4

H OW TO DO THIN G S W I TH
P O RNOGRA PH Y

Nancy Bauer

My title is of course a twist on the one J.L. Austin gave to the series of twelve
William James lectures he delivered at Harvard fifty years ago. And since my
understanding of what is going on in Austin’s lectures both deeply informs what
I am doing in this paper and at the same time is pointedly at odds with the stan-
dard way of taking them, I think it best for me to start with some general
remarks about how I read How to Do Things With Words.1
One way to gesture at my beef with the standard interpretation of Austin’s
lectures is to say that it fails to take seriously his entitling them according to the
conventions of an instruction manual. Ironically, one won’t even be able to
make out the title unless one already knows how to do things with words.
Perhaps you are inclined to take this irony merely as an instance of Austin’s
legendary cleverness. (Let us not forget Sense and Sensibilia, which involves a play
both on Jane Austen’s title and on their homonymous names.)2 But you won’t
take it so lightly if, like me, you are convinced that Austin’s central concern was
precisely to show that his contemporaries in professional philosophy didn’t in fact
know, or perhaps had ironically managed to repress, what they couldn’t fail to
know: namely, that we don’t just say things with our words but also do things
with them. Austin suggested in his lectures that philosophers had led themselves
to focus exclusively on a single aspect of our use of words, namely, the meaning
of sentences, which is to say, given the conception of meaning bequeathed to us
by Frege, their “sense,” understood as the determinant of their truth value. What
philosophers had failed to notice, Austin claimed in his lectures, is the extent –
extremely great indeed, he argued – to which our use of words consists in more
than claim-making: it gets things done. We use language not just to convey sense
and reference, but also to apologize and to promise and to bet and to accuse and
to forgive. To read the philosophy of his day, Austin implied, was to get the
impression that philosophers had lost sight of this basic function of words and
thus literally stood in need of an instruction manual, of being taught, or, better,
re-taught, how to do things with them.
The rebuke that Austin issued to his peers is ordinarily construed quite
narrowly, as though his aspiration were merely to found a new cottage industry
in what was just coming to be called the philosophy of language, the business of

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which would be to construct theories of how people use words – to do “prag-

matics,” as we now call it. On my reading, however, this understanding of
Austin’s legacy turns on an impoverished grasp of his ambitions and achieve-
ments.3 There is no sign in How to Do Things with Words that Austin sees
himself as modestly gesturing toward a smallish expanse of unexplored philo-
sophical territory adjacent to the vast swath that was being colonized by
philosophers of language. To the contrary, there is every indication that he
wishes to challenge the foundational premises of this incipient movement, most
notably the assumption that well-formed sentences (or their parts) invariably
and inherently possess, in some absolute sense, “literal” meanings on which
their linguistic powers stand and fall. This challenge runs very deep – even
deeper, I think, than many of Austin’s admirers and fellow skeptics about the
importance of “literal meaning” are wont to go.4 For Austin’s goal is not to argue
that there is no such thing as literal meaning or to claim that it plays a more
modest role in the workings of language than others had assumed. He does not,
that is, wish to propound some counter-theory. Rather, he is worried about the
very idea that there must be some one thing or other at the heart of language
use, some overarching theory that philosophers can and ought to endorse about
how utterances say and do what they do. In effect, then, Austin is challenging
the coherence and importance of the central project that philosophers of
language understand themselves to be undertaking. He is suggesting that doing
philosophy – getting a productive philosophical grip on how things are with the
world – does not require that we be able to pin down the semantics of natural
language in advance of what Wittgenstein, at least here on the same page as
Austin, calls “looking and seeing.”
On my reading, then, How to Do Things with Words, addressed quite explic-
itly to Austin’s colleagues in professional philosophy during the heyday in
Anglophone circles of the idea that philosophy was all about analyzing
language, audaciously accuses philosophers not just of failing at the enterprise of
understanding how language works but in fact of not knowing the first thing
about it. The philosopher Austin has in mind lacks a sense not just of what
words in general can do, though that is true enough; more specifically, he is
deeply misguided about what he himself is (and perhaps more importantly, is
not) doing with his words. In so far as he sees himself as in the business of
constructing an a priori semantic theory, he reveals himself not to know how to
do things with his own words. The way back to philosophical sense-making will
have to rest on what he already knows, but to his peril has ignored or repressed,
about what words – and, in particular, his words – do.
How to Do Things with Words is not the only expression of Austin’s convic-
tion that much of what passed for philosophy in his day was in fact a kind of
wheel-spinning. Elsewhere, for example, Austin takes aim at the ideas – ideas
that were absolutely central to the philosophy of his day – that (1) our percep-
tions of the world are mediated by mental representations (in Sense and
Sensibilia); (2) ethical theory could not proceed other than by attempting to pin

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down the meanings of terms like “good” and “right” (in “A plea for excuses,”
“Ifs and cans,” and “Three ways of spilling ink”); and (3) knowledge is to be
understood as incorruptibly true belief and therefore, since it is never the case
that our certainty with respect to the truth of a proposition is absolute, cannot
be secured (in “Other minds”). In all of these writings, it is generally agreed,
Austin is commending to our attention not an addition to an established
research program but, at best, a replacement for it – or sometimes, as in the case
of discussion of “the problem of other minds,” a call to abandon it altogether.
Though many people of course find these writings quite uncongenial, no one
misses the radical aspirations that are driving them. And yet, curiously, Words is
routinely taken “straight,” as though here – and only here – Austin was
perfectly content to till the same old philosophical soil and wished merely to
draw attention to some adjacent virgin land.5
The repression that Austin points up in calling his book How to Do Things
with Words thus finds its ironic twin in his inheritors’ collective failure to grasp
the nature of his (and, it follows, their own) enterprise – to discern the serious
note in his clever title. And I am now in a position to say that my twist on that
title is meant to mark what I see as a further repression in this inheritance, one
that concerns the way Austin has been taken up by certain contemporary femi-
nist philosophers who are motivated by sympathy for the idea that the
proliferation of pornography, at least under the current circumstances, consti-
tutes a violation of women’s civil rights. I confess to being dubious about this
understanding of pornography’s powers, but my primary goal here is not to
contest it. Rather, what concerns me is the method these particular inheritors of
Austin are employing. Specifically, I am worried about “using” or “applying”
what are taken to be Austin’s ideas, or slight modifications thereof, in service of
having a philosophical say about pornography. What worries me about this
method is twofold. First, I am convinced that it constitutes a very bad way to do
feminist philosophy – very bad from the point of view of philosophy and, at
least as importantly to me, of feminism. Second, this appropriation of Austin, in
so far as it unquestioningly takes up the standard attenuated reading of How to
Do Things with Words, obscures the various ways in which the book might
genuinely help feminists think about how to combine philosophy with the
furthering of our political aims. The present paper aims to make these two
worries vivid or at least to provoke feminist philosophers to think carefully
about what their words actually say and do.

To grasp why feminist philosophers of a certain stripe have been attracted to his
views, we will of course need to get clear on what specifically Austin, in
remarking on philosophers’ failure to attend to the way words do things, is
accusing his colleagues of overlooking; for he acknowledges early on in Words
that he has a very specific phenomenon in mind. He concedes that some of his
contemporaries had evinced interest, albeit “somewhat indirectly,” in certain

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ways we do things with words, namely the way we use them to express our atti-
tudes or to sway other people to adopt those attitudes.6 These philosophers had
argued that “‘ethical propositions’ are perhaps intended, solely or partly, to
evince emotion or to prescribe conduct or to influence it in special ways.”7 Here,
Austin is alluding to the central tenets of the forms of ethical non-cognitivism
most prominent in his day, namely emotivism, which holds that our moral utter-
ances, while apparently statements with sense and reference, are in fact devoid of
propositional content and instead merely express a speaker’s approval or disap-
proval of one or another view; and prescriptivism, which adds to emotivism’s main
thesis the idea that such utterances also function to exhort the speaker’s auditors
to follow suit. According to prescriptivism, when I say that euthanasia is wrong, I
am not putting forth a proposition about how things are with the world – as I
would be if I were to say, e.g., that whether or not euthanasia is morally permis-
sible is a controversial issue. I am merely giving the (emotivist) thumbs-down to
euthanasia with the (prescriptivist) intention of getting my audience to follow
suit. In How to Do Things with Words Austin evinces virtually no explicit interest
in the expressive powers of speech – that is to say, the dimension that engages
the emotivist. On the other hand, he is directly concerned with the power of
speech to sway an audience, the power that engages the prescriptivist, which
Austin calls its “perlocutionary” force. And yet Austin’s interest in the perlocu-
tionary powers of language is limited For perlocutionary effects – those
consequences that I bring about by (“per”) my locutions – are, he thought, essen-
tially a chance by-product of our utterances: depending on the audience and
perhaps the time or place or other circumstances, the same utterance might
generate very different perlocutions. (I enrage you when I say that euthanasia is
wrong; but I inspire Fred.) Austin was interested not in the way that, at least on
his understanding, words happen to do things – not, that is, in their perlocu-
tionary force – but in the way they inherently do them.8
What the philosophers of Austin’s day had not noticed, what Austin was
trying to highlight, was the extent to which an utterance, delivered under the
right circumstances, in and of itself constitutes a doing of something with words –
regardless of the reactions it produces in its audience. When, for example, I say,
“I forgive you,” I’m not merely putting forth a proposition about the condition of
my soul, nor am I merely expressing my feelings about what you’ve done or trying
to get you to do or think or feel something. I am performing the act of forgiving
you. When I promise you I’ll meet you at five, I’m not just stating my intentions
or expressing my commitment to you or trying to get you to the church on time;
I am, literally, giving you my word. When I say, “I christen this ship the Queen
Elizabeth,” I’m not just announcing the name of the ship or expressing my pride
in it or trying to impress you; I’m christening the ship. Of course, not just any old
utterance of the sentence “I christen this ship the Queen Elizabeth” will actually
count as the act of christening the ship. Certain conditions need to be in place: I
need, for instance, to be the person officially designated to christen the ship, and
my utterance must occur at the right time and in the right place, and I need to

