Feeling Extended: Sociality as Extended Body-Becoming-Mind

3. Language as Conative Force

3 Language as Conative Force In chapter 2, language consisted of verbal labels that help us organize our experience cognitively, especially understood in terms of the transcranial transferability of those labels and their transformative cognitive effect on each individual’s understanding of the world. As I began to suggest in the introduction, however, this is an extremely narrow conception of language , and one that, as we’ve seen (§2.0), has been philosophically under assault at least since the German Romantics and Idealists, and most strenuously so since the 1955 William James lectures at Harvard that became Austin 1962/1975. In this chapter we will be exploring speech acts not as cognitive labels but as a channel of communicable (transferrable) bodily force—a conative force that energizes/mobilizes other bodies. To begin, recall the soritic or scalar series launched in §2.3: [a] I’m irritated, but don’t feel it yet. [b] I begin to feel my irritation. [c] I say to myself subvocally, “Hey, I’m feeling angry.” [d] I mutter out loud, though no one hears me, “Hey, I’m feeling angry.” [e] You walk into the room, and I say to you “Hey, I’m feeling angry.” [f1] You hear me say it. [g1] You realize that it’s true, “I’m feeling angry”—but the “I” refers to you. Imagine now that you and I are a couple, and instead of (f1) internalizing my words and (g1) realizing that you’re feeling angry too, [f2] you take my words as an accusation, a speech act, and [g2] that feeling of being accused and attacked makes you angry. Austin argues that language doesn’t just represent or “constate” reality (convey information with “constative” utterances ) but performs actions, and so changes reality (with “performative” utterances such as “I now pronounce you man and wife” or “I sentence you to five years in jail,” or ultimately, Austin realizes halfway through his lectures , all language). In response to (g2), “constativists”—the RPOL proponents whose hegemony among philosophers of mind and language Austin 86 Chapter 3 was explicitly seeking to undermine, who believed that language consists entirely of labels and label-based statements conveying propositional information about the world—would almost certainly want to “correct” your misreading of my utterance: I wasn’t trying to anger you; I was simply stating my own anger verbally. Rationally speaking, therefore, you shouldn’t feel accused; you frankly have no right to your anger. This constativist correction may be true in some cases—but not a priori. Indeed, you may even be right. If I am self-aware enough, I may give some consideration to your accusation that my declaration was actually an accusation, and realize that for the past few days or weeks [h1] I have indeed been feeling not just angry but angry at you, that you did something that angered me days ago, that I have been trying hard to feel all right about it but failing, and that unconsciously my declaration was intended to make you feel bad about what you did. My intention in (e), we might say, was affective-becoming-conative(-becomingcognitive ), but it doesn’t actually become cognitive until (f2 > g2) your reaction prompts (h1) my self-realization. But it is even more complicated than that. Say [f3] I secretly wanted to irritate you—my (e) saying to you “Hey, I’m feeling angry” was a deliberate (fully affective-becoming-conative-becoming-cognitive) provocation—but [g3] you don’t bite. You just smile consolingly and give me a loving pat on the cheek. According to Austin, my (f3) attempt to irritate you is an illocutionary act (what I’m attempting to do in saying something) and my (g2) success in actually irritating you is a perlocutionary act (what I actually do by saying something). But clearly I can’t perform the perlocutionary act of irritating you unless you collaborate in that act with me and respond with irritation; in Austin’s terms, (g3) would be a failed perlocutionary act. But how exactly is it possible for my act to fail through something you do (or don’t do)? To supplement that scalar series schematically, then: [a] I’m irritated, but don’t feel it yet. [b] I begin to feel my irritation. [c] I say to myself, subvocally, “Hey, I’m feeling angry.” [d] I mutter out loud, though no one hears me, “Hey, I’m feeling angry.” [e] You walk into the room, and I...