On Maitra’s view of licensing, as we’ve seen, it’s possible for subordinating speaker authority to emerge out of the facts of the local speech situation. By this, I mean facts about the content of what is said, and whether or not it is plausibly added to the conversational
background, which can be determined on the basis of whether it is challenged or not by the speaker’s audience. I believe this narrow focus on local features causes three related problems. First, this leads her view to provide counterintuitive results concerning when a speaker does and doesn’t have the authority to successfully issue rankings and potentially subordinate, as it seems to ignore the broader social factors necessary for subordination. Second, and consequently, I believe this account has difficulty distinguishing between cases where an utterance has the performative force of a ranking, and ones where it functions more plausibly as an expressive, in that it is taken as primarily an expression of the speaker’s wholly personal emotions rather than a claim about the world.98 And lastly, as I will explain in the following section, Maitra’s account
98 The account of expressives I appeal to here—and explain more fully below—comes from Kukla (2014, 450–53).
It is worth noting that Kukla is using ‘expressives’ in a non-Austinean way, and thus takes us away from the Austinean framework that Maitra employs. While this involves a slight change in terminology, I believe it is
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has problems clarifying the domain of speaker authority, since it holds that licensing invests authority in a person independent of any social position.
Imagine a case similar to the subway example, except that instead of an Arab woman facing the brunt of an older white man, a well-dressed white man is accosted by a lone, unkempt, young male passenger. The young man calls the older passenger “a greedy f**k,” who “got rich by raping the planet,” and claims loudly that the world would be “better off without him” and his ilk. Just like in the original example, all other conversations cease, and no one, including the target, voices any objection to the statements being made.99
Some—though not I—might be tempted to describe this modified case similarly to the original. That is, the speaker might be thought to be issuing a ranking that aims to mark his target as an inferior and undesirable. With sustained silence from the other passengers, his ranking succeeds. And since unfairly ranking as inferior is a feature of subordination, we might conclude that this younger man subordinates his target in saying what he does. Yet, I believe it is very unlikely that this example depicts a case of subordination, and figuring out why can help us understand the type of authority at play in ordinary instances of hate speech.
The first and most obvious way to avoid this counterintuitive result would simply be to point out that what’s gone wrong here is that this ranking is not an unfair or unjust ranking, and therefore not subordinating like the original case.100 We might say, then, the ranking succeeds,
ultimately fruitful, in part because it allows us to examine the issue of uptake more broadly. I thank an anonymous reviewer for Social Theory & Practice for encouraging me to clarify my shift in terminology here.
99 Much like the original subway case, this one is likely not unfamiliar to anyone who has lived in a larger city for
some time, and I chose it in part because of its familiarity. As such it should be thought of as taking place within an ‘everyday’ context, rather than, say, at a political rally, which would be relevantly different.
100 Of course, intuitions likely conflict on this point, and many, including an anonymous reviewer for Social Theory & Practice, would see this as an unfair or unjust act—though perhaps not a subordinating one. In any case, my point
is simply that there is a lack of symmetry between the two subway cases under consideration, and we need to investigate their differences more closely.
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but it’s not subordinating because its content is not morally objectionable. This distinction between fair and unfair, or just and unjust, acts of ranking helps to separate the troubling case of the South African legislator from the more mundane case of ranking one athlete as faster than the others (Langton 1993, 304). So, it must be registered that this second subway case does not involve anything near the type of unjust ranking found in the initial example. I take it as given that the two subway cases differ dramatically in their content, in that one is deeply unjust while the other is arguably anti-oppressive. This has clear implications for the subordinating force of the one in contrast to the other.
But I won’t pursue this strategy, in part because it makes ‘unjust’ do a lot of the crucial work, and I’m somewhat skeptical it’s up to the task. What I want to point out, moreover, is that this is not all that is different in these two cases—the explanation is not that simple, though it seems to be the (only) one that Maitra’s account permits. Even once we acknowledge this
distinction in the content of the utterances in the two subway cases, the young man’s utterance is still clearly quite different from the completely innocuous form of ranking done at the end of a 100m dash or after an ice dancing routine. First, it is not obviously the mere registering of an empirical fact (as the 100m dash is), but rather involves the projection of specifically ethical values (and so, unlike ice dancing). And second, it issues a ranking not about athletic or artistic ability, but about one’s standing in a social hierarchy. Arguably, any departure from equality here is prima facie unjust.101 This is not to say it comes anywhere near rivaling the type of injustice at issue in our first case, it is only to note that I find this route—that while both cases describe the successful issuing of a ranking, only the first is an unfair ranking and that is where
101 One broad camp of egalitarians—Relational Egalitarians—can be thought to oppose any social system that
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the difference lies—too quick and too blunt. Furthermore, I just don’t see these two cases as being even this similar to each other, even aside from their differences in content.
