I don’t think I have a problem with your last example. We agree that language/meaning is prior to intention and conditions it, that it is “subject transcendent”, -(though I don’t like the term “subject”, which is tied to the outmoded project of philosophical epistemology and means “ground/grounder of knowledge”, as if human beings, as “rational animals”, were to be defined exclusively in terms of possession of knowledge). The “joke” in your example is that a self-congratulatory phrase was reversed of itself and “unawares” into a perjorative one. And I do think the phrase carries the association you ascribe to it. But I don’t think its meaning need be “measured” in terms of its “original” or “proper” intent. Rather there is a situation of communicative exhange there, however technologically and textually mediated, and its “proper” meaning is to be assessed in terms of the communicative follow-through, rather than through some fixed predetermination. But we are all inextricably in-the-world and none of us can escape uncontaminated from what Adorno called its “context of delusion”.

I have no trouble with the fact that the world is not an entirely “human” place and that human beings are not always honorifically “human”, if that is indeed an honorific. Nor do I deny that language entails and immense dispersal and exteriority that is not the product of invention by anyone and far exceeds any intentional agency and consciousness, (though only a species with a highly differentiated neural consciousness system could have emerged into and developed language). (However, the extensiveness, complexity, and sheer improbability of language should be a source of wonder and defies perhaps not just our means of explanation, but the notion of explanation itself.) So, as I said, a non-humanistic perspective is not surprising to me and even something that I would hold necessary. But I do reject the structuralist, “neo-structuralist” or “post-structuralist” account of an “autonomous”, self-operating language that determines human beings entirely unawares, which itself partly derives from Heidegger’s “history of Being” as the self-moving destining of “man” by Being, itself an immense and insufficiently differentiated hypostatization. In fact, I think the Saussurian account of the sign, which the above-mentioned French thinkers expropriated, is far too thin to do the work that they want it to. I much prefer Wittgenstein’s PI account of natural language in terms of language-games, “grammar”, and rule-governed activity within a form of life, though he developed it only indirectly and non-thematically for peculiar philosophical purposes of his own. Saussure’s proposal that language consists in the “play” of differences without positive terms was originally intended as a methodological proposal in establishing a “science” of linguistics, serving to identify the digital constituents of any natural language, its phonemes and morphemes, and thus far it was a good proposal. But it is not an account of syntax, semantics, “pragmatics” or usage, or any other dimension of the meaning generating or carrying capacity of language. Further, it ignores the analog components of language, what linguists term somewhat dismissively “paralanguage”.

Two things are left glaringly out of account there. One is that language, words and sentences, are used and applied in communicative exchange across the world, such that the world emerges into language and language maps onto the world, with whatever degree of adequacy. The other is that language-usage aways implicates and is underpinned by a relation to an other, which modal-relational dimension is co-constitutive of meaning, of “the meaning of meaning”, and plays a role in the setting up of context, as a determinant of meaning, as well. The upshot here is to reject a dualistic opposition between “internalism” and “externalism”, between “subject” and “object”. The plane or field on which the modal-relational dimension is constituted is neither internal, nor external, neither objective, nor subjective, neither being, nor nothingness, neither objectifiable, nor subsumable in a subject, but it is in some measure really effective for all that. (I will leave aside the disrupted and abstractive mode of communication involved in textuality here as too complicated for now, but ask why textuality should be regarded as the primary, let alone exclusive, model or instance. Is the arbitrary fact of digital encoding really the point of contact between language and world?) At any rate, from my residually Hegelian-Marxist standpoint, the hypostatization of language as a machine, let alone a “technology”,- (and part of the Wittgensteinian point about the constitutive status of the basic rules of language is that it refutes and constrains any nominalistic-instrumentalistic account and manipulation of language),- and the ultra-transcendental, hyper-theoristic “view from outer space” that it entails strikes me as at once an extreme effect of reification and as contaminated with the ghost of theology.

Our respective interests and orientations are somewhat different. Just to cue you in, one of may basic philosophical interests, from a post-epistemological and meta-Marxist standpoint, is in the effort by Gadamer and Arendt to retrieve the pre-modern, basically Aristotelian notion of practical reason, as utterly distinct and separate from theoretical reason. Roughly, in a nutshell, the “fault” of modern thought lies in the occlusion of praxis by a theoria tied into the service of techne. That “overcoming” that “fault” is a tall order in late modern/post-modern conditions is indicated by Levinas, who figures here also and whose works attempt to retrieve a notion of agency, no matter how fractured, uprooted, and eroded, in the face of its multiple naturalistic dissolutions, in his hyperbolic notion of responsibility.

