Holding Hearers Accountable: Corruptive Illocutionary Interpretation

Rae Langton (2009)[1] argues that the speech act of pornography constitutes an illocutionary act of silencing women. To be clear, this claim does not center on particular acts of subordination and silencing depicted within instances of pornography, nor on particular acts of subordination and silencing parrotted afterthefact; rather, she finds that pornography itself is the act and the action it commits is to silence. Langton first finds that pornographic speech acts seem capable of subordinating women. She reasons that if her finding is true, then pornographic speech acts can also cause a particular kind of silencing of women by training its consumers to hear locutions like “no” as something closer to “yes,” rendering women virtually incapable of performing the speech act typically assigned to such a declination. In other words, they are silenced.

While Langton focuses rigorously on the role that some speech acts play in silencing other speech acts, ultimately conferring tremendous determinative power on certain forms of speech, she says comparatively little of the intermediary hearers situated between those speech acts. I find this problematic given the significant role hearers play in determining what act is performed by an instance of speech. In a project intended to isolate and identify the causes of a particular type of harm, it makes little sense to treat a major broker of that harm as a passive player, as I will argue Langton has done in her essay. To that end, I will open with a brief gloss of Langton’s forwarded use of the Austinian notions of locution, illocution, and perlocution. In section two, I will explore the roles of both speakers and hearers in determining the actions performed in speaking. In section three, I will delve further into the remarkable near absence of hearers in an essay about speakers and consider the impact of bringing them to the fore. I will use that reanimation of the hearers to unfold what I call corruptive illocutionary interpretation, which I will offer as a more detailed and comprehensive explanation for what Langton deems “misfiring” in women’s speech. Finally, I will conclude that the role of intermediary hearers is too significant to ignore in an analysis of the relationship between pornographic speech acts and sexual harm committed against women. It reasons that if we want to understand the link between the two, we should interrogate the people who seem to be doing the linking.

Before I proceed, I want to briefly acknowledge that there are different ways of carving, organizing, and identifying the objects of an analysis like this based on the interests and aims of the particular investigation or investigator. Haslanger (2000) lights on this in her analysis of gender and race by distinguishing conceptual, descriptive, and analytical approaches to a given topic as three separate projects, each with different methods and aims. A conceptual project on the topic I am raising might survey and articulate our concepts of speech, harm, and so forth. A descriptive project on the topic might involve an expedition for social kinds related to our conventions of speech behavior and the joints at which to carve them, possibly naming and defining new concepts along the way. Much of that work has been performed in this case, and I will lean on its findings. Like both Haslanger and Langton, my interest here is analytical and motivated by an interest in “revising what we mean for certain theoretical and political purposes” (p. 34). That is, while the work is philosophical, I intend for it to better explain these complex mechanisms of language and social interaction to the benefit of any field—philosophy, policy, law, or otherwise.

I. Locution, Illocution, Perlocution, and Uptake

In staging her analysis and claim, Langton employs the Austinian notions of locution, illocution, and perlocution. Each may be considered a constituent of a speech act and acts in themselves. Locutionary acts refer to our utterances and their general attendant meanings. Perlocutionary acts refer to the impact of our locutions; for example, by performing the locution, “That outfit looks terrible,” I might accomplish the perlocutionary act of embarrassing you. An illocutionary act refers to something between the two. It is the very action I am performing by producing the locution. In the example above, we might reason that the illocutionary act is to insult. So, by performing the locution “That outfit looks terrible,” I commit the illocutionary act of insulting you from which entails the perlocutionary act of embarrassing you.

A fourth notion relevant to Langton’s and my argument is uptake. Whether my illocutionary act obtains as I desire depends on how the hearer takes it up. For example, if I perform the locution, “That outfit looks terrible,” with the intent of insulting you but do so without realizing that today is that most dreadful of gradeschool holidays, opposite day, and if you are an observer, then you will likely believe I have complimented you. In Langton’s terms, I have failed to secure uptake.

II. Illocutionary Determination

Who determines the illocution of a speech act? Three straightforward possibilities come to mind: 1) the speaker, 2) the hearer, or 3) both the speaker and the hearer. In this section, I will first consider what Langton has to say on the matter. Then, I will briefly consider (1) and (2) above and demonstrate why both seem to fail at capturing what is happening when we engage in speech acts. I will follow that by considering (3) and demonstrating why it is the most accurate take on the speaker and hearer’s roles in illocutionary determination.

