Over half a century ago, J. L. Austin introduced us to the idea that speech acts do things and don't just transmit abstract contents from mind to mind—they have performative force—and he made clear how relations of authority and social norms constituted the possibility of speech acts having specific illocutionary effects. Austin's pragmatic analyses were free of any sensitivity to how authority and norms are structured by power inequalities, relations of oppression, or social identities. In recent years, there has been a burst of attention to how speech acts can constitute situated exercises of power that may create, enforce, or dismantle agency and identity; speech acts can subordinate, silence, grant rights and statuses, resist and reconstitute identity, and more (see Anderson, forthcoming; Herbert Reference Herbert2015; Kukla Reference Kukla2014; Langton Reference Langton1993; Langton and Hornsby Reference Langton and Hornsby1998; Maitra Reference Maitra, Maitra and McGowan2012; and Tirrell Reference Tirrell, Maitra and McGowan2012). In this essay we continue along this path, but enhance it in what we think are two new ways.
First, while others have begun to look at how social and community identity shapes the force of speech acts, we want to look at how speech can constitute and negotiate the boundaries of communities themselves. Speech does not merely reflect and depend upon social identity; it helps create it by ingrouping and outgrouping individuals and establishing and clarifying community boundaries and norms of membership.
Second, we focus on a kind of speech that we think has flown almost entirely under the philosophical radar, which we term peripheral speech. Peripheral speech is, by definition, not the main show or the primary mechanism by which business gets done. It is the informal, typically playful, insider speech that forms the marginalia and the glue holding together the web of discursive practices of a community. It includes inside jokes, riffs, gossip, and insider references; it is fluid and only loosely constrained, and only those who have skills, discursive knowhow, and normative competence characteristic of a community can play along successfully. Peripheral speech is shared by a community, but is also used to bring people into it and cast people out of it. Peripheral speech has—perhaps unsurprisingly—received virtually no direct analytic attention. Yet, in our view it plays a fascinating and critical role (or set of roles) in constituting positive shared identities and negotiating the boundaries of communities.
When philosophers have discussed practices of ingrouping and outgrouping, discussions have focused on cases in which these practices are derogatory and oppositional, functioning by constructing an ‘us’ by way of contrasting it to a denigrated ‘them’ (for an interesting, developed example of such functioning, see Tirrell Reference Tirrell, Maitra and McGowan2012). While we recognize how common it is to build insider identity oppositionally, we think it is also important to attend to other sorts of practices of identity formation, negotiation, and solidification. One of the things we find compelling about peripheral speech is that it provides opportunities to build positive shared identities that are not oppositionally defined and do not depend on the denigration of others. Plenty of peripheral speech works oppositionally, and much peripheral speech denigrates outsiders—racist jokes, broad recognizable stereotypes and the like are often fodder for peripheral speech. But it is not built into the nature of peripheral speech to proceed negatively in this way, and in fact as we will see, it often functions to build positive, nonoppositional identities.
We begin with a more general pragmatic exploration of the kind of speech that constitutes communities and ingroups and outgroups individuals. We then give an account of peripheral speech and its role in constituting community. We argue that successful entitlement to peripheral speech essentially requires a moderately revised version of what Ishani Maitra (Reference Maitra, Maitra and McGowan2012) has called ‘licensed authority’—that is, roughly, speaker authority that is not granted by way of established rules and conventions, but rather settled locally and in situ, in part through its uptake. We end with a brief discussion of how peripheral speech can be used to resist or dismantle dominant norms and, conversely, how the force of peripheral speech can be resisted.
Before we go farther, we should note that we are working with a maximally inclusive understanding of ‘speech’ as any kind of bodily performance that communicates. Speech acts, for us, not only include verbal and signed interventions, but can also include gestures, Facebook ‘likes’, eye rolls, colored bandanas, and perhaps even fashion choices. At some point the line between communicative and noncommunicative acts becomes fuzzy, but we are not concerned with that line for our purposes. Hence, peripheral speech can encompass all dimensions of our communicative performances, and what distinguishes it as peripheral may be its tone, the body language with which it is delivered, or other such expressive dimensions.
1. Ingrouping, Outgrouping, and Community-Specific Speech
Some speech is designed only for members of a specific community or ingroup. Clear examples include expert discourse and vocabulary, inside jokes, nicknames, and certain kinds of slang. Users of such speech can recognize one another as fellow insiders; misusers or uncomprehending listeners mark themselves as outsiders. Thus, one of the pragmatic effects of speech can be to display ingroup and outgroup status.
Some speech not only displays ingroup and outgroup status, but helps constitute that status—it serves to clarify, negotiate, and enforce community boundaries and to bring people into and cast people out of a community. This can be relatively explicit. For instance, a community might use speech to lay down a set of criteria for membership; a medical association may state that only those who pass a certain exam can join, or a club may state that only men can join. Such speech acts specify conditions on membership at the level of their semantics, but when uttered with the proper authority, they can also make it the case that communities have specific boundaries and entry conditions. A speech act may ritualistically initiate someone into a community rather than lay down rules for entry: A judge announces that someone is hereby a citizen, or, slightly less officially, at the end of an oral defense, the director states ‘Congratulations, Dr. Menendez!’ and shakes the candidate's hand, thereby initiating a person into the community of academics with PhDs. Conversely, with speech, we can strip individuals of their membership in a formally constituted community. Less formally and less explicitly, a use of a nickname might bring someone into a group, while the strategic use of inside jokes can keep individuals in the group or cast them out. As we will discuss in detail later, would-be community members sometimes try to use insider slang or expert discourse to petition for group membership; this may or may not work depending on how other group members give uptake to the petition.