But some of your vocabulary spurs me to yet another test case (forgive me) just to clarify a remaining point.

Years back, I was engaged in a Usenet discussion, and one of the participants used a “signature” in his posts that read: “You can always tell a pioneer by the arrows in his back.” After a while, one of the discussants—who was, apparently, partly of Native American descent—teased the other poster about the casual racism in his signature. To the second poster—and to many of the rest of us—the meaning or significance of the signature phrase is necessarily derived—at least in part—from a historical/linguistic context that refers to Native American peoples shooting European pioneers in the back.

The original poster insisted that the meaning of the phrase could not derive from that context because he had no intention of referring to any such thing. Now, I presume you would agree that the orignal poster’s “intent” cannot pretend to govern the meaning of that phrase. The meaning of the phrase necessarily and inevitably is bound to the historical and discursive context in which “pioneers” and “arrows” have always been found together: the context of European expansion in the United States.

So: when you acknowledge that “signs are constantly being re-inscribed and are all-but-inevitably exposed to misreading or misunderstanding or contamination by other signs and their contexts,” it seems that you may be presuming that intent has the power to establish whether or not a given interpretation is a “misreading”—as if intent somehow establishes the “proper” or “uncontaminated” interpretation of the phrase.

If we suppose (as we all did) that the original poster was being perfectly truthful that he did not intend to convey the slightly racist meaning I’ve been discussing—that has nothing to do with what the meaning of the phrase is. Even if we disagree about the interpretation, the only thing that can adjudicate the matter is the objective, extra-human network of historically-situated signifiers embedded in their complex web of associations—in addition to the various cues and contexts signalled in the original posting.

In other words, it is simply not true that the Native American’s interpretation constitutes a “misreading” of the phrase, even if we agreed that this reading is far from the poster’s original intent. If there has been “failure” in the system here, it is a failure that belongs entirely to the poster himself—it does not inhere in any “contamimation” or “misreading” external to his intent.

It is true that this picture of discourse portrays language as a kind of impersonal machine that we are all simply inserted into as we learn to speak and write. A machine that has nothing to do with the unarticulated desire that constitutes our oh-so-human intent. But that is the reality—the phoneme and grapheme are technological machines like any other. But I see no reason to worry that this is an “inhuman” state of affairs; just as there is no reason to presume that the widespread use of the wheel somehow plunged humanity into the “inhuman”.

I didn’t misspell the word: I typed “the intensionality of meaning”, not its “intentionality”. That’s the distinction in logic between extensional and intensional, roughly, between the items that fall under a concept, the “external” scope of application of a concept, and the discrimination of concepts under which items can fall. The point I was trying to make was that for something to be a sign, let alone a sign that and of what it is, there must be at least some minimal reference to intensionality, to a capacity to discriminate and select between concepts, (which is not the same thing as thematic intentionality and doesn’t imply that a sign must somehow embody an identical or stable intention). (Consider the border-line case of ethological interpretations of animal behavior). That does not at all deny that signs are constantly being re-inscribed and are all-but-inevitably exposed to misreading or misunderstanding or contamination by other signs and their contexts. But that would count I think against the sort of Turing test that you propose: in that case, the interpreter ascribes or projects a meaning, based on some minimal assumption of intensionality, that is not “originally” there.

