In the 1970s, John Searle^§MS2.3.1a started to get into a tangle with a new wave of thinking flagged by the neologisms “poststructuralism” and “deconstruction.” It began with a talk Jacques Derrida^§MS0.4d gave at a conference in Montreal in 1971, in which, towards the end, he discussed the speech act theory of Searle’s teacher, J.L. Austin.^§MS2.3.1a The talk was later translated into English and published in a short-lived journal of poststructuralist thought, fittingly titled Glyph. “Continental Philosophy,” so called, had at last engaged with Anglo-American “Analytical Philosophy” on questions of language and meaning that were of apparently common concern. However, there was to be no felicitous meeting of minds.

Derrida was disturbed by the suggestion that “communication is that which circulates a representation as an ideal content (meaning).”²⁰¹ In the case of speech acts reported by Analytical Philosophers, such ideal meaning resides in the intentions of the speaker situated in a sequence of actions in which the speech act itself is embedded. Reiterating Austin, these conditions of a felicitous speech act are as follows (think of marriage vows or the verdict in a court case): that the speech act occurs in a context where conventional procedures are agreed by the parties and have a shared meaning; that the speech act is appropriate to this context; that the performance is enacted correctly so that the speech act appears in the right way at the right place in the procedure; that the participants intend the procedure to have its usually anticipated effects; and that subsequently the speech act and its surround does in fact prove to have had those intended effects.²⁰² Anything else is infelicity.

Such felicity, Derrida says, depends on the speech act having “an exhaustively definable context” within the whole performance, agreed by all its agents, with meaning carrying forward beyond the performance itself. Furthermore, he goes on, if intention is the measure of felicity and infelicity is thwarted intentions, what is this thing intention and who was its owner?

Derrida mocks the possibility of “a free consciousness present to the totality of the operation, and of absolutely meaningful speech, [a] master of itself: the teleological jurisdiction of an entire field whose organizing center remains intention.”²⁰³ Things, for Derrida, are more complicated than mere intention and its realization. Contexts change over time, interpretations differ, and intentions may be at cross-purposes, to a point where the myriad of such differences may themselves become the meaning of the speech act.

One other problem for Derrida, who writes extensively about writing – and this becomes the epigraph for his paper – is that Austin says that he is confining himself “for simplicity to the spoken utterance.” Quotation in a novel or reciting lines from memorized text in a play become for Austin merely “parasitical” on normal speech acts because the intentions of the writer/actor are not those of the ostensibly original speaker.²⁰⁴

However, such iterability is in the nature of all speech. The “I do” at a wedding or “I pronounce you guilty” in a court case are as much a matter of social iterability as individually expressed intention. What do these words really mean when they are so often repeated? For their formulaic feel, such speech acts are always at least to one degree or another wanting of authenticity and sincerity. Quoting and iterability, for Derrida, are by no means anomalous or derivative. They are the norm.

So, a speech act is never just an act of volition, in and of a moment. It has a social provenance. It is a ubiquitous process of taking out of one context and moving to another meanings that can never be quite the same but whose provenance can nevertheless be traced (“deconstruction”). It is a transposition. Conventionality there is, but also change. Agency there is, but also society. In our grammar, we call this process “design,” a tension in meaning between the social sources of meaning and the scope for individual agency in moments of re-meaning.

Because Austin was by then dead, Searle took it upon himself to defend his Analytical master in the face of Continental attack. “It would be a mistake,” says Searle, “to regard Derrida’s discussion of Austin as a confrontation between two prominent philosophical traditions. This is not so much because Derrida has failed to discuss the central theses in Austin’s theory of language but rather because he has misunderstood and misstated Austin’s position at several crucial points, as I will attempt to show, and thus the confrontation never takes place.”²⁰⁵ One should expect at least some such “misunderstanding” in any speech act.

