Saying the opposite of what you say

[drdoug]

I've mentioned before that I have a fascination for performative utterances: They're that particular sort of thing you say that do what they say they do because you said them. They're not just descriptions of how things are, they change how things are because they are said. So, for instance, saying "You are under arrest" makes you under arrest

Comments

[simont]

And a Minister who says they won't resign is actually saying that they might - as in J. K. Galbraith's observation that "anyone who says four times that he won't resign, will". Other recent classics include "this institution is fundamentally sound financially".

These examples, of course, all fall into the wider pattern of the Yes, Minister dictum "never believe anything until it's been officially denied."

I don't know that they're exactly anti-performative, though; they seem more like anti-informative to me, in that the statement is an attempt not to change the state of the world but merely to cause the listener to believe a particular thing, and inadvertently causes them to believe the opposite.

For a true anti-performative utterance, you'd surely have to find some circumstance in which saying (for example) "You're under arrest" does not merely fail to place you under arrest, but it specifically makes you not under arrest in some way. (Perhaps cancelling your previous state of being under arrest, or perhaps merely by protecting you from subsequent actual arrest, e.g. by being sufficiently obviously wrongful that you could use it in court to argue your way out of trouble.) And I think those are harder to find.

The closest example of that I can immediately think of is the 'nonpology' or 'fauxpology' of which we've been seeing talk in blogs and news articles recently, of the form "I'm sorry if anyone was offended" - it's clearly trying to look like the performative "I apologise", but just as clearly conveying a total lack of actual apologeticness.

[edit] ... ok, I hadn't thought clearly enough about your example of 'This institution is financially sound', for which presumably your point was that even if it's true when spoken it might cause itself to subsequently become untrue, by making investors start worrying about what might have prompted anyone to feel a need to reassure people of it in the first place.

[drdoug]

I don't know that they're exactly anti-performative, though; they seem more like anti-informative to me, in that the statement is an attempt not to change the state of the world but merely to cause the listener to believe a particular thing, and inadvertently causes them to believe the opposite.

Aha, yes! I think you've put your finger on it. They aren't anti-performative at all. Maybe the broader class would be a statement having the opposite effect to the one intended. Statements with paradoxical effects, or backfiring statements, perhaps.

I'm sorry if anyone was offended

*laughs* Yes. I think that illustrates it nicely. It's a bit like a performative statement but has the opposite effect.

I've realised that the Streisand effect is pretty similar, although that covers actions taken as much as statements made. (And I'm simultaneously amused and sympathetic that the Wikipedia page for that has the photo of Barbra Streisand's house.)

[drdoug]

I forgot to mention the Prime Ministerial expression of full confidence in a Minister, which very clearly signals somewhat less than full confidence; further, it seems obviously intended to shore up their position, but in many circumstances can serve to undermine it - at minimum by giving it airtime for another set of news cycles. I used to call this force Major after the PM who probably made the most public expressions of confidence in their Ministers.

Also related: Don't bother me, I'm asleep. We have no rules. This page left intentionally blank. Steal this book. Please do not throw stones at this sign. All Cretans are liars. Words cannot convey my feelings.

[simont]

Ha, I like 'force Major' :-)

Some of those examples made me think that surely I'd heard of this concept under another name, and sure enough, a bit of googling found me a collection of "self-defeating sentences", including some of your examples here. I think from that post I particularly liked "I am not contradicting you!"

[drdoug]

:) Those are fun.

I'm not even going to mention apophasis.

[simont]

I'm not even going to mention apophasis.

:-)

A favourite joke of mine when I was at university was to append to someone else's remark "... To say nothing of ..." and then tail off into silence - because of course I was saying nothing of it!

(Sometimes I did that purely for comic effect, and sometimes because I thought there actually was some relevant point that could be alluded to, and which didn't actually need mentioning because it was so obvious that just hinting at the existence of such a point would do. And of course sometimes people got the joke, and sometimes they got completely confused and prompted me to finish my sentence, and sometimes - most satisfyingly - they did the latter and then the penny dropped. :-)

[simont]

Also, on a more subtle note, here's a sentence that I liked enough to put in my collection of fun email/news sig quotes years ago (and I still like it, though I don't use that collection at all any more):

"The distinction between the enlightened and the terminally confused is only apparent to the latter."

What I like about it is that it's self-defeating read one way, and yet also not:

On the one hand it has a kind of Epimenides paradox nature about it: it seems to be trying to say that there is no difference between enlightenment and terminal confusion, but defeats itself by then admitting that there is an observable difference between people with each condition, namely whether they think they can see a difference. So if there is a difference, surely the enlightened person is themself confused in not being able to notice that, and so ... [disappears into Strange Loop recursive confusion]

And yet, at the same time, there is a perfectly good interpretation of that sentence that would be able to be literally true with no paradox at all, which is to posit that "enlightenment" refers to some kind of post-thought meditative nirvana in which nothing is apparent to you at all (and, presumably, you're supposed to like it that way). In that case, the sentence would have similar content to one such as "The distinction between the unconscious and the terminally confused is only apparent to the latter", which clearly is not paradoxical at all in the same way.

(Related to this sentence, of course, is the similarly self-defeating one about the difference between theory and practice being that in theory there is no difference. Though I know someone who complains about that one every time he hears it, on the basis that actually there are entire fields of theory concerning themselves exclusively with the ways in which theory and practice differ!)

[drdoug]

Nice one.

That's reminded me of the Socratic idea that being wise is primarily knowing that one knows nothing. Certainly my main memory of Socratic dialogues is that they start with Socrates claiming to know nothing about a topic and 'educating' his luckless interlocutor who claims the contrary, until at the end they are browbeaten in to agreeing that they don't know either.

I do have something like this belief myself: in fields I could credibly claim to be an expert, it feels a lot like what I do know is not much (if anything) more than having a better grip on how much we don't know than non-experts have.

"I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken" - but that's getting in to the realms of oxymorons, which is another vast territory.

[purplerabbits]

I think any comment on how quiet it is would count as anti-performative?

[cartesiandaemon]

I observed[1] on twitter, "'Would you recommend windows 10 to your friends' is like 'are you alseep'; it doesn't get more likely the more times you ask" :)

[1] Or whatever the verb form of "sarcasm" is :)