In How To Do Things with Words (1962), Austin introduces the category of exercitives, which are speech acts that as part of their illocutionary force impose a rule or a norm. Legislative speech provides paradigmatic examples of exercitive speech. Club charters and statements of licensing requirements are exercitives that establish community membership. Much ingrouping and outgrouping speech, however, cannot be neatly classified as excertitive although it serves a related function. Speech acts that bring someone into a group or cast her out, or petition for membership, do not necessarily—except in a rather forced sense—establish a new rule or norm.Footnote 1 Welcoming the first black member into a country club might in effect have excertitive force, but normally congratulating the class of 2020 at the end of a commencement ceremony does not. Such speech acts do, however, alter the norms that apply to particular people, by moving them one way or the other across the boundary of a community, which will have its own internal normative structure. In short, ingrouping, outgrouping, and displaying, negotiating, and constituting community boundaries are among the important pragmatic functions of language although as far as we know, these functions have not received rigorous attention from philosophers of language.
Our primary goal in this paper is to examine peripheral speech, which we think is an especially rich, interesting, powerful, and flexible kind of speech that serves to sustain, clarify, constitute, and negotiate community boundaries, including by ingrouping and outgrouping individuals. But before we get to peripheral speech, it will help to introduce a bit more theoretical machinery that will let us think about the pragmatics of ingrouping and outgrouping.
Much of the speech that serves to negotiate community membership belongs to a broader pragmatic category we dub community-specific speech. In ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons (2009), one of us (Kukla) together with Mark Lance distinguished between speech acts that are structurally agent-neutral in their audience, from those that are structurally agent-relative. In brief, speech acts with agent-neutral outputs speak impersonally, calling for the same normative uptake from anyone who might happen to hear those utterances. Newspaper headlines and impersonally stated declaratives are paradigmatic examples. Although different hearers will of course respond differently to such speech acts, they are not designed to impose differentiated normative statuses on different people. In contrast, imperatives, requests, and promises are good examples of speech acts with agent-relative outputs: When I request a favor, for instance, I do so of one or more individuals in particular, and in doing so I call for a specific transformation in my target's normative status; she may now turn down my request or grant it, but either way she is now in the special position of having had a request made of her. In contrast, a passerby who overhears my request is under no pressure to turn it down or grant it; indeed, for him to do so would be a kind of infelicity. (He might leap in and offer to do what I was requesting, but this is a new speech act, an offer—with, incidentally, an agent-relative output—and not itself a response to the normative claim made by the request.) Likewise, the inputs of speech acts—that is, the normative statuses that enable a speaker to perform a speech act—can be agent-neutral (available to anyone regardless of their special authoritative position) or agent-relative (indexed to a specific authoritative position). For instance, anyone can assert that Paris is the capital of France, even though a given speaker may not actually have the warrant to back up that claim. There is nothing about the act of assertion that indexes it to anyone in particular. But only the owner of an object can offer it up for sale; only the ones who will be having sex can consent to that act, and so on.
‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’ argued that all inputs and outputs were agent-neutral or agent-relative (although any one speech act typically has several outputs and hence might have a mix of the two). But it seems to us (Kukla and Herbert) now that there is a third type of input and output, which we will call community-specific. Speech with a community-specific output functions, as a matter of its pragmatic structure, to call for uptake from members of a community qua community members, and not just qua individuals with the shared property of belonging to a community. While the semantic content of the speech act may help settle its pragmatic scope, the distinction we are drawing here is importantly not a semantic but a pragmatic one. In recognizing that you are being called to give uptake to a community-specific speech act, part of what you are giving uptake to is your community membership and your recognition of the community membership of the speaker. This is insider speech, not (just or necessarily) in virtue of the content, but in virtue of its function as a second-personal social transaction. Correspondingly, speech acts that have community-specific inputs are of a sort that are felicitous only when performed by insiders.
Consider the use of technical jargon and acronyms. On the one hand, such language is semantically community-specific, in the sense that insiders will understand it and outsiders will not. But often this type of semantics, along with other contextual cues, creates a specific kind of pragmatic effect: Part of the performative force of the use of jargon may be to call attention to and solidify community membership and insider status. Not only is the speaker speaking only to community members, but the use of jargon can serve to call for self-recognition among members that they are insiders and that the speaker is as well. (None of this need be conscious or intentional, of course!) Such speech acts are not agent-neutral in output. The point is not just that these speech acts are comprehensible only to people within a community (which would not in and of itself hurt their agent-neutral status), but they also are designed to have a differential normative effect on community members; they are for them. They are also not easily understood as agent-relative, as they call upon audience members not as individuals but specifically as any member of the community.
Note that one might also have a speech act with an agent-relative output even if the audience whose normative status is changed is an entire group. For instance, a fire marshal may announce, ‘Everyone in Dorm C must evacuate!’ This applies to everyone in Dorm C and no one else, in virtue of their membership in the group of people living in that dorm. But it does not call to them as participants in a shared identity or as community members per se. They are affected as individuals, albeit individuals picked out descriptively by a common social property. Community-specific outputs, in contrast, call upon people not as individuals with a common property but as a community.
Meanwhile, only insiders have the right authority to engage in community-specific speech (although outsiders might speak to a community: ‘We come in peace!’). The felicitous performance of community-specific speech acts requires that the speaker be recognizable as an insider with the standing to engage in such speech. Hence, these speech acts have community-specific inputs as well. Community-specific speech typically draws on background commitments (both explicit and implicit) and shared understandings in order to call for uptake from community members and in order to flag the speaker as an insider.
Announcements such as ‘Everyone should vote on November 8’ carve out an ‘everyone’ that is pointedly not specific to individuals, but also calls upon hearers to recognize that they are citizens of the relevant community to whom the advice is offered. The speech act does not have its performative effect in any interesting sense when overheard by a noncitizen for whom no election is occurring. Legislative speech and constitutional speech are community-specific in a very formal sense: only the right kind of entitled insider can issue this sort of speech, and its normative scope is explicitly anyone who is or becomes a member of the community bound by those laws or constitutions.Footnote 2 It is typically phrased in universal terms: ‘No one shall . . .’ or ‘Everyone has the right to . . .’. But we all understand that the scope of the force is limited to citizens of the relevant community.
