The Seventh Function of Language

by Laurent Binet

  “Austin’s work is purely descriptive. It explains how it works, but not what to do to make it work. Austin describes the mechanisms in operation when you make a promise or a threat or when you address someone with the intention of making them act in one way or another, but he doesn’t tell you how to make your listener believe you and take you seriously or act how you want him to. He just notes that a speech act can succeed or fail, and he sets out certain conditions for success: for example, in France, you must be mayor or deputy mayor for the phrase ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife’ to function. (But that is for pure performative utterances.) He doesn’t tell you how to succeed for sure. It’s not a user manual, it’s just an analysis—you understand the subtle difference?”

  Click click.

  “And Jakobson’s work isn’t just descriptive?”

  “Well, yeah, it is, actually, but this seventh function … we’d have to assume it’s not.”

  Click click.

  “Fuck, it’s not working.”

  Bayard cannot quite finish off the second face.

  He feels Simon’s accusing gaze on him.

  “All right. What time is it on?”

  “Don’t be late!”

  Click click. Bayard changes his strategy and, instead of trying to complete a second face, attempts to build a crown around the first face. While he manipulates his cube with growing dexterity, he thinks that he has not really grasped the difference between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary.

  Simon is on his way to the conference on Jakobson, which he is excited to attend, with or without Bayard, but as he is crossing the campus lawn, he’s arrested by a burst of throaty but crystal-clear laughter, and when he turns around he spots the young woman from the photocopier. The Carthaginian princess in leather boots, now fully clothed. She is chatting to a small Asian girl and a tall Egyptian girl (or maybe she’s Lebanese, thinks Simon, who instinctively noted her Arab features and the little cross hanging from her neck; maybe a Maronite, but more likely a Copt, in his opinion). (What clue is he basing this assessment on? It’s a mystery.)

  The three young women head cheerfully toward the upper town.

  Simon decides to follow them.

  They pass a science building where the brain of the serial killer and supposed genius Edward Rulloff is preserved in formaldehyde.

  They pass the hotel-management school, with its pleasant odor of baking bread.

  They pass the veterinary school. Concentrating fully on following the girls, Simon does not see Searle entering the building with a large bag of dog biscuits. Or perhaps he does see him without bothering to decode this information.

  They pass the Romance Studies building.

  They cross the bridge over the gorge that separates campus from town.

  They sit at a table in a bar named after the serial killer. Simon discreetly takes a seat at the bar.

  He hears the princess in boots say to her friends: “Jealousy doesn’t interest me, and competition even less … I’m tired of men who are afraid of what they want…”

  Simon lights a cigarette.

  “I always say that I don’t love Borges … But to what extent, at every moment, I shoot myself in the foot…”

  He orders a beer and opens the Ithaca Journal.

  “I’m not afraid to say that I’m made for powerful physical love.”

  The three young women burst out laughing.

  The conversation moves on to the mythological and sexist reading of the constellations and to the way Greek heroines are perpetually sidelined (Simon checks them off in his head: Ariadne, Phaedra, Penelope, Hera, Circe, Europa…).

  So he, too, ends up missing the conference on Jakobson’s living structures, because he preferred to spy on a black-haired young woman eating a hamburger with two friends.

  75

  There is electricity in the air. Everyone is there: Kristeva, Zapp, Foucault, Slimane, Searle. The lecture hall is packed, overflowing; it’s impossible to move without standing on a student’s or a professor’s toes. There’s a loud murmur among the audience, as at the theater, and the master arrives: Derrida, onstage, it’s happening now.

  He smiles at Cixous in the front row, makes a brief sign of friendship to his translator Gayatri Spivak, spots his friends and his enemies. Spots Searle.

  Simon is there, with Bayard. They are sitting next to Judith, the young lesbian feminist.

  “The word of reconciliation is the speech act through which by speaking a word we make a start, we offer reconciliation by addressing the other person; which means that, at least before this word, there was war, suffering, trauma, a wound…”

  Simon spots the Carthaginian princess, which has the immediate effect of muddling his powers of concentration, so much so that he does not manage to decode the subtext of Derrida’s opening words, which suggest he is going to be placatory.

