Abstract
In recent work Mary Kate McGowan presents an account of oppressive speech inspired by David Lewis's analysis of conversational kinematics. Speech can effect identity-based oppression, she argues, by altering ‘the conversational score’—which is to say, roughly, that it can introduce presuppositions and expectations into a conversation, and thus determine what sort of subsequent conversational ‘moves’ are apt, correct, felicitous, etc.—in a manner that oppresses members of a certain group (e.g. because the suppositions and expectations derogate or demean members of that group). In keeping with the Lewisian picture, McGowan stresses the asymmetric pliability of conversational scores. She argues that it is easier to introduce (for example) sexist presuppositions and expectations into a conversation than it is to remove them. Responding to a sexist remark, she thus suggests, is like trying to ‘unring a bell’. I begin by situating McGowan's work in the wider literature on speech and social hierarchy, and explaining how her account of oppressive speech improves upon the work of others in its explication of the relationship between individuals' verbal conduct and structurally oppressive social arrangements. I then propose an explanation and supportive elaboration of McGowan's claims about the asymmetric pliability of conversations involving identity-oppressive speech. Rather than regarding such asymmetry as a sui generis phenomenon, I show how we can understand it as a consequence of a more general asymmetry between making things salient and un-salient in speech, and I show how this asymmetry also operates in various cases that interested Lewis.
Notes
1Lewis observes the same structural phenomenon in conversations involving relative modal terms. A says: ‘I can't attend the managers' meeting on Wednesday’; B replies: ‘You can't or you won't?’, and thus she alters the conversational score so that correct play thereafter requires the use of ‘can't’ to accord with a more stringent standard (e.g. ‘cannot within the realm of what is physically possible’) rather than A's initial, less stringent usage. But whereas this change in the conversational score happens quite effortlessly, it is difficult to reverse the score so that a less stringent usage of ‘can't’ once again becomes correct play.
2For discussion of this brand of linguistic idealism, see for instance Taylor Citation1985.
3McGowan is not the first to apply Lewisian ideas about conversational kinematics to questions concerning speech and sexual hierarchy. Langton and West Citation1999 use the scorekeeping framework to flesh out the notion that pornography silences women, by changing conversational scores in such a way that makes it difficult for women in turn to have their conversational contributions accommodated in the conversational score. McGowan Citation2003 formulates the concept of the conversational exercitive and recommends it as a useful conceptual tool for refining Langton's Citation1993, Citation1998 speech-act-theoretic analyses of MacKinnon's claims about pornography's subordination of women. McGowan Citation2004 outlines a more general-purpose account of the conversational exercitive, observing some of the key features which distinguish it from regular Austinian exercitives (e.g. the fact that it does not function via the recognition of speaker intentions, and how this explains the unusual felicity conditions for its performance). McGowan Citation2009 examines how conversational exercitives function in oppressive speech.
4Haslanger says we should not principally conceive of oppression as a relation between individuals, because this ignores the fact that oppression is often effected by complex systems that are beyond the control of individual agents. But at the same time she wants to acknowledge the genuine possibility of individual-on-individual oppression, and this is why she draws the distinction adverted to here [Haslanger Citation2004: 104–5].
5It is perhaps unfortunate that McGowan calls this a working-class example and uses the unusual phonetic spelling of ‘sistuh’ rather that ‘sister’ to drive the idea home, on both counts leaving herself open to a charge of class prejudice. She deflects this by including a footnote that describes a parallel scenario involving two stereotypically posh men conversing at an elite gentleman's club [note 23, at 105]. In the interests of avoiding the appearance of classism (an even more important desideratum than usual, in a paper about the relationship between language and structural oppression), it might have been better to have used the posh rather than working-class example in the main text.
6Here's one revealing example of this view in action. The American legal scholar Cass Sunstein Citation1996 defends an expressivist conception of law, on which it is an important and proper part of the law's function to express and endorse certain ideals and values to its subjects. Expressivist aims, for Sunstein, are a key part of the justification for legal restrictions on things like racist hate speech (see also Post Citation2009: 129]). But why emphasize expressivist aims? Why not advert to the harms or other adverse consequences of hate speech? For Sunstein, debates about the legitimacy of anti-hate speech law ‘could not plausibly be focused on consequences’, because, he thinks, ‘the stakes are relatively low, and cannot justify the amount of time and energy devoted to the issue’ [Sunstein Citation1996: 2023, my emphasis]. This is a remarkable claim, because the most influential texts arguing in favour of legal restrictions on hate speech [e.g. Delgado Citation1993; Lawrence Citation1993; Matsuda Citation1993; Delgado and Stefancic Citation2004 are all focused, in arguing the case for anti-hate speech law, on the harmful consequences that may be attributed to hate speech. Sunstein's claim that ‘the stakes are relatively low’ does not follow an argument to the effect that these other authors are mistaken in attributing egregious harms to hate speech. It is stated, rather, as though it were simply a commonsense observation. But why would this claim seem like a matter of assertible commonsense to Sunstein and his audience of legal scholars, notwithstanding evidence and argument to the contrary? In short, it is for the reason stated above, namely, the fact that the ‘sticks and stones’ view of speech operates as the default position in American jurisprudential scholarship.