Less formally but just as vividly, a fascinating example of community-specific speech is so-called ‘dog whistle’ speech (see also Saul [n.d.] and Albertson [Reference Albertson2015] for extended discussions of dog whistles). Dog whistle speech is designed to let insiders know that they are being spoken to by an insider while—unlike in the case of jargon and acronyms—outsiders will fail to notice that there is insider speech happening right in front of them. Political speeches often use buzzwords that have special meaning for a certain constituency in this way. Albertson gives the following example (which Saul also discusses): Apparently George W. Bush was fond of using the phrase ‘wonder-working power’ in his speeches, which is a relatively obscure biblical phrase with currency in evangelical communities. Albertson asked two groups of college students if they recognized the phrase. She found that 84 percent of students from a small Pentecostal Bible college recognized the phrase, whereas only 9 percent of (the presumably better-educated, on average) Princeton students reported recognizing it. It seems plausible, at a minimum, that Bush used the phrase not just to convey an idea to those who had the background to understand what he was saying, but also to signal to some listeners that he was one of them and at the same time to call upon them to recognize themselves as part of a shared community together with him. Many interpreted Donald Trump as directing a similar dog whistle to anti-Semites when he used an image but the dog whistle backfired as almost everyone picked up on it (Diamond Reference Diamond2016).
Ritualized tattoos among prisoners and clothing colors for queers and gang members are other well-known examples of such dog whistle community insider speech; in both cases, what are designed to look like idiosyncratic aesthetic choices to outsiders are equally designed to signal specific messages and insider status to other insiders. Tattooed teardrops on the face represent that the wearer has killed someone to others who have done time in prison, and different colored handkerchiefs represent different sexual tastes to those in the queer and kink community. But pragmatically, they also serve to identify insiders to one another while flying under the mainstream radar (the availability of all these meanings on the Internet corrodes their effectiveness as dog whistles, of course).
A speech act might have a community-specific input but some other kind of output, for instance, when people flag their speech as entitled by their social identity or group membership when speaking to outsiders (‘As a disabled queer, I am mindful of . . .’.; for a detailed discussion of such identity-signaling speech acts see Herbert [n.d.]). Or a speech act may have a community-specific output but some other kind of input; the president of the United States may address ‘terrorists’, for example. We reserve the term ‘community-specific speech’ for speech that has community-specific inputs and outputs.
2. Peripheral Speech
Peripheral speech is a genre of community-specific speech. Like all community-specific speech it has community-specific inputs and outputs; it is addressed by insiders to insiders, as a matter of pragmatic form. Peripheral speech is marked out from community-specific speech more generally by at least four features: (1) it draws upon and negotiates a shared group identity though it is not conducting the official business of the community; (2) it is typically playful and not explicitly rule-bound; (3) it can help to construct a positive ingroup identity that need not be established via contrast to a denigrated outgroup—a ‘they’ that helps define the ‘we’ by unflattering contrast; and (4) speaker authority in peripheral speech is both unsettled in advance and uncodifiable. We will discuss each of these features in the remainder of this essay.
Consider first some kinds of community-specific speech that are not peripheral speech: Legislative and constitutional speech explicitly exert and define community norms and boundaries. Informal or semiformal discussions among community members negotiating joint decisions or talking through issues in which the members have a joint stake can be community-specific insider speech as well; examples are, neighbors’ discussions about whether the vacant storefront in the middle of the neighborhood should become a Chik-Fil-A or arguments among philosophers as to the coherence of compatibilism or discussions within black activist communities over whether and how the #blacklivesmatter hashtag should be mobilized. All these different kinds of speech are in some sense the explicit discursive business of a community, and none of them are peripheral speech (though they may be infused with peripheral speech as they unfold).
Peripheral speech is the informal, typically playful speech of a community that is never the official business but always fills the margins. It is speech that draws upon and displays a shared identity, but invokes it indirectly and in a fluid way that only insiders will be able to follow and play along with. Both performing and giving appropriate uptake to peripheral speech invokes and mobilizes shared norms, experiences, ways of talking (including gestures and body language), and lived senses of identity but without explicitly regulating them or having them be the explicit semantic topic. It is the ‘bricolage’ of community discourse, as Derrida ([1966] Reference Derrida and Derrida1978) would put it. This includes inside jokes, various kinds of slang, some sorts of gossip, informal insider memes and stylistic flourishes, sometimes slurs that have been repurposed for within-community use, and more. It can include comments that presuppose a background of shared lore ([‘I'm not feeling well today’; ‘You gotta stop eating Mama Joe's meatballs!’] [‘I'm planning on hitting the APA smoker after dinner’; ‘Well, pick someplace with slow service then!’])
Peripheral speech occurs in the gap between official speech and private speech—speakers aren't merely speaking as one private individual to another, nor are they engaged in carrying out the official work of the group. While official speech is sometimes community-specific and sometimes not, and private speech is never community-specific, peripheral speech is always community-specific in structure. Peripheral speech draws on the shared group identity while explicitly doing something other than the official work of the group. When participants at a tech conference trade sexist puns about ‘dongles’ and ‘forking’ during a woman's presentation, they aren't doing the official business of participating at the conference; yet, their speech is still drawing on a shared community membership in the male-dominated tech field for the jokes to ‘work’ (see, for instance, West Reference West2013).