Searle’s response is to reiterate his version of Austin, now tidied up and more systematic. Nevertheless “there is no getting away from intentionality” in speech acts, and where “in serious literal speech the sentences are precisely the realizations of intentions: there is no gulf at all between the illocutionary intention and its expression.”²⁰⁶ This, for Searle, is the uncomplicated truth of what we are now calling requirement.

Searle’s conception of what we call assertion was just as uncomplicated as what he attributed to his master, based in the premise that there is an external reality unmediated by human frames of meaning: “there is a reality totally independent of us … [and] of our representations of it … Having knowledge consists in having true representations for which we can give certain sorts of justification or evidence.”

This was the agenda – at once truism and untrue for its oversimplification of meaning – of the eponymous John Searle Center for Social Ontology at the University of California, Berkeley. Derrida, Searle argues by way of contrast, makes the “apparently spectacular declaration that there is nothing outside of texts” on the basis of “the banality that everything exists in some context or other! What is one to do then, in the face of an array of weak or even non-existent arguments for a conclusion that seems preposterous?”²⁰⁷¹

Derrida replies with a quote from Searle’s reply: “Copyright © 1977 by John R. Searle.” Before jumping to the conclusion that this has illocutionary force, before deciding whether it should be considered a speech act on Searle’s part, Derrida asks,

how can I be absolutely sure that John R. Searle himself (who is it?) is in fact the author [of the copyright statement]? Perhaps it is a member of his family, his secretary, his lawyer, his financial adviser, the “managing editor” of the journal, a joker or a namesake. Or even D. Searle (who is it?), to whom John R. Searle acknowledges his indebtedness … in the first of a series of four footnotes … located not in the text but the title, on the boundary, and is directed, curiously enough, at my name, “Reply to Derrida¹” – If John R. Searle owes a debt to D. Searle … then the “true” copyright ought to belong (as is indeed suggested along the frame of this tableau vivant) to a Searle divided, multiplied, conjugated, shared.²⁰⁸

Searle’s reply to Derrida had been ten pages long. Derrida’s reply to Searle’s reply was eighty-one pages, also published in Glyph. Derrida calls his reply to the reply to the reply, “Limited Inc. abc,” after the pseudo corporation that wrote the text attributed to Searle, and the social iterations that resulted in the text signed © by Searle. He starts with section “d” presumably because he has already used “abc” in the title, raves humorously for all these pages, including some paragraphs so breathless that they run for several pages, and ends at section “z,” presumably only closing his case there because the alphabet has run out.

One thing that can be said about the difference between “Analytical” and “Continental” philosophies of language and meaning is that the former are humorless, grinding away with assertions cloaked in torturously-languaged logic. Such logical objectivism amounts to a relentless insistence on being right, an insistence that we might read as such in terms of our grammar of requirement. Derrida, at least is a humorist, living and laughing as we all do in a world where things are never quite right.

Though Austin, just for a moment, does lapse into dry, self-deprecating humor: “Clearly there are these six possibilities of infelicity … ” the analyst says, but then is quick to equivocate, “even if it is uncertain which is involved in a particular case … And we must at all costs avoid oversimplification, which one might be tempted to call the occupational disease of philosophers if it were not their occupation.”²⁰⁹

When Northwestern University Press asked Searle for permission to reprint his reply in a 1988 book, he refused. By then, Derrida’s response to Searle’s non-response had become somber:

What I call “text” implies all the structures called “real,” “economic,” “historical,” socio-institutional, in short: all possible referents … “There is nothing outside the text” … does not mean that all referents are suspended … But it does mean that every referent, all reality has the structure of a differential trace, and one cannot refer to this as “real” except in interpretative experience.²¹⁰

It’s a pity Derrida calls everything “text,” because this concept usually refers to something narrower – as it does for us,^§MS0.2.1 indeed very narrowly in this grammar. But if we can get past his strange nomenclature, or for that matter believe what he is now saying about text given the writing-centered focus of his work, we want to bring into our transpositional grammar some of Derrida’s ideas: of ever-changing context, interpretative frames, and the play of provenance of conventionalized designs yet renewal in redesign – Derrida’s “traces.”