7This deflationary view concerning the role of verbal factors in oppression is sometimes expressed as a complaint, roughly, that linguistic concerns distract from the real work of combating social injustice. See, e.g., Marjorie Heins's Citation1983: 592] suggestion that ‘too much work remains in the battle against the subtle and unspoken … institutional racism entrenched in our society to squander resources suing loudmouths’, or Henry Louis Gates's Citation1993: 43] claim that attempts to curb racist speech merely pay lip service to civil rights, since they don't address the pressing realities of economic disadvantage.
8Part of what is at stake, in this question, is whether it is only speech in the conversational mode that has the oppressive function McGowan identifies, or whether any speech—conversational or not—can enact oppressive permissibility facts. Obviously there is much speech that does not take place in the conversational mode; there are books, speeches, articles, lectures, editorials, and many artistic forms of speech (poems, plays, and novels), which are addressed to their audiences primarily in a ‘one-way’ fashion. Why might this matter? Because to the extent that conversations are specially pliable in the way Lewis observed, this is not an accidental quirk, but rather an upshot of the cooperative character of conversational speech. What makes a locutionary exchange a conversation, as opposed to a dysfunctional quarrel or a free-associative talking game, is the joint aim of the participants to be talking about the same things, and to be talking with similar communicative ends in mind (e.g. solving a problem, or exchanging information). It is because of this cooperative character that unchallenged presuppositions can presumptively acquire the status of common ground for participants in a conversation. By contrast, in forms of verbal interaction that are not inherently cooperative, demurrals and objections do not need to be issued immediately on pain of acquiescing to an interlocutor's viewpoint. At certain points in McGowan's account it is unclear which parts of our verbal practice she thinks may be properly characterized as conversational, in a way that would allow her insights about conversational exercitives to apply.
9In the paper I am centrally concerned with here, McGowan does not explicitly endorse the restriction of oppressive speech, but nor, she says, is she ‘yet convinced’ that regulation would be ‘completely wrongheaded’ [McGowan Citation2009: 401]. In other work [Maitra and McGowan Citation2007 McGowan does conditionally defend legal restrictions on pornography, but this more general policy position stands or falls independently of her [2009] account of oppressive speech.
10It would be wrong to suggest that pornographers and hate speakers have no power, authority, or influence, in the informal senses of these words. There are some prominent pornographers and wealthy hate speakers, after all. My point concerns the inflated status that is attributed to these figures when their speech is deemed responsible for inflicting society-wide inequalities. Scholars cannot speak from their university chairs and transform the world to fit their vision of how it should be. Political leaders cannot shape societies at will; they have to eke out compromises and settle for incremental policy changes. Pornographers and hate speakers seem to have less moral and intellectual authority than scholars, and less social influence than politicians, and yet, so we are told, they can shape whole societies to fit their vision of how the world ought to be. This is the extraordinary claim that we find in critiques of hate speech and pornography which stands in need of explanation.
11I think it is easier to be persuaded by Jeremy Waldron's Citation2010 approach to this question (focused upon hate speech), than by Rae Langton's Citation1998 approach (focused upon pornography). Waldron tries to explain how hate speakers can have a profound impact upon the civic status of their targets even though they do not occupy a position of any power or authority. Langton, by contrast, argues that despite appearances pornographers in fact do have a genuine kind of authority, in a limited domain, which is nevertheless commensurate with the great degree of social influence she attributes to them.
12McGowan sees her account as supplementing feminist critiques of pornography, and I am ostensibly endorsing that view of her work in what I say here. Langton, for one, has recently written approvingly of McGowan's approach to these issues, noting in particular the fact that this approach is well-equipped to explain how non-authoritative speech nevertheless can have far-reaching social consequences [Langton Citation2012: 137–8]. Notice, however, that it would be open to McGowan to question the anti-pornography feminists' preoccupation with the sexualized extremes of misogynistic expression. If she is right that the Steves of this world are enacting the oppression of women in their ‘everyday’, conversationally-exercitive speech, she might well regard it as something of a red herring to home in, as many authors have, on the distinctive operations of pornography. Thanks to Aveek Bhattacharya for bringing this point to my attention.