Peripheral speech is distinguished in part by its function. It uses informal, non-rule-bound play to perform specific actions, including displaying insider status, inviting someone into a group, settling the boundaries of a group and the norms it shares, recognizing someone else's insider status, closing ranks against someone and thereby outgrouping them, and so forth. All of these speech acts (displaying, inviting, etc.) are individuated by their performative force, not their content. While the semantic content of peripheral speech may often concern common group experiences and the like, it need not; Lynne Tirrell (Reference Tirrell, Maitra and McGowan2012) gives an example of kids playing a nonsense game in a car and using it to ingroup one another and to outgroup the adults. In this case, the semantics is nonexistent and unnecessary. What distinguishes peripheral speech is not its semantics but its pragmatics (which will often be triggered or supported by the semantics, of course).
Peripheral speech, precisely because it is by nature not rigidly rule-bound, requires quite a bit of specialized skill. It retains its playfulness and fluidity by morphing quickly; jokes and memes flow in and out of currency. In engaging in such speech, we are not only using these specialized skills but we are also displaying that we have them. The kind of playfulness distinctive of peripheral speech is characteristically available only to insiders who are skilled and at home in a community, and it shows off that skill. Notice that having such a skill is a robust, embodied matter; merely abstractly understanding why something is funny is not enough. Part of what counts as ‘getting’ peripheral speech is being able to play in a way that is recognized and given uptake in a wide variety of contexts and to be able to keep playing even as the norms shift around unpredictably and in situ.
In her classic article, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception,” María Lugones (Reference Lugones1987) describes how she is playful in some of the worlds she inhabits and not others. Our account of peripheral speech helps makes sense of this phenomenon because playfulness is not a self-standing character trait; the ability to be playful in a community is enabled by having a certain kind of facility and secure insider-status in that community.Footnote 3 Other insiders recognize our ingroup status by recognizing these skills, most paradigmatically by playing along and talking back. Those who can't play mark themselves as outsiders, as do those who don't notice that or how the play is happening and thus do not give it the proper uptake. This process does not just reflect the realities of community membership but also helps to constitute it. Being an insider is a rich ongoing material and social status that cannot be reduced to how one speaks and certainly not to how one banters. Yet, at the same time, being recognized as an insider by insiders is not just the recognition of a separate fact; rather, this recognition plays a constitutive role in having that insider status. Part of being an insider is being recognized as one. Crucially, the relevant sort of recognition is not mere passive, conscious acknowledgment, but the kind of recognition that is built into practice. Being able to play along with insider peripheral speech is a primary means of securing this recognition, but it also constitutes the latter because generally one can't play unless others play back. Other insiders recognize someone as an insider in part by recognizing him as a skilled user of peripheral speech, and they do this most importantly in responding by playing back. This playing back, in fact, is a constitutive condition of the speaker being able to keep playing and hence being able to exercise peripheral speech skillfully. (Though playful, peripheral speech need not be ‘unserious’ or frivolous. It can be a potent way of constructing an ideology or transmitting political views. For example, The Daily Show, though a comedy program constructed around jokes and satire, has been a highly influential news program: in 2004 fans of The Daily Show were found to have a more accurate understanding of the issues in that presidential election than those who relied on more conventional news sources [National Annenberg Election Survey 2004].)
As we discussed earlier, dog whistles are always community-specific speech and are structured to be ‘hearable’ only to insiders and glossed over by those outside the community. Like peripheral speech, then, dog whistle speech is insider speech. But while dog whistle speech can initiate peripheral speech or sometimes even do double duty as peripheral speech, its pragmatic structure is different. It is in the nature of dog whistles that they are embedded messages that speak to two audiences at once; they are designed to convey one meaning to the broader audience while signaling insider status to the narrower audience. They are unidirectional messages designed to be heard and recognized by insiders, but not, qua dog whistles, to be given uptake in the form of an openly insider-speech response. If the dog whistler begins to engage in peripheral play with insiders, thereby openly outgrouping others, then the speech is no longer dog whistling. Peripheral speech is a second personal engagement calling for a dialogical performance, whereas dog whistle speech is designed to be recognized in a way that those not in the ingroup will not notice.Footnote 4
Peripheral speech typically involves iterations and riffs, variations on familiar themes that over time can be telegraphed for insiders in minimalist discursive brushstrokes. Talbot Brewer, speaking of a marriage but in terms that fit any well-worn discursive community, writes:
These self-deepening repetitions extend and refine a habitable world of shared possibilities that are not open to mere strangers. These possibilities depend upon a shared sense of what is worth doing or saying, what is funny, what deadly serious, what beside the point. With this shared sense in place, subtle forms of humor can be compressed into a few words; rich arrays of proprietary symbols and conceptual associations can be mobilized without fear of losing anyone. (Brewer Reference Brewer2005: 53)
Peripheral speech is inherently flexible and adaptable—its content, limits, and entitlement are always up for grabs. It has to show up at the right moment, woven through and around other speech; one cannot formally schedule time for a peripheral chat. Part of what makes it distinctive is its shifting character; because it is used for play and because it establishes and sustains insider status, it really can't remain static. Static speech that proceeds according to fixed conventions very quickly ceases to be playful, and it also very quickly becomes codifiable and learnable by outsiders; hence, it cannot effectively function as peripheral speech. One way of marking oneself as an outsider is by using dated forms of peripheral speech. We can watch this happen quickly with Internet terms and hashtags and jokes, for instance, that lose their edge and their ability to signal group membership as they become co-opted by the mainstream and often become monetized.
Peripheral speech bends itself in ever new ways around the other, more official business of discourse. This phenomenon is likely heightened in the Internet age. Not only is peripheral speech not rigidly rule-bound, but in general making its rules explicit kills it. If we encode and explicitly enforce the rules for using a slang term or the circumstances in which a derogatory term gets a pass, or if a meme becomes widely recognized by the mainstream, or if it becomes clear that a meme is being promoted top-down by some sort of corporation, it ceases to have the special pragmatic power that peripheral speech has. Its use no longer displays insider skills and knowledge, and it loses the playful fluidity and morphability that makes it such a powerful discursive tool for sustaining interactions that negotiate community identity.