2.1 Langton’s Take on Determination

Langton is not broadly detailed on this matter—at least not explicitly so. Insofar as she addresses illocutionary determination, she speaks primarily of context and instances of speech other than the one in question as exhibiting the relevant force. To understand context fixing illocution, imagine the CEO of your company pulling you aside and saying, “You can never wear that again,” and the difference made when they preface that locution with “I’m saying this as your friend, not as your boss.” Without the preface, in the context of a CEO addressing an employee, the illocution seems to be I hereby command you not to wear that to work. With the preface, in the context of a CEO addressing their friend, the illocution seems more akin to I hereby advise you that is not a great look. There you have two very different illocutions determined by context. Langton also speaks at some length about authority as a determining factor; however, as demonstrated above, whether a person is perceived as having or speaking from authority seems to collapse into a matter of context in at least some relevant senses. It is a particular kind of contextual distinction, but the same can be said of things like credibility, likeability, and intelligibility. A speaker’s having or lacking—or being perceived as having or lacking—any of those elements is a co-constituent of the context in which the speaker is heard.

The second factor Langton considers is speech determining the illocution of other speech—the mechanism underlying her forwarded claim that pornography silences women. She surveys several ways speech can silence speech—e.g., commands to be silent—but focuses on a form of silencing that she terms illocutionary disablement. In this form of silencing, a person can produce all the locutions proper to a particular intended illocutionary act but fail nonetheless to perform that illocution. The focal case for Langton’s claim is that of a woman’s intended declination of sex performed with the proper locutions for the act but not being heard as intended. She refers to this failure of intention to satisfy the conditions necessary for an illocution as a misfire or a failure to secure uptake in the hearer, and she identifies as the cause of that particular misfire the subordinating pornographic speech acts that train individuals to perceive locutions like “no” in sexual contexts as something other than illocutionary declinations. Instead, they may even perceive it as assent. Langton and others argue that an individual so trained may sexually harm another person without realizing it.

A couple of things stand out to me as unrigorous or missing the mark in Langton’s take on this relationship between subordinating pornographic speech and sexual harm. First, as with authority, the illocutionary force of pornographic speech seems to contribute to and ultimately collapse into context. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the proliferation of speech subordinating women contributes to a social climate in the context of which illocutionary declinations of sex are treated by hearers as something other than what they are. This clarification may seem minor and even agreeable to Langton, but properly situating pornographic speech in this way helps bring forth from the shadows a codefendant left inexplicably unindicted by Langton: the hearer.

The hearer’s absence is further accentuated by Langton’s repeated use of the word “misfire” and a general commitment to passive language concerning them. My raising this is not a trivial matter of personal distaste for the words Langton chooses to convey her argument. That particular word and her passive framing change the texture and implications of the argument itself. First, to suggest that the woman’s speech misfires is to unrigorously suggest that the failure occurs on the side of the speaker—as with the misfire of a gun. But that is not the case here. She fires the words off with the proper propulsion and aim. No misfire occurs in the speaker’s volley. Hewing toward this language and the many passive references to the hearer—as in “uptake is not secured” instead of “they do not take up the illocution”—renders the hearer all but absent from Langton’s argument. Again, this is not a matter of terminological partiality but of a gaping hole in the paper. Pornographic speech cannot silence women absent an intermediary—i.e., the hearer.

I framed the focal question at the start of this section as a search for “who” determines illocutions, not “what” determines them. I then proceeded to characterize Langton’s determinative contributors as seeming to collapse into context—a what, not a whom. I grant that context can play a leading role in frustrating an intended action. For example, my intention to perform the third defenestration of Prague can be frustrated by William Slavata’s being too big for the window or the window being too tightly shuttered. Still, it seems inaccurate to cast context as the leading frustrater in cases of overridden declinations resulting in sexual harm since doing so implies that the person who causes harm is a passive actor, the mere conduit for an externally situated context. In other words, that reading assumes a lack of agency and a lack of active participation in both the context and the illocutionary determination on the part of the person who causes the harm.

