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By Anshuman A. Mondal

The prime minister was recently accused of tolerating racism by posing with some blacked-up Morris dancers for a publicity photograph. His accusers have, in turn, been accused of being over-sensitive or guilty of misreading.

It's a wearyingly familiar scene, played out every time there is a controversy of this kind. One side claims the right to freedom of speech, the other insists that other fundamental rights have been violated (for instance, to be free from racial discrimination). A stalemate ensues that is never resolved, but life moves onuntil the next controversy flares up.

The giving and taking of offence is at the heart of these controversies. But what exactly is going on when people give or take offence? Is it simply a difference of opinion or interpretation, or are there deeper motivations and explanations?

To answer these questions we need to re-think not just freedom of speech, but also the idea of 'speech' on which it rests.

The common sense view of language is that is simply a vehicle of communication. It sees expression as merely the passing of information, ideas, concepts and images from one human to another. 'Speech' is therefore separated from action. While making speech always involves an act writing, verbalisation the expression, once it is made, stands on its own, apart and distinct from the act which created it.

This underlies most contemporary understandings of freedom of speech. The first amendment of the US constitution, for instance, states that "Congress shall make no lawabridging the freedom of speech". If speech is not distinct from action, then this would effectively mean that Congress shall not make any law, which is absurd.

However, in his seminal book How to Do Things with Words, the Oxford philosopher J L Austin developed something known as 'speech act theory'. He argued that there were two broad categories of speech: the first, which he called 'constatives', are simply descriptive and informational; the second he called 'performatives', and they dont simply say something, they do something. These forms of speech are therefore a kind of action.

In my book Islam and Controversy: The Politics of Free Speech after Rushdie, I argue that the giving and taking of offence are performative speech acts in Austins sense. They act upon the world and the work they do is political insofar as they aim to establish a power relation between offender and offendee. Put simply, to offend someone is to subordinate them, to put them down. Conversely, to take offence is to draw attention to that subordination.

The link between abusive speech and the performance of power is demonstrated by a simple thought experiment how many offensive terms of abuse can you think of that apply to the white race, male gender or heterosexuality?

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Comment: Don't fear censorship it protects the vulnerable