Performativity

James Loxley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134331697
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Do our writings and our utterances reflect or describe our world, or do they intervene in it? Do they, perhaps, help to make it? If so, how? Within what limits, and with what implications? Contemporary theorists have considered the ways in which the languages we speak might be 'performative' in just this way, and their thinking on the topic has had an important impact on a broad range of academic disciplines.

In this accessible introduction to a sometimes complex field, James Loxley:

• offers a concise and original account of critical debates around the idea of performativity
• traces the history of the concept through the work of such influential theorists as J. L. Austin, John Searle, Stanley Fish, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man and Judith Butler
• examines the implications of performativity for fields such as literary and cultural theory, philosophy, performance studies, and the theory of gender and sexuality.
• emphasises the political and ethical implications that its most important theorists have drawn from the notion of performativity
• suggests ways in which major debates around the topic have obscured its alternative interpretations and uses.

For students trying to make sense of performativity and related concepts such as the speech act, 'ordinary language', and iterability, and for those seeking to understand the place of these ideas in contemporary performance theory, this clear guide will prove indispensable. Performativity offers not only a path through challenging critical terrain, but a new understanding of just what is at stake in the exploration of this field.

1
FROM THE PERFORMATIVE TO THE SPEECH ACT

J. L. AUSTIN

You are more than entitled not to know what the word ‘performative’ means. It is a new word and an ugly word, and perhaps it does not mean anything very much. But at any rate there is one thing in its favour, it is not a profound word.

(Austin 1979:233)

In 1955, John Langshaw Austin delivered the William James Lectures at Harvard University. In the series Austin refined ideas he had begun to explore in both a course on ‘Words and Deeds’ at Oxford and a couple of the relatively few articles he had by then published, work which had already won him a more than parochial fame. The series of twelve lectures was not, however, all that warmly received: an audience of hundreds for the first had dwindled to ‘a core of some twelve to fifteen souls’ by the last, ‘and not all of these few were happy’ (Cavell 1984:30). A junior fellow of the University named Paul de Man heard only that ‘a somewhat odd and quirky Oxford don was giving a series of rather dull and fairly inscrutable lectures’ (Miller 2001:61). Needless to say, he did not feel moved to attend. After Austin’s early death in 1960 the notes from which his Harvard lectures were delivered were prepared for publication and appeared in book form as How To Do Things With Words in 1962. Once they were in the hands of a wider audience, the indifference with which they had apparently first been greeted was replaced by an interest that has not only been sustained over decades, but has also repeatedly managed to renew itself just when it seemed at last to be exhausted. Such success has not been without its consequences: proving so open to a variety of appropriations, Austin’s thinking has sometimes disappeared into the accounts of his work preferred by his inheritors. It is therefore as well for anyone concerned to map any of the more oblique peregrinations of the performative to begin by tracking some of his formulations as closely as possible.

CONSTATIVES AND PERFORMATIVES

At the outset of his first lecture, Austin draws a defining contrast between two views of language. On one side, there is the view he attributes to the ‘logical positivism’ that was such a force in Anglophone philosophy during the first half or so of the twentieth century: that the normal or defining business of language is making statements, such as ‘it is raining’ or ‘the cat is on the mat’, and that such statements are to be assessed in terms of their truth (their correspondence to the given facts of a situation) or their falsity (the failure of any such correspondence). Grammarians and philosophers have certainly not failed to notice that language can be used in other ways, for asking questions, or exclaiming, or issuing commands, but these uses have tended to be treated as peculiar departures from the customary linguistic business of reporting reality. This view of language is termed ‘the descriptive fallacy’: the mistaken assumption that language use is essentially constative, aimed at the production of true or false statements or descriptions.