In some cases, however, peripheral speech can involve a trope that is more ossified and stable—a piece of discourse passed on and tossed about within a specific insider community. For instance, many philosophers will be familiar with the ‘Philosophers’ proofs that P’—a list of jokes that started circulating on paper in the 1980s and that has morphed over the years and now circulates electronically.Footnote 5 Examples include:
Goodman: Zabludowski has insinuated that my thesis that p is false, on the basis of alleged counterexamples. But these so-called ‘counterexamples’ depend on construing my thesis that p in a way that it was obviously not intended—for I intended my thesis to have no counterexamples. Therefore p.
Davidson's proof that p :
Let us make the following bold conjecture: p.
Wallace's proof that p :
Davidson has made the following bold conjecture: p.
On the one hand, the list itself is ossified and relatively stable; it has been passed around for several philosophical generations and additions are rare. On the other hand, the ways that philosophers cite and pass around and riff on the list seem to be exemplary cases of peripheral speech. In trading these jokes around, one is not doing the actual business of philosophy. However, presenting them as funny displays one's insider status, as does giving them uptake as funny. The jokes exemplify an insiders’ facility with philosophy-speak that is quite endless and can't be cashed out entirely; they play off of different philosophers’ styles and personalities, and off of the conceit that all the famous philosophers are begging the question, ultimately, and so forth. These jokes are certainly understandable at most by professional philosophers.
But the point is stronger: trading them around and performing getting them actively constructs a ‘we’ who shares a body of knowledge, a set of discursive skills, and a bunch of disciplinary norms, and it draws a firm boundary between us and outsiders, including self-styled philosophers who are not professionals. It also indirectly but clearly establishes who the central figures in our shared community are, by deeming them worth including on the list. (It's no accident that this forty-odd-year-old list names only white male philosophers.) Furthermore, it serves as an informal pedagogical tool for inducting people into the community: young philosophers learn who these figures are, how they argue, and what counts as funny to a philosopher by being told these jokes and laughing on cue, even before they understand them. For instance, most of the readers of this paper probably giggled at the Wallace joke, even though you may well not know who Wallace is, and you almost certainly don't know enough about his specific argument style to get the joke—the list bears marks of its historical production. To laugh at the jokes is to perform being intimately familiar with these philosophers and their quirks and with the norms of philosophical discourse. And we learn how to be these things in substantial part through being included in this sort of peripheral speech.
An interesting point brought out by this example is that one can successfully ‘get’ peripheral speech and play along even if one does not fully understand the meaning of one's play. We can laugh appropriately at the Wallace proof even without understanding why it is a satire of Wallace. Likewise, we can often invoke Internet memes or slang or appropriately use hand gestures or expressions even if their full significance and content eludes us, and even if we don't quite understand why the rules are what they are. This is, in part, why people can transmit and entrench racist or sexist ideas, for example, without ‘feeling’ racist or sexist.
The ‘Proofs That P’ list may be a stable piece of discourse, but its existence and role in the discipline form part of our background norms, and insiders become insiders partly by learning how to play with and laugh at such a list. (We play in similar ways with bits and pieces of philosophical discourse—men with martinis or brown hats, robot cats, gruish properties, and so forth.) So it is not the list itself that is peripheral—especially given that it is not itself a speech act—but particular performances and uses of it. And like all peripheral speech, these evolve fluidly over time. Our joke above about no one knowing who Wallace is would not have been funny when the list first came out, presumably, or at least not in the same way.
As we suggested above, the skilled use of peripheral speech is not sufficient for insider status. In fact, while it is important, it is not even uniformly necessary, as those with speech and social disabilities can still be insiders in various groups. Consider con artists who learn how to successfully impersonate insiders in part by learning to use their peripheral speech as well as their ways of dressing and other norms (with our thanks to an anonymous referee for this interesting example). If being a skilled user of peripheral speech were enough to constitute community membership, we could not understand the sense of betrayal that accompanies the discovery of a fake infiltrator of this sort. For example, a narc who infiltrates a college campus partly by adopting the discursive mannerisms of a student will, if found out, be seen as faking membership in the college community since he lacks many key constitutive properties of being a student, such as pursuing a degree, doing homework, etc. Yet, depending on the details, a con artist might well use peripheral speech (and other such tools) to secure insider status rather than to fake it. We have multiple recognizable narratives—in movies such as Down With Love, Avatar, etc.—in which someone constructs an elaborate persona in order to woo someone else or penetrate their world, but by the time her plan is uncovered, she has become an insider. Community membership, after all, is a lived, practiced status. It's about having one's daily activities entangled in the web of recognitions and transactions and collective activities that makes up life in that community. It does not, in the first instance, depend on one's inner motives for action. The feelings of betrayal are sometimes precisely about having welcomed someone into a community who had nefarious motives and sometimes about having been duped into thinking someone was in a community who was not.