2.2 There is no Illocution Without “U” and “I”

As mentioned, I will consider here whether illocution is determined solely by the speaker, the hearer, or through a joint effort of the two. Langton briefly acknowledges early on that a speaker, by means of their intention, often plays a role in determining what illocution they perform. She does not return explicitly to that notion again; I take it that is because she denies that a speaker can be the sole illocutionary determiner of their speech. I support Langton in what seems to be her limited conferral of determinative power to the speaker, even though I take her to fall short of thoroughly surveying determiners. Some, Like Bird (2002), claim that no uptake is required for a speaker to perform their intended illocution, leaving speakers as sole determiners. So, whereas Langton argued that the illocutionary act of marriage customarily constituted by the words “I do” fails to obtain in cases of same-sex couples where such marriage is legally and socially prohibited, Bird would argue that the couple’s illocutions obtained and that the failure of others to recognize their joint act is a wholly separate matter. While I am sympathetic to this take as a means of organizing concepts, there is a strong practical sense in which that failure of recognition is not separate from the illocutionary determination. When the couple seeks a marriage license, or to jointly file taxes, or to be with their partner in the hospital during after-hours, they will find that for these and a myriad of other practical purposes, their illocutionary act of marriage did not seem to obtain as Bird might insist. In other words, there is a very real and practical sense in which the speakers’ intentions were not sufficient to determine their speech as constituting marriage.

But what of the hearer? There is a sense in which it is more compelling to suggest that hearers are the sole determiners of illocution since hearers seem positioned to make the final call, as it were. That is, a speaker can volley whatever locutions they like and with whatever illocutionary intent, but it seems like a hearer can always misidentify the act or insist that they perceived another act. At a glance, this could be taken to explain what’s going on in the example just given of the marriage-frustrated couple. It also seems to serve the commonly encountered notion among friends, family, and loved ones that even if you did not mean it that way, that is how I perceived it/how it made me feel. That sentiment, colloquial though it may be, seems premised on deference to the hearer. Still, casting the hearer as the sole determiner of illocution does not seem to capture the full picture. If I shoot and kill someone because, upon hurriedly waddling into a bathroom stall, they shout, “I’m fixin’ to drop a bomb in here,” neither a court of law nor of public opinion will excuse my actions on the grounds that I determined his words constituted a threat to my life. If we allowed that hearers were the sole determiners of illocutionary acts, then it would be a simple, unquestionable fact—based on my testimony alone—that the colonically congested man threatened my life. So determined, so mote it be. That seems wrong.

With those options off the table, we are left with the third reasonable possibility mentioned at the outset—that illocutionary determination is not a unilateral process but a collaboration between the speaker and the hearer. At a glance, this option may appear less compelling given that it seems to allow for the setting of simultaneous contradicting determinations of illocutionary acts—e.g., that the man threatened and did not threaten. In the case of this kind of disagreement between the speaker and hearer, are we to grant that both are correct? Are both wrong? It seems like there needs to be a right and wrong, a fact of the matter regarding what act is performed. Lucy McDonald (2021) addressed this recently, describing illocutionary determination as a negotiation. She argues that the illocution achieved is not grounded in either the speaker or the hearer but in a sort of summary of the agreement between the two. Notably, that agreement and the illocution produced need not be consonant with either the intention or the interpretation; instead, what is relevant is where their negotiation ends. On this take, determinations track with our conversational conventions. “After the hearer has signaled her interpretation of the utterance, the speaker may choose to correct the hearer’s interpretation, or she may continue the conversation, which signals that she accepts the hearer’s interpretation” (McDonald, 2021, p. 8).

To demonstrate McDonald’s claim, consider a lunch I shared several years ago in the Brooklyn apartment of a friend’s elderly Russian grandmother. My friend spoke some Russian but mostly English, her grandmother mostly Russian, and her grandmother’s personal care assistant (PCA) mostly Spanish. Near the end of the meal, the grandmother asked in broken English and Russian if I wanted chay, which is Russian for tea but is pronounced like chai. I responded by making a drinking motion and confirming verbally, “chai?” The grandmother nodded. I nodded back and said, “I would love a chai.” The PCA asked, “What kind of Chay?” I responded, “Just plain chai is fine.” The PCA held up a plain Lipton bag to confirm my request. I looked at her, confused. My friend joined in, clarifying that chay is Russian for tea and that her grandmother does not have chai tea. I opted for orange pekoe.

