monograph

The Pragmatics and Politics of Group Speech (under contract with Routledge, expected 2024)

Overview

Social groups of various kinds have the capacity to perform speech acts: they can recruit an individual to speak for them, or they can rally behind a unified message. The company spokesperson says, ‘We are proud to announce…’; the protest group chants its demands for ‘Equal pay for all…’; the team of co-authors asserts that ‘Recycling practices increased by 5%…’, and so on. In such cases the speech acts of announcing, demanding, and asserting are made in the name of the group itself, and as such are understood as representing and normatively committing the whole group, not simply the individuals involved in their production. It is the company that needs to follow through on its announcement; the protest group that needs to demonstrate entitlement to its demands; the research team that needs to justify its assertion, and so on.

Just as groups of various kinds are capable of performing speech acts, so too can this capacity can be impeded. Group speech can be silenced, distorted or unfairly extracted. For example, a group’s spokesperson might be threatened or intimidated into silence, or the consent of a community might be elicited by selective engagement with agreeable community members. Such cases are apt to be described as genuine collective injustices; it is not simply that group speech goes wrong, but that the group itself is wronged in the exercise of its linguistic agency. Moreover, groups that are empowered to speak sometimes abuse their say, spreading lies and misinformation, making empty promises, and hypocritical apologies. In these cases, group speech can be a tool of wrongdoing and injustice.

This book explores the pragmatics and politics of group speech—of what it takes for groups to speak; how group speech may be unjustly impeded and co-erced; and how it may sometimes be abused. The book is divided into two parts. Part I develops a unified approach to group speech inspired by the work of J.L Austin and Adolf Reinach, including an account of what is required for a group to be spoken for, and how groups can speak for themselves. Part II uses this account to explore group speech in a range of politically salient contexts—including the expression and the disavowal of group speech through public dissent; group silencing in the context of legally-mandated consultation processes between States and Indigenous communities; political apologies for past injustice; corporate lies and misinformation; and the kinds of group expressives embodied in practices of building, defacing, and toppling public monuments.  

Chapter 1. Introduction

The introduction will bring the phenomenon of group speech into view, and emphasize its social and political significance. It will also explain one of the book’s guiding methodological assumptions, which is that questions about the nature and conditions of group speech cannot be neatly separated from political questions about the empowerment, disempowerment, and abuse of group speech, and the way these play out in concrete real world contexts. We need a theory of group speech that will illuminate, rather than obscure, the ways in which certain groups are systematically prevented from having their say, and the ways in which certain groups abuse the say they have. The introduction will conclude by giving an overview of the book’s remaining chapters.

Part I: Pragmatics

Chapter 2. Speech as social action

Drawing on a tradition that runs from Thomas Reid, to Adolf Reinach, to J.L. Austin and some of his contemporary followers, this chapter sets out an overarching speech act theoretical framework for the book. The core of the framework is the idea that speech acts are distinctively social acts—acts that depend not only on the intentions, linguistic competence, and normative entitlement of the speaker, but also on the understanding and complicity of the audience. With reference to recent work in feminist speech act theory I show how this broad framework has been used to make sense of various politically significant phenomena that will feature in later chapters, such as silencing, blocking, bending, and discursive injustice.

Chapter 3. Speaking for groups

What does it take for a spokesperson to speak for a group? This chapter develops an account of this phenomenon that coheres with the framework developed in Chapter 2, and draws heavily on the work of Reinach and Austin. It begins by distinguishing speaking for a group from related phenomena, including speaking about a group, speaking as a group member, speaking in a group’s behalf, and act as a group messenger. It then argues that a felicitous act of speaking for group requires a certain kind of authorization of the spokesperson by the group, a certain kind of intention on the part of the spokesperson, a certain form of “representational uptake” from the audience, and it places a demand of fidelity on the group spoken for. The chapter ends by contrasting the view developed with other views in the received literature.

Chapter 4. Groups speaking for themselves

One of the key points in Chapter 3 is that, in order for groups to be spoken for, they must be able to speak for themselves. This chapter explores what it takes for group to speak for themselves, i.e., what a joint speech act involves. A joint speech act is not an aggregate or chorus of individual speech acts, nor is an act of a “corporate agent” that can be considered an agent in its own right, over and above the individual participants who participate in it. Instead, it is single act performed by those individuals acting together, such that the intentions involved are shared intentions, and the normative implications associated with the act fall upon them jointly.

Part II: Politics

Chapter 5. “Not in our name”

This chapter examines the role of public dissent in group speech activity. As discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, group speech acts are routinely performed by spokespersons who are not authorized in advance but rely instead on having their presumed authority tacitly accepted. But in order for tacit acceptance to count as an act of authorization on the part of the group spoken for it must recognizable as such—and this means that the group must have the option of dissenting instead of accepting what is said in their name. So, in order for acts to be performed in the name of groups, it is imperative that these groups are entitled and given the safe platform to dissent—to say, “Not in our name!” where this too is a kind of group speech act. This chapter examines this dual character of public dissent, as something that is at once an embodiment of group speech, and something which normatively underpins it.

Chapter 6. Group silencing in participation processes

This chapter explores practices of group silencing in the context of legally-mandated participation and consultation processes between States and Indigenous and rural communities. International law, as well as the domestic law of many countries, accords a collective right to these communities to be consulted before decisions are made that will affect their lives and livelihoods. In this sense, the law appears to empower the speech of these communities. Yet, despite the widespread recognition of this right, the speech of Indigenous and rural communities is routinely silenced, distorted and dismissed, often within the very processes that are ostensibly designed to “give them a say.” This chapter illustrates this with specific examples of how the speech of certain communities has been silenced in different ways, including though the imposition of ill-fitting conceptual resources; through failure to recognise community spokespersons (often accompanied by selective engagement with bogus representatives); through systematic misconstrual of the force of community speech (often owing to stereotypes about the political or epistemic credentials of the community); and through failures to take community speech seriously within the relevant decision-making process.

Chapter 7. Political apologies and corporate lies

This chapter explores the idea of hollow or empty group speech acts, by focusing on two phenomena that have recently received philosophical attention: political apologies (e.g., the Australian government’s apology for its historical mistreatment of Indigenous groups) and corporate lies (e.g., a tobacco company’s lies about the health risks associated with smoking). Pragmatic analyses of empty apologies and lies standardly give a central place to the notion of sincerity, where this is seen as a matter of the speaker harbouring—or, in the case of empty apologies and lies, failing to harbour—certain fitting attitudes, such as remorse or conviction. I argue, however, that sincerity has only minimal application in the case of political apologies and corporate lies, and should be replaced in our pragmatic analysis by the notion of group fidelity, where this is understood as a forward-looking demand on the group’s conduct.

Chapter 8. Not set in stone

This final chapter uses the pragmatic framework for thinking about group speech developed in earlier chapters to examine some of the politics surrounding public monuments. Public monuments can be seen as group speech acts, or as C. Thi Nguyen puts it, joint “commitments made concrete.” But who they speak for, who they address, and what they say, is not, I argue, set in stone. The very publicity of public monuments, and their implicit claim to speak “for us”, make them susceptible to (and suitable targets of) discursive resistance strategies, such as “blocking” and “bending”. I examine in particular practices of defacing and toppling monuments, arguing that these practices should be viewed as part of an ongoing struggle internal to the community, over who “we” are and what we are prepared to say for ourselves.