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have a champagne bottle in my hand. Admittedly, some of these conditions are

more vital to the success of my act of christening than others. If I am the captain
of the ship and smash a bottle of sparkling grape juice against its hull, all may be
well; but it certainly won’t be if I simply get it into my head to go down to the
harbor and undertake to name some random ship. Similarly, if I swear I’ll be
there at five and yet lack any intention of meeting you, then my act of
promising, like my ill-conceived christening venture, will be “infelicitous” or
“unhappy,” to invoke Austin’s terms of art.9
A central goal of Austin’s in drawing attention to what he calls the “perfor-
mative” or, later in his lectures, the “illocutionary” power of speech, its
inherent power not just to say but also to do things, is to disrupt philosophers’
fixation on the idea that the only philosophically pertinent measure of our
utterances is their truth value. Once we evaluate what Austin calls “the total
speech act in the total situation” (148), we see that the truth or falsity of an
utterance (or, more precisely, the truth or falsity of the facts presupposed,
implied, entailed by, or otherwise associated with that utterance) is only one
dimension of the utterance’s success or failure. In addition to involving, first,
the issuing of a “locution” with sense and reference, which implies a “truth /
falsehood dimension,” virtually all utterances will at least aim at the execution
of a performative act (“illocution”), which is to be judged according to what
Austin calls a “happiness / unhappiness dimension” (148). (An utterance often
will also involve, third, the evincing and effecting of states of mind and
behavior in ourselves and others; that is, it may have certain “perlocutionary”
effects.) Because our utterances constitute speech acts, the things we say are
not only “heir to [the] kinds of ill which infect all utterances” but also “subject
to [the] unsatisfactoriness to which all actions are subject” (21, my emphases).10
Austin’s intention in making such observations, as he says quite explicitly at
the end of his last lecture, is to produce a “programme” (164) for philosophers,
one that must begin with their abandoning certain fixations and tendencies
toward oversimplification – “which,” he observes, “one might be tempted to call
the occupational disease of philosophers if it were not their occupation” (38).
At the end of Words, in his only example of how this new program might go, he
discusses his contemporaries’ tendency – quite dominant in the philosophy of
the mid-twentieth century – to imagine that moral philosophy must start with a
pinning down of the meaning of the word “good.” Certain influential philoso-
phers had suggested, Austin notes,

that we use it for expressing approval, for commending, or for grading.

But we shall not get really clear about this word “good” and what we
use it to do until, ideally, we have a complete list of those illocutionary
acts of which commending, grading, &c., are isolated specimens – until
we know how many such acts there are and what are their relation-
ships and inter-connections
(163 – 4).

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Here, clearly, Austin is accusing his colleagues of severely undercounting the

number of acts that involve the use of the word “good,” of succumbing to the
occupational temptation to oversimplify things. But how to generate a
“complete list”? I suggested above that here is a place that Austin and
Wittgenstein are in agreement: both think that finding one’s way out of a philo-
sophical dead end requires what Wittgenstein calls “looking and seeing.” (A
crucial difference here is that Wittgenstein never seems to suggest – at least on
my reading of him – that a philosopher can avoid any given dead end once and
for all.)
But what does “looking and seeing” involve? Is it empirical work? Well, do I
have to investigate how we use a word such as “good”? Do I have to leave the
proverbial study and concretely observe the way that other people talk? Or am I
to stay in my study and proceed abstractly, by way of the logical analysis of
concepts? Tellingly, Austin rejected both of these paths. His favorite method for
generating his lists of things that words do was to sit around a table with
students and colleagues, and float proposals. The authority of the lists generated
during these sessions – of, for example, the various categories of illocutions he
details at the end of Words – was therefore to rest neither on observations of
other people talking nor on the inexorability of abstract logical thinking but on
Austin’s own experience as a user of English words – his own ear – as tested
against other people’s experience (and ears). In rebuking his fellow philosophers
for not knowing how to do things with words, then, Austin was in effect
accusing them of avoiding their own experience. This avoidance for Austin
amounted to a failure on the part of his colleagues to recognize the locus of their
authority as philosophers – that is to say, the authority required to speak in the
voice of the universal, to make claims about how things, in general, are. Their
commitment to the idées fixes that were preventing them from noticing how
words do things were also, therefore, blinding philosophers to the ways in which
their own words were idling. How to Do Things with Words is therefore to be read
as a plea for philosophers to pay heed not only to what people in general do
with words but also to what they themselves are – or are not – doing with them.

As it turns out, Austin would live to see very little of the response to this plea.
He died in 1960, just a few years after he delivered the lectures that constitute
How to Do Things with Words and before the lectures were published as a book.
Given the unlikely places in which appeals to this work have surfaced in the
mean time, I suspect that Austin long ago stopped turning over in his grave.
Surely he did not anticipate that his lectures would come to preoccupy the likes
of Jacques Derrida and the legions of deconstructionist literary theorists capti-
vated by Derrida’s views or to provide a centerpiece notion (that of
“performativity”) for the Foucaultian thinking that has led to the development
of university departments of Queer Studies. More controversially, I would like
to imagine that Austin might have been, if not surprised, then troubled by the

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interpretation and appropriation of his work that has gained ascendancy among
his fellow analytic philosophers, an inheritance epitomized in the work of John
Searle and others who understand themselves to be working on “pragmatics” in
the philosophy of language.11 By now, in any event, one can hardly imagine a
use of How to Do Things with Words that would be shocking enough to disturb
Austin in his eternal slumber. (As he himself says at the end of his BBC lecture
on performative utterances, “life and truth and things do tend to be compli-
cated.”)12
Given the colorful history of the reception of How to Do Things with Words,
we perhaps ought not be surprised to learn of a movement within analytic femi-
nist philosophy of the last decade whose aim is to show how Austin’s work
might be deployed to bring pornography out from under the protective wing of
free-speech law. The argument is advanced most powerfully and carefully in a
number of papers authored by the philosophers Rae Langton and Jennifer
Hornsby, who have achieved the (alas) still unusual feat of garnering respect for
both their “mainstream” philosophical writing as well as their explicitly feminist
work on pornography.13 Langton and Hornsby start with the fact that in many
progressive societies – most notably the United States – the production and use
of pornography is protected on the grounds that curtailing its traffic would
constitute a violation of a right to free speech.14 The rationale for this protec-
tion turns on the assumption that pornography, like all speech in the legal sense
of the term, is (mere) expression: it advances a certain opinion or point of view.
But – and here’s where Austin comes in – it’s a mistake, Langton and Hornsby
warn, to assume that a piece of speech is invariably just an expression. What
How to Do Things with Words shows us is that speech is often performative (or
“illocutionary”), that it often accomplishes certain things in and of itself, that
ordinarily to speak is to act. Admittedly, certain conditions must be in place for
any speech-act to come off – to be “felicitous” or “happy,” in Austin’s argot; and
the case of pornography is no exception. But if we can specify these conditions
and establish the plausibility of the claim that they’re in place in contemporary
culture, then we can show that pornography does not merely express a certain
set of opinions but in fact acts both to subordinate women and to silence them.
And in so far as it inherently and differentially harms women, pornography
constitutes a kind of sex discrimination and thus ought at least in principle to
be actionable.
My discussion of this argument will focus on two of its features. First, there is
a question about whether pornography has the authority that Langton and
Hornsby claim it must have in order to do what they say it does – for example
to subordinate women by ranking them as sex objects.15 Of course, as Langton
and Hornsby readily concede, individuals rank people all the time without
materially subordinating anyone. For subordination to occur, the issuers of what
Austin at the end of his lectures (153 – 5) calls “verdictive” speech must have
the right sort of authority in, of course, the right sort of circumstances. (Indeed,
though Austin doesn’t quite say so, the power of a verdict will often depend

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heavily on the authority of an utterer.) But it’s very difficult to say what sort of
“authority” pornography could possess apart from an account of what authority,
and especially the kind of authority that’s not ceremonially invested in a person
or group, is or could be. It’s clear enough that the United States Supreme Court
has the authority to strike down a law that a majority of its members deem
unconstitutional. But it’s certainly not obvious what it would mean for pornog-
raphy or its producers or purveyors or consumers to enjoy authority in a culture
at large. We cannot even count on agreement about what pornography is,
although of course that might just indicate where we need to start in thinking
through any question about its authority.
My second concern in this paper will be with an assumption that runs
throughout the literature on this subject, namely, the assumption that pornog-
raphy is speech. To get my worry on the table, let me quote the first paragraph
of “Speech acts and unspeakable acts,” Langton’s most influential article on
pornography and Austin:

Pornography is speech. So the courts declared in judging it protected

by the First Amendment. Pornography is a kind of act. So [the well-
known feminist legal scholar and anti-porn crusader] Catharine
MacKinnon declared in arguing for laws against it. Put these together
and we have: pornography is a kind of speech act
(“Speech Acts,” p. 293).

