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Created: September 24, 2002
Latest Update: September 24, 2002
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Lecture Notes: September 2, 2002

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, September 2002.
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Soc. 595: ReInterpreting Theory:br> Background and Development of the Idea of Illocutionary Force

Rita Brown started us off with a question on the definition of illocutionary force. Rita said she'd read it over five times and it still didn't make sense. I can relate to that. It took quite a few readings for it to make sense to me, too. But I think I can explain it pretty well, at least my version of it. In class, I explained illocutionary force within the framework of critical theory and the Frankfurt School.

I started teaching with Habermas, the present representative of the Frankfurt School, in 1996, with Between Facts and Norms, at which time we started the Dear Habermas site. The main idea we borrowed from Habermas was that humans could live in the newly multicultural world without killing each other through reliance upon a system of law that would provide legitimacy, by guaranteeing that the validity claim of each individual would be listened to in good faith, and by public discourse that includes rational argument through which consensus can be reached.

My objection all along has been that Habermas overemphasizes the rationality of most of the people in my circle, if not his. And I think he overemphasizes the extent to which we can depend on discourse. I think there really are some evil people in the world, as one of you asked me, and I hope there really is some sort of internal hell where they get what's coming to them, though I really think torture over eternity is a tad too much for almost anything. My God is more forgiving than that. And talk alone may not always resolve effectively an evil such as fascism.

Habermas bases his faith in legitimacy and human ability to live in one world on the legal system, a system which establishes laws by those duly authorized to enact them and by public discourse at which all validity claims can be heard in good faith. But he tends to want consensus, in the sense that after such public discourse, we can come to some agreement on how to resolve conflicting validity claims. I've never been quite comfortable with that idea of consensus.

Maria Pia Lara's Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives and the Public Sphere offers a reinterpretation of Habermas' rational discourse solution that I find much more adaptable to my lived experiences. Pia Lara goes back to Habermas' early writings in which he emphasized an aesthetic component in keeping with Walter Benjamin's analysis. Benjamin, like the other Frankfurt Scholars, was trained in literature and the arts. Even when Adorno and Horkheimer were so depressed and discouraged over the failures of the enligthenment to keep us in civilization from massive killings, torture, and genocide, aesthetics offered an imaginary drawn from our culture that may permit us to imagine different ways of interrelating than we have previously known. In other words, the creative individual potential offers a way to include the moral and aesthetic spheres and to influence the transformed discourse potential.

Let me try again to say that in Engliish, plain English. Through individual creative imagaination, the aesthetics sphere, and through a moral sphere in which we can agree on some indicators of good as opposed to evil, we can create through narratives, stories, possible lifeworlds in which humans of very different persuasions can effectively live together, without resorting to killing each other. Habermas' Between Facts and Norms focuses on an institutional path to such a result. Pia Lara takes us back to the early approach of the creative and moral spheres that she claims Habermas left behind when he turned to an institutional solution.

Pia Lara reminds us of the extent of the problem of oppression and exploitation in today's world. And she proposes the necessity of recognizing that harm. Hal Pepinsky in his Peacemaking Primer say a very similar thing:

"'Tis a Blessing for Anger to be Open Once as a guest lecturer in a graduate seminar, as I spoke of the kind of self-discipline peacemaking requires, one graduate student tried to side with me, and another sitting beside me with his wife, passed prolonged suffering at the fellow student's arrogance and threatened to break his jaw. As I told both of them after the event, when the first student backed off verbal retaliation and taunting following the second student's threat, I knew the second student was now at virtually no risk to swing as his oppressor because he had said how he felt openly, in front of us others, instead. Violence breaks out when we can't safely express and be validated for the anger and fear first. Cycles of violence take hold of us precisely as the underlying fears of ourselves and others which drive us remain nonshareable beforehand. So when I'm self-possessed enough to hold out hope and continue trying for peace, I welcome honest, open, public utterances of anger and frustration, I welcome heating up debate to its angriest, most fearsome sources, because the sooner and more directly the anger and fear comes out, the safer we all become. It is to my peacemaking mind absurd to ask young angry singers to tone down their rhetoric. Better to welcome the rhetoric and take the time to talk it over with the angry singers and their fans, rather than forcing people to endure the fears they resonate to in the music to bear them in isolation, in hiding, until they explode into blinds acts of pain and devastation.

Maria Pia Lara suggests the usefulness of stories, of narratives to express the anger harbored deep within over the harms done to the oppressed and exploited. She reminds that there must be a "creatively imaginative" voice to tell the story, to capture the attention of all those who have for so long denied that any harm has been done. In Chapter 1 she speaks of the role of autobiography in releasing the creativity to imagine the world differently, to imagine one's own world, of which one has dared not dream.

I believe I recalled to you Catharine MacKinnon's A Feminist Theory of the State, in which she describes her feminist methodology as granting validity to what women say, referring particularly to much of what was said in consciousness raising groups in the late 60s, early 70s. I amended MacKinnon's call for belief without positivist cross examination by suggesting that whatever is said in discourse where several have come together to try to understand, even if it be exaggeration, or lie, or repressed denial, serves the purpose at that point of providing recognition of the harm. And recognition of the harm is the point. If, through the aesthetic component of narrative I can come to understand the Other as human within his/her contextuality, then I can interrelate more effectively with/him her, with less need to express violence and anger. The aesthetic sphere provides a means of dealing with the anger in non-violence, as Pepinsky points out. Once the offended one has expressed anger, there is less danger of violence.

And now for illocutionary force. Illocutionary force seems to me to be a kind of dynamics by which we come together in discourse for the purpose of coming to understand each other. With such understanding we stand the best chance of transforming each of us, bit by bit, as we come to understand more effectively, and hence to be able to refrain from hostility despite our differences and our disagreements.

Does that help?