Notice in that exchange how illocutionary determinations seem to float in constant question between all participants until the end, despite several attempts to settle it. The eventual determination arose not from any single speaker or hearer but from a negotiation between interlocutors. In a sense, determination by this account is a matter of where an interlocutory exchange rests. Had the grandmother followed up by clarifying to all that she has chai in the back of the cabinet and actually intended to offer that from the start, a different illocutionary determination of her initial offer—that she thereby offered me chai—would have arisen by that further communication. We can even reason to a third scenario in which she had chai in the cabinet and intended to offer it but decided not to clarify that, thereby tacitly agreeing with the apparent illocutionary determination in the room that she offered chay, not chai.

This cooperative take on the matter is more appealing and cogent than the alternative for a few reasons. First, as noted by McDonald (2021), it satisfies the instinct that a speaker should have greater authority—or at least not less authority—than a hearer over the illocutionary determination of their own locutions. Still, it acknowledges the apparent reality that the ultimate determination is not theirs to make alone. There is additional appeal in noting that this version allows both the speaker and hearer the agency to clarify, correct, or defend their intended action or their interpretation of another’s action. Not only is that more palatable than one party or the other lacking any such control, but it also seems to track our lived experience more faithfully, as evidenced by the real-world example above.

III. Intermediary Hearers and Corruptive Interpretation

If illocutionary determination is a cooperative practice, as described above, then two things seem to be true: 1) hearers play an active role in faithfully interpreting the illocutions of speakers, and 2) hearers can, by engaging unrigorously or maliciously, corrupt that practice and the intended illocution of the speaker, causing the determination of an illocution other than what the speaker explicitly intended. In this section, I will first address (1) as it pertains to the shortcomings I previously touched on in Langton’s argument. I will then put forward (2) as an alternative and more comprehensive explanation for what Langton termed a “misfire” or failure to secure uptake, demonstrating further the role of hearers.

3.1 The “Invisible” Hand of the Intermediary Hearer

Toward the end of section 2.1, I posited that pornographic speech cannot silence women absent an intermediary—i.e., the hearer. And yet, Langton makes no meaningful attempt in her account to interrogate the hearer or their far from passive role in silencing women. This leaves their contributions to the process unaddressed and thus paints a woefully incomplete picture of the relationship between pornographic speech acts and the people—the intermediary hearers—who commit sexual harm against women.

Langton speaks at length about authority as a necessary felicity condition for a hearer’s uptake of speech intended to have exercitive force. When introducing this notion, she acknowledges that a speaker can be understood as having authority over areas of different kinds and sizes, e.g., a state, a family, or one’s own life or body. She employs this notion of authority as a condition that makes possible—though does not guarantee—the exercitive force of pornographic speech. For example, so her argument goes, if men and boys perceive pornographic speechmakers as authorities in the domain of sex, then the anti-feminine content of pornographic speech meets a critical felicity condition permitting those men and boys to take it up as exercitive. Consider this claim in simplified form:

P1: If speakers have authority, then their speech may carry exercitive force.
P2: Pornographers have authority.
C: So, pornographers’ speech may carry exercitive force.

Notably, Langton acknowledges that she will not be examining whether or why pornographic speechmakers are viewed as authoritative, only that they seem to be, and so we should take them as such—perhaps for the sake of the argument.

After some time, Langton returns to the topic of authority qua the authority a woman has over her life and body. We might expect her to take the same course as above and grant that women have authority over their lives and bodies—if not for explicated reasons, then as a reasonable foundation for the argument in line with her earlier conferral of authority on pornographers. Accordingly, if women have authority over their lives and bodies, then it follows that women have met the felicity conditions permitting their speech concerning those domains to carry exercitive force. That is not what Langton argues. Instead, in the case of women, she appears to deny the consequent of the argument simplified above, but something goes askew, as emphasized here (interpreted from p. 58-59):

P1: If speakers have authority, then their speech may carry exercitive force.
P2: Some women’s speech does not carry exercitive force.
C: So, some women do not have authority.