But why should we put these two things together? A great deal of pornography is
not speech, except in the legal sense of the word. Much pornography consists in
photographs, still or pixelated, of actual human beings on display before a
camera. If we are going to talk about the performative effects of pornography,
then, we will need to know something about what Stanley Cavell, following
André Bazin, has called the ontology of photography and film.16 It’s of course
quite central to what Austin is doing in his lectures that, as the title indicates,
he’s talking about how to do things with words. And this is true even though, as
Austin explicitly observes (119), we can achieve both illocutionary and
perlocutionary acts non-verbally, as when we throw a tomato in protest (that
would be the illocutionary act) and humiliate our speaker (the perlocutionary
act). So in drawing attention to the fact that Austin is talking about the
phenomenon of human speech, I am not denying that pornography might have
both illocutionary and perlocutionary force. Rather, I am wondering how
photography and film do the things they do. To elide the legal and ordinary
senses of “speech” seems to me to occlude this issue from the start.17 Austin
stresses in his lectures that “there cannot be an illocutionary act unless the
means employed are conventional” (119). If he is right, then in order to deter-
mine what illocutionary act a photograph or film might perform, we need to
think about whether these media really are governed by conventions and, if so,
what they are. And even if “convention” need not play a role in the perfor-

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mance of every successful illocutionary act, as Hornsby, for one, thinks it need
not, we still have an open question about how the media of photography and
film play on our sensibilities – how they achieve the effects they achieve, and
how we understand the role of the picture taker or director (or purveyor of
pornography or consumer of it) in the achievement of these effects.18 This is to
say that the question of authority, or authorship, will be pertinent here as well. I
will not make much headway on these issues in this paper. My goal is simply to
get them on the table.

Why are Langton, Hornsby, and others as invested as they are in the specific
project of using Austin to try to argue that pornography constitutes a form of
sex discrimination? An understanding of their motivations will begin to emerge
from a brief look at a signal instance in the history of the feminist anti-pornog-
raphy movement.
In 1984, the city of Indianapolis attempted to enact an ordinance making
the traffic in pornography civilly actionable. At the heart of the ordinance,
authored for Indianapolis by Catharine MacKinnon and fellow anti-porn
activist Andrea Dworkin, was the claim that “pornography is a systematic prac-
tice of exploitation and subordination based on sex which differentially harms
women.”19 Without much ado, the ordinance was struck down by a district court
on the grounds that, in the words in which Circuit Court Judge Easterbrook
affirmed the lower court’s ruling, “the ordinance regulates speech rather than
the conduct involved in making pornography.”20 And of course the regulation of
“speech” – or more specifically, of human beings’ attempts to express their opin-
ions – is prohibited by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
But, oddly, Judge Easterbrook at the same time explicitly agreed in this land-
mark decision, American Booksellers Association, Inc. et al. vs. Hudnut, that
pornography is in fact a practice of exploitation and subordination. How, then,
could he justify the idea that it is protected speech as opposed to harmful, and
therefore actionable, conduct?
Perhaps Judge Easterbrook did not fully realize what he was doing in
endorsing MacKinnon’s understanding of pornography as a kind of practice.
Indeed, a lower-court judge accused MacKinnon of lodging her claim that
pornography might not just cause subordination but actually be a kind of subor-
dination via “a certain sleight of hand.”21 The trickery would consist in
MacKinnon’s failure to flag an equivocation in her implicit characterization of,
if you will, the ontological status of pornography. This characterization is
expressed in three claims at the beginning of the ordinance, all of which
Easterbrook seconds in Hudnut:

1 Pornography is a discriminatory practice based on sex which denies women

equal opportunities in society.

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2 Pornography is central in creating and maintaining sex as a basis for

discrimination.
3 Pornography is a systematic practice of exploitation and subordination
based on sex which differentially harms women (In Harm’s Way, p. 439).

Claims one and three both say that pornography is a practice – of discrimina-
tion, of exploitation, and of subordination. If these claims are correct, then as a
practice pornography is a form of sexism, just as discrimination, exploitation, or
subordination on the basis of someone’s skin color constitutes a form of racism.
Claim two, on the other hand, is a claim not about what pornography is but
about what it causes: namely, the use of sex “as a basis for discrimination.” And,
from a legal point of view at least, this looks to be a very different sort of claim,
a claim about what a reader of Austin might be tempted to call pornography’s
perlocutionary effects. For if pornography (merely) causes sex discrimination,
then, plausibly, it’s (merely) a form of (legal) speech, albeit, perhaps, an
extremely powerful one, as Judge Easterbrook – who fails to see any difference
in status between claim two and claims one and three – opines:

We accept the premises of this legislation. Depictions of subordination

tend to perpetuate subordination. The subordinate status of women in
turn leads to affront and lower pay at work, insult and injury at home,
battery and rape on the streets. In the language of the legislature,
“pornography is central in creating and maintaining sex as a basis of
discrimination. Pornography is a systematic practice of exploitation
and subordination based on sex which differentially harms women.
The bigotry and contempt it produces, with the acts of aggression it
fosters, harm women’s opportunities for equality and rights [of all
kinds].” (Indianapolis Code §16 – 1(a)(2).) Yet this simply demon-
strates the power of pornography as speech. All of these unhappy
effects depend on mental intermediation
(Hudnut, section III).

Though Easterbrook explicitly identifies pornography as a “systematic practice

of exploitation and subordination based on sex which differentially harms
women,” he in the same breath insists that pornography is ultimately to be
characterized as “speech,” that is, as a phenomenon whose “unhappy effects
depend on mental intermediation.” In Easterbrook’s opinion, pornography, no
matter how systematic its discriminatory effects, cannot be said to discriminate
against women in and of itself and therefore must count, legally at least, as a
protected form of expression.
Call this the “liberal” view of pornography. Not only is this liberal view
encoded in American law, but it also has been vigorously defended by famous
liberal philosophers, including, perhaps most influentially, Thomas Nagel and
Ronald Dworkin.22 The view is sometimes seen as having its roots in the second

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chapter of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, “Of the liberty of thought and discus-
sion,” in which Mill is taken to have argued that what tends in the liberal
literature to get called the “free marketplace of ideas” is essential to the flour-
ishing of humanity. Mill’s arguments in this chapter are pretty much
unabashedly utilitarian: he champions free speech – and thought – on the
grounds that encouraging people to think and say what’s on their minds is the
only way that the ideas most beneficial to humankind – that is to say, the
truthful ones – will come to the fore.23 But in their discussions of pornography,
both Nagel and Dworkin are careful not to endorse any utilitarian rationale,
since they are of the same mind in judging that the proliferation of pornography
is highly unlikely to bring about a better world. Indeed, for the sake of argu-
ment, Dworkin assumes that it will bring about a worse world. Nonetheless, he,
like Nagel, argues that curtailing pornography would violate our human (and
not just legal) rights.
Dworkin claims that human beings have what he calls a “right to moral inde-
pendence,” the right

not to suffer disadvantage in the distribution of social goods and oppor-

tunities, including disadvantage in the liberties permitted to them by
the criminal law, just on the ground that their officials or fellow-citi-
zens think that their opinions about the right way for them to lead
their own lives are ignoble or wrong (“Pornography,” p. 353).

The legal right to free speech is a guarantor, then, of a moral right, if I can put
the idea that way, to a certain lack of interference in one’s private life. And
Nagel argues that anti-pornography activists dangerously conflate the sphere of
privacy with the sphere of what he calls “public space” and do so, he speculates
(and so does Dworkin (“Pornography,” p. 356)), because they find other
people’s sexual fantasies abhorrent (see Nagel’s “Personal rights,” pp. 104ff.).
Both Nagel and Dworkin suspect that those who would exempt pornography
from protection by free-speech laws are motivated by a revulsion for sexual
fantasy – their own and others’ – which interferes with their ability to acknowl-
edge the line that any decent theory of human rights draws between the private
and public spheres.
The liberal stance epitomized in the writings of Nagel and Dworkin is tailor-
made to contest the view that the problem with pornography is that it’s indecent
speech, a view that has in fact been codified in US laws allowing communities
to restrict public displays of what they deem “obscene.”24 To label pornography
“obscene” is to suggest that it offends decent sensibilities to such a degree that
curtailing its expression at least on the local level is legally tolerable. Now,
according to the liberal view, any right you have not to be offended by what
turns me on is going to be dwarfed by my right to privacy (figured, if you like, as
what Dworkin calls “moral independence”). But the liberal argument doesn’t
touch the likes of MacKinnon, at least not on this particular ground. For

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MacKinnon deplores the idea that what’s wrong with pornography is that it’s
obscene; indeed, she finds this idea as odious as the phenomenon of pornog-
raphy itself. The “obscenity” claim, according to MacKinnon, both reinforces
the view that pornography is a kind of expression, so that its only badness could
be its giving of a kind of offense (that is to say, to invoke the Austinian termi-
nology, its having a certain perlocutionary effect), and diverts us from noticing
that pornography is a discriminatory practice that differentially harms women.25 It
follows from MacKinnon’s position that fighting pornography on obscenity
grounds is a self-defeating way for feminists to proceed, since the very idea that
pornography is obscene reinforces precisely the fundamental liberal claim that
feminists ought to contest, namely, that it is at heart merely expressive speech.
Even if the obscenity objection were to result in a reduction in the traffic in
pornography, its grounds, MacKinnon insists, are intolerable from a feminist
point of view.
Like many anti-pornography feminists of a certain stripe, MacKinnon is
inclined to endorse instead a strategy that fits with her second claim in the
Indianapolis ordinance about pornography’s harms, the claim that “pornography
is central in creating and maintaining sex as a basis for discrimination.” This
strategy is to adduce scientific evidence that men’s use of pornography causes
them to harm women in various ways, from viewing them with contempt and
disrespect (and thereby, perhaps, not taking them seriously as workers or
thinkers or human beings) to, some argue, raping or otherwise physically
harming them. The most famous experiments designed to support this point
were conducted some years ago by Edward Donnerstein, a psychologist whose
work is invoked frequently in the feminist anti-pornography literature.
Donnerstein and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments in which they
measured men’s reactions – both verbal and, as it were, penile – to violent
pornographic images. They found an association between men’s pornography-
related arousal levels and their sensitivity, or lack thereof, to violence against
women; and they concluded from this data that some men who consume
pornography may be more likely than other men to hurt women.26 Notoriously,
this rather weak conclusion entails a number of controversial assumptions, for
example that men’s use of pornography must be a cause of their desires and atti-
tudes, rather than a symptom of them. Still, a very charitable reading of
Donnerstein’s conclusions might support the view that pornography causes some
men to harm some women.
But that conclusion is not strong enough to undergird MacKinnon’s under-
standing of pornography as a discriminatory practice that harms women. It is
not enough, in particular, to defeat the liberal view of pornography as protected
speech. In other words, MacKinnon’s second claim, about the harms pornog-
raphy causes, is bound to be trumped by the liberal argument against controlling
the traffic in pornography. What needs to be shown, in order for MacKinnon to
prevail, is how to make sense of the central idea in claims one and three of the
Indianapolis ordinance: the idea that a bunch of magazines and films and books

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could constitute, in and of themselves and regardless of what effects they

happen to produce, a subordinating and exploitative practice of discrimination
against women. This is where Langton and Hornsby enter the picture.