To this end, I think it’s best to resist the notion that the young man’s attempt at ranking his target as inferior, whether fair or unfair, succeeds. One way to do this is to see why the passengers may not take the young man to be attempting a ranking at all, even if this is exactly what he intends to be doing. That is, whether some utterance has the performative force of an assertion or of an expressive is sometimes not up to the speaker, but rather partially constituted by the uptake it receives (see Kukla and Lance 2009). As Rebecca Kukla argues, the difference between these two speech-acts—assertions and expressives—lies, in part, in how assertions make truth claims “about how the world is, and it either is or isn’t that way for everyone” (Kukla 2014, 450, emphasis in original). In doing so, assertions seek “uptake in the form of agreement or rational challenge” (ibid., 451). Expressives, on the other hand, may be thought of as mere expressions of one’s feelings, and therefore as “‘wholly personal,’ non-truth-bearing speech acts” (ibid.).102 This difference shows up in the uptake expressives receive. As Kukla points out,
“it doesn’t even make sense for me to ask whether I agree or disagree with [your expressive], or whether it reflects the world correctly. […] It is merely an expression of feelings, disconnected from rational discourse” (ibid.). I want to suggest that the young man’s utterance in our second example is best understood as functioning as an expressive in his situation. What he perhaps intends to be a statement about the world, the passengers might understandably take as an
outburst of anger, and respond accordingly.103 Their silence, therefore, might not be indicative of
102 Kukla takes the phrase “wholly personal” from Naomi Scheman; see Scheman (1993, 24–25).
103 Here it is worth acknowledging that rankings and assertions are not identical acts. However, I agree with Maitra
when she claims that the two are importantly related, and that “a speaker can perform a ranking just by asserting something;” see Maitra (2012, 112).
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their granting him the licensed authority to issue a successful ranking, but, instead, tolerance for his anger, perhaps.
But I don’t want to say the same thing about the ordinary hate speaker in our first case. Indeed, my basic claim is that these two cases share very little in common at the level of pragmatics. That is, beyond the important differences in the content of our two cases, it is the differences in their pragmatic structure that provides crucial insight into the subordinating authority of ordinary hate speech.
As I see it, even if the hate speaker sees himself as merely voicing his own ‘wholly personal’ anger, it’s important to see something else, something very close to Maitra’s
description of the case, going on. No matter his intentions, in speaking as he does—and being who he is—I take it that he performs a subordinating act. We might see this as the flip side of a phenomena Kukla terms “discursive injustice.” Cases of discursive injustice occur when a speaker who has the standard entitlements to perform a certain speech act goes about performing this act in all conventionally appropriate ways, and yet because of her gender, the uptake she receives constitutes her speech act as a different kind of act than its input would conventionally dictate (2014, 444–45).104 An utterance that would standardly be an imperative might become a request, simply because it comes from a woman in a traditionally male-dominated environment. And so similarly, despite the fact that ordinary speakers are not normally in a position to
construct norms for others with what can be seen as potential rankings, the social position of some ordinary speakers, like the ordinary hate speaker in our original subway case, empowers their speech with unique performative force.
104 Kukla notes that this phenomena is not restricted to instances where gender is the salient feature; discursive
injustice also occurs where race, ability, orientation and other forms of membership in disadvantaged groups are at the fore.
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I take it that something along these lines helps to explain the differences in the pragmatic structure of the two subway cases, as I highly doubt the ranking of the man in the second subway case is—aside from content—identical to that of the Arab woman. Yet, if the authority to rank others can be an emergent fact of the local speech situation, and if the deployment of rankings, given the right response, add their content to the shared background, something close to identity in pragmatic structure seems to be a plausible consequence of Maitra’s view. As Maitra puts it,
[w]e might say the ‘essential aim’ of assertions is to make a difference of a particular kind to the shared background for a conversation, namely, to add its content to the shared background, and so to eliminate all possibilities incompatible with that content. … [And] we can say that a ranking, just like an assertion, seeks to add its content to the shared background of the conversation. If none of the participants to the conversation objects, the content may be added. That means that the background must be updated to eliminate all possibilities incompatible with that content. (Maitra 2012, 112)
My worry is that what distinguishes the second subway case from our original example are features that Maitra’s account of licensing has difficulty explaining.
This localized understanding of authority is clearest when Maitra says that in the case of licensing, the scope of authority “extends only to the parties to the conversation, and no farther” (2012, 117).105 She goes on to explain how the overlapping feature of multiple instances of hate speech “reinforce the subordination that each instance separately contributes” (ibid. 117–18, emphasis added). On this picture, then, the main difference between the two cases is in how often each occurs; their internal features are, in many key ways, the same.
More importantly, I worry that an account of licensing of this sort runs the risk of
ignoring the fact that hate speakers are never starting from scratch.106 It’s simply not the case that
105 To be clear, Maitra is here describing the “jurisdictional” question of authority for cases of licensing. 106 This is similar to the argument I made in Chapter One about Langton’s use of the South African legislator’s
speech as a paradigm example of subordinating speech. Like Maitra, she over-inflates the role of an isolated speech act from a single speaker. I take these to be distinct, though obviously related criticism.
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the speakers in our two subway examples above are making anything close to similar moves with their speech acts. What’s needed is an account of how ordinary instances of hate speech draw on, exploit, and give voice to pre-existing oppressive social norms that they then reshape and deploy in their utterances. Indeed, I take it that it’s partly because ordinary hate speech is so ordinary, in the sense of not uncommon or familiar, that it is able to have the authority it does, and this element of familiarity needs to be recognized in our account of subordinating authority.