  And in fact, Derrida comes calmly and methodically to Austin’s theory, developing some objections to it, in strictly academic terms and in what appears to be the most objective manner possible.

  The theory of speech acts, which posits that the word is also an act—in other words that the speaker acts at the same time as he speaks—implies a presupposition that Derrida disputes: intentionality. Namely: that the speaker’s intentions preexist his speech and are perfectly clear to him as well as to his receiver (assuming that the receiver is clearly identified).

  If I say, “It’s late,” it is because I want to go home. But what if I actually wanted to stay? If I wanted the other person to keep me there? To prevent me from leaving? If I wanted the other person to reassure me by saying: “No, it’s not that late.”

  When I write, do I really know what I want to write? Isn’t it the case that the text reveals itself as it is formulated? (Does it ever really reveal itself?)

  And when I do know what I want to say, does my receiver receive it exactly as I think it (as I think I thought it)? Does what he understands of what I say correspond exactly to what I think I wanted to tell him?

  It’s clear that these opening remarks deal a serious blow to the theory of speech acts. These modest objections make it perilous to evaluate the illocutionary (and especially the perlocutionary) power in terms of success or failure, as Austin does (in lieu of truth or falsehood, as the philological tradition has done until now).

  Hearing me say “It’s late,” my receivers believed that I wanted to go home and they offer to accompany me. Success? But what if, in fact, I wanted to stay? If someone or something deep inside me wanted to stay, without me even being aware of it?

  “In fact, in what sense does Reagan claim to be Reagan, president of the United States? Who will ever know him, strictly speaking? Him?”

  The audience laughs. Everyone is at maximum attentiveness. They have forgotten the context.

  It is now that Derrida chooses to strike.

  “But what would happen if in promising ‘Sarl’ to criticize him I went beyond what his Unconscious desires, for reasons we’ll analyze, and do everything I can to provoke him? Would my ‘promise’ be a promise or a threat?”

  In a whisper, Bayard asks Judith why Derrida pronounces it “Sarl.” Judith explains that he is mocking Searle: in French, as far as she understands, “Sarl” signifies “Société à responsabilité limitée,” a private limited company. Bayard thinks this is quite funny.

  Derrida goes on:

  “What is the unity or identity of the speaker? Is he responsible for speech acts dictated to him by his unconscious? Because I have mine, too, which might want to give pleasure to Sarl inasmuch as he wants to be criticized, or cause him pain by not criticizing him, or give him pleasure by not criticizing him, or cause him pain by criticizing him, to promise him a threat or to threaten him with a promise, or offer myself up for criticism by taking pleasure in saying things that are obviously false, enjoying my weakness or loving exhibitionism more than anything, et cetera.”

  The whole audience turns toward Searle, of course
, who, as if he had anticipated this moment, is sitting in the exact center of the tiered seating. The lone man in the middle of the crowd: it’s like a scene from Hitchcock. His face remains impassive under this barrage of scrutiny. He looks like he’s been killed and stuffed.

  And besides, when I make phrases, is it really me who is speaking? How can anyone ever say anything original, personal, unique to him, when by definition language obliges us to draw from a well of preexisting words? When we are influenced by so many external forces: our times, the books we read, our sociocultural determinisms, our linguistic “tics” so precious that they form our identity, the speeches we are constantly bombarded with in every possible and imaginable form.

  Who has never caught a friend, a parent, a colleague or a father-in-law repeating an argument they have read in a newspaper or heard on the television almost word for word, as if he were speaking for himself, as if he had appropriated that speech, as if he were the source of those thoughts rather than a sponge for them, rehashing the same formulas, the same rhetoric, the same presuppositions, the same indignant inflections, the same knowing tone, as if he were not simply the medium through which a newspaper’s prerecorded voice repeated the words of a politician who himself had read them in a book whose author, and so on … the medium through which the nomadic, sourceless voice of a ghostly speaker expresses itself, communicates, in the sense of two places communicating via a passage.

  Repeating what he has read in a newspaper … to what extent can the conversation with your father-in-law be considered a citation?

  Derrida has returned seamlessly to the central thread of his argument. Now he touches on his other principal argument: citationality, or rather, iterability. (Simon is not sure he’s really grasped the distinction.)