Let us now examine more carefully Langton’s argument in support of what I

will henceforth call the subordination claim, the claim that pornography can be
seen as having “the illocutionary form of subordination” (“Speech acts,” p.
313). Langton’s proposal is that we recognize pornography, in Austinian terms,
as (1) verdictive speech that “ranks women as sex objects” and (2) exercitive
speech that “legitimates sexual violence” against them (“Speech acts,” pp.
307{–}8).27
Verdictives, Austin says, are “judicial acts” as opposed to “executive acts”;
they are judgments about how things are that are based on evidence, rather than
opinions about how things should be that are based on preferences.28 Two of
Austin’s examples of verdictives are an umpire’s ruling whether a ball is out of
bounds and a jury’s finding an accused party guilty or innocent – though, as
Austin notes, a successful verdictive can be issued in an unofficial context, too;
he lists “reckon” and “calculate” as examples. In addition to their force as judg-
ments, Austin observes, “verdictives have obvious connexions with truth and
falsity, soundness and unsoundness and fairness and unfairness.” For of course
“the content of a verdict is true or false”: there is a fact of the matter about
whether the ball was fair or foul or whether the defendant committed the crime
or not. And yet, as Austin explicitly recognizes, verdictives, “as official acts,”
have the power to “make law” regardless of whether their content is true;
hence, their “connexions” with fairness and soundness. “A jury’s finding makes
a convicted felon” even if the judgment that the accused is guilty is wrong,
unfair, and unsound.
In her argument that pornography performs the verdictive act of ranking
women as inferior to men, Langton is particularly interested in the implications
of Austin’s observation that an “official” verdictive can, if I can put the matter
this way, substitute a faulty judgment for a fact of the matter – can make it the
case that the batter is “out” even if she in fact beat the ball to the bag.29 Though
she does not quite say so explicitly, Langton wants to focus our attention on
cases in which the authority of a verdictive-issuing judge is not patent. When it
comes to ball games and murder trials, and other such public events, the fact of
a verdict’s having been issued is obvious and the truth of the verdict’s content is
therefore subject to debate, at least in principle. But when the power invested
in the judge is not ceremonial, the possibility of mistake, unfairness, injustice,
or other forms of unhappiness may not be salient. The judgment and the fact of
the matter may become hopelessly conflated, in which case the verdictive will
have created the reality that the judge purports merely to describe. The teacher
tells Johnny that he is a failure and so, in his own mind, he becomes one (and,

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of course, the teacher’s judgment may then become a self-fulfilling prophecy).

The evangelist declares that homosexuality is an abomination, and so, in the
minds of his parishioners, it is. And, under the right circumstances, Langton
argues, pornography’s ranking of women as inferior to men, as mere sex objects
as opposed to genuine human subjects, might be precisely what makes it the
case that women are subordinate to men. By “the right circumstances,” Langton
seems to imply, she means simply that the recipients of the verdictive take the
judgment of its issuer to be (1) authoritative, which means, more specifically,
that (2) he is regarded as a reliable judge who (3) thereby induces the relevant
people to conform to the picture of the world of which the verdict, if I may put
it this way, is a snapshot. So in so far as pornography’s picture of the way things
are is authoritative in this sense, it might actually construct women as the
second sex.
Langton offers us a very similar story about the second way in which she
thinks pornography plausibly subordinates women, namely, by functioning as
“exercitive speech that legitimates sexual violence.”30 Here is what Austin has to
say in How to Do Things with Words about exercitives, which, he notes, consti-
tute “a very wide class”:

An exercitive is the giving of a decision in favour of or against a

certain course of action, or advocacy of it. It is a decision that some-
thing is to be so, as distinct from a judgement that it is so: it is
advocacy that it should be so, as opposed to an estimate that it is so; it
is an award as opposed to an assessment; it is a sentence as opposed to a
verdict
(p. 155).

In this passage Austin implies, congenially enough for Langton, that an exerci-
tive, when used by an authoritative person under the right circumstances, has
the power to make the content of the utterer’s judgment a reality. “Annul” is an
exercitive verb, as are “veto” and “repeal.” Notice that all of these examples
(unlike, say, the examples “entreat” or “recommend”) are typically associated
with conventional procedures, and all can be felicitously used only in conjunc-
tion with the right kind of authority, ordinarily that of the state. Although
Austin does not include Langton’s “legitimate” in his examples, it seems to fit
the bill: to legitimate some practice, say, does indeed seem to constitute “a deci-
sion that something should be so.” To my ears, “legitimate,” while perhaps not
as solidly associated with conventional procedures and civil authority as an
exercitive like “veto,” nonetheless seems to require that the party doing the
legitimating cannot just be any old person: she or he must command a certain
authority. To legitimate a practice, one must have the power to make that prac-
tice come to be, or rather come to be taken as, legitimate. I draw attention to
the distinction here only to make explicit the obvious fact that an authority’s
declaring something to be legitimate does not automatically make it legitimate,

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in the sense that it would be if it were just or reasonable. Langton of course

concurs: indeed, her argument implicitly rests on the claim that the pornogra-
pher’s legitimation of violence against women is unjust and unreasonable, to say
the least. What Langton needs in appealing to the idea that pornography is
exercitive speech that legitimates violence against women is only the idea that
an authority’s legitimating of a practice provides its practitioners with an offi-
cial, conventionally recognized justification for their action, should they find
themselves in need of one.
So much, at least for now, for the two faces of the subordination claim. Let us
turn to the second claim advanced by MacKinnon and analyzed separately and
in slightly different ways by both Langton and Hornsby: that pornography has
the illocutionary force of silencing women. The idea is that in addition to legiti-
mating violence against women pornography performs a second exercitive
function, that of depriving women of the background conditions that must be in
place in order for their voices to be heard. Langton calls this silencing “illocu-
tionary disablement.”31 It occurs when someone can utter the words she wishes to
utter but is doomed to fail to do what she wishes to do in uttering them. A man
says “I do” during a marriage ceremony; but his partner is also a man and so he
fails to marry.32 An actor trying to alert another character on stage to a pretend
fire suddenly spots an actual fire in the back of the theater; he yells “fire!” but
the audience takes this as more dialogue and so he fails to warn. Linda Lovelace,
the star of the notorious Deep Throat, writes a book, called Ordeal, about her
horrendous experiences making the film; but the book is routinely marketed as
pornography, and so she fails to protest. A woman wishing to repel the sexual
advances of a man says “No!” but, because pornography has made it the case that
men hear this “no” as a “yes,” she fails to refuse.33
Before I discuss this last and, for Langton and Hornsby, most pertinent
example in depth, let me draw attention to an important feature of the
silencing claim, which is that it does not say that pornography has the perlocu-
tionary effect of causing women not to speak – though of course one could argue
that, in addition to silencing women in the way Langton and Hornsby think it
might, pornography causes women to feel intimidated about uttering the words
they are inclined to say. The claim at stake here, though, is that pornography
silences women at the level not of their locutions but of their illocutions: it
makes it the case that some of the illocutionary acts that women attempt to
perform are overwhelmingly likely to misfire. Pornography, according to the
silencing claim, denies women a reasonable chance of being able to make their
auditors understand the force of certain of their utterances and thus to achieve
certain acts – notably, the act of refusing sex. It makes it impossible, to put the
point in the Austinian terms that Langton finds congenial, for certain of
women’s utterances to obtain “uptake.”34 Take the case, now, of a woman who
wishes to refuse sex with a man. Except under unusual circumstances, she will of
course be able to say “no” or its equivalent – to attempt to refuse the man.
However, the argument goes, if the man is conditioned not to recognize the

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woman’s words as an attempt at refusal, then she will be unable to refuse. And
it’s plausibly the case, according to supporters of the silencing claim, that
pornography teaches men that, for example, to cite Hornsby’s words, “women
who do not behave with especial modesty or dress with especial circumspection
are ready and willing to gratify men’s sexual urges, but will feign unwillingness,
whether through a pretended decency, or through a desire to excite.”35
More specifically, according to Hornsby, pornography might “create a
presumption of [a] woman’s being insincere.”36 In a discussion of how pornography
could be seen to produce women’s illocutionary disablement by conditioning
men in a certain way, Langton and a co-author, Caroline West, try to understand
exactly how the creation of such a presumption might come about. For, certainly,
pornography does not proffer a verbal argument that when a woman says “no” she
is in fact not refusing sex. Indeed, if it were to offer such an argument, we would
have more reason to construe it as what the law calls “speech” than we have if it
determines men’s attitudes by a process of psychological conditioning.37 To see
how this conditioning happens, how certain presumptions get into men’s heads,
Langton and West ask us to consider a pictorial spread from Hustler magazine,
the first photograph of which depicts a waitress being pinched by a male pool
player “while his companions look on with approval.”38 The captions accompa-
nying the spread reportedly read as follows:

Though she pretends to ignore them, these men know when they see
an easy lay. She is thrown on the felt table, and one manly hand after
another probes her private areas. Completely vulnerable, she feels one
after another enter her fiercely. As the three violators explode in a
shower of climaxes, she comes to a shuddering orgasm.