Against this emphasis on the centrality of the constative, Austin sets the claims of those sentences fallaciously presented as special uses or departures from a descriptive norm. These are sentences that share the grammatical form of statements, and might perhaps be assumed to be such, were it not for some apparently distinctive features. Firstly, ‘they do not “describe” or “report” or constate anything at all, are not “true or false”’; and secondly, ‘the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as, or as “just”, saying something’ (Austin 1975:5). The examples he then cites make clear the kind of utterance he has in mind: ‘I do’, spoken as part of the marriage service; ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’, spoken when breaking a bottle against the hull of the ship in question; ‘I give and bequeath my watch to my brother’, occurring in a will; ‘I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow’. Austin comments:

In these examples it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it.

(Austin 1975:6)

To say, in these instances, is to do: for this reason, Austin christens this kind of sentence or utterance performative, to make clear that here ‘the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action’ (Austin 1975:6).

This fundamental separation of the performative from the constative issues immediately in some significant consequences, which Austin then goes on to spell out. For a start, the criterion of validity or justification to which constative utterances are liable, that of truth considered as the correspondence of a statement to the facts of a particular situation, can’t be said to apply in quite the same way to performatives, because the utterance is already a part, and perhaps the most important part, of the facts: there is no separation, and therefore no relation for us to assess, between utterance and situation. The utterance is not setting out to describe a situation, an event or an action: it is an event or an action. Saying ‘the cat is on the mat’ is valid in being true; to see if it is true, we need only take a quick look at the relative positions of cat and mat. To attempt to do the same with ‘I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow’ would be absurd. In this case the criterion of correspondence to the facts could not apply, unless we wanted to claim that the words spoken were merely the outward report or description of some inward spiritual or mental act. Austin is aware that this is just the view taken by those in the grip of an essentially constative model of language, and that such a view has a long lineage: he cites the title character of Euripides’s play, Hippolytus, as giving voice to the notion that the tongue might swear to do something, but this wouldn’t matter if the heart hadn’t underpinned this oath with one of its own (Austin 1975:9–10). Against this view he sets the fact that performative utterances just don’t function in this manner. If I say ‘I bet’ or ‘I do’ in the appropriate circumstances I have made a bet or married, regardless of any mental reservations I was having at the time; if I say ‘I promise’, you would expect to hold me to it, even if I think I didn’t really mean it when I said it. ‘Accuracy and morality alike’, Austin declares, ‘are on the side of the plain saying that our word is our bond’ (Austin 1975:10).

INFELICITIES

There is, though, more to a performative than this. Even if it cannot be simply true or false, its validity can still be assessed: we have only to consider the matter of the ‘appropriate circumstances’ mentioned by Austin in order to show how. Not every utterance of the words ‘I do’, for example, produces a marriage, and nor does saying ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’ in front of a suitable vessel necessarily result in a ship being so named. Performatives are dependent for their validity on circumstances in precisely the way that a marriage can only be said to have taken place if the right words were said at the right time in the right place, if the right kind of person was officiating, if the contracting parties were not somehow ineligible on grounds of age or species, or already married to someone else. There are, then, lots of different ways in which a performative utterance might go wrong and fail to take effect, or else do so only problematically. A consideration of these various possible difficulties serves to show what the conditions for a successful performative must be, and in his second lecture Austin is able to tabulate six rules that encompass these conditions. They are quoted here in full.

(A.1)	There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances, and further,
(A.2)	the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked.
(B.1)	The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and
(B.2)	completely.

(γ.1)	Where, as often, the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain thoughts or feelings, or for the inauguration of certain consequential conduct on the part of the participant, then a person participating in and so invoking the procedure must in fact have those thoughts or feelings, and the participants must intend so to conduct themselves, and further
(γ.2)	must actually so conduct themselves subsequently.

The picture of the performative that emerges from this account of its enabling conditions is necessarily complex, much more so than the baldly unilinear definition of constatives with which Austin began. Statements could be valid in being true or invalid in being false, and that was seemingly all there was to say on the matter; with performative utterances, on the other hand, there were a number of different axes along which validity could be assessed. If all these conditions were met, a performative could be said to be successful or – in Austin’s preferred terminology – ‘felicitous’ or ‘happy’.