There is not a disagreement here between you and me- (or, for that matter, I think, between Derrida and Gadamer),- that meaning/language is a collective institution irreducible to the intentions of its bearers and is in some sense, for lack of a better word, “objective”, always bearing implications that exceed the intentions of its bearers or users. Similarly, both Derrida and Gadamer agree that texts can not be interpreted by reference to any independently existing intentions of their authors, if only because the ascription of such intentions would itself be just another interpretation of the text, and that the interpretation of a text is always a re-situation of that text that understands more and otherwise, if not “better”, that anything the author could have intended. But I suppose the main point or perhaps corrective I wanted to introduce into the “picture”, over against its potential or actual ellision or denial, was the role that the interactive/relational dimension of meaning constitution plays in the very emergence and existence of the “institution” of language and meaning. (I can well understand the point to non-humanistic perspectives, as well as how various humanisms can be deployed and criticized as ideologies, but I’ve never understood the enthusiasm for “anti-humanism”, with its paradoxical and possibly damaging seeming denial of human agency, “freedom”, however minimal the ascription of such may be in any given situation,- an enthusiasm that seems at the same time to be attached to a radical libertarianism. The course of Foucault’s work, which I have directly read and am much more familiar with, from contingent mutations of entire discourse-formations, to underlying, nonthematic practices of power to “the care for the self” has struck me as having something of the air of re-inventing the wheel.) To that end, I offered a rough-sketch account or “philosophical explanation” of intentionality, that neither takes the experience of focal intentionality as immediately given, irreducible, unsurpassable or foundational, but also does not reduce it to an epiphenomenal illusion rather than a real phenomenon, that emerges at a certain secondary level. The difference from internalist accounts of “mind” such as Searles’, which I think is badly missed, is how the capacity for intentional behavior emerges from relational interaction with others, together with the emergence, formation, or “folding” of a self that bears such agency. (And the formation of a self through its relations and conflicts with others is one of the “fundamental”, recurrent themes or preoccupations of literary works/productions, however much else is dragged along into the “picture”, n’est-ce pas?) In effect, we give ourselves to each other and our world(s). And in that process, language-games involving intentions and their ascriptions are not entirely dispensable, not because they are the primary and entire truth and not because they are somehow predetermined or inscribed in the nature of the universe, but because they are needful for sustaining aspects and activities of our collective form of life that we may find valuable, on pain of archaic regressions otherwise.

“But by the same token signs can not be interpreted as bearing meaning and thus be the signs that they putatively are without reference to the intensionality of meaning and thus to some connection, however potential or tangential, to agents that also and not quite coincidentally can bear intentions.”

It seems to me that this formulation puts us in danger of simply identifying “intention” with “meaning”—which does, in fact, correspond to a certain colloquial definition of “meaning,” e.g., “What do you mean to do tomorrow”? and “What did you mean by that”?—but that definition does not at all encompass everything we mean by “meaning”; it does not encompass, I suggest, precisely the larger questions of signification that we’re talking about.

The best way to explain my objection is with a thought experiment: Let’s say you created a computer program to generate three random words in the English language and string them together. Let’s say you also had the odd habit of printing out this random string once a day and posting it on the bulletin board in your local coffee shop.

Obviously, most of the “sentences” produced are nonsense: “Runs cradle over”; “Scare portch retinue,” etc. But one day the computer generates the words “Charity never fails”. As ususal, you post it in the coffee shop. And that day, some newcomers come into the shop, read the posting—and are extremely moved. The significance of the phrase bowls them over: Yes, yes—even where charity seems wasted, it ultimately contributes to a totality of good! It is a beautiful and profound statement.

Now, I think it is impossible to argue that these people did not see meaning in the sentence—and the meaningful significance they see in it would probably be very similar to the meaning we would see in it if we had read it in a book of wise sayings. So “meaning” unquestionably has been produced in this scenario—and it doesn’t matter where you think this “meaning” resides: in the sentence itself, or in the “minds” of the readers, or whatever—and yet there was absolutely no intention behind the signifiers that created this meaningful situation.

I hope this makes it clear why it simply begs the question to define “meaning,” at the outset, as intention. To me, the scenario above is all we need to establish that the production and the effect of “meaning”—in the properly broader sense of “signification,” and however you want to theorize its operation—is something that takes place without the intervention of any “intention.” This is not to say that intention doesn’t exist: It only means that once a signifier is “out there”—no matter its source—the fate of its significance and meaning in the world is entirely up to “external” matters, not least of which is the historical and linguistic environment that makes the signifier intelligible.

An intention is not an item, an atomic entity. Rather an intention is a distinction that belongs together in a complex with other interrelated distinctions, such that there are acts, which may or may not correlate with movements, consequences, intentions, motives, and the like. “In principle”, it is conceivable that there could be a language-game of acts without there being one of intentions,- (but could there be a language-game of sheer movements?),- and a language-game of acts and intentions without there being any language game of motives,- (which are only ever “known” as sheer inferences anyway),- and so forth. (But how do we identify acts? Is it not through “naming” an intention?) We distinguish acts from intentions insofar as acts can have unintended consequences or intentions can be forgotten, confused or otherwise “unfulfilled” and the like. None of this need imply any self-subsistent interiority distinct from the exteriority of signs. “Intentions” are only ever mutual attributions coordinated through the grammar of first, second and third person perspectives.