Langton never argued that authoritative speakers’ speech always carries exercitive force, only that it may. As such, it does not necessarily follow that if an instance of speech lacks exercitive force, its speaker must lack authority.

Suppose we grant that women have authority over the domain of their lives and bodies, as Langton grants to pornographers over the domain of sex. So granted, we have two speakers—pornographers and women—both in positions of authority over their given domains. Now, to the focal matter of this section, let us introduce the previously all-but-absent intermediary hearers. These intermediaries hear authoritative speech from pornographers, and they hear authoritative speech from women. Both speechmakers speak with exercitive force, backed by their authority. Suddenly, a new question arises: why do some people decide to heed the authoritative speech of pornographers but not the authoritative speech of women? Or, to put it in terms that are slightly closer to Langton’s argument, why do some people acknowledge the authority of pornographers and ignore the authority of women? After all, it seems reasonable to assume that people who commit sexual harm encounter women and girls before they encounter pornography. Why, then, is it not the case that women silence pornography? Langton neither addresses nor considers this because she does not dutifully interrogate the role of the intermediary hearers as active participants in the process of illocutionary determination.

3.2 Corruptive Illocutionary Interpretation

In section 2.2, I demonstrated that illocutionary determination is best understood as resulting from a joint process between the speaker and the hearer. Having also now located and brought forth the hearer as an intermediary between subordinative pornographic speech acts and women’s declinatory speech acts, we can consider their role as co-determiners in both. Furthermore, we can identify them as complicit contributors to the so-called “misfire” Langton observes in women’s speech.

First, consider the hearer’s active engagement with the pornographic speech act. Suppose the pornographer produces that material with the following intended illocution: I hereby declare that it is permissible to treat women in a subordinative manner. Recall that, illocutionary determination being the result of a joint process, the hearer may, by their engagement with the material, fix a different illocution to the pornographer’s speech: I hereby commit, without shame, a grievous assault against women. Given that the pornographic speech locution is static—in the sense of its being a video or photograph—the pornographer’s contribution to the determinative dialogue with the hearer does not continue beyond the presentation of the material; that is, they are not able to actively defend themselves or sway the hearer toward their intention as in the example of the Russian tea confusion. As such, the remaining power to impact illocutionary determination rests with the hearer alone. Which illocution is achieved seems, at this point, to turn on how the hearer engages with the material.

Now, let us attach the titular corruptive element. Suppose the hearer is not engaging with pornographic material but with a photo advertising a waterpark—commercial speech. The content is of an adult couple wearing conservative swimwear on innertubes in a lazy river. The illocutionary intent of the advertiser who produced the commercial speech is something akin to I hereby invite you to our waterpark. However, recall that the illocutionary determination may shift depending on how the hearer engages with the material. In this case, the hearer finds one of the adults in the advertisement attractive and engages with the material as though it were pornography. To be clear, unlike some advertisements, there was no ambiguity on the part of this advertiser or advertisement as to the intended illocution. Nevertheless, according to the collaborative theory of determination, we are left with the unsavory conclusion that the hearer shifted the illocutionary act toward something wildly different than intended. It seems like something has gone wrong here—this does not seem to reflect the collaborative nature of the theory I presented earlier. This is an example of what I call corruptive illocutionary interpretation. This sort of engagement occurs in real life concerning the corruption of seemingly harmless photos of children into child sex abuse images. I raise it here because it offers a window into what is happening when hearers override women’s declinatory speech acts. It is important to remember that corruptive interpretation can also lead to positive ends, as in the previous paragraph’s example of the hearer refusing to take up the intended subjugative illocution and recognizing the the pornographic speech act as an act of harm instead.

We should pause to take stock of what we have gleaned from the two cases above. First, the intermediary hearers actively participate in determining whether a pornographic speech act subordinates women or betrays the speaker as a person causing harm. Second, intermediary hearers are not constrained to exclusively cooperative negotiations of illocutionary determination but can engage corruptively in the process instead, yielding markedly different determinations from the speaker’s intent. Now, we can consider the intermediary hearer’s active engagement with the woman declining and refusing sex. Both of the observations above apply to that engagement as well. When a woman refuses sexual activity, the hearer is actively participating in determining the illocution just heard. Also, as before, they can participate corruptively by either declining to acknowledge, unrigorously acknowledging, or choosing to ignore the speaker’s intent.

