore it” (51). Searle’s classification of speech acts clarifies Bourdieu’s
terminology. In “A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts,” Searle makes the following distinction:
“The point or purpose of a type of illocution I shall call its illocutionary point. Illocutionary
point is part of but not the same as illocutionary force. Thus, e.g., the illocutionary point of
requests is the same as that of commands; both are attempts to get hearers to do something.
But the illocutionary forces are clearly different” (3). The illocutionary forces of a command
or a request, despite their varying degree, are in both cases transparent with their illocutionary
point. Intimidating speech acts, on the other hand, intimidate without having intimidation as
their illocutionary point because illocutionary success is often guaranteed by a speech
situation that is defined by an asymmetrical distribution of linguistic capital between the
addressor and addressee. Indeed, a forceful utterance can aggravate this asymmetry and
amplify the distribution of linguistic capital in such a way as to privilege the success of future
speech acts.
Performing Constitutionality
Considering that speech act theory suggests the social and political conditions prerequisite for
illocutionary success, perhaps it is unsurprising that two of the more important acts that define
the modern sense of liberal republican political being, the American Declaration of
Independence, and the Declaration of 1789 as approved by the French National Assembly,
were both instances of speech acts. Perhaps the political power of language was never so
dramatically evident as it was in the declarations of the age of revolution. A declaration of
political sovereignty seems to constatively indicate the legitimacy of national authority, but it
also performatively constitutes the authority by which it is considered legitimate. Jacques
Derrida explains of the American Declaration of Independence that:
One cannot decide—and that’s the interesting thing, the force and the coup de force of such a
declarative act—whether independence is stated or produced by this utterance. […] Is it that the good
people have already freed themselves in fact and are only stating the fact of this emancipation in the
Declaration? Or is it rather that they free themselves at the instant of and by the signature of this
Declaration? […] This obscurity, this undecidability between, let’s say, a performative structure and a
constative structure, is required in order to produce the sought after effect. (451)
The logical circularity of the Declaration is a temporal problem. Derrida explains that the
“people” to which the Declaration refers do “not exist. They do not exist as an entity, it does
not exist, before this declaration, not as such. If it gives birth to itself, as free and independent
subject, as possible signer, this can only hold in the act of the signature. The signature invents
the signer” (451). Lyotard makes a similar argument concerning the French National
Assembly’s Declaration of 1789; “The article names the sovereign, and the sovereign states
the source that names him. But the sovereign had to begin his declaration before being
authorized to do so by the Article he is going to declare, thus before being the authorized
sovereign” (146). Derrida and Lyotard argue that the American and the French Declarations
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operate with a temporal short-circuit, what Derrida terms “a sort of fabulous retroactivity”
(451). Both Declarations are getting away with it because they constitute, as a result of their
performative success, the authority to which they must refer in order to be successful.
Fabulous retroactivity is not as “fabulous,” perhaps, as Derrida would lead us to believe; such
declarations cannot function independently of determinate contexts in which the addressees
are willing and able to consider the speech act as felicitous. If, for example, I declare that I
myself am now a sovereign state, the retroactive success of my speech act will in all
likelihood be less than fabulous. Indeed, the speech situation has everything to do with the
success of the declaration. Fabulous retroactivity can only successfully establish social
conventions if shared language, social, and political conventions facilitate an understanding
between addressor and addressee.
The cultural and political milieu of the Enlightenment in which these declarations were
successfully uttered attests to the unusual concern paid to the importance of communicative
understanding. The so-called “constitution debate” of the 1790s (whose most well-known
antagonists were Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine) is evidence of how language was
beginning to be understood as having a more fundamental role in creating, rather than a
simply constative role in describing, the organization of nations and citizens. Angela
Esterhammer argues that “Romantic period writers made the philosophy of language integral
to both the politics and the literature of their age in a way that it has not been before or since”
(5). And Jay Fliegelman argues in Declarations of Independence that the mid-eighteenth
century “was revolutionized by an intensified quest to discover (or theorize into existence) a
natural spoken language that would be a corollary to natural law, a language that would permit
universal recognition and understanding” (1–2). While the social contract theory is articulated
differently by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, all presuppose a speech situation in which the
terms of a contract are mutually understood not only between an addressor and an addressee,
but between an addressor and a whole country of addressees. If there is no pragmatic situation
to guarantee the success of the fundamental political speech acts, promises and contracts, the
legitimacy of state authority can no longer be explained by the social contract. The pragmatic
bent of Enlightenment philosophy can thus be considered to a certain extent as a theoretical
corollary for its political counterpart, the social contract theory, in both its monarchical and
republican versions.
