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

Volume XXII Issue VIII Version I 20 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2022 © 2022 Global Journals A Locating Media in Cultural Theories Just as Anderson’s print capitalism generated a sense of collectivity, cannot media as a type of writing give rise to a horizon comparable to that of illocutionary acts? If we follow Derrida, in that speech theory brought forward a new perspective on meaning with a potential for further application beyond the notion of speech, we then recognize a range of issues to be explored in further research. I argue that the first step to substantiate the point is to reiterate the non-referential aspects of the speech act. (2) The autonomous consequence of the performative There is an implicit assumption that media involve a qualitatively different communicative process to that of a speech act: the former concerns the way some mediations intervene into social relations based on newly created communicative processes, and the latter presupposes a primordial style of telling as a form of being. Media transmute speech acts into "recited" versions and replicate the message in totally new referential orders. However, it is true that normative semantics on messages transmitted by means of media may not lead to positive evidence of the performative, constitutive effects of speech acts recited. Just as the statement, "I wager on that" (a speech act) is qualitatively different from "I wagered on that", information in media often revolves around events in the past, as opposed to raw, on-going acts of doing things with words. Yet, media recite speech acts on an unprecedented scale and generate a new linguistic domain in which the immediacy of the agent and speech is intensified. This constitutes a transcendence of time and space normally crucial for the efficacy of a speech act. However, if media can actually operate as a form of writing and generate processes whereby saying is equivalent to doing things, what do media actually do? Austin’s contribution lies in the discovery of communicative practices that substantively change the given condition in which a semantic value is transmuted to effects comparable to doing something. The point was arguably made through samples of utterances that trigger change in reality. Derrida in his discussion about the delayed statement written on paper invokes a speech event in which similar performative effects become real. Media practices that have attained the status of an illocution generate in the receivers of messages impacts comparable to those of perlocutions. Research on popular cultures, i.e., novels, music, and cult movies, has substantiated the point, but these works have tended to treat the recipients’ reaction without sufficient reference to the role of communicative mediation into social life. However, if we see that certain media practices are comparable to illocutions that are conducted in daily life, often with autonomous influences on the lives of actors once conducted, foci on actors, in particular, on their subjective preferences as certain symptoms of deviance, may be seen as sources of epistemic deviance. This is the case because the perlocutionary forces tend to operate irrespective of the intention of the participants. (3) The need to reformulate research questions Derrida was no more concerned with the historic formation of a speech act than Austin himself, and this indicates a conspicuous absence of criticism with regard to the social consequences of speech acts. If we take into consideration (1) and (2) and proceed in empirical research on media practices, the absence implies urgent needs for a critical investigation of their making. Media transplant the original speech act into a manifested iterability and replicate the message in question in totally new referential orders. The transmission of messages by means of media per se does not lead to positive evidence on the formation of indexicality, but if we take the original primary as a type of speech act and detect the illocutionary concatenations, we see that with the transgression comes definitive semantic mutation. Media recite speech acts on an unprecedented scale and generate a range of new linguistic processes wherein the immediacy of the agent and speech act is intensified. By reciting the original illocutionary act, for example, media give rise to the transcendence of time and space crucial for the efficacy of a speech act. We should anticipate that this transcendence does not rule out the signification of the performative. Media enable recitation of speech acts as writing well after the performance of the original. In fact, the consequence of the tempo-spatial transcendence of a speech act in the media may even manifest itself in an augmented force unique to the historic specificity of the media. It is well known that, in the second phase of Hollywood, cinema created stars unexpectedly. It did so by directing audience attention to particular agents so as to naturalize the media effect (or perlocutionary effect) by means of individual actors. The performative in this case is highly actor-oriented, or so it seemed to the audience of the extensive media network. Media unified the performative with the agent and attempted to personify the capacity of media technology to transmit data instantly across a wider space than known before. The consequence of a speech act affects the status of those who are involved in it, either directly or indirectly: some are involved in the act, while others are involved as the receivers of the messages. If conducted in a prescribed manner, the consequence is normally independent of the intention of the participants. Although the emphasis on autonomy seems contradictory to cases of illocutions in the first person singular, once an act is executed, its consequence tends to acquire autonomy irrespective of the will of any person involved.