Here, Langton and West observe, we have a case (a typical case, we might note)
in which a woman is not represented as explicitly refusing sex – as saying “no.”
And yet, they argue, the most natural and obvious way of making sense of what
is going on in the pictorial requires that one presuppose that

the female waitress says “no” when she really means “yes”; that, despite
her protestations to the contrary, she wanted to be raped and domi-
nated all along; that she was there as an object for the men’s sexual
gratification; that raping a woman is sexy and erotic for men and
women alike
(“Scorekeeping,” p. 311).

Langton and West want the concept presupposition here because it allows them
to understand the pictorial in terms proposed by David Lewis in his influential
paper “Scorekeeping in a language game” (1979).39 Lewis is interested in the
way that certain things we don’t say routinely come to play an important role in
conversation. For example, suppose we are talking about the difficulty of an

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exam and I remark that “even Jane could pass.” Even though I don’t say that
Jane is incompetent, my remark introduces into the conversation the presuppo-
sition that Jane is incompetent. According to Lewis conversation tends to be
governed by a “rule of accommodation” that allows a presupposition like “Jane
is incompetent” to be tacitly introduced and then, as long as no one explicitly
challenges it, to exercise an influence over what can and cannot properly be
said thereafter. Lewis urges us to think of the tacit introduction of presupposi-
tions into a conversation as a kind of “move” in a rule-governed “language
game,” a move that changes the “score” of the game. If none of my interlocutors
challenges my remark about Jane, then the presupposition that Jane is incompe-
tent is, to quote Langton and West’s way of putting the matter, “immediately
established as part of the score” of the language game and thereby makes it the
case that saying “even Jane could pass” counts as a correct move in that game.40
Moreover, this change of score may license, for example, the making of jokes at
Jane’s expense, further disparaging of her talents, and so on (see “Scorekeeping,”
p. 310). Even more insidiously, Langton and West argue, because presupposi-
tions are often implicit, they are less salient than explicit claims, hence more
difficult to challenge, hence more unlikely to be challenged than overt attempts
to change the conversational score.
With this picture in place, one can understand pornography as implicitly
establishing rules in the various “language games of sex” by introducing presup-
positions into these games – presuppositions that, because they are tacit, are
more likely to go unchallenged than if they were explicit. Because the introduc-
tion of these presuppositions by and large in fact goes unchallenged, certain
utterances in the language games of sex have come to be seen as counting as
correct moves in those games. This is how a pornographic photo spread like the
one from Hustler has come to change the score of the language games of sex,
despite its not making an explicit claim that that a woman’s “no” should not
count as an act of refusal. For by successfully introducing into the conversation,
as it were, the tacit presupposition that a woman’s “no” does not constitute an
act of refusal, Hustler, along with other such pornographic speech, has made it
the case that the rule “do not take her ‘no’ as an attempt at the illocutionary act
of refusal” comes to govern what does and does not count as a correct response
to a woman’s “no” – has made it the case that men are, according to the rules of
this particular language game, right not to take a woman’s “no” as an act of
refusal.41 In so far as pornographic speech sets up the rules in the language games
of sex in this sort of way, Langton observes, it constitutes a particularly powerful
kind of speech, namely, “speech that determines the kind of speech there can
be” (“Speech acts,” p. 326). And in so far as pornographic speech has this deter-
mining power, it will be able to disable women’s attempts at refusal, to silence
them at the level of their attempted illocutions.
What Langton and West are arguing, then, is that the presuppositions that
pornography introduces into our cultural conversation about sex go unchal-
lenged not just because they are insidiously tacit but because pornography has

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the authority to determine, via its own illocutionary acts, what sex is in the
culture. Langton is fully aware of the pivotal role that this claim about pornog-
raphy’s authority plays in her arguments. In “Speech acts and unspeakable acts,”
for example, she writes as follows:

If pornography sets up the rules in the language games of sex – if

pornography is speech that determines the kind of speech there can
be – then it is exercitive speech in Austin’s sense, for it is in the class
of speech that confers and removes rights and powers. We saw that the
claim that pornography subordinates requires the premise that pornog-
raphy is authoritative speech, otherwise it could not rank and
legitimate. We can now see that the claim that pornography silences
requires the same premise: pornographic speech must be authoritative
if it is to engender the silence of illocutionary disablement
(“Speech acts,” p. 326).

The question now becomes: what is the nature of the authority that porno-
graphic speech must enjoy in order to subordinate and silence women?

The answer to this question is not at all obvious. Even if we feel morally certain
that pornography is a thoroughly pernicious influence in the culture, we may
well have difficulty cashing out this influence in terms of the notion of
authority. For since pornography is not formally invested with whatever illocu-
tionary power it has, we need to think about exactly how it might possess the
authority to subordinate or silence women. This, it is important to me to note,
is something that Austin’s anti-pornography appropriators simply do not do.
They simply claim that “it may be that pornography has all the authority of a
monopoly” for “hearers who . . . do seem to learn that violence is sexy and coer-
cion legitimate.”42 My impatience with this claim stems not from a sense of its
implausibility or any dearth of evidence – I have no problem with the strategy
of putting empirical questions on the back burner – but from its resolute avoid-
ance of the question of what authority might come to in this instance.
Ironically, at this crucial juncture in the appropriation of Austin we find a
profoundly un-Austinian moment. Austin’s procedures are everywhere and
always characterized by dogged attention to the terms in which we are inclined
to express ourselves, by a sense of the fatefulness of how we count things and
how they count for us. If pornography’s illocutionary powers rest on its
authority, then we cannot hope to understand these powers absent reflection on
what we have in mind in recurring to the word “authority.”
What form might pornography’s authority take? Langton’s claim that pornog-
raphy (plausibly) has the power to legitimate violence against women suggests

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that perhaps what is at stake is a kind of authorization, a granting of permission to

men to hurt women who appear to be refusing sex. (Notice that “authorizing” is a
kind of illocutionary act.) Consider a certain type of adolescent boy cruising the
Internet who comes upon some explicit photographs of naked men, presented in
an explicitly affirmative context. It does seem to me that this boy’s sense of
relief – or of belonging, or of finding a concept for his longing, or of increased
longing – might be construed as something that the site he is gazing at is autho-
rizing. Note that “authorize” in this context would mean that the boy would
understand himself to have reason to think that his feelings, of whatever kind, are
shared by others and, hence, not inhuman. To put the point in a slightly different
way, the boy would perhaps experience the fact of the existence of others like
himself as permission to see himself as something other than completely – and
disturbingly – sui generis. This feeling of authorization is likely to be even more
intense for Internet surfers who have extremely unusual sexual desires. Indeed,
there are countless websites devoted to people who are sexually aroused by
blowing up balloons (for some, to the point of popping; for others, just before the
popping point); by pretending that they have an amputated digit or limb; by
expressing physical love for dolphins; by watching people in high heels step on
bugs; and by having other people feed them to the point of gross obesity.43
But of course it is a very different question whether a website could possibly
justify our dolphin-lover in his practices. True, a website might provide informa-
tion about the formal permissibility in a given domain of sexual encounters with
dolphins and so in that way reveal that certain types of human activities with
dolphins are or are not (legally) authorized. But could a website give the
dolphin-lover reason to construe his behavior and attitudes as authorized in
some absolute, context-less sense? “Authorized” here would have to mean some-
thing like: absolving the dolphin-lover of responsibility for his fetish. But what
or who in a culture has such powers of absolution überhaupt, that is to say, apart
from the faith that individuals place in it or him or her?
Perhaps, though, these fetish cases are misleading. Perhaps we should be
considering pornography that purveys and reinforces conventional discrimina-
tory constructions of what it is to be a woman, pornography that portrays
women as essentially sex-hungry beings who love penetration in all forms and
who live to provoke men to orgasm. The authoritative force of such pornog-
raphy, one might argue, comes from the sheer ubiquity of it: when men (and
women) live in a conventionally pornographic world, when they are told over
and over again that this is what women are like, then they will participate in
the subordinating and silencing of women almost involuntarily. Consider the
boy who searches the Internet for heterosexual porn and then (I mean subse-
quently, not, or not necessarily, consequently) presses sex on his girlfriend.
Suppose that the boy has discovered and pored over lots of photographs of men
forcing sex on resistant women. In this case, unlike that of the latently gay
young man, we are not inclined to imagine the boy as experiencing an autho-
rization of what he took to be his idiosyncratic desire to deny the humanity of

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his girlfriend. But this is because it is hard to imagine that the boy ever felt
alone in conceptualizing women as mere sexual commodities, as bodies that are
there for the taking. Unless one never sees magazine covers or billboards or
watches TV or goes shopping for clothes, one cannot help but learn that huge
numbers of people conceptualize women that way. So the boy who claims to feel
authorized by pornography to conceptualize his girlfriend as a sexual object is
being grossly disingenuous. There is nothing in the case to be authorized: the
idea that women are essentially sexual objects for men, along with the idea that
the happiest and most womanly women embrace this status, is ubiquitously
accepted in our culture.
Still, imagine that the boy who assaults his girlfriend attempts to excuse
himself by claiming that he did so because a pornographic website authorized
the act. What are we to say? That, given our society’s essentially pornographic
outlook on women, the boy was in fact authorized by the website to assault her?
But then we would have to accept his excuse. What we want to say is that
nothing could authorize what he has done. This is not just because what he has
done is horrific. It’s not even just because, at the end of the day, we are loathe
to absolve rapists of their crimes on the grounds that our society is insidiously or
even explicitly rape-friendly. It’s because no person or institution that is not
formally invested with the authority has such authority apart from individuals’
granting it to them – because we understand adult human beings as bearing
responsibility for the way they see the world. We understand them this way
because we wish to attribute to them the power to think for themselves – the
power, that is, to be philosophical in the best sense of the word. (Not coinci-
dentally, this understanding of what it is to be philosophical is, I take it,
Austin’s understanding; to do philosophy, for Austin, was to investigate what it
is to be a human being not by conducting empirical research but by reflecting
on what one’s experience reveals as, for example, the difference between a
mistake and an accident.)44
But perhaps I am exploring the wrong sense of authority. There is also the
sense to which we appeal when we speak of authoritative editions of texts. But
to call a text authoritative is simply to make a claim that this particular edition
is more tightly connected with its author than any other. If one were to chal-
lenge the text’s authority, a defender of it would tell a story that would end at
the author’s doorstep. The story might be fallacious or mendacious, needless to
say; but the basis of the claim to authority would be clear. Consider now our use
of the term “authority” to refer to an expert in a certain field. To call someone
an authority in this sense is to claim that the person’s views are, or ought to be,
influential. And it’s at least plausible that pornography might be authoritative
in this sense: it might have a very strong, even exclusive power to shape certain
of people’s beliefs and attitudes about the world and particularly about how we
should construe sex difference.
But I doubt that this sense of “authority” can at the end of the day do the
work that Langton et al. need it to do. What they need is a conception of