But I have trouble with the notion that the sheer iterability of signs or the deployment of material signifiers in particular contexts can sufficiently account for the “effects” of meaning. That does successfully block of any Platonic or “essentialist” account of meaning/language/”mind”, but doesn’t suffice to explain how they actually interrelate and “work”. In fact, no material sign or token is the sign that and of what it is without the interpretation of the sign, which is not provided of itself. (There is no Being without the understanding of Being.) Two things seem to me to be left out of such an account. One is that a natural language is a rule-governed activity, the rules of which must at bottom be constitutive and impose their constraints of the possibilities of meaning generated: no such rules, no language. (This is not to deny that a background of practices and relations is also intricated with the meaning-generating capacities of a language and perhaps “essential” to it). The second point is that, though there is no speech without language and vice versa, those rules, or more exactly complex interactions of several different sets or systems of rules, do not just operate themselves, but I think their generation must ultimately be traced to interactions between speaking or communicating agents.

“Intentions” then would be gatherings or nodal points of complex interacting systems of underlying, implicit rules, which are at once more extensive, elaborate and impoverished than any thematic or focal intention, that are activated by interaction and mutual attribution between agents. “Intentions” would be neither purely interior, mental, or individual, nor would they be wholely exterior, “material” or collective. It is true that meaning can not be reduced to intentions and that intentions can not be independently identified separate from the conditions that generate or constitute meaning. But by the same token signs can not be interpreted as bearing meaning and thus be the signs that they putatively are without reference to the intensionality of meaning and thus to some connection, however potential or tangential, to agents that also and not quite coincidentally can bear intentions.

My upshot here is that there is a danger of being too unilateral in considering questions of meaning. Austin’s initial version of “speech acts”,- (and I’ve read at one time both Austin’s and Searle’s books, though only secondary accounts of the debate),- is tied to a robust conventionalism, appealing to ritual or institutional contexts to uncover the performative dimension of “illocutionary force”, such that he inadvertently seems to imply a kind of structuralism, whereby it is hard to understand how the individual deployment of a speech act can be distinguished from the deployment of the system of conventions and thus how the system of conventions could be generated in the first place. Searles’ methodological or pragmatic principle of explicitness, whereby anything not directly said in a speech act can be said explicitly otherwise, (with the implication that the contextual background can in principle be completely recuperated) tends to assimilate the dimension of “illocutionary force” (or, as I prefer to term it, the modal-relational dimension of meaning constitution) back into the logico-semantic status of a proposition, which is precisely what it is to be distinguished from. And I take it the the crux of the issue over Searles’ compulsion to reduplicate “speech acts” in terms of independently existing, originating mental intentions is that it carries a residue of metaphysics, insofar as it aims at a conception of the unity of “mind” and a theory of “mind” as separate from anything else. But “mind” is not something sheerly separate, individual and intra-cranial. Much of what we identify or designate as “mind” is an internalization of communicational processes across the exteriority of the world. (Call that a post-materialist, hence a forteriori post-idealist, version of Hegelian Geist, if you will). Further, there is no clear demarcation between the physiological, behavioral and mental, but rather the three interact in generating phenomena that we might be wont to call mental. And if communication always occurs across relationships, then “speech acts” are not discrete items, but are only “completed” through speech reception, such that “speech acts” are always intricated with other such acts and signs.

That much is at least clear enough to me. But also I don’t think claims or insinuations of the impossibility of communication or the inextricable and irrecuperable ambiguity of meaning are exactly the last word either. The self-dividedness or doubleness of the human self is in fact the very condition and “hinge”, as it were, of human sociality and relatedness. “The self is a relation which relates itself to itself”; well, not quite: the self is a relation that relates itself to itself through its relations with others. That misunderstanding or miscommunication are always possible is a trivial claim. That the communicative generation and understanding of meaning, however conflicted and mired in material conditions, does occur “for all intents and purposes” is the very condition for the emergence and existence of language and meaning in the first place. Claims that any sentence or utterance can be construed ironically or that the indeterminacy of meaning-potentials must result in a hyperbolic skepticism about meaning strike me as question begging. (It’s not that figurative meaning is non-literal meaning, but rather that literal meaning is non-figurative meaning; any meta-language must imply, without reducing to, an object-language and the same for the relation of meta-communication to communication). Constraints on meaning-interpretation are constitutive of the very possibility of such interpretation. It’s just that such constraints and their parameters are not “transcendental”, once and for all.

