Cheating, Bullshit, and Illocutionary Acts
This post is thick and theoretical, so take comfort from this cute gamer snek picture and then buckle up.
In Harry Frankfurt's 1986 essay "On Bullshit," Frankfurt writes a colorful twenty pages attempting to distinguish between lying and "bullshitting," that timeworn combination of bragging, misrepresenting, and performing more expertise than you actually possess. With Hair Twittler currently doing everything he can to bullshit his way into the destruction of American democracy, it's interesting to look back on Frankfurt's prescient analysis thirty years ago. A liar, he says, exists in some sort of relationship with the truth—namely, he is not truthful and does not say truthful things. Thus the liar presupposes 1) that truth exists and 2) that he knows what it is (and therefore can intentionally not tell it). The bullshitter, on the other hand, is all about the performance of self. The facts are not important to him; "He is not trying to deceive anyone concerning [the facts]. What he cares about is what people think of him" (Frankfurt 5). So whereas a person telling the truth or lying is interested in convincing you of a certain reality, a bullshitter is interested in you believing they are a person who thinks that thing. The bullshitter is conveying an impression; whether they happen to also be lying or truth telling is somewhat immaterial.
In Austinian terms, the bullshitter is all about the illocutionary act. A (not so quick) sidebar into Speech Act Theory: In the 1950's/60's, British language philosopher J.L. Austin developed a theory of performative utterances, showing how speech (in certain contexts) can itself commit an act. The classic example is "I thee wed," which, if said in front of a registered officiant at the proper part of a wedding ceremony, does the act of wedding. The saying is the doing. Austin then breaks down the different parts of a speech act. A locutionary act is the surface, semantic statement ("Don't you think it's cold in here?") The illocutionary act is the underlying meaning ("I think it is cold in here."), which is not the same thing as the locutionary act even though an advanced speaker of a language would consider them equivalent. If the conversation went A: "Don't you think it's cold in here?" B: "No, I don't." A: "Yeah, me neither," you'd rightfully find that a little funny, because A *obviously* thinks it's cold; that was the illocutionary act of their question. The third part, the perlocutionary act, is an effect, intended or not, which the locutionary act implies but does not state explicitly; in this situation, causing someone to close a window or lend the speaker a sweater might be the perlocutionary act of the locution "isn't it cold?" If this sounds too confusing, fear not, adults with average social skills can navigate this puzzling array of inferences and silent requests very skillfully and (usually) automatically. You've done it many times today.
Returning to Harry Frankfurt, we can see how the bullshitter is primarily an expert at illocution—the meaning underneath the words. A bullshitter might make a locutionary act ("I am the best president, Angela Merkel told me she liked me best, I'm making America so great") and, though you might be tempted to fact-check that statement ("we have researched this and it is...categorically untrue"), fact-checking the bullshitter misses the point. Fact-checking only makes sense on the plane of locutionary acts. What the bullshitter is really doing is in the illocution, where he is saying "I am supremely confident and in control." That is the illocutionary act of the statement. His (terrifying) perlocutionary act, then, is to convince the listener of his confidence and correctness. If the listener hears the underlying message and is convinced, the perlocutionary act was successful. This is why it is so difficult to dissuade a bullshitter's adherents; arguing that the facts are incorrect means nothing when a whole illocutionary/perlocutionary conversation happened right under our noses and communicated exactly what was intended.
Being a bullshitter means being a master of speech acts, of wolf whistles and subcutaneous communication. The bullshitter is not constrained by reality. To quote Frankfurt in a particularly fascinating moment, "telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus....In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. An in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth. A person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom...he does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared to fake the context too" (13). The bullshitter is free from the constraint of the truth, he speaks irrespective of it.
This gets *really* interesting when we bring it back to games. Frankfurt's bullshitter maps onto a very particular type of gamer—the spoilsport. Salen and Zimmerman, loves of my life, denote five types of game players in Rules of Play: Standard, Dedicated, Unsportspersonlike, Cheater, and Spoilsport, which we will define below. The types are analyzed along three different axes: lusory attitude (how much they buy into the game and its magic circle), respect for the rules, and interest in attaining the goal of the game.
The Standard player is your basic, engaged rule-follower. Though casual, they invest the game with meaning and have a vested interest in creating a level playing field/having everyone follow the rules (269). At an average board game party, most people are probably standard players. Most people in general are standard players.
The Dedicated gamer is an expert, exploiting possible strategies and zealously practicing to improve. They engage more enthusiastically with the rules than the casuals and invest the magic circle with more authority as well, because it justifies all the time they've spent honing skills. They really want to win, and it means a lot to them when they do. Professional athletes and hardcore gamers fall into this category.
The Unsportspersonlike player would do anything to win: shortcuts, exploiting rules, finding holes. Someone could disagree and call these players simply dedicated, exploiting various loopholes as part of a valid strategy—when soccer players dive after being barely grazed, looking for a yellow card for the opposing team, some might call that unsportspersonlike, but others might find it (perhaps begrudgingly) a valid way to gain advantages and exploit the fact that referees exist (S/Z 271). There's something "in bad faith" about this kind of player, though, that turns the zeal of dedicated players into an unjoyful thing, not in keeping with the spirit of the game. They lack a lusory attitude – they don’t accept the inefficiencies of play, they must WIN— and they violate the unwritten/implicit rules. They aren't cheating, but it's no fun to play with them.
The Cheat flat out breaks the rules, the explicit rules of play (not just implicit ones like the unsportspersonlike player). But the cheater is still playing the game – they break rules, yes, but in order to win. So they’re still within the discourse of the game, they still confer meaning on it. They have a terrible lusory attitude and a disrespect for the rules, but they still have an overdeveloped desperation to win (S/Z 275). It matters to them. The cheat is like Harry Frankfurt's liar: still operating within the realm of true/false, just falling on the false side.
Finally, the Spoilsport: a nihilist who denies rules altogether, the rage quitter, the table-flipper, the “this game is stupid and I'm going to eat the pieces so no one else can play” type of player. They ruin it for everyone. As Salen and Zimmerman articulate, “meaning is violently erased” by a spoilsport (275). They kill the magic circle through their lack of lusory attitude, lack of respect for the rules, and lack of interest in winning. They just want the game destroyed.
This, then, is the role the bullshitter plays in real life. If modern politics is a game, made of different types of players, then the spoilsport is the one laughing at the cheater for trying so hard. The bullshitter doesn't need to lie; he can just deny that any of the institutions of democracy have meaning. If America has a magic circle, a set of rules and illusions we accept in order to adopt the lusory attitude and buy into the game of democracy, the spoilsport is the one brazenly denying its existence.
Frankfurt writes somewhat wistfully about a time before bullshit. He quotes Longfellow, who wrote equally wistfully of his own bygone age: "In the elder days of art/ builders wrought with greatest care/ Each minute and unseen part,/ For the Gods are everywhere." This vision, of a craftsperson who refuses to cut corners, filled with self-discipline and fidelity to craft, is lost in an age of subjective standards, self-indulgence, and bullshitters who get away with murder. How lovely it would be to exist on the plane of that master crafter, who might construct a good chair or a bad chair but would not, could not, bullshit their way through a chair, denying that the concept of chair means anything at all. And games, blessedly, offer that marvelously comforting epistemology: the rules are clearly stated, breaking them is cheating, giving up entirely is being a spoilsport. The chair is a chair, the game is a game, truth is truth, and things we play have meaning.