13McGowan hedges a little by suggesting that even if an act of oppressive speech can be easily reversed, this ‘does not entirely disqualify it as oppressive’ [ibid.: 403]. She imagines a case in which a business owner hangs a ‘whites only’ sign, but in which the policy enacted by the sign can be revoked by anyone removing the sign (the example assumes that the sign's removal can be easily carried out). The policy in such a case may be short-lived, she says, but it is oppressive nonetheless [2009: 403–4]. This is unconvincing. If the phenomenon of ‘oppression’ that we're trying to diagnose is stable, operant over extended periods, consistent in its character—features of the sort that McGowan herself stresses—then it is unclear how ephemeral policies can be understood as proper parts of the phenomenon, or indeed, how they can even be seen as policies, as opposed to momentary states of affairs.
14It is not only verbal activities in which the phenomenon of asymmetric pliability may arise. In one of her earlier pieces, McGowan observes that ‘a similar phenomenon seems operative in the heterosexual sociosexual arena. Once some formerly taboo sexual practice is introduced and treated as permissible, it thereby is permissible in virtue of the rules of accommodation operative and, once this happens, it is difficult to subsequently re-introduce the taboo’ [McGowan Citation2003: 188].
15I mention just a few studies here, but note that there is a rapidly-expanding body of research on the psychological and sociological impact of identity-oppressive language. Some studies skirt around the larger causal questions by exploring how the experience and perception of hate speech differs across lines of social difference and circumstance. There are qualitative studies which indicate that members of disadvantaged social groups are more likely than others to feel personally attacked in public verbal confrontations [Nielsen Citation2004, and studies in social psychology which show that subjects' judgments about the offensiveness of hate speech vary depending on gender, race, sexual preference, and that these judgments are sensitive to a variety of framing effects [Cowan and Mettrick Citation2002; Cowan and Khatchadourian Citation2003; Cowan et al. Citation2005. There are other studies which aim more at the heart of the causal complex of language and social disadvantage, by identifying correlations between identity-prejudicial speech and various markers of structural oppression (e.g. suicide rates, rates of naturalization and inter-marriage, residential segregation), and by seeking to ascertain the extent to which these correlations are sensitive to the character of (e.g. the degree of complexity in) the identity-prejudicial language in question [Mullen and Rice Citation2003; Mullen and Smyth Citation2004; Leader et al. Citation2009.
16In these conjectures about associative schemas I am opening up a point of intersection between McGowan's work and the growing body of research on the nature and ethics of implicit bias [Blum Citation2004; Kelly and Roedder Citation2008. One of the concerns in this literature is how we should characterize the processes through which implicitly-biased judgments are rendered, and accounts that ascribe a major role to associative schemas represent one candidate view about this matter. In the present discussion I do not address the question of how exactly we should conceive of associations between A and B, or associative schemas linking A with B, C, D, etc., beyond the definitional idea that ‘associanda’ must be reliably correlated. Nor have I said much about the actual content of identity-oppressive schemas, and how the contents of such schemas vary from one ‘socially marked group’ to another. Of course, these issues are the focus of much feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and other critical discourses, and if a view like McGowan's is going to be elaborated using the idea of associative schemas, it will be more compelling to the extent that it can unite a formal analysis of how conversational exercitives operate, with substantive analyses of the content of identity-oppressive schemas of thought.
17On this front as well, my elaboration of McGowan's account chimes with her own discussion. She mentions at various points, for instance, that changes in conversational score can take the form of changes in facts about what is salient to the conversation's participants, although in this she emphasizes narrower aspects of salience (e.g. who is picked out by the use of a pronoun) than the associative schemas that I'm adverting to here.
18One might perceive a tension between my remarks about salience and certain things McGowan says about the covertness of oppressive speech. Conversational exercitives almost always operate covertly, she says, in that the permissibility facts they enact are not explicitly signalled in the locutionary content of the speech act. But is it possible for something to be made salient in a covert manner? On McGowan's usage of ‘covert’, it is. Steve's remark makes a negative associative schema salient and this in turn enacts permissibility facts. However, the exercitive force of Steve's utterance is still covert, because the utterance does not explicitly convey, in its locutionary substance, the content of the permissibility facts that are enacted in its being uttered.
19Thanks to Christopher Jay for pressing me on this point.
20I am grateful to Leslie Green, Hannah Field, Katherine Simpson, two anonymous referees for this journal, and an audience at the University of Oxford, for comments, criticism, and suggestions.