  To be understood, at least partially, by our receiver, we must use the same language. We must repeat (reiterate) words that have already been used, otherwise our receiver will not be able to understand them. So we are always, fatally, in some form of citation. We use the words of others. Now, as with Chinese whispers, it is more than probable—it is inevitable—that through repetitions each and every one of us will employ the words of others, in a slightly different sense to those others.

  Derrida’s pied-noir voice becomes more formal and bombastic:

  “Even that which will ensure the functioning of the mark (psychic, oral, graphic, whatever) beyond this moment, namely the possibility of being repeated, even that begins, divides, expropriates the fullness or the intrinsically ‘ideal’ presence of intention, of the desire to express, and a fortiori the harmony between meaning and saying.”

  Judith, Simon, the young black-haired woman, Cixous, Guattari, Slimane, everyone in the lecture hall, even Bayard, is hanging on his every word when he says:

  “Limiting even that which authorizes, transgressing the code or law that it constitutes, iterability irreducibly inscribes alteration in the repetition.”

  And he adds, imperiously:

  “The accident is never an accident.”

  76

  “Even in what Sarl calls ‘real life,’ the possibility of parasitic contamination is already there—that ‘real life’ of which he is so assured, with a confidence that is almost, not quite, inimitable, of knowing what it is, where it begins and where it ends; as if the meaning of those words (‘real life’) could immediately create unanimity, without the slightest risk of parasitical contamination, as if literature, theater, lying, infidelity, hypocrisy, infelicity, parasitical contamination, the simulation of real life did not form part of real life!”

  [Words spoken by Derrida at the Cornell conference, 1980, or dreamed by Simon Herzog.]

  77

  They are bent over like slaves in antiquity pushing blocks of stone, but these are students puffing and panting as they roll barrels of beer across the floor. It is going to be a long evening and they will need reserves. The Seal and Serpent Society is an old fraternity founded in 1905, one of the most prestigious and therefore, in American terminology, one of the most “popular.” Lots of people are expected because we are celebrating the end of the conference tonight. All the guest speakers are invited and this is the last chance for the students to see the stars until their next visit. In the entrance to the fraternity’s Victorian lodge, someone has written on a sheet: “Uncontrolled skid in the linguistic turn. Welcome.” Though entry is theoretically reserved for undergrads, tonight the lodge is hosting people of all ages. Of course, this doesn’t mean that it is open to just anyone: there are always those who come in and those who remain outside the door, in accordance with universal social and/or symbolic criteria.

  Slimane is unlikely to forget this, being regularly refused entry in France, and it looks as though it’s going to be the same old story here when a pair of students acting as bouncers bar his way. But, without anyone knowing how he does it, or in what language, he talks to them briefly and passes through, his Walkman around his neck, watched enviously by the outcasts in acrylic turtleneck sweaters.

  The first person he sees, inside, is telling an audience of young people: “Heraclitus contains everything that is in Derrida and more.” It’s Cruella Redgrave alias Camille Paglia. She holds a mojito in one hand and in the other a cigarette holder, with a black cigarette exhaling a sweet perfume. Next to her Chomsky is talking with a student from El Salvador, who explains that the Revolutionary Democratic Front has just been decapitated by his country’s paramilitaries and government forces. In fact, there is no remaining left-wing opposition, which seems to greatly worry Chomsky, who sucks nervously at a joint.

  Perhaps because he is used to back rooms, Slimane goes down to look around in the basement, where Black Sabbath’s “Die Young” is playing. He finds bunches of well-dressed and already drunk students, lap dancing haphazardly. Foucault is there too, in a black leather jacket, without his sunglasses (so he can taste the fog of life, thinks Slimane, who knows him well). He gives him a friendly wave and points to a student in a skirt who is entwined around a metal pole like a stripper. Slimane notes that she is not wearing a bra but is wearing white knickers that match her white Nike sneakers, each with a large red swoosh (like Starsky and Hutch’s car, but with the colors reversed).

  Kristeva, who is dancing with Paul de Man, spots Slimane. De Man asks her what she’s thinking about. She replies: “We are in the catacombs of the first Christians.” But her eyes do not leave the gigolo.