Notably, unlike the pornographic speech material, the woman’s speech is not static. She is an active participant in the dialogue. This is relevant because, in the case of the corrupted images, the speechmaker is not present to clarify their initially intended speech act. In the case of a woman refusing sex, it is reasonable to assert that whether the woman’s response to the initial instance of her illocution being overridden is to fight, fly, freeze, or flop, each of these common responses is a further expression‚ a clarification, of the woman’s initial illocutionary intent. The hearer, by proceeding despite these continued active or passive responses and signals, is engaging not with one single illocutionary act, as with the pornographic materials, but with constant verbal, non-verbal, active, or passive clarifications of the woman’s initial illocutionary intent. Far from a misfire, which suggests that a failure occurred in the woman’s speech, bringing forth these hearers and identifying their capacity to participate corruptively reveals that the failure of the woman’s speech act to obtain as she desired can be attributed instead to active obstruction by the hearer committing the harm.

I began this analysis by inquiring whether a comprehensive understanding of Langton’s claim that pornographic speech silences women could be accomplished without exploring in greater depth the role of the individuals hearing that speech. First, I considered how the determination of illocutionary acts is allocated among speakers and hearers and found that determination results from a joint negotiation between both parties. Upon further examination of Langton’s argument, I located the relevant hearers as inhabiting the intermediary space between two authoritative speakers—women and pornographers. Doing so created space for a new line of questioning as to why these intermediaries would defer to the authority of pornographers over the authority of women, particularly given that their interactions with women can reasonably be argued to precede their interactions with pornographic speech. This peculiarity was heretofore untraceable in Langton’s analysis. Moving ahead, I found that these intermediary hearers are complicit in the determination of pornographic speech as subordinative. Moreover, their agency in the process allows them to corrupt the speaker’s intent and the determinative negotiation overall. This corruptive interpretation is a more thorough and faithful reading of women’s frustrated illocutionary refusals than Langton’s passive and less rigorous take on the matter.

This significant account of the intermediary hearer’s instrumental role in the relationship between pornographic speech acts and sexual harm to women does not rise to the surface of Langton’s argument. By failing to rigorously address the role of those intermediaries who hear the pornographic speech acts and commit harm against women, we risk developing an unbalanced understanding of and reaction to the relevant contributors to gender-based harm. To be clear, I am sympathetic to the overall intention of Langton’s argument. Accordingly, I had no intention here of arguing that we should let subordinative pornography and its producers off the hook. I merely implore a greater focus on the intermediary hearers whose startlingly complicit role was not rigorously considered by Langton. I agree with Langton’s normative political conclusion that subordinative pornography is harmful and should be dealt with as such. I have also found through this analysis the unsurprising conclusion that people who directly ignore the authority women have over their bodies are harmful, and I believe they should be dealt with as such. While developing political and social policy solutions is neither the intent nor the domain of a philosophical inquiry, including this one, I noted at the outset how—like Haslanger and even Langton herself—my intention was to develop and proffer an analysis capable of better explicating these complex dealings for any field to which it is of use.

Ultimately, I have found that if the goal of Langton’s inquiry is to develop a philosophical analysis demonstrating the role that pornographic speech plays in gender-based subordination and silencing, that relationship cannot be fully and faithfully understood without including adequate examination of the role of the intermediary hearer.

Bird, A. (2002). Illocutionary silencing. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 83(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0114.00137

Haslanger, S. (2000). Gender and race: (What) are they? (What) do we want them to be? Noûs/NoûS, 34(1), 31–55. https://doi.org/10.1111/0029-4624.00201

Langton, R. (2009). Speech acts and unspeakable acts. In Oxford University Press eBooks (pp. 25–64). https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199247066.003.0002

McDonald, L. (2021). Reimagining illocutionary force. Philosophical Quarterly, 72(4), 918–939. https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqab063

[1] To benefit the flow of this paper, expect all further mention of the work of Rae Langton to reference Langton (2009).