Global Journal of Human-Social Science, A: Arts and Humanities, Volume 22 Issue 8

Volume XXII Issue VIII Version I 18 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2022 © 2022 Global Journals A Locating Media in Cultural Theories clarify that the issue is not that of medium (i.e., whether it is speech), but the way in which the message under question manifests itself so as to generate a shared rule of locution. 21 For those who are accustomed to speech act theory, Derrida’s overture to writing contradicts the fundamental premise of the theory. However, the social dimension of space/time, which comes into being through writing, presupposes, according to Derrida, an act, suggesting the potential for a significant theoretical synthesis. Austin was primarily concerned with speech- based performativity, but he did accept the possibility of other locutionary media with illocutionary effects. Austin thus included gestures and other types of expression as vehicles of performativity. If that means that Austin accepted non-speech-based performatives, what about writing addressed to a person absent at the time of its production? As an example, a “deed” related to the ownership of property may or may not expect the presence of the addressee, insofar as the validity of the terms stipulated in the document is concerned. Nonetheless, the fact that its illocutionary force is no less effective and valid is clearly attributable to the sanction of law with regard to the rule of succession and procedures. A document can thus function as a performative (if not a speech act), thereby casting the notion of contexts as an awkward redundancy. The fact that we do not need an actor performing an act to realize a speech act is apparent because certain performatives can be perfectly coextensive with the non- speech-based performativity or deeds by means of saying other than via speech. It is because letters, wills, and other writings are endorsed with the same effects as those generated via normative speech acts. Such writings are given a force whereby the contents predicate its consequents as denotation of acts to be consummated. Derrida goes a step further and raises a question about the distinction of writing from speech based on the assertion that both are subject to repetition and thereby accessible to heterogenous addressees, either intended or unintended, and are therefore iterable: … a written sign carries with it a force that breaks with its context, that is, with the collectivity of presences organizing the moment of its inscription. This breaking force … is not an accidental predicate but the very structure of the written text. In the case of a so-called ''real" context, what I have just asserted is all too evident. This allegedly real context includes a certain "present" of the inscription, the presence of the writer to what he has written, the entire environment and the horizon of his experience, and above all the intention, the wanting -to -say-what-he-means, which 21 Admitting the possibility of non-verbal performative acts, Austin writes, “In very many cases it is possible to perform an act of exactly the same kind not by uttering words, whether written or spoken, but in some other way.” (ibid., p. 8) animates his inscription at a given moment. But the sign possesses the characteristic of being readable even if the moment of its production is irrevocably lost and even if I do not know what its alleged author-scriptor consciously intended to say at the moment he wrote it, i.e. abandoned it to its essential drift. As far as the internal semiotic context is concerned, the force of the rupture is no less important: by virtue of its essential iterability, a written syntagma can always be detached from the chain in which it is inserted or given without causing it to lose all possibility of functioning, if not all possibility of “communicating” precisely. One can perhaps come to recognize other possibilities in it by inscribing it or grafting it onto other chains. No context can entirely enclose it. Nor any code, the code here being both the possibility and impossibility of writing, of its essential iterability (repetition/alterity). 22 Just as a document exerts an illocutionary force with a comparative consequence to reality, speech is perceived as being devoid of its contexts, to be addressed to someone absent, acquiring a similar transcendence through time and space. Thus, subjecting speech to the scheme of iterability, Derrida proceeds to articulate the si gnificance of what he considers the Austinian paradigm of performativity. Consequently, speech in Derrida’s discourses loses the tempo-spatial particularity that Bakhtin describes. As the analysis of voices in literary works reflects socio- linguistic dimensions of speech genres, it appears that the emphasis on iterability of voice appears contradictory in the light of empirical data. Yet, the very fact that speech acquires multiple genres in the novel, literally echoing a social dimension now in writing, suggests an inherent architectonic segmentation at work in speech practice. Although Derrida does not offer empirical data for substantiating his claim on iterability, in his reference to drama, where performatives fulfill their social functions in fiction, he makes it possible to confirm the modality of iterability in action, including the cultural sphere in which media assume the task of grafting writings onto daily life. 23 Derrida lists four reasons for the placement of the performatives in his paradi gm of writing. First, Austin presents locutions from speech practices that normally serve to deliver information in the classical sense and creates a contradiction with the notion of a speech act. 22 Derrida, ibid., p. 9 23 In this connection, Bakhtin evocatively refers to the transmutation of speech genres as they move from primary speech to complex, written ones. Displacing the notion of context with the relations of speech genres, Bakhtin describes how speech genres enter into complex ones and “lose their immediate connection to actual reality” (p. 62) This implies that Bakhtin supports the notion of iterability, but also emphasizes the importance of looking at the interaction between the primary speech genre and the complex one, in particular, in the historical transformation of the former. Admittedly, it remains to be seen how the Bakhtinian treatment of the grafting helps illuminate the way in which the status of a locution is affected in media. M.M. Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres”, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays , University of Texas Press, Austin, 1986.