To put it in more positive terms: All of the effects you’re talking about that seem to require an appeal to “intention”—the question of irony, etc.—absolutely do not require any such appeal. All of the effects and problems you’re talking about can be explained and investigated at the level of the signifier—i.e., it can be explained without having to appeal to anything outside the order of iterability itself. The “brain states” that you’re talking about, in other words—although I’m sure they exist—have nothing to do with how irony and “the sense of citationality” are actually effected. The effects of irony, sarcasm, sincerity, seriousness, etc., are all created by signifiers visibile in the real world—and our determination of the status of these effects (insofor as they can be “determined,” which is never absolutely) is accomplished by reading such signifiers.

To give a convincing example, we have to talk about irony, since that’s the thing that most persistently makes people believe that “intention” created the ironic effect, not the text itself. Before we get into the strictly linguistic conception of irony, we gotta remember the general conception: A confident man walks along the street, a master of himself and his destiny—he trips on a crack and plasters his face in the sidewalk. Man, confident in his ability to guide his own destiny, is proven wrong by a falling piano. Irony thus conceived is that of a “divided consciousness”—or a consciousness aware simultaneously of a mystified and demystified state. The important thing to remember is that the doubled consciousness generated when we read about the fall of the confident man would be effected just as “completely” if we had watched an actual man in the street proclaim his invulnerability, then get hit by a bus.

So, now, to utterance. A Jane Austen novel begins: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Most of us are confident that it is an ironic statement; but what are the steps that lead to that confidence? We chafe, for one thing, against the statement’s “universal truth” claim, against the idea that all rich single men’s desires would so conveniently agree with society’s expectations. The truth claimed by the statement is now confronted with “our” unspoken claim that that this “acknowledgment” is neither true, nor universally held (since we do not hold it). Note that we could also discern the possibility of this argument even if we do agree with the truth claim of the statement. Either way, this argument—the two sides of which create the double consciousness—is effected whether or not we come to any conclusion about whether the historical Jane Austen perceives this argument, this “problem” with the statement, (and then, obviously, whether or not she endorses one “side” or the other if she does acknowledge a problem).

Of course, we tend to be confident in our conclusion that she does endorse a critique of the statement’s “truth,” for many reasons; at the level of the sentence itself, for instance, there are rhetorical cues, including an insistence on sweeping categorical statements, that contextualize it within a specifically argumentative mode, one that an experienced English speaker has learned to associate with “sarcasm”. Perhaps more importantly, the sentence is always read within the context of her other works, where we know such irony is rife. It is also read in the context of the English novel, for which this double consciousness has long been a primary tool in its satire. The important point is: that all of the “signals” that draw our attention to the possibility of irony have come from objective, visible, iterable sources—not some unseen “intent”.

So the issue is not that the sentence, by itself, is “inherently” ironic. If we were perusing an early anthropological study of genteel rural English society by some cultural outsider, we might read that, in this society, “it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” This context encourages us to take it as a simple statement of fact about the social expectations of the tribe. But it is also possible that we readers, knowing “men” as we think we do, might also scoff at this “truth” claim, at this idea that all single men’s desires would so conveniently agree with society’s expectations. Nobody could assert that this scoffing is not precisely the skepticism Austen’s sentence “expects”—introducing as it does a somewhat anthropological novel. Yet the anthropologist’s “intentions” in the matter are presumably the opposite of Austen’s. And, still, those intentions are entirely irrelevant to our determination of whether the sentence is ironic. I’m not arguing that our conception of Austen’s or the anthropologist’s inentions are always irrelevant—obviously, if you’re writing a biography of either of them, such questions will be relevant—the point is that irony is never dependent on the concept or the status of intention in order to appear and “do its work.”

