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C O N C E P T S
“misfire,” says Austin. The utterance will be unhappy— and so, no doubt,
will the bride or groom, or perhaps both. The essential thing about perfor
mative utterances is that they do not describe but perform— successfully
or unsuccessfully— the action they designate. It is in pronouncing these
words that I promise, order, or marry. A simple test for the performative
is the possibility o f adding “hereby” in English before the verb: “I hereby
promise”; “We hereby declare our independence”; “I hereby order you”;
but not “I hereby walk to town.” I cannot perform the act o f walking by
pronouncing certain words.
The distinction between performative and constative captures an im
portant difference between types o f utterances (“The distinction will have
been a great event o f the century,” writes Derrida).^ It has the great vir
tue o f alerting us to the extent to which language performs actions rather
than merely reporting them. But in How to Do Things with Words, as Aus
tin pushes further in his account o f the performative, he encounters diffi
culties. It seemed initially that to identify performatives, one might draw
up a list o f the “performative verbs” : verbs that in the first person o f the
present indicative (I promise, I order, I declare) perform the action they
designate but in other persons and tenses behave differently and describe
actions rather than perform them, as in: “I promis^fl? to come” ; “ You or
dered? him to stop” ; “He w ill declare war if they continue.” But Austin
notes that you cannot define the performative by listing the verbs that be
have in this way because, for instance, the utterance “Stop it at once!” can
constitute the act o f ordering you to stop just as much as can “I order you
to stop.” And the apparently constative statement, “I will pay you tomor
row,” which certainly looks as though it will become either true or false,
depending on what happens tomorrow, can, under the right conditions,
be a promise to pay you rather than a description or prediction like “he
will pay you tomorrow.” But once you allow for the existence o f such “im
plicit performatives,” where there is no explicitly performative verb, you
have to admit that any utterance can be an implicit performative. For ex
ample, in English the sentence “The cat is on the mat” is for some reason
the stock example o f a simple declarative sentence, your basic constative
utterance. But “The cat is on the mat” could be seen, rather, as the ellipti
cal version o f “I hereby affirm that the cat is on the mat,” a performative
9.
Jacques Derrida, “The University
Without Condition,” in
Without A li
bi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford Universit)? Press, 2002), 209.
utterance that accomplishes the act o f affirming to which it refers. Austin
concludes, “What we need to do for the case o f stating, and by the same
token describing and reporting, is to take them a bit off their pedestal, to
realize that they are speech acts no less than all those other speech acts that
we have been mentioning and talking about as performative.” ^® Constative
utterances also perform actions— actions o f stating, affirming, describing,
and so on. They are a kind o f performative. Moreover, for many consta
tive statements— “The cat is on the mat,” “Boston is populous,” “It’s a nice
day today”— the interesting question may not be whether the utterance is
true or false but why I might be saying it. What speech act am I perform
ing by uttering these words? In brief, Austin starts from a situation where
performatives are seen as a special case of the constative— pseudo-state
ments— and arrives at a perspective from which constatives are a particular
type o f performative.
Given the difficulty o f finding solid criteria for maintaining the
distinction between constatives and performatives, Austin changes tack,
abandoning “the initial distinction between performatives and constatives
and the program o f finding a list o f explicit performative words” and con
sidering instead “the senses in which to say something is to do something”
[How, 121). He distinguishes the locutionary act, which is the act o f speak
ing a sentence, from the illocutionary act, which is the act we perform by
speaking this sentence, and from the perlocutionary act, which is an act
accomplished (effects secured) by performing the illocutionary act. Thus
uttering the sentence “I promise” is a locutionary act. By performing the
act o f uttering this sentence under certain circumstances I will perform the
illocutionary act of promising, and finally, by promising I may perform the
perlocutionary act o f reassuring you, for example. Or when I perform the
illocutionary act o f affirming that Montpellier is in France, I may accom
plish the perlocutionary act o f bringing you to know it. Thus, instead o f
two types o f utterance, constative and performative, we end up with three
dimensions or aspects o f every speech act, o f which the locutionary and il
locutionary are particularly important to a theory o f language.
The result o f Austin’s heuristic trajectory is radically to change the
status o f the constative statement: it began as the model for all language
use; then it became one o f two general uses o f language, and finally, with
10.
J. L. Austin, “Performative Utterances,” in Philosophical Papers (Lon
don: Oxford University Press, 1970), 249-50.
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