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authority on which pornographers can be seen to enjoy exclusive power to fix

the conventional signification of pornographic images and words – or, if you
like, the rules in the language games of sex. But the power to fix conventions is
a far stronger sort of power than the power, however great, to influence people’s
beliefs and attitudes. And it’s not at all clear that any authority could possess
the stronger sort of power, at least when we’re talking about an entire culture’s
ways of understanding the conventional signification of some phenomenon. For
the fixing of conventional signification rests, as David Lewis in his work on
convention suggests, not (or not simply) on what some authority ordains it to be
but on what those who abide by the convention recognize and accept it to be.45
This means that the conventional signification of a piece of pornography – if
indeed pornography has conventional signification – will be a matter not of the
pornographer’s authority to fix it but of consumers’ acquiescence to the pornog-
rapher’s point of view. In so far as pornography’s authority consists in its power
to get us to acquiesce to the way it sees the world, its effects are not conven-
tional, not what Austin might call illocutionary, but rather, if anything,
perlocutionary. One might be tempted to think that pornography virtually
inevitably makes people see the world in a certain way. But even that is simply
to say that it has a certain very strong perlocutionary force. The question then
becomes: why?

The answer to this question surely has something to do with our culture’s persis-
tent misogyny, not to mention racism, homophobia, and other sorts of
entrenched prejudices, hates, and fears. But it also seems to me that Langton et
al. have grossly under-described the way that pornography plays on human
sensibilities. That pornography can be and no doubt frequently is influential in
a pernicious, sexist way seems to be obviously true. But it is equally obvious that
pornography meets the needs and desires of a huge number of people, both men
and women; and the idea that it alone has manufactured these needs and desires
is as implausible as the idea that the invention of the telephone has manufac-
tured our needs and desires to talk to people who are not within shouting
distance. This is not to suggest that the invention of the telephone has manu-
factured no new needs, nor is it to contradict the obvious fact that it has
transformed certain old ones. Marx famously says that there is no such thing as
a raw human need, that all needs take a culturally specific form.46 And in
Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud observes that apparent advances in civiliza-
tion – and he singles out various technological developments, including the
invention of the telephone – seem actually to have deepened human misery.
But Marx does not suggest that we have no inherent human needs, and it is one
of Freud’s goals in Civilization and Its Discontents to show that the new needs are
permutations of the old. If the invention and proliferation of the telephone
(and perhaps even more dramatically the cellular phone and the Internet)
means that some of us can now bear to live farther away from our loved ones

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than we once might have, it does not mean that we never before longed to hear
the voices of or see those loved ones when they or we did have to leave home.
And if the invention and proliferation of video technology means that some of
us can now meet our sexual needs and desires more conveniently and more
privately than we once might have, it does not mean that we never before
longed for the various satisfactions that are peculiarly sexual (which is to leave
open the question of the dimensions and terrain of the field of such satisfac-
tions).
As the feminist film theorist Linda Williams notes in Hard Core, the porno-
graphic use of film has been with us since the invention of the moving picture.
The first man to achieve the taking of photographs in fast enough succession to
produce a primitive film, Eadweard Muybridge, produced hundreds upon thou-
sands of sequences of naked men and women engaging in various activities.
And the so-called “stag film,” the crude, ordinarily black-and-white, ordinarily
narratively sloppy films made for viewing in a booth in a sex shop or at a bach-
elor party, can trace its origins to the earliest period of film history. These facts
alone cannot of course prove the claim that pornographic film meets certain
human needs. But we get closer to a proof if we consider what Stanley Cavell
says, in The World Viewed, about the power of the medium of film to present us
the human body as something that is “dressed . . . hence potentially undressed.”47
It follows that when we see a desirable human being in a film – potentially any
human being in any film, Cavell implies – we are “looking for a reason” for this
human being’s clothes to come off.48 Cavell continues,

When to this we join our ontological status – invisibility – it is

inevitable that we should expect to find a reason, to be around when a
reason and occasion present themselves, no matter how consistently our
expectancy is frustrated. The ontological conditions of the motion
picture reveal it as inherently pornographic (though not inveterately so)
(p. 45).

The implication here is that the desire to see another human being naked is
something that film is prone to adduce, not to create. Again, this is to leave
open the possibility that in its adducing of desire, a particular film may reveal it
for the first time or transform it or make it stronger or show it to be in competi-
tion with a set of moral rules to which I thought I was eternally committed.
Indeed, it seems to me that unless you are open to the idea that pornography
has these particular powers, you will misunderstand whatever illocutionary force
it has.
Even if I’m wrong about pornography’s powers, I still want to claim that
Langton et al. are pressing what I was calling the liberal argument in favor of
not curtailing the traffic in pornography in the wrong place. The reason these
thinkers are so invested in the idea that pornography’s force is illocutionary is
that if pornography is merely a kind of expression, then by definition it’s

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protected speech. But I want to insist – and here I once again follow Stanley
Cavell, this time in a recent paper of his called “Passionate and performative
utterances”49 – upon the obvious fact, one that even Austin underplays, that
expression has the power to wound, a power that is certainly much stronger,
precisely because it’s less conventional, than the analogous power to do things
manifested by the illocution.
Take the expression “I’m bored,” Cavell suggests. If it needs saying, “it may
also be obvious, perhaps should be obvious, without saying; then saying it would
place a demand that I may be unwilling or unable to face, a demand that you
acknowledge the obvious.” And now take the case of a woman’s “No!” to a
man’s sexual advances. It seems to me that the same analysis applies. What
forces the woman’s silence is not the authority of pornography, but the man’s
failure (which can take more than one form) to acknowledge the obvious. Can
we imagine an instance in which the only way a woman is attempting to refuse a
predatory man is by saying “no” (simply, flatly, with no note of desperation in
her voice, with no accompanying body language)? The scandal is not, or not
merely, that the man has heard her “no” as a “yes,” if indeed he has; it’s that he
no longer reads anything she does in anything resembling conventional human
terms. He no longer treats her as a human being. The woman’s “no” strikes me
as a desperate, and, in Cavell’s sense, desperately passionate, utterance. Her
failure to stop the man is a product not of the fact that the felicity conditions
for the success of her illocution are not in place, but the fact that there is not a
human exchange going on here: the perlocutionary failure of the woman’s utter-
ance is, given this man’s intentions, foreordained. Is it plausible to suggest that
what has gone wrong is only that the man has been taught by pornography to
ignore the woman’s humanity, that pornography is the necessary and sufficient
goad to his brutishness and brutality? The answer to that question must depend
in part on what pornography is.
But we will not arrive at a meaningful understanding of pornography if we
ignore the passionate power of expression, which means in this context its
ability to take us into a no man’s land of hurt and pain. The courts are wrong to
conceptualize expression as inherently neutral, to take its lack of convention-
ality to mean that its utterers are not responsible for its perlocutionary effects.
When an utterance has caused pain, it will be absolutely necessary for us – I
mean, for anyone interested in what has happened, including the people
directly involved – to make judgments about who is responsible for which
effects. When we are in the domain of the perlocutionary we cannot rely on
convention to sort out the question of responsibility. (I leave it to others to
judge whether and how this observation might bear on any attempt to ask the
courts to regulate pornography.)
All of this leaves unaddressed the question of whether pornography is a kind
of expressive speech. This question might be unproblematic when it comes to
pornographic words. But even if we can decide such a question fairly straightfor-
wardly, we’re left with the question of the nature of pornographic photographs

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and films. Here, I think, what is required is an understanding of the mysterious

erotic power of photographs of human beings. Developing such an under-
standing is a project for another paper, one that, I think, might start by
juxtaposing Cavell’s writings on photography with those of Linda Williams on
pornographic film. In The World Viewed, Cavell suggests that photography, as a
medium, in so far as it has satisfied a human wish, has satisfied a wish peculiar
to the modern world, a wish vividly expressed in Descartes’ Meditations, for an
escape from what he calls “metaphysical isolation” (p. 21). It satisfies this wish,
he says, “by automatism, by removing the human agent from the task of repro-
duction” and thus by maintaining “the presentness of the world by accepting
our absence from it” (p. 23). In Hard Core, Linda Williams suggests that what is
sought in pornographic film is a confirmation of the existence of the woman’s
orgasm, which would mean of her sexuality, which in turn, I take it, would
mean of the legitimacy of the man’s sexual desire for her.50 Cavell writes, “A
photograph does not present us with ‘likenesses’ of things; it presents us, we
want to say, with the things themselves” (World Viewed, p. 17). Whether we can
or will say this – that is to say, will rest content with this way of expressing our
intuitions, is another matter. And Williams claims that the pornographic film
“obsessively seeks knowledge through a voyeuristic record of confessional,
involuntary paroxysm, of the ‘thing’ itself” (Hard Core, p. 49).
What is the relationship between the quest for knowledge of the thing itself,
or things in themselves, and human sexual desire? What sort of epistemological
wish, if any, is involved in the desire to gaze at pornographic photographs and
films? Whatever answer one might be inclined to propose, it is clear that this
wish cannot be identified or accounted for simply by the idea that pornography
is a kind of speech. One wants to ask: who is doing the speaking? The subjects
of the photographs? (And are they subjects or objects, or both?) The pornogra-
phers? And what exactly is being said? And to whom? And why are people so
aroused by looking at photographs and films of other people’s naked bodies and
their sexually explicit activity?
There is work to be done here. What surprises me is that none of the people
on either side of the pornography debates appears to be interested in doing it.
(Linda Williams’s work, and the work that has followed in the wake of it,
constitutes something of an exception, although without asking important ques-
tions about what photography is and what film is, and so without aspiring to get
to the heart of the matter.) Perhaps this is because what is required would be an
honest accounting of our investments, both positive and negative, in the
phenomenon of pornography, which might entail looking at a lot of pornog-
raphy, if one hasn’t already, and looking differently at a lot of pornography, if
one has. Austin’s work reminds us philosophers that it is possible to look at
something very familiar – ordinary words, in his case – in a new way, one that
shows the perversity of our history of imagining that words bespeak themselves
and stolidly wear their truth conditions (and nothing else) on their proverbial
sleeves. The example Austin sets gives us reason to imagine that we will feel at