Bourdieu agrees that the standardization of language was a fundamental necessity of the
nation state: “only when the making of the ‘nation’, an entirely abstract group based on law,
creates new usages and functions does it become indispensable to forge a standard language,
impersonal and anonymous like the official uses it has to serve” (48). Even such notoriously
radical thinkers as William Godwin argue for a standardized language that confirms the
possibility of—yet, for Godwin, obviates the necessity for—a social contract. As Bourdieu
suggests, a felicitous speech situation similarly defines alternative versions of the state. The
pragmatic linguistic conventions that Godwin argues are necessary for rational
communication in an anarchy are the very same that Immanuel Kant argues are necessary for
enlightened thought in a monarchy, and also those that republicans in France and America
argue are necessary for the natural laws that guarantee economic, and thus individual,
freedom.
Jürgen Habermas details the related post-Enlightenment development of the modern
The Politics of Speech Act Theory
7
nation-state and linguistic pragmatics in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,
and acknowledges the debt his contemporary pragmatic philosophy owes to Enlightenment
philosophies of language and the state. He argues that, in the age of Enlightenment, state
authority ceased to regulate private interests directly: the private realm and state authority
were mediated by the emerging “public sphere” (Structural 30). The political function of
Enlightenment rationality becomes clearer in Habermas’ explanation of the role of
individuals in the public sphere:
private people […] soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities
themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically
privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labour. The medium of this
public confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: people’s public use of their reason.
(Structural 27)
As Habermas argues in “What is Universal Pragmatics?,” understanding, the goal of rationalcritical debate in the public sphere, is only possible with a pragmatic speech situation.
Habermas’ most important and general point about the public sphere is that these rational,
pragmatic rules that structure the relation between subjects and the state are contingent upon
the political standardization of socio-economic equivalence between subjects (he often uses
the term “bourgeois public sphere”). Enlightenment rationality and pragmatism are thus
historically- and class-contingent. If the subject and the state are both linguistically defined,
then it is no surprise that Enlightenment forms of the subject and the state betray the class
prejudice that structures the possibility for pragmatic communication in the public sphere.
Searle: Speech Acts and Intentional States
In his essay “Indirect Speech Acts,” Searle discusses the possibility that speech acts could
perform some other act in addition to their explicit illocutionary point. This class of speech
acts Searle describes as “that in which the speaker utters a sentence, means what he says, but
also means something more” (“Indirect” 30). The total speech situation is important for
Searle’s explanation of indirect speech acts: “In indirect speech acts the speaker
communicates to the hearer more than he actually says by way of relying on their mutually
shared background information, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, together with the general
powers of rationality and inference on the part of the hearer” (“Indirect” 31–32). Even the
simplest propositions only become meaningful by presupposing other propositions or
relations between propositions and acts. By shifting the focus to the act of intelligibility
performed by the addressee, every illocutionary utterance becomes, in a certain sense, an
indirect speech act. As a result, the speaker “communicates to the hearer more than [the
speaker] actually says by way of relying on their mutually shared background information.”
Searle reconsiders the significance of speech action with his theory of “intentionality,” a
more general theory of cognition. He distinguishes between “intentionality” and
“consciousness”:
Many conscious states are not intentional, e.g., a sudden sense of elation, and many Intentional states
are not conscious, e.g., I have many beliefs that I am not thinking about at present and I may never have
thought of. For example I believe that my paternal grandfather spent his entire life in the continental
United States but until this moment I never consciously formulated or considered that belief. Such
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unconscious beliefs, by the way, need not be instances of any kind of repression, Freudian or otherwise;
they are just beliefs one has that one normally doesn’t think about. (Intentionality 2)
Searle’s explanation is typically straightforward. He ends the passage with the rather
dismissive reaffirmation that unconscious, intentional beliefs, “are just beliefs one has that
one normally doesn’t think about.” However true Searle’s assertion may be, he is only able to
write in such a tone because of the banality of his example. It is easy enough for Searle to talk
about the intentional belief that his grandfather has never left the continental United States.