Most of the discussions of the pragmatics of ingrouping and outgrouping speech focus specifically on how group identity is built contrastively, through denigrating and ‘othering’ a different group (see in particular Young Reference Young1990, Tirrell Reference Tirrell, Maitra and McGowan2012, McGowan Reference McGowan, Maitra and McGowan2012 as well as Morrison Reference Morrison1993 for a classic and different version of this move). For most of these authors, this sort of contrastive identity construction is at least ethically shady. On this portrayal, language can be used to display and negotiate insider status only through an act of rejection and derogation.Footnote 6 Of course, this happens frequently and is worth exploring. But interestingly, peripheral speech need not function in this way. The tissue of informal shared discursive play that makes up peripheral speech—jokes, slang, riffs on shared knowledge, and so on—can contribute to building a substantive shared identity without essentially defining that identity in terms of its negation of a specific other identity. Of course, any positive identity is contrastable with its own outside, but the content of the identity need not always be forged by way of a negation of a specific other group. Peripheral speech can contribute to both kinds of identity formation.Footnote 7
The list entitled ‘Proofs that P’ we examined above, for instance, separates philosophers from nonphilosophers, but not by contrasting philosophers with any particular other denigrated group. It doesn't even build on a notion of what nonphilosophers, in general, are like; instead, it playfully builds a picture of what philosophers are like, and its only implicature for nonphilosophers is that they are not like that. In making this point, we are certainly not denying that peripheral speech can be used to outgroup people in hurtful and cliquish ways; that's often enough the force of the jokes or slang. But it need not. Peripheral speech can provide tools for building a positive (in the sense of nonoppositional, not necessarily in the sense of evaluatively good) identity, and this is an ethically and theoretically important function that language can serve.
We hope it is clear from reflection upon everyday experience that peripheral speech can be a powerful tool for ingrouping and outgrouping and for displaying and (informally and nonliterally) articulating shared community meanings, norms, and experiences. We are reminded of an old joke:
A group of incarcerated men have been in prison together for a long time. Over the years they have each told one another the same jokes so many times that they've come up with a numbering system for them; instead of running through a whole joke yet again, they just call out ‘Four!’ or ‘Twenty-one!’ and the group laughs at the appropriate joke. Eventually a new prisoner shows up, and he watches the others doing this. One will call out a number, and the others will laugh uproariously. Wanting to be accepted as part of the group, the new guy waits for a pause in the conversation, and calls out ‘Eleven!’ The other men just stare at him blankly. One shrugs and says, ‘Meh! It's all in how you tell it’.
3. Entitlement to Peripheral Speech and Licensed Authority
Every speech act—even an assertion, traditionally the blandest of speech acts—has some performative force or other; it is designed to do something, to have a normative effect of some sort. As such, every speech act requires the right sort of speaker authority in order to succeed. Only someone who owns an object can announce that it is for sale; only someone with ordering authority can issue an imperative; and so forth. Only those who have social status as potential epistemic agents and claimers can assert. Our interest here is in peripheral speech that serves to ingroup and outgroup. What sort of authority must speakers have to make such speech work? This is a question that requires a subtle and contextual answer since by its nature peripheral speech does not operate according to stable and explicit conventions. There is no formal status sufficient to authorize someone to use peripheral speech, the way that ownership authorizes putting something up for sale.
In an influential paper, ‘Subordinating Speech’, Ishani Maitra (Reference Maitra, Maitra and McGowan2012) distinguishes between three kinds of speaker authority: basic, derivative, and licensed. Basic authority is the kind that one has in virtue of what she calls one's ‘social position’, by which she seems to mean one's formal, institutional position. Elected officials and teachers who are responsible for grading students, for instance, have clearly defined special illocutionary powers to enact laws and give essay assignments. Someone with basic authority can bestow derived authority upon a different speaker, by dubbing that person as their representative. A teacher may put a student in charge of the class while he leaves the room, or a police officer may send her deputy to arrest someone.
But Maitra points out that we can do powerful things with speech without any such formal institutional authority. Her particular interest is in speech that subordinates a group's members. While it is clear how legislators, for instance, can subordinate with their speech—most obviously by enacting subordinating laws—it is less clear what sort of authority enables ordinary speakers to subordinate with their speech acts, as Maitra argues they sometimes can. Likewise, speakers with basic or derived formal authority can perform speech acts that ingroup and outgroup: a judge may grant citizenship, an appointed representative may initiate someone into a fraternity, a review board may strip a doctor of her medical license. But the speech with which this paper is concerned does not have this formal authoritative structure. We ask a question analogous to Maitra's: What enables ‘ordinary’ people to draw people into groups and cast them out through peripheral speech, especially given that such speech acts can easily fail and are not always felicitous or successful?
Maitra's third category of speaker authority is what she (somewhat counterintuitively) calls ‘licensed authority’. This is authority that is not formally established in advance of the speech act itself, but is rather claimed and given uptake in situ. Her central example is of an informal group of hikers, in which one member begins making pronouncements about where they will hike and how they will proceed. Whether this member has the authority to become the de facto leader of the group in this way, with special speech act powers, depends on whether the other group members give him uptake as authoritative. The success of this process is not determined by explicit institutional rules or conventions. As we discuss in more detail below, we find this notion of licensed authority to be especially helpful for understanding the kind of authority that enables someone to successfully pull off peripheral speech. As we saw earlier, succeeding at peripheral speech generally requires that others give the speech uptake by playing along and talking back, recognizing the speaker's status as a skillful user of this type of speech by responding with more peripheral speech. This is not a kind of authority that is formally or institutionally bestowed in any cases we can think of; it is rather settled in situ and partially constituted by being recognized as in place through return play.Footnote 8
Maitra's notion of licensed authority appears to us to bring together at least three importantly different dimensions, which she does not clearly tease apart: (1) Licensed authority is established in medias res rather than in advance; a speaker performs a speech act without having the authority to do so already in place and gains that authority if (and only if) audience members give the speech act the proper uptake (see also Langton [Reference Langton2015], which also discusses the role of presupposition and accommodation for informal speaker authority. By acting on the assumption that he has authority and others accommodating this presupposition, the speaker in fact comes to have authority.). In effect, the uptake retroactively establishes the legitimacy of the entitlement of the speaker. (2) The authority does not depend upon formal or explicit rules or conventions or institutional statuses. (3) The authority does not derive from the speaker's social position.
