{"id":467,"date":"2019-05-12T16:24:37","date_gmt":"2019-05-12T16:24:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/?p=467"},"modified":"2019-05-12T16:24:37","modified_gmt":"2019-05-12T16:24:37","slug":"silencing-acts-the-law-and-illocutionary-disablement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/2019\/05\/12\/silencing-acts-the-law-and-illocutionary-disablement\/","title":{"rendered":"Silencing Acts: The Law and Illocutionary Disablement"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over our first two days, we probed the concepts of the imaginary and the fictitious, and their deep centrality to the law, normatively and critically. As we turn to the final set of readings tomorrow, we will begin to explore what \u2013 in my view \u2013 may be the most interesting concept: performativity. As Loxley\u2019s \u201cFrom the Performative to the Speech Act\u201d makes manifest, relying heavily on J. L. Austin\u2019s How to Do Things with Words<\/em>, the things that we say can in fact do things in the world<\/em>. Our utterances are therefore not \u2018just\u2019 words, but actions too. In the shadows of this impactful analysis of language is silence<\/em>, a theme lying dormant in the imaginary and the fictitious as well.<\/p>\n

A seminal reading for the legal imaginary seminar was Goodrich\u2019s \u201cSpecula Laws,\u201d which he ends by discussing a 1990 case when a journalist refused to pass documents to the Court, in order to protect his source, and was therefore held in contempt of court; his counsel was not even allowed to speak. Goodrich writes, \u201cWithin that silence resides an entire iconography of the territory of the law for it is in that silence that law may properly be said to speak and in speaking to erase all claims to any other destiny, any other fate or reason but its own.\u201d[1]<\/a> In a likewise pivotal reading on legal fictions, Alison Young ends her 1998 article on rape trials with a reference to the story of Tereus and Philomela in Ovid\u2019s Metamorphoses<\/em>: \u201cClosing its dirty ears, law is deaf to the accusations of rape, and silences woman, replacing her tongue with the pathos of wordless song, inarticulate sound, non-language, the pain of alterity.\u201d[2]<\/a> Both Goodrich and Young chose to end their articles by noting how law speaks loudest through its power to silence, and yet they do not investigate[3]<\/a> this encompassing power of law, the power to silence.<\/p>\n

In Rae Langton\u2019s \u201cSpeech Acts and Unspeakable Acts,\u201d we find a theoretical framework for analyzing the power to silence. Her two central claims are that pornography subordinates women and that pornography silences women. Although her first argument is critical to understanding the normative power of pornography, it is her second claim that offers much to thinking about law\u2019s power to silence. Building on J. L. Austin\u2019s tri-partite notion of how utterances do things in the world, Langton explores a threefold distinction for how speech acts can be silenced. It is the third of these that is most interesting, which is termed illocutionary disablement<\/em>, and denotes how \u201cthe appropriate words can be uttered, with the appropriate intention,\u201d and yet the speech act can still fail.[4]<\/a> Her example for this is breathtakingly powerful, as she explores how a woman can say \u2018no\u2019 to a sex act, while the hearer can fail to recognize what this means: \u201cShe says \u2018no.\u2019 She performs the appropriate locutionary act. She means what she says. She intends to refuse. She tries to refuse. But what she says misfires. Something about her, something about the role she occupies, prevents her from voicing refusal. Refusal\u2014in that context\u2014has become unspeakable for her.\u201d[5]<\/a> In her analysis of the reprehensible and nearly incomprehensible, Langton displays how silence does not merely mean restricting what one can say or preventing one from saying anything at all, but also stripping one\u2019s words of their meaning. Furthermore, she highlights the relationship between the positionality of the speaker to both her words and their reception by the hearer. In thinking about the law, this conception of silence seems particularly poignant: the power to enable or disable the meaning of words, to enable one\u2019s voice or to strip it of any meaning. The question that then arises is how this power is weaponized and operated through and in the law. How does the law perform illocutionary disablement? When does it exercise its power of silencing?<\/p>\n

Although Langton offers much for thinking about the power to silence, and what it means to be silenced, it remains disconnected from a discourse of law\u2019s<\/em> power to silence. Moving into the second half of the course, I am particularly interested in how this power of the law operates, what its normative implications are, the ways in which it exasperates existing inequities, and what it means for better understanding the law.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Peter Goodrich, \u201cSpecula Laws: Image, Aesthetic and Common Law\u201d (1991) 2 Law and Critique <\/em>2, 254<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Alison Young, \u201cThe Waste Land of the Law, the Wordless Song of the Rape Victim\u201d (1998) 22 Melbourne University Law Review<\/em>, 465<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Young, in some respects, can be seen to be investigating this power at times in her article, notably when she discusses the restrictions on the victim\u2019s voice during the trial. However, the focus here is on the disenfranchisement of the victim through the trial, rather than the power of law to silence.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Rae Langton, \u201cSpeech Acts and Unspeakable Acts\u201d (1993) 22 Philosophy and Public Affairs <\/em>4, 315<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Ibid<\/em>, 321<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over our first two days, we probed the concepts of the imaginary and the fictitious, and their deep centrality to the law, normatively and critically. As we turn to the final set of readings tomorrow, we will begin to explore what \u2013 in my view \u2013 may be the most interesting concept: performativity. As Loxley\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57839,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[136347,136349],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57839"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=467"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":468,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467\/revisions\/468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}