But now comes infelicity in relation to Dagmar/D,^§MS2.3.1a and the realization that this is a phenomenon too delicately named.

“Lawsuit alleges that a UC Berkeley professor sexually assaulted his researcher and cut her pay when she rejected him,” was the headline in the Los Angeles Times, March 23, 2017.²¹¹ Here comes a complaint filed by Joanna Ong, student age 24, against Searle, professor age 84, with the court in Alemedia County, California, referring to a sequence of speech acts.

Searle, according to the statement, groped Ong in his office after he told her “they were going to be lovers.” He also said he had an “emotional commitment to making her a public intellectual,” the complaint states, and that he was “going to love her for a long time.”²¹² After this, there was a confidential settlement,²¹³ and, it was reported, the “professor … abruptly stepped down from teaching his undergraduate philosophy course.”²¹⁴

Next came the news of revised requirements for speech and action at the university. “After years of bad news about sexual harassment and assault involving professors within the University of California, its Board of Regents voted this week to strengthen the systemwide Faculty Code of Conduct’s policies against such behavior.”²¹⁵ And after that, to avert further possibility, another requirement by dint of speech act issued by the President of the University. Other complainants had come forward. “John Searle, formerly a professor emeritus in UC Berkeley’s Department of Philosophy, has had his emeritus status revoked … his action permanently removes him from the university community.”²¹⁶

As for Dagmar/D, to swear to faithfulness to a promise or to honor an intellectual debt in the calculus of speech acts is also to forewarn the possibility of unfaithfulness and dishonor. Assertion is transposable with other possibilities. Speech may or may not align with embodied reality.

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²⁰¹ Jacques Derrida, 1971 [1988], “Signature Event Context,” pp. 1–23 in Limited Inc, edited by G. Graff, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, p. 6.

²⁰² J.L. Austin, 1962 [1975], How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 14–15, 25–38.

²⁰³ Jacques Derrida, 1971 [1988], “Signature Event Context,” pp. 1–23 in Limited Inc, edited by G. Graff, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, p. 15.

²⁰⁴ Ibid., pp. 1, 16–17.

²⁰⁵ John R. Searle, 1977, “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida,” Glyph:198–208, p. 198.

²⁰⁶ Ibid., p. 202.

²⁰⁷ John R. Searle, 1995, The Construction of Social Reality, New York, NY: Free Press, pp. 149, 159–60.

²⁰⁸ Jacques Derrida, 1977 [1988], “Limited Inc Abc …,” pp. 29–110 in Limited Inc, edited by G. Graff, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, p. 31.

²⁰⁹ J.L. Austin, 1962 [1975], How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 38.

²¹⁰ Jacques Derrida, 1988, Limited Inc, edited by G. Graff, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, p. 148.

²¹¹ www.latimes.com/local/education/la-essential-education-updates-southern-lawuit-alleges-a-uc-berkeley-philosophy-1490299535-htmlstory.html

²¹² Joanna Ong v. the Regents of the University of California et al., case number RG-17-854053, in the Superior Court of the State of California, County of Alameda www.documentcloud.org/documents/3523114-34060351.html#document/p1

²¹³ www.law360.com/articles/1092658/berkeley-prof-can-t-avoid-harassment-settlement-judge-told

²¹⁴ www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/famous-philosophy-professor-accused-sexual-harassment?utm_term=.mebPE4p65#.jkm2pv6kx

²¹⁵ www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/17/u-california-strengthens-faculty-policies-against-sexual-harassment-and-assault

²¹⁶ http://dailynous.com/2019/06/21/searle-found-violated-sexual-harassment-policies/

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 246–250. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

John R. Searle’s "Reply to Derrida" §MS2.3.1b