Just Saying: The Literal as Code

Say two people meet in the street. One says:

‘I see you have a number of grey hairs’

The person is offended, the other replies ‘no, I’m just saying, you really do have a number of grey hairs’ – as though their speech were just some neutral recording apparatus. There is, of course, no ‘just saying’. What such faux-naïve literalism studiously ignores are:

the available conventions of address, the context of enunciation, the selection of this speech act from among others, the whole phatic aspect of communication, the inter-personal relation performatively set-up by a speech act.

Cleaving to the literal constitutes a kind of low-level violence done to such implicit rules of human communication, the rules pertaining to context and convention, part of what Zizek calls the big Other, through which communication is inevitably mediated – thus even these ‘gray hair’ comments are only meaningful as violations of background rules.

One gets this kind of thing very often in the blogosphere too. ‘Now some woman called Jane Smith has sprung to Derrida’s defence’. Now the person may indeed be a woman who is indeed called ‘Jane Smith’, but the statement works – in rather obvious ways - to undermine the woman’s authority. (If J.Smith happens to be a fairly well known professor specialising in Derrida, then the nature of the rhetorical act is even clearer). But the writer will, like the observer of grey hairs, plead literal truth.

This can lead to the paradoxical phenomenon of: the literal as code: a care taken to say things which are literally true, which constitute a ‘just saying,’ but whose real meaning derives from the act of speaking, context of address, the assumed position of enunciation, the silenced alternative etc

I’m thinking that the ‘just saying’ defence and the ‘irony’ defence – the faux-naïve insistence on the literal and the insistent (non-naïve) suspension of the literal are somehow twin, linked strategies/errors. But I’ll come back to it.