Performative utterance


In the philosophy of language and speech acts theory, performative utterances are sentences which not only describe a given reality, but also change the social reality they are describing.
In a 1955 lecture series, later published as How to Do Things with Words, J. L. Austin argued against a positivist philosophical claim that the utterances always "describe" or "constate" something and are thus always true or false. After mentioning several examples of sentences which are not so used, and not truth-evaluable, he introduces "performative" sentences or illocutionary act as another instance.
In 1971, it was referred to by Johnathan Miller in his discussion on UK immigration with Enoch Powell on the Dick Cavett show.

Austin's definition

In order to define performatives, Austin refers to those sentences which conform to the old prejudice in that they are used to describe or constate something, and which thus are true or false; and he calls such sentences "constatives". In contrast to them, Austin defines "performatives" as follows:
  • Performative utterances are not true or false, that is, not truth-evaluable; instead when something is wrong with them then they are "unhappy", while if nothing is wrong they are "happy".
  • The uttering of a performative is, or is part of, the doing of a certain kind of action, the performance of which, again, would not normally be described as simply "saying" or "describing" something.
The initial examples of performative sentences Austin gives are these:
  • "I do " – as uttered in the course of a marriage ceremony.
  • "I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth"
  • "I give and bequeath my watch to my brother" – as occurring in a will
  • "I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow"
As Austin later notices himself, these examples belong to what Austin calls, explicit performatives; to utter an "explicit" performative sentence is to make explicit what act one is performing. However, there are also "implicit", "primitive", or "inexplicit" performatives. When, for instance, one uses the word "Go!" in order to command someone to leave the room then this utterance is part of the performance of a command; and the sentence, according to Austin, is neither true nor false; hence the sentence is a performative; – still, it is not an explicit performative, for it does not make explicit that the act the speaker is performing is a command.
As Austin observes, the acts purported to be performed by performative utterances may be socially contested. For instance, "I divorce you", said three times by a man to his wife, may be accepted to constitute a divorce by some, but not by others.
Every performative utterance has its own procedure and risks of failure that Austin calls 'infelicities'. He sees a sharp distinction between the individual text and the 'total speech act situation' surrounding it. According to Austin, in order to successfully perform an illocutionary act, certain conditions have to be met. Besides the context, the performative utterance itself is unambiguous as well. The words of an illocutionary act have to be expressed in earnest; if not, Austin discards them as a parasitic use of language.

John Searle

Building on Austin's thought, language philosopher John Searle tried to develop his own account of speech acts, suggesting that these acts are a form of rule-governed behaviour. On the one hand, Searle discerns rules that merely regulate language, such as referring and predicating. These rules account for the "propositional content" of sentences. On the other hand, he discerns rules that are constitutive in character and define behaviour. These rules are the conventions underlying performative utterances and they enable not only representation and expression, but also communication.
This focus on effect implies a conscious actor and Searle assumes that language stems from an intrinsic intentionality of the mind. These intentions set the prerequisites for the performance of speech acts and Searle sets out to map their necessary and sufficient conditions.
Searle argued in his 1989 article How Performatives Work that performatives are true or false just like constatives. Searle further claimed that performatives are what he calls declarations; this is a technical notion of Searle's account: according to his conception, an utterance is a declaration, if "the successful performance of the speech act is sufficient to bring about the fit between words and world, to make the propositional content true." Searle believes that this double direction of fit contrasts the simple word-to-world fit of.

Performative text

Building on the notion of performative utterances, scholars have theorized on the relation of a spoken or written text to its broader context, that is to say everything outside the text itself. The question whether a performative is separable from the situation it emerged in is relevant when one addresses for example the status of individual intentions or speech as a resource of power. There are two main theoretical strands in research today. One emphasizes the predetermined conventions surrounding a performative utterance and the clear distinction between text and context. Another emphasizes the active construction of reality through spoken and written texts and is related to theories of human agency and discourse. The ideas about performance and text have contributed to the performative turn in the social sciences and humanities, proving their methodological use for example in the interpretation of historical texts.
Early theories acknowledge that performance and text are both embedded in a system of rules and that the effects they can produce depend on convention and recurrence. In this sense, text is an instance of 'restored behaviour', a term introduced by Richard Schechner that sees performance as a repeatable ritual. The focus here is largely on individual sentences in the active first person voice, rather than on politics or discourse. The syntactical analyses are firmly anchored in analytical epistemology, as the distinction between the research object and its context is not conceived as problematic.

Postmodernist theories

The second set of theories on performance and text diverged from the tradition represented by Austin and Searle. Bearing the stamp of postmodernism, it states that neither the meaning, nor the context of a text can be defined in its entirety. Instead of emphasizing linguistic rules, scholars within this strand stress that the performative utterance is intertwined with structures of power. Because a text inevitably changes a situation or discourse, the distinction between text and context is blurred.
Austin and Searle thought in terms of demarcated contexts and transparent intentions, two issues that in the 1970s led Searle into polemics with postmodern thinker Jacques Derrida.
The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida holds with Austin and Searle that by illocutionary force, language itself can transform and effect. However, he criticizes the notion of 'felicity conditions' and the idea that the success of a performative utterance is determined by conventions. Derrida values the distinctiveness of every individual speech act, because it has a specific effect in the particular situation in which it is performed. It is because of this effect or 'breaking force' that Derrida calls the possibility of repeating a text 'iterability', a word derived from Latin iterare, to repeat.
According to Derrida, the effects caused by a performative text are in a sense also part of it. In this way, the distinction between a text and that which is outside it dissolves. For this reason it is pointless to try to define the context of a speech act.
Besides the consequential effects, the dissolution of the text-context divide is also caused by iterability. Due to the possibility of repetition, the intentions of an individual actor can never be fully present in a speech act. The core of a performative utterance is therefore not constituted by animating intentions, as Austin and Searle would have it, but by the structure of language.
The philosopher Judith Butler offers a political interpretation of the concept of the performative utterance. Power in the form of active censorship defines and regulates the domain of a certain discourse. Indebted to the work of Michel Foucault, Butler expounds how subjects are produced by their context, because the possibilities of speech are predetermined.
Notwithstanding such social restraints, Butler underscores the possibility of agency. The boundaries of a discourse need continuous re-demarcation and this is where speech can escape its constriction. The emphasis on the limits of what is allowed to be said also frames that what is silenced.
Performativity has a political aspect that consists in what Derrida has described as the breaking force, by which an utterance changes its context. Butler assigns an important role to what Austin has called infelicities and parasitic uses of language. Quotations, parodies and other deviations from official discourse can become instruments of power that affect society.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari define language as the totality of all performative utterances, which they call order-words. They write "We call order-words, not a particular category of explicit statements, but the relation of every word or every statement to implicit presuppositions, in other words, to speech acts that are, and can only be, accomplished in the statement. Order-words do not concern commands only, but every act that is linked to statements by a "social obligation." Every statement displays this link, directly or indirectly. Questions, promises, are order-words. The only possible definition of language is the set of all order-words."