MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

conclusion 389

he makes concerning performatives drive home what he really thinks

is missing in Austin. The logical point emerges in the specification

of the difference in Austin between illocutionary and perlocutionary

verbs.

Use of the first person pronoun is necessary for the working of

illocution: if there are to be performative intentions and effects, rather

than merely causal ones, there has to be a subject that intends to have

effects in relation to an interlocutor. Cavell illustrates the point by the

verb ‘encourage’ – significantly, the related perlocutionary verbs he

cites are, unlike ‘encourage’, all widely used to characterise effects of

music:

‘Encourage’ may seem to satisfy the illocutionary formula ‘To say “X” is

to X’, hence not to be a perlocutionary verb. But it does not satisfy some-

thing else Austin calls an illocutionary formula: ‘If “X” is illocutionary,

then“IXyouthat...”isEnglish’ (a test that does not always work). I

can’t encourage you that, though I can encourage you to; perhaps that

is illocutionary enough. Then perhaps ‘encourage’ for some reason is in

a halfway region. Yet terms in the semantic range of encourage, such as

hearten, inspire, rouse, embolden, have no tincture of the illocutionary

about them: we cannot say ‘I hearten you’ to hearten you, or ‘I embolden

you’ to embolden you.

(ibid.: 178 )

Any claim about the perlocutionary effect of my utterances therefore

‘has to come primarily from you, not me... In perlocutionary acts, the

“you” comes essentially into the picture’ (ibid.: 179 – 80 ). The conven-

tions which sustain many illocutions are consequently not applicable to

perlocution, because ‘the perlocutionary act is not, as it were, built into

the perlocutionary verb’ (ibid.: 172 ). If it were ‘I would be exercising

some hypnotic or other ray-like power over you, you would have lost your

freedom in responding to my speech’ (ibid.). I could achieve whatever

effect my utterance had built into it, in the way I can succeed in being

married to you if I say the right words in the right circumstances.^12

The sense of perverse domination that is evident in an assertion like

‘I inspire you’ illustrates the point, and makes the ethical aspect of

12 As Peter Dews shows, Austin himself makes many of the same points as Derrida concern-
ing the contingency of the actual functioning of the conventions governing illocutionary
utterances (see Dews 1995 ). Lawrence Kramer ( 1990 ) has illuminating things to say
about music and illocution, but he does not make the decisive point about perlocution
that I develop from Cavell.