I realize it would sound odd to attribute “irony” to Austen’s sentence if we decided, for whatever reason, that she didn’t “endorse” the skepticism that the sentence generates against itself. But if we “correct” that oddity with a mandate that irony can exist only when the author endorses this skeptical possibility, then we’re simply forcing the concept of intention into our definition of irony, begging the question of their inextricable relationship in Austen’s sentence. The oddity is diffused anyway, I think, if one keeps in mind that the skepticism that the sentence generates against itself—the doubling that is the condition of irony—is always a possibility of that sentence; always, no matter who writes it, or to what end.

Rough analogy and one possible solution to your query, the intention is like atoms. You do not see intents ( to do so you’d have to have technology for monitoring brain activity far more advanced than our’s). But we never the less have empirical evidence that intention exists and when we view positing intention as making an empirical theory it becomes clear how it is possible to distinguish between “parasitic” and non “parasitic” statements.

We seem to have ample empirical evidence for a theory of mind involving intentions. It’s a spectacularly successful theory in explaining the behaviour of those around us . Using it you can predict a hell of a lot. Think of how often you use concept’s like intention to predict the actions of others.

Similar empirical evidence to that which allows us to posit intentions allows us to support theories like “if X laugh’s, X may not intend his previous comment seriously” or “If X takes a sarcastic tone, X may not intend his comment’s seriously” evidence for these theories might come from things like the fact that people frequently don’t act on statement’s made in a sarcastic tone etc. Based on this we can discern when a statement is intended to be “parasitic” by looking at relevant empirical evidence like are they laughing? what is their tone? ( both in terms of voice tone and tone in word choice), does my current knowledge about what this person believes and their personality lead me to think they would seriously assert this? We don’t have to “see” intention and it doesn’t have to be inside the text for us to know it’s there and to know what it is, just like we can know that there are atoms and what they are like based on seeing their effect’s rather than them.

That’s just one possible sketch of a solution I don’t really believe it myself in all it’s details. But it’s plausible and shows that Derrida’s objection ( as you describe it, I haven’t read the text) isn’t necessarily the knock down you proffer it as.

The theory claims, for instance, that the marriage vow is a perfect example of a “speech act,” because when you say “I do” at the right moment, it’s not just an utterance: it performs the act of instigating the reality of your marriage.

But let’s say that you say “I do”—and then later find out that your marriage certificate is invalid and the official who presided over your wedding was an intruder who is, in reality, only a busboy. You’ve said “I do,” but you are not married, and therefore the thing that determines the “act” of your speech act was never performed.

Now, let’s say that you obtained a real and official marriage certificate before the wedding, you had a real justice of the peace presiding over your wedding—but you get cold feet when the time comes to say “I do.” Let’s say you only mumble “I don’t know…”—But the official presumes that you did say “I do,” he pronounces you man and wife and your bride hustles you out of the building. You are married, but you never said “I do.”

These simply highlight the fact that the thing that determines the “act” and the reality of your marriage is—no more and no less—the simple fact of whether or not the state has registered your marriage. That, and only that, is the final and determining factor of whether or not you have been married.

If it were true that your utterance of “I do” were the determining factor in whether or not you were married, neither of the scenarios above should be possible. The fact that they are possible confirms that the utterance is not the determining factor in the “act.”

The same is true of all of the other “speech acts” Austin goes into. In every case, the determining factor that determines whether an “act” has been performed is not the utterance itself, but rather an external registry or consensus of one kind or another.

But if you probe even further, you’ll find that these “acts” we’re talking about are always provisional and contingent. For instance, you might be married to your third wife in Utah—but the status of your marriage as an “accompished act” depends entirely on the communal body that is willing to recognize the marriage in its registry.

Given that Austin makes much of the real-world effect supposedly accomplished by a speech act, one has to wonder about the status of this “reality” if it is something that exists in this jurisdiction, but not that one…

You’re joking, right? Where is the intention? All I see is a declaration (an utterance, an iteration). The whole point about intention is that it is supposed to be something that originates the declaration, as well as being the thing that determines whether or not the utterance is “merely citational.”

Now, if you’re saying that the intention is identical to the utterance, then you agree with me that it’s an entirely superfluous term. Because then we would never have any question about the intent “behind” an utterance—since the reality of the intent would always-already be identical to the reality of the utterance.