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least as much exhilaration as despair or shame when we recognize the depth of

our own implication in what our words – and, I am suggesting, our pictures – say
and do.51

Notes
1 For me, a second reason for beginning this paper, for this Festschrift, with a discus-
sion of How to Do Things with Words is equally important: the fatefulness of Austin’s
lectures for Stanley Cavell. A 1985 interview of Cavell by James Conant begins with
Cavell’s articulation of this fatefulness:

In 1948, I found myself in Los Angeles and enrolled as a special student at

UCLA. Its philosophy department was very fine, had lots of different kinds of
people in it, very sympathetic people. But I couldn’t for a long time tell whether
I thought this was the beginning of something which down the road would
become what I wanted to spend my life at. This doubt moved with me when I
moved to Harvard three years later to continue graduate studies, and indeed
though I was rewarded at the subject of philosophy, and there were moments in
which I was exhilarated, what I was doing was still not the thing that somehow
in my mind I thought there must be for me. What that might be did not get
answered distinctly until J.L. Austin appeared at Harvard to give the William
James Lectures in 1955 and to offer seminars in other of his interests. Then I
had the experience of knowing what I was put on earth to do. I felt that
anything I did from then on, call it anything you want to, call it philosophy,
will be affected by my experience of dealing with this material. It is not neces-
sarily that in Austin I found a better philosopher than my other teachers had
been, but that in responding to him I found the beginning of my own intellec-
tual voice. (James Conant, “An interview with Stanley Cavell,” The Senses of
Stanley Cavell, eds Richard Fleming and Michael Payne (Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell University Press, 1989), pp. 35 – 6)

Were I confident that I had found the beginning of my own intellectual voice, I would
be inclined to characterize my first encounter with Stanley Cavell – which also dates
to 1985 – in the terms in which he describes his indebtedness to Austin. A difference
might be this: among the splendid teachers I have had, none has been a better philoso-
pher than Cavell. One way to put the aim of the present paper – indeed, of all of my
philosophical writing – is this: I’m trying to transplant what I’ve learned, and continue
to learn, from Cavell into my own philosophical garden. (The metaphor is appropri-
ated from Simone de Beauvoir, who herself is appropriating the image from Voltaire,
when she suggests at the beginning of Pyrrhus et Cinéas (Paris: Gallimard, 1944) that
overcoming skepticism about philosophy’s powers to transform a life requires not only
a willingness to find one’s own garden but also, first, imagining that there’s one out
there to be found.)
2 See Stanley Cavell’s account of Austin’s delight in this particular instance of word-
play in “Austin at criticism,” Must We Mean What We Say? 2nd edn (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 97 – 114.
3 In a monograph-length version of the present paper, which is also called How to Do
Things With Pornography and which I am presently completing, I defend this reading
of Austin in much more detail.
4 Here I have in mind work in pragmatics by some of its most influential practitioners:
John Searle, Kent Bach, François Recanati, and Charles Travis.

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5 I borrow the metaphor from Austin’s discussion of his philosophical method in “A

plea for excuses,” in which he notes that

we should prefer a field which is not too much trodden into bogs or tracks by
traditional philosophy, for in that case even “ordinary” language will often have
become infected with the jargon of extinct theories, and our own prejudices
too, as the upholders or imbibers of theoretical views, will be too readily, and
often insensibly, engaged. . . . Granted that our subject is . . . neighbouring,
analogous or germane in some way to some notorious centre of philosophical
trouble, then . . . we should be certain of what we are after: a good site for field
work in philosophy. Here at last we should be able to unfreeze, to loosen up and
get going on agreeing about discoveries, however small, and on agreeing about
how to reach agreement (Philosophical Papers, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1979), pp. 182 – 3).

6 How to Do Things with Words, eds J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbis{aacute], 2nd edn
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 2.
7 Words, pp. 2 – 3. Let me note that it is not at all clear that Austin is here endorsing a
form of ethical non-cognitivism. Indeed, it seems clear that he is dubious about the
doctrine. Two pieces of indirect evidence here. First, the paragraph in which the
sentence I’ve just quoted is embedded takes digs at various fashions in the philos-
ophy of Austin’s day no fewer than five times. The context of the remark about
“ethical propositions” is this: Austin first notes the development of the view that
certain statements – those that are not “verifiable” (his scare quotes) – are in fact
pseudo-statements and then notes a “second stage” in this development, in which
pseudo-statements are reconceived as utterances that were never intended to be
stating things in the first place. “Ethical propositions” exemplify – “perhaps” – such
(non-) pseudo-statements. Second, on pp. 19 – 20, when Austin is in the middle of
his discussion of the “infelicities” to which all attempts to act, via words or other-
wise, are subject, he says this:

A great many of the acts which fall within the province of Ethics are not, as
philosophers are too prone to assume, simply in the last resort physical movements:
very many of them have the general character, in whole or part, of conventional
or ritual acts, and are therefore, among other things, exposed to infelicity.

If you put this together with what Austin says in the sentence to which this note is
attached, you see how much of a stretch it is to imagine that he is agreeing with
non-cognitivists that “ethical propositions” are intended as prescriptivists say they
are. His view, rather, seems to be that ethics is about acts, verbal or otherwise; and
therefore the question of whether “ethical propositions” are genuine propositions
does not arise. (See also this passage, in the paragraph after the “province of Ethics”
sentence: “The more we consider a statement not as a sentence (or proposition) but
as an act of speech (out of which the others are logical constructions) the more we
are studying the whole thing as an act” (20).)
8 In a recent, unpublished manuscript on How to Do Things with Words (“Passionate
and performative utterances”), Cavell has forcefully suggested that Austin’s charac-
terization of the perlocutionary powers of speech leaves much to be desired. Cavell
puts pressure both on Austin’s lack of interest in the expressive powers of speech and
on his insinuation that the relationship between a given stretch of speech and the
perlocution it achieves is essentially arbitrary.
9 For the record: there are important distinctions between the sorts of infelicity that
we find in these two cases. In the christening case, Austin observes, we will say that

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the ship was not christened – that, because I am not authorized to christen your ship,
the procedure does not come off, that it “misfires.” But my insincerity in swearing
that I’ll be there at five does not nullify my promise, though what I’ve done consti-
tutes an “abuse” of the procedure and renders my act of promising “hollow” or
“void.”
10 Jennifer Hornsby, in a series of papers on the role of illocution in a theory of
language (cited in note 13 below), especially one sensitive to the moral and political
dimensions of linguistic communication, argues that Austin’s characterization of illo-
cution suffers from his failure to distinguish carefully between the concept of an
“action” and that of an “act.” In particular, she thinks, Austin’s sloppiness here made
it impossible for him to draw a principled line between illocution and perlocution.
Later in the present paper, my disagreement with Hornsby’s reading of Austin will
occasionally become explicit. In How to Do Things with Pornography, I go into much
greater detail about my concerns with the way that Hornsby and other philosophers
of language have understood the ramifications of Austin’s views.
11 This claim of course needs fleshing out. What I have in mind is the way that Searle
and certain other “speech-act theorists” (e.g. Kent Bach and François Recanati)
embrace the standard division of labor in contemporary philosophy of language
according to the categories of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. On my view,
Austin’s work constitutes a radical challenge to the enterprise of making sweeping
claims about how our use of words works and thus to the very idea of “philosophy of
language,” at least as it is currently construed. For a start on a defense of this claim,
see my How to Do Things with Pornography.
12 Philosophical Papers, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 239.
13 Langton has written a book on Kant and has published numerous papers in moral
and political philosophy and metaphysics. Hornsby is a well-known philosopher of
mind and language. Langton and Hornsby have developed very similar, though not
completely identical, appropriations of Austin in service of arguing for the coher-
ence of the idea that pornography doesn’t just say things but also inherently harms
women. Their many papers on this topic include the following: Rae Langton,
“Speech acts and unspeakable acts,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 22(4) (autumn
1993): 293 – 330; Langton, “Sexual solipsism,” Philosophical Topics 23(2) (fall 1995):
149 – 87; Langton and Hornsby, “Free speech and illocution,” Legal Theory 4 (1998):
21 – 37; Langton, “Subordination, silence, and pornography’s authority,” Censorship
and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, ed. Robert Post (Los Angeles: Getty
Museum Publishing, 1998); Langton and Caroline West, “Scorekeeping in a porno-
graphic language game,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 77(3) (September 1999):
303 – 19; Hornsby, “Things done with words,” in Human Agency: Language, Duty,
and Value, eds Jonathan Dancy, J.M.E. Moravcski, and C. Taylor (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1988); Hornsby, “Speech acts and pornography,” Women’s
Philosophical Review, November 1993, reprinted in an amended version in The
Problem of Pornography, ed. Susan Dwyer (Florence, KY: Wadsworth, 1995); Hornsby,
“Illocution and its significance,” Foundations of Speech Act Theory, ed. Savas L.
Tsohatzidis (New York: Routledge, 1994); Hornsby, “Disempowered speech,”
Philosophical Topics 23(2) (fall 1995): 127 – 47; and Hornsby, “Free and equal
speech,” Imprints 1(2) (1996): 59 – 76.
14 As Hornsby notes, the right to “free speech” is notably more sacrosanct in the
United States – where it is constitutionally protected – than it is in other democra-
cies (where it is not). See e.g. Hornsby’s “Free and equal speech,” pp. 59 – 60.
15 See “Speech acts,” pp. 307 – 8.
16 See Cavell’s The World Viewed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979),
chapter 2, and Bazin’s “The ontology of the photographic image” in his What Is
Cinema?, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 9 – 16.