The first two of these dimensions are separable: Some authority is already in place before someone speaks even though it does not devolve from any formal rules or position, such as when one friend or lover in a pair has long been functioning as the dominant one. And some authority may have this retrospective structure in virtue of formal rules; for instance, a move in a game may officially count as legitimate if and only if it is received and accepted as a move—a Scrabble move counts as authoritative if no one challenges it, for instance, even if the word does not exist. Maitra's hiker's authority is both informally claimed and retrospectively established, but these are two separable features of it.
As for the third dimension, we should not follow Maitra in conflating formal institutional status with ‘social position’. As Maitra recognizes, the hiker's ability to take charge and lead does not depend on any formal or codified institutional authority. But we find it odd that she claims it doesn't depend on the hiker's social position. The ability to claim authority in situ, outside of any codified rules, does not reduce to social position. And yet, how we are positioned in social space makes an enormous difference to our ability to claim authority successfully and hence to do things such as exercise control over ingrouping and outgrouping. Typically, one's power to claim authority in situ depends heavily on one's position within an implicit network of power hierarchies and relationships. For instance, it is no accident that Maitra's authoritative hiker is marked as male; in general, men have better success at claiming such leadership roles. The leader may have ‘raw charisma’, but typically we perceive charisma and ‘leadership potential’ through lenses such as gender, race, body shape and size, and class. The politics of respectability (see Young [Reference Young1990: ch. 2], for an excellent discussion of this), which are marked by race and class among other social identities, help to determine who gets uptake when attempting to establish rather than use preexisting authority.
In a lovely blog post entitled ‘When Life Hacking is Really White Privilege’ (2013), Jen Dziura responds to a self-help article, ‘How to Break All the Rules and Get Everything You Want’ (Altucher Reference Altucher2013) written by James Altucher, an upper-middle-class white man. Altucher's article is a manual for claiming licensed authority: He offers tips on how to get into places that are ‘closed for private parties’, how to get to the front of a checkout line if you only have a few items, and so forth. Overwhelmingly, his tips are about simply claiming licensed authority and calling for others to give uptake that constitutes that authority. But as Dziura points out, Altucher's ability to do this depends thoroughly on white privilege and class privilege in particular. A noticeably homeless black man is unlikely to be able to sweet talk his way into the table tennis section of a private club by asking if he and his son can just ‘take a look around inside’, as Altucher does. It is not just institutional authority that depends on social position; in situ, uncodifiable, claimed authority does as well.
The ability to claim authority in situ is not just dependent upon generalized social privilege; the ‘most privileged’ speaker does not always get to claim the floor. Often, being a recognizable insider, even of a more broadly marginalized group, can help someone to claim authority in a particular context in which an outsider would be distrusted or simply ignored. During the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, black nurses from the local community were the ones signing up study participants and assuring them that the study was in their interest, and they did so in local churches; there is good evidence that this use of ‘insider’ speakers and spaces was key to giving the study ongoing apparent legitimacy (Gamble Reference Gamble1997).
Thus, we need to refine Maitra's taxonomy: Speaker authority may come from an official institutional role (either originally or derivatively), or it may be more informal. It may come from one's position within a social hierarchy and community or from something more neutral such as being the one nearest to the salt that needs to be passed or the one holding the bus schedule that needs to be consulted. And it may be constituted in advance and then used, or it may be constituted in situ partially through its uptake. We can sum up these options with a chart of possible sources of speaker authority. The authority that undergirds any successful speech act will fit into either the left or the right column in each row; any combination of left and right columns is possible:
TYPES OF SPEAKER AUTHORITY
A professor's announcement of a due date for an essay fits into boxes 1A, 2A, and 3A. A husband who orders off a menu for his wife without consultation in the course of a long-standing gendered, unequal marriage speaks from a position fitting into 1A, 2B, and 3A. A child who orders ice cream before her friends do because she ended up at the front of a queue speaks from 1B, 2A, and 3B.
Our claim is that the authority behind peripheral speech typically fits into 1B, 2B, and 3A. It is entitled not by an official institutional position but through a subtle social position, and its entitlement is constituted in situ partially through its uptake, which is not determined by any explicit rules or conventions. When someone tries to mobilize peripheral speech, others generally have some choice about what uptake to give. We can bring someone into a group by playing along with her (perhaps somewhat awkward) attempts at peripheral speech, helping her play by giving her good uptake, and we can close borders against her by refusing to do so. The speaker's presupposition that she has the authority to use that slang can be tenuous and hesitant, and sometimes the audience refuses to accommodate that presupposition (Langton Reference Langton2015). It is common to watch someone try to pull off a certain use of slang, for instance; sometimes this works and sometimes it misfires, and the audience has some control over this outcome.
Hence, not only does peripheral speech resist codification according to formal rules and conventions, but whether it ‘works’ or not depends heavily on how well it ‘plays’ with its audience. Whether an attempt to reveal ingroup status by playing along turns out to be an awkward reminder of outgroup status or a solidification of ingroup status depends on subtleties of the uptake and response that speech receives. Likewise, trying to use speech to cast someone out by closing ranks against them works only if one has the authority to do such a thing; this authority is partially constituted by how skillful the peripheral speech act is and how much it ends up being accepted by others. Movies and television shows are full of scenes of people reaching out to bring someone into a group by playing with him in speech or trying to enter a group by mobilizing ingroup slang and references, or getting cast out of a group through misfired peripheral speech.Footnote 9 The success and failure conditions are both uncodifiable and heavily dependent on the subtleties of group dynamics.
