Is the state the source of pornography’s authority?

Veronika Lassl

University of Vienna

In her seminal 1993 paper “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts”, Rae Langton uses John L. Austin’s speech act theory to defend the view that pornography constitutes (rather than merely causes) subordination of women. She proposes thinking of pornography as an illocution of subordination. Illocutions of subordination come with certain success conditions – one of them is that the speaker possess relevant authority. Whether pornography possesses the relevant authority is thus crucial to Langton’s defence of the constitution claim.
Since the publication of “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts”, critics have objected that pornography does not possess authority (e.g. Bauer 2015, Butler 1997, Green 1998). According to Ishani Maitra, these objections stem from a view of authority that ties authority to positions in institutions (Maitra 2012). But according to her, there are other forms of authority. One of them is derived authority. It is conferred on someone by the actions or omissions of someone in a position of authority (for instance, by a lawmaker). In a 2017 paper “Is Pornography Like the Law?”, Langton makes reference to Maitra’s notion of derived authority. She writes that pornography may plausibly possess derived authority that is conferred upon it by omissions of the state. I want to challenge this proposal in my talk.
My challenge concerns the domains of the authority in question. On Maitra’s account, derived authority only ever extends as far as the authority of its source (cf. Maitra 2012, 117). If pornography’s authority stems from the state, the state must therefore have authority over at least the same domains as pornography. But this, I argue, commits us to an undesirable picture of how far the state’s authority reaches into its citizens lives. Instead, we should reject the view that pornography’s authority over this domain, whatever it may be, derives from the state. Maitra’s notion of derived authority, I conclude, is not well suited to capture the mechanisms behind pornography’s authority and the relationship between pornography and the state.

Chair: Robin Waldenburg

Time: 05 September, 15:20 – 15:50

Location: SR 1.004