The first theoretical concept in our course comes from the work of the English philosopher J. L. Austin. He developed the notion of “performative utterances” in a series of lectures given at Harvard in 1955 that have been collected under the title How To Do Things With Words (Harvard University Press, 1962). Austin, a key figure for ordinary language philosophy and a participant in what is called the linguistic turn in the theoretical humanities, takes language seriously as a field for philosophical investigation. Like many other 20th-century thinkers he shares the assumption that thinking about formal properties of language and language use can tell us something about how meaning happens. The meanings he is interested in and the relations they have to language use, however, are both common or ordinary and peculiar or difficult to grasp. In what follows I will briefly summarize the lecture in which he introduces and begins to define “performatives” by contrast with what he calls “constatives,” and conclude with why I think the emphasis on performatives is useful for our course.
Austin begins by expressing his frustration with a basic assumption commonly made in the philosophy of language of his moment: “It was for too long the assumption of philosophers that the business of a ‘statement’ can only be to ‘describe’ some state of affairs, or to ‘state some fact,’ which it must do either truly or falsely” (1). If you have ever taken a logic class and been engaged in the task of filling out truth-tables then you may have some sense of what Austin is talking about. Logicians tend to be concerned only with what is called “propositional truth-value” and they tend to emphasize the kinds of predicate statements to which a truth-value can be assigned (for some famous examples, “All men are mortal,” “The cat is on the mat,” or “The current king of France is bald”). Any number of fascinating questions may emerge from thinking about predicative truth-values, especially questions about referentiality (for instance, how do we think about the truth of that last statment when it seems to refer to an entity, “the current king of france,” that doesn’t exist?). Nonetheless, as Austin points out, this emphasis neglects other kinds of statements or utterances which are not in the business of stating facts or describing the world, that is, are not what he calls “constatives.”
The particular kind of statement he investigates here is called a “performative utterance.” His preliminary definition is that these utterances almost always have “humdrum verbs in the first person singular present indicative active” and
A. they do not ‘describe’ or ‘report’ or constate anything at all, are not ‘true or false’; and
B. the uttering of the sentence is, or is part of, the doing of an action.
Here are some examples of performative utterances:
I promise to play as well as I can.
I bet you five bucks you can write a novel in a day.
I christen this ship “The Unsinkable.”
I challenge you to a duel.
As Austin puts it, “In these examples it seems clear to me that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing… it is to do it” (6). If I say “I promise you” then this is, in effect, to promise you. In order to name a ship I must perform a certain act: say, break a bottle on its bow and utter the above phrase or something like it (and I must have the authority to do this as well, if I want the name to stick). This is the key aspect of performative utterances: “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action” (6). (This is why the title of Austin’s book is “How to do things with words.”)
Note, all of these examples are in first-person indicative active. One trick that may help to identify a performative: if you can put “hereby” between the first-person pronoun and the verb, the chances are excellent that it’s one of Austin’s basic performatives (“I hereby christen this ship ‘The Sinkable’.”)
** Little exercise: come up with five examples of performative utterances. **
It may be useful to contrast performative utterances with constatives. Here are a few that may be a little trickier to distinguish from the performatives above:
I believe that it will rain tomorrow.
Sometimes I feel like dancing. I want to dance the night away.
While these are also in first person active, these statements do not in the first instance do anything; they are constatives in that they are either true or false. For Austin, performatives cannot be true or false, but they can be successful or unsucccessful, or what he calls happy or unhappy. His lovely phrase for “all the things that can go wrong on the occasion of such utterances” is “the doctrine of Infelicities” (14).
** Return to your examples of performatives above. For each one, delineate the circumstances under which the performative could be happy or unhappy. That is, what are the appropriate cicumstances which permit the uttering of the sentence to take effect? **
We will slowly bring this idea of performative utterances from the scale of the sentence to larger chunks of meaning. For example, we can consider the difference between a “declaration” (as in the U.S. Declaration of Independence) and an “affirmation” as in the Cherokee Memorials that we are reading next. In general it is often extremely useful to ask this question of any text we are reading:
Not only
What does it mean?
but also
What does the text do?
Or, what is it trying to do?
And, to whom is it trying to do it?
What are the circumstances which permit it to try to do this?
Bibliography and further information:
J.L Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Harvard UP, 1962).
Richard Rorty, ed. The Linguistic Turn (University of Chicago Press, 1967).
(AF)