But one could imagine a less straightforward example, such as the intentional belief that
individual freedom is evident in the success of the social contract that leads private
individuals to enter into economic-contractual engagements in a public market controlled by
abstract rational rules. Can intentional states include more complex or politically significant
assumptions?
Searle’s concept of intentional states is an extension of his theory of speech acts. He
argues that “Intentional states represent objects and states of affairs in the same sense of
‘represent’ that speech acts represent objects and states of affairs” (Intentionality 4).
Intentional states do not simply refer to or imply another state of affairs, but they constitute a
relation of implied states as a condition of intelligibility. They also, then, can do so indirectly.
As Searle later explains, intentional states complement illocutionary acts by providing the
possible conditions for success:
in the performance of each illocutionary act with a propositional content, we express a certain
Intentional state with that propositional content, and that Intentional state is the sincerity condition of
that type of speech act. […] All of these connections, between illocutionary acts and expressed
Intentional sincerity conditions of the speech acts are internal; that is, the expressed Intentional state is
not just an accompaniment of the performance of the speech act. The performance of the speech act is
necessarily an expression of the corresponding Intentional state. (Intentionality 9)
An intentional state cannot be defined easily; it is a complexly inter-related manner of beingin-the-world that implies propositions in relation to which intelligibility can occur. For Searle,
the “background” makes both intentional states and illocutionary acts intelligible. Intelligible
phrases co-present a tacitly acknowledged constellation of intentional and propositional
implications. Searle describes this tacit co-presentation in the following manner: “Ordinary
language invites us to, and we can and do, treat elements of the Background as if they were
representations, but it does not follow from that, nor is it the case that, when these elements
are functioning they function as representations” (Intentionality 157). The background is the
condition for intelligible intentional states and propositional illocutionary acts, but Searle
explains it would be a mistake to treat the background with the kind of pragmatic analysis that
can be applied to propositional acts or intentional states: “There simply is no first-order
vocabulary for the Background, because the Background has no Intentionality. As the
precondition of Intentionality, the Background is as invisible to Intentionality as the eye
which sees is invisible to itself” (Intentionality 157).
This may seem to place the speech act theorist in a conundrum, for, as Searle argues,
“there is no nonintentional standpoint from which we can survey the relations between
Intentional states and their conditions of satisfaction. Any analysis must take place from
within the circle of intentional concepts” (Intentionality 79). But, in fact, this seeming
conundrum is actually the situation upon which speech act theory can be brought to bear. So,
The Politics of Speech Act Theory
9
in response to the previous question (Can intentional states include more complex or
politically significant assumptions?), the answer seems to be “yes.” In fact, it seems that all
speech acts, either directly or indirectly, refer to and/or constitute the socio-political relations
requisite for their success. And just as speech act theory can be used to understand what social
and political conventions contribute to and are established by illocutionary success, a similar
critical method can be used to understand what background is necessary for intentional states
to become intelligible. This methodological analogy may seem rather confused, but the
important point—the point toward which I think Searle gestures with his theoretical
extrapolation of intentionality—is that even the most seemingly commonplace speech acts
and communicative practices become meaningful only when considered within the complex
and far-reaching socio-political context that is our background. Speech act theory makes clear
that meaning is the occasion of the operation, and not only of the possibility, of politics.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Matthew Reesor and Joseph Sheehan, both of whom kindly read a manuscript of this essay.
Notes
1. See, for example, Esterhammer’s Romantic Performative; and Brigitte Nerlich and David D. Clarke,
Language, Action, and Context: The Early History of Pragmatics in Europe and America, 1730–1930
(Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1996).
2. Grice defines the Cooperative Principle: “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at
the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are
engaged” (48).
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