  He looks as though he’s searching for someone. He climbs upstairs. Bumps into Morris Zapp on the staircase, who winks at him. The stereo plays “Misunderstanding” by Genesis. He grabs a paper cup of tequila. Behind bedroom doors, he hears students fucking or vomiting. Some doors are open and inside the rooms he sees them smoking, drinking beers, sitting cross-legged on single beds, talking about sex, politics, literature. Behind one closed door he thinks he recognizes Searle’s voice, and some strange growling noises.

  In the large entrance hall, Simon and Bayard are talking to Judith, who sips a Bloody Mary through a straw. Bayard sees Slimane. Simon sees the Carthaginian princess, who comes in with her two friends, the short Asian girl and the tall Egyptian. A male student yells: “Cordelia!” The princess turns around. Hugs, kisses, effusive greetings. The student immediately trots off to fetch her a gin and tonic. Judith tells Bayard and Simon (who is not listening): “The power can be understood by considering the model of divine power, according to which making an utterance is equivalent to creating the utterance.” Foucault comes up from the basement with Hélène Cixous, grabs a Malibu and O.J., and disappears upstairs. Seeing this, Judith quotes Foucault: “Discourse is not life; its time is not our time.” Bayard nods. Some boys gather around Cordelia and her friends, who seem very popular. Judith quotes Lacan, who said somewhere: “The name is the time of the object.” Bayard wonders if one might as easily say “the time is the name of the object,” or “the time is the object of the name,” or maybe “the object is the name of the time,” or even “the object is the time of the
name,” or simply “the name is the object of the time,” but he grabs another beer, takes a hit of the joint that’s being passed around, and nearly cries out: “But you already have the right to vote, get divorced, and have an abortion!” Cixous would like to talk to Derrida, but he is hemmed in by a dense mob of transfixed admirers. Slimane avoids Kristeva. Bayard asks Judith: “What do you want?” Cixous hears Bayard and joins the conversation: “Let’s get a room!” Sylvère Lotringer, the founder of the magazine Sémiotext(e), holds an orchid and talks to Derrida’s translators Jeffrey Mehlman and Gayatri Spivak, who shouts: “Gramsci is my brother!” Slimane talks with Jean-François Lyotard about the economics of lust or a postmodern transaction. Pink Floyd sing: “Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!”

  Cixous tells Judith, Bayard, and Simon that the new history that’s coming is beyond the male imagination, and for good reason, it will deprive them of their conceptual crutches and begin by ruining their illusion machine, but Simon is no longer listening. He observes Cordelia’s group like a general sizing up the enemy army: six people, three boys and three girls. Approaching her would have been extremely difficult anyway, but in this grouping it now seems particularly inconceivable.

  All the same, he starts to move toward them.

  “White, physically attractive, with a skirt and fake jewelry, I employ all the codes of my sex and my age,” he thinks, attempting to enter the girl’s head. Passing close, he hears her say, in French, in a tone of perfectly erotic worldliness: “Couples are like birds, inseparable, abundant, uselessly beating their wings outside the cage.” He detects no accent. An American says something to her in English that Simon doesn’t understand. She replies, first in English (also accentless, as far as he can tell), then in French, throwing back her throat: “I’ve never been able to have affairs, only novels.” Simon goes off to grab a drink, maybe two. (He hears Gayatri Spivak say to Slimane: “We were taught to say yes to the enemy.”)

  Bayard takes advantage of his absence to ask Judith to explain the difference between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary. Judith tells him that the illocutionary act of discourse is itself the thing that it performs, whereas the perlocutionary act provokes certain effects that are not to be confused with the act of discourse. “For example, if I ask you: ‘Do you think there are any free rooms upstairs?,’ the objective illocutionary reality contained in the question is that I’m hitting on you. By asking that question, I hit on you. But the perlocutionary stakes are played at another level: knowing that I am hitting on you, are you interested in my proposition? The illocutionary act will be performed with success if you understand my invitation. But the perlocutionary act will be fulfilled only if you follow me to a room. It’s a subtle difference, isn’t it? And it’s not always stable, in fact.”