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17 In the context of arguing that we need the techniques of analytic philosophy or

language if we are to understand properly what the word “speech” means in the
concept “free speech,” Hornsby acknowledges that “most pornographic material is
not linguistic” and that some people “move, without any argument, between ‘speech’
in a narrow sense (confined to the linguistic) and ‘speech’ in the broadest sense
(including all ‘expression’).” But, as an analytic philosopher of language, she is not
interested in thinking about how non-linguistic pornography does whatever it does.
See “Free and equal speech,” p. 62.
18 On Hornsby’s view, Austin’s claim about the importance of convention to illocution
was rash; it stemmed, she thinks, from his paying too much attention to highly ritu-
alized illocutions, such as marrying, christening ships, baptizing, and so on. Hornsby
argues that in many cases a sufficient condition for the success of a person’s illocu-
tion is simply that her utterer grasps that she is attempting to perform it. For
example, if you understand me to be trying to tell you something, then I will have
successfully performed the illocution of telling. See Hornsby, “Illocution and its
significance.”
19 Catharine A. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, In Harm’s Way: The Pornography
Civil Rights Hearings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 439.
20 United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, American Booksellers v. Hudnut,
771 F.2d 323 (1985), section I.
21 This accusation, from American Booksellers v. Hudnut, 598 F. Supp. 1316, 1334 (S.D.
Ind. 1984), is quoted in Langton, “Speech acts,” p. 294.
22 See, e.g., Nagel, “Personal rights and public space,” Philosophy and Public Affairs
24(2) (spring 1995): 83 – 107; Dworkin, “Do we have a right to pornography?” A
Matter of Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 335 – 72;
Dworkin, “Liberty and pornography,” The New York Review of Books 38(14) (15
August 1991); Dworkin, “Women and pornography” (a review of Catharine
MacKinnon’s Only Words), The New York Review of Books 40(17) (21 October 1993);
and Dworkin (in an exchange with Catharine MacKinnon in the wake of his review
of her book), “Women and pornography,” The New York Review of Books 41(5) (3
March 1994).
23 Hornsby and Langton see a certain irony in liberals’ understanding their view as
grounded in Mill’s, for they read Mill in his famous chapter on the liberty of thought
and expression to be championing not just the freedom to think and say what one
wishes but, more essentially, the freedom to do things with one’s words – what they
call “freedom of illocution.” For reasons that will, I hope, become clearer as this
paper progresses, I have doubts about whether this notion is coherent. I discuss these
doubts at some length in How to Do Things with Pornography.
24 A landmark obscenity case, which defines “obscenity” in terms of what would offend
“the average person” with respect to “community standards,” is Miller v. California,
413 U.S. 15, 24 (1973).
25 See, e.g., MacKinnon, “Equality and speech,” Only Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1993). See also her essay “Not a moral issue,” Feminism Unmodified
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 162 – 4, and her letter to the
editor of The New York Review of Books in response to Ronald Dworkin’s review of
Only Words, in “Pornography: an exchange,” NYRB 41(5) (3 March 1994).
26 See, e.g., Edward I. Donnerstein, Daniel Linz, and Steven Penrod, The Question of
Pornography: Research Findings and Policy (New York: Free Press, 1987).
27 Austin introduces the category of “verdictives” on pp. 153 – 5 of Words. Until
further notice, all of the quotations from Austin are from this section of the book.
28 The latter type of illocutions are “exercitives,” which I discuss directly later.
29 See pp. 267 – 70 of Langton’s “Subordination, silence, and pornography’s authority,”
referenced in note 13 above.

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30 Langton, “Speech acts and unspeakable acts,” referenced in note 13 above, pp. 307 –
8; my emphasis.
31 See “Speech acts,” pp. 315ff.
32 Happily, given recent judicial rulings in, e.g., my home state of Massachusetts, there
is reason to hope that this example will become archaic in the foreseeable future.
33 Langton considers all of these examples in some depth in “Speech acts.” See pp.
316 – 17 for her discussion of the first two examples and pp. 320 – 2 for her treat-
ment of the second two.
34 For various reasons that are not relevant here, Hornsby, in her somewhat different
treatment of illocutionary silencing, prefers to think of illocutionary silencing as
involving not a failure of “uptake,” per se, but of what she calls “receptivity.”
Hornsby discusses the reasons for her way of understanding what’s at the crux of illo-
cutionary success in all of her writings on this subject (see note 13 above for a list).
See especially “Illocution and its significance.”
35 “Illocution and its significance,” p. 206, n. 28.
36 “Illocution and its significance,” p. 199.
37 For the idea that pornography “works by a process of psychological conditioning,”
see Langton and West’s “Scorekeeping in a pornographic language game,” cited in
note 13 above, p. 303.
38 The Hustler spread is discussed in “Scorekeeping in a pornographic language game,”
p. 311. Langton and West thank Catherine Itzin for drawing their attention to this
example, which appears on p. 30 of Pornography: Women, Violence, and Civil Liberties,
edited by Itzin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). The Hustler spread appar-
ently is from the January 1983 issue; I have been unable to obtain a copy of it.
39 David Lewis, “Scorekeeping in a language game,” Journal of Philosophical Logic 8
(1979): 339 – 59, reprinted in Lewis’s Philosophical Papers, vol. I (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1983), pp. 233 – 49.
40 The Jane example is from Langton and West’s “Scorekeeping,” pp. 309 – 10. I can
only briefly note here what I regard as the irony of Langton’s decision to help herself
to Lewis’s notion of a language game, rather than that of Wittgenstein, from whom
Lewis appropriates the term. Lewis’s goal is to unearth a certain deep structure he
presumes governs human conversation, one, specifically, that allows the presupposi-
tions with which interlocutors are operating to be introduced in a tacit but
conventional way. The idea that in our talk we rely on a species of attunement with
one another is important to Wittgenstein. But his work contests the notion that this
attunement is a kind of convention. Unlike Wittgenstein, Lewis is not inclined to
wonder whether our linguistic attunement with one another is deeper or more
complicated than the notion of “convention” implies. I have come to appreciate the
idea that we ought to wonder about this, and that developing the notion of attune-
ment requires a kind of Gestalt shift for those who describe human conversation as
resting on “agreement” or convention, from Stanley Cavell. See Cavell’s sustained
discussion of Kripke’s (mis)characterization of Wittgenstein’s views on conversa-
tional attunement in “The argument of the ordinary,” Conditions Handsome and
Unhandsome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 64 – 100.
41 Langton and West do not have much to say about exactly what constitutes a
“language game of sex.” One gets the sense that by this concept they intend to
include all attempts at illocutionary acts that have to do with sexual matters. This
would mean that a woman’s unspoken attempt at a refusal of sex – her look of horror
or revulsion, say – would count as part of such a language game, albeit one in which
the woman’s attempt to pull off the illocutionary act of refusal does not count as a
correct move in the game, given the presuppositions that pornographic materials
have introduced into it without challenge. In my book How to Do Things with
Pornography, I worry more about whether thinking about the way that pornography

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has an influence on the culture is helped along by the notion of “language games of
sex.” See note 40 above for an indication of the direction in which my worries run.
42 Langton, “Speech acts and unspeakable acts,” p. 312.
43 For examples, see: www.deviantdesires.com, www.overground.be, www.dophinsex.org,
www.theagitator.com / archives / 004764.php, www.dimensionsmagazine.com /
Weight_Room / anonymous.html.
44 See Austin’s “A plea for excuses,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 57 (1957), p.
11. The paper is reprinted in Austin’s Philosophical Papers, 3rd edn (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 175 – 204.
45 The Lewisian locus classicus here is Convention: A Philosophical Study (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1969). I could take a different tack in worrying about
the relationship between authority and convention. But I am here referring to
Lewis’s views since Langton apparently takes Lewis to be authoritative himself with
respect to the issue of authority.
46 See, e.g., Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 – 1845, The Marx –
Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 66 –
125.
47 Cavell, The World Viewed, enlarged edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1979), p. 44.
48 Unlike certain film theorists, Cavell is not suggesting that film-watchers (contempo-
rary human beings, that is) are inherently voyeuristic, though that may be so.
Rather, he is fleshing out a set of claims about film’s power as a medium to trans-
figure the human body.
49 See note 8.
50 Williams, xxx.
51 I owe my interest in this subject to Sally Haslanger, who invited me to participate in
a panel discussion of Langton and Hornsby’s work at MIT in January 2000. I have
presented the views in this paper at a conference on Austin in Amiens, France, in
March 2001; at Harvard University in April 2001; at the Pacific Division meetings
of the American Philosophical Association in Seattle in March 2002; and the
conference honoring Stanley Cavell organized by Sanford Shieh at Wesleyan in May
2002. I thank the audiences at these events for helpful questions and suggestions. I
have also benefited from discussions of this material with Stanley Cavell, Alice
Crary, Michael Glanzberg, Kathrin Koslicki, Mark Richard, participants in a seminar
on pornography and hate speech I gave at Tufts in the spring of 2001, and members
of the Boston-area Workshop on Gender and Philosophy, especially Ishani Maitra
and Mary Kate McGowan.

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