In order to engage successfully in insider speech, we need a set of skills and background knowledge that make up part of insider lore. But this never suffices; we also need to receive uptake as insiders from our audience. This is because peripheral speech characteristically involves call and response. If your words fall flat, then you fail to solidify your insider position with those words, however apt and skillful they seemed to you and however well they may have worked the last time. Those with solid insider positions can invite borderline group members in by engaging in peripheral speech play with them, or they can outgroup people by refusing to give their peripheral speech uptake. Lugones writes, ‘Playfulness is, in part, an openness to being a fool, which is a combination of not worrying about competence, not being self-important, not taking norms as sacred and finding ambiguity and double edges a source of wisdom and delight’ (1987: 17). We agree, but notice that one must have a certain amount of social capital in order to be open to being a fool and in order to earn the right to not worry about competence. Whether we have that social capital is almost always open to contest, and how well we play helps to settle that question.
The core point here is that none of this can be done by fiat or by claiming an institutional role or by following a set of conventions. There is no official standing or form of locution that automatically succeeds in displaying, creating, refusing, or withdrawing insider status in the domain of peripheral speech. And whether one has the right sort of speaker authority to pull these things off is always settled in situ. For the speaker, then, successful use of peripheral speech can be both a display of insider's speaker authority and a contingent attempt to claim this authority at the same time. Both these goals can succeed or fail, depending on what uptake the speech act gets, where successful uptake normally takes the form of a playful response involving more peripheral speech.
4. Resisting and Reclaiming Speech
The fact that speaker authority in peripheral speech is both unsettled in advance and uncodifiable while at the same time establishing and also reflecting one's social position and community membership helps us to understand why attempts to reclaim slurs and pejoratives as positive ingroup peripheral speech are precarious and fragile. Words that function as slurs when used by outsiders sometimes lose their slurring character entirely when used playfully by insiders. As parts of peripheral insiders’ play, words that would typically be slurs can serve to affirm shared community and identity or to claim and display outgroup status with pride.
Sometimes these insider uses emerge organically, but other times a word that is used to subordinate a group becomes a target of active reclamation attempts by insiders. In American English, ‘dyke’ and sometimes ‘bitch’ are powerful examples, as are ‘niggah’ and ‘thug’ (i.e., see Anderson, forthcoming). Such reclamation projects seek to turn a word used by a larger community to subordinate a subgroup into affirmative language establishing insider identity. Lynne Tirrell argues that ‘successful reclamation requires a reorganization of the inferential structure associated with the term’ (1999: 60), and we would add that it requires a reorganization of who can use the term to what end. But because the authority to use such terms is constituted in situ, and because the terms are already dangerously loaded with negative force when the wrong people use them, their use can easily backfire. A term undergoing reclamation, when used by the wrong person in the wrong way, can have the opposite effect: when used by an outsider it reverts to being a slur or a pejorative. Tirrell writes, ‘For the reclaimed term to prevail, there must be community-wide agreement about the bulk of the assertional commitments [attached to the use of the term]’ (1998: 61). But this is complicated by the fact that part of what is at issue and unsettled in such reclamation projects is often the boundaries of ‘the’ community. There are no strict and stable rules for who counts as the right person or what counts as the right kind of use, and even normal discursive clumsiness can make peripheral speech fall flat. This precariousness of entitlement is built right into the pragmatics of peripheral speech. This makes the project of repurposing traditionally subordinating, outgrouping speech especially dangerous (Herbert Reference Herbert2015). ‘Bitch’ used skillfully by someone in the right position can be hilarious and empowering; used just an indefinable bit off-key, it can reinforce sexism and be alienating and hurtful.
Sometimes we need to resist or intervene on peripheral speech because it can and often does bully, unjustly subordinate, exclude, or create a hostile space in other ways. Because peripheral speech cannot survive becoming serious or official, one way of resisting it is by insisting on taking seriously what was said in play. Judith Butler (Reference Butler1990, Reference Butler1997) and others have discussed how one can subvert dominant norms through jokes and discursive play. Much less discussed is the converse: resisting norms that are encoded in our informal play by insisting on taking seriously and making explicit what was performed as a joke. Forcing people to take responsibility for their jokes can be a powerful way of combating subordinating speech and shining a light on how outgrouping can function. This approach too is tricky, however, because taking peripheral speech serious is a way of not playing along and thereby outgrouping oneself. Almost of essence, to take peripheral speech seriously is to give it an uptake that marks you as an outsider; insiders are those who ‘get it’ as they show by playing along skillfully (although as we noted much earlier, we can ‘get it’ in the sense of displaying the relevant skill without fully understanding the meaning of what we are doing or saying).
An insider with a fair amount of social capital can pull off this kind of resistance and make it potent by halting the play and forcing the speakers to account for their words (for instance, when the play is based on racist or misogynist tropes and background assumptions). But if someone is already in a precarious or vulnerable position and at risk of being outgrouped, resisting by not playing in this way can be risky. We also saw earlier that ‘getting it’ is a matter of displaying the ability to exercise a robust skill, one that inherently involves playing with others, earning their recognitional uptake in the form of more play and being able to continue the play. For this, the ability to acknowledge abstractly that something is funny is not enough. Responding seriously, even when combined with manifesting a theoretical understanding of the joke, is still often enough to mark one as an outsider. For instance, women who object to sexist discursive play are often first accused of ‘not having a sense of humor’ or being told that it is ‘all in good fun’, but this can quickly escalate to anger, effective ejection from the community, and frequently threats of violence (see West Reference West2013, for instance).
Philosophers of language typically focus in speech act theory on formal institutional speech acts and authority and assume the informal cases are basically similar but fuzzier. But this paper has explored cases when the informality is an essential part of the pragmatic structure. This changes the pragmatic terrain in uncharted ways. Codifying peripheral speech or making its norms explicit undermines its performative force and in effect destroys it. At the same time, it can adapt and reconstitute itself quickly, bending and weaving its way around more official and convention-bound discursive practices. We hope to have demonstrated that peripheral speech is a powerful social tool and a fascinatingly complex, philosophically rich form of discourse.