Searle—and most others who worry about “intent” and think it is a concept that can help to explain how language works—thinks that “intent” is never merely identical to the utterance. If intent is never identical to the utterance that might be associated with it—even the most perfectly worded utterance that might ever be associated with that intent—it is therefore never identical to any utterance, past or future. Intention is never identical to any particular iteration.

Now, Searle, and everybody I have spoken to who takes Searle’s side in the debate, insists that the way you can determine whether or not an utterance is “serious” is by measuring the utterance against intent. But how do you measure an utterance against something that is not iterable? How indeed do you measure the utterance against something that has never been witnessed by anybody? How can we take seriously a theory of language that uses as a yardstick something that does not and cannot appear, objectively, in the real world?

That’s one issue. The second issue I’ve been referring to—and which, I think, we should separate, for now, from the former—has to do with the indissoluble relationship between citationality and iterability. I see now that I shouldn’t have tried to interlace those issues in this discussion.

I was referencing brian1’s comment about your earlier post. Iterating, even.

I don’t disagree because I do not understand what you are saying. You say that if intention is “outside the order of iterability,” then we could not “read” it. And that is supposed to show that it is not “commensurable” with things that “exist as iteration.” And that is supposed to show the intellectual bankruptcy of a field you seem to know pretty much nothing about?

Isn’t the concept of intention a pretty familiar one? I intend to go home in a few minutes—there’s an intention. Can you “read” that intention? Is it incommensurable with my going home in a few minutes? If I hit by a bus and don’t manage to make it home, can what happened be “measured against” my intention? How is this different from my intention to communicate, and my act of doing so? Please explain to me what I am not getting—without using the word “iteration” if possible.

And just some clarification about what Austin was saying:

If I say, “brian2, I challenge you to a duel,” then I am performing the speech act of challenging you to a duel.

If I say, “brian2, remember that time I challenged you to a duel?” then one of the things I’m doing is citing, or mentioning, my previous speech act.

If I laughingly say, “brian2, I challenge you to a duel,” then I have pretended to challenge you to a duel.

Austin thought that a number of factors distinguished between these cases. Context was one, and speaker intention was another.

In all of these cases, the words I use and conventions I employ are borrowed from previous speakers. If this means that non-citational and non-pretended speech acts are “iterations,” then they are iterations.

Also, there are probably borderline and ambiguous cases. There are boderline cases of baldness, but that doesn’t mean that there is no difference between someone who is bald and someone who has a full head of hair.

Finally, this is not the cornerstone of Austin’s or Searle’s theory of speech acts (at least, not as Austin and Searle saw things). And it certainly is not the cornerstone of all of analytic philosophy. As with any other field, the subject matter is broad, and the views on that subject matter vary widely.

For instance, am I wrong in my conclusion that “intent,” as Searle conceives it, could not exist as iteration? Do you disagree with the consequences that I draw from that? If so, why?

I’m afraid I don’t have time to get into a more detailed discussion of this, but here are a few comments about what you said:

“One of the issues, for instance, has to do with Austin’s and Searle’s explicit assertion that one can determine a “normal” versus “parasitic” speech act by determining whether or not a given utterance is “citational” and which one is not. (These are Austin’s terms, not Derrida’s).”

This is a good example of what I was getting at. From what I remember, Austin uses the term “parasitic” once in a side comment. It is not some central tenet of his theory that pretended speech acts are “parasitic” on “normal” ones. And “citational” speech acts are something else entirely, according to Austin.

“but whatever intent is, we could not possibly “read” it if we ever saw it, because it would have to exist outside the order of iterability.”

Is this just supposed to be obvious? You use phrases like “of course”, and you describe Derrida as simple “pointing out” claims that you then explain in terms of a highly articulated theory which many people do not share with you.

“Searle and the rest of the analytics—quite bewilderingly—ignore the small fact that this creature, this non-iterated “intent” has never been witnessed by anybody.”

Actually, there is a core branch of analytic philosophy (philosphy of mind) devoted to this. Searle is a prominent figure there. Your prior comment indicates that you disagree with some common views in that field, but it is wrong to say that the issue is being ignored.

Incidentally, not all analytic philosophers of language try to explain linguisitc meaning in terms of a prior notion of intention, as Searle does. Before you smear total strangers on the internet, you might want to have a better sense of what their views actually are.