What, though, if only some of them were met? What would we say of the improvised wedding, sincerely meant but following no conventional procedure? Could that be said to have inaugurated a marriage? And what if the cleric or registrar conducting proceedings had been defrocked or improperly appointed? What if one party made a mix up of the other’s name? Would it make a difference if part of the ceremony was omitted by mistake, or if a bomb scare caused its abandonment before its completion? A bigamous marriage would be infelicitous if marriage required monogamy, but would one entered into by someone under duress or the influence of alcohol be problematic in quite the same way? Austin divides the various kinds of ill that might afflict an attempted performative utterance into two major classes, and it is crucial to an understanding of tensions that emerge at the heart of his thinking to acknowledge this division. First there are the violations of the four rules A.1 to B.2, which are violations of the conventional procedures necessary for the successful accomplishment of the performance. Attempted performances thus afflicted are called misfires: in such circumstances ‘the act in question, e.g. marrying, is not successfully performed at all, does not come off, is not achieved’ (Austin 1975:16). These were to be categorically distinguished from violations of rules γ.1 and γ.2 (hence the use of the Greek letter gamma to mark these off from the Roman A and B), which Austin terms abuses. In these cases, where there is something like a fundamental failure of intention or accomplishment, the infelicity does not result in a ‘void’ or ‘empty’ performance, one which simply failed to take place: instead, the act is accomplished, and is ‘hollow’ rather than empty (Austin 1975:16). Thus we can still be bound by a promise we didn’t mean, or married if we plight our troth when drunk. The gap between an ‘inward’ state of mind and an ‘outward’ verbal performance, so comprehensively dismissed when it seemed to allow the model of constative language to characterise all utterance, is here readmitted to the picture. It is a subtly different gap now: Austin had been objecting to an attempt to define performative utterances as merely constative reports of inward, silent actions or performances, not states of mind, and if no such attempt is taking place he is quite happy to admit a difference between intention and performance. It is a difference that will come to matter to many of his readers.

Misfires and abuses are further subdivided in subsequent passages in such a way as to furnish the violation of each of Austin’s six rules with its own name. Thus rule A.1 is transgressed by the misinvocation of a procedure, or by an attempt to invoke a procedure where one has never been or is no longer accepted. It is unlikely, for instance, that I would respond to someone who challenged me to a duel by agreeing to settle our differences on the field of honour at dawn the next day. Where rule A.2 is violated, a misapplication has occurred: a horse has been appointed consul, or a married person has attempted to marry again, or a ‘low type’ has sauntered up to a vessel and crashed a bottle of champagne against it before proclaiming, ‘I name this ship the Mr Stalin’, when the ship wasn’t to be so named, or at least not by him. The transgression of rule B.1 is identified as the introduction of a flaw into the execution of the procedure; that of rule B.2 as a hitch that results in its premature termination.

The abuses that violate the γ-rules call for a slightly different characterisation: problems arise as a result of participants not having the right feelings, thoughts or intentions to make the performance thoroughly felicitous, though it should be reiterated that performances thus affected are not thereby rendered void. Interestingly, Austin is in the end as concerned with the closely related class of mistakes as he is with these kinds of abuses. What do we say about a guilty verdict pronounced upon someone who did not, in fact, commit the crime? What, more trivially, of a penalty awarded in a football match when no foul had, in fact, been committed? In these circumstances the performative is certainly not void: the ‘criminal’ will be punished, the penalty ...

Table of contents

• THE NEW CRITICAL IDIOM
• CONTENTS
• SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 FROM THE PERFORMATIVE TO THE SPEECH ACT
• 2 PHILOSOPHY AND ORDINARY LANGUAGE
• 3 A GENERAL THEORY OF SPEECH ACTS
• 4 SPEECH ACTS, FICTION AND DECONSTRUCTION
• 5 PERFORMATIVITY, ITERABILITY AND POLITICS
• 6 BEING PERFORMATIVE
• 7 PERFORMATIVITY AND PERFORMANCE THEORY
• GLOSSARY
• FURTHER READING
• REFERENCES
• INDEX