pages of this 275-page book are devoted to performativity. Carlson discusses Aus
tin’s concept o f the performative and others’ reinterpretation o f it in a section of a
chapter entitled “The Performance of Language: Linguistic Approaches,” in part
140
C O N C E P T S
kept on and not terminated. Behind the formulations in the English trans
lation o f Lyotard lies French usage: while le perform atifzs substantive is a
neologism, it is perfecdy colloquial to desire your concepts or machines to
he performants— to do their work well/
I f we focus not on the figure o f performance in general but on the
concept o f the performative, then we no longer have the orderly feedback
loop o f mutual enrichment that Carlson happily describes. Eve Sedgwick
and Andrew Parker, in their introduction to a collection entitled Реф гт а-
tivity and Performance, speak instead o f “a carnivalesque echolalia o f what
might be described as extraordinarily productive cross-purposes. One of
the most fecund, as well as the most underarticulated, o f such crossings has
been the oblique connection between performativity and the loose cluster
of theatrical practices, relations, and traditions known as performance.”^
This chapter seeks to provide some articulation, looking at what hap
pens when the notion o f the performative is extracted from Austins theory
of speech acts and adopted by literary theorists and critics to describe first
literary discourse and later a wide range o f discursive productions, includ
ing identity itself It is striking, for instance, how the theatrical reference
has been repeatedly attenuated so that one ends up with a performativity
that is very different from one modeled on theatrical performance. The
performative becomes part o f a basic aporetic structure o f texts o f all sorts
and a condition o f invention or inauguration, and then, in the debates o f
feminist theory, gay and lesbian studies, and queer theory, it becomes a fo
cal point for questions about agency and identity. But recent developments
in the thinking o f performativity may be leading us back toward concepts
of performance, in which a certain sense o f theatricality is revived. At any
rate, this point o f arrival, with talk o f a performative concept o f gender, is
very different from the point o f departure, Austin’s conception o f perfor
mative utterances, but the performative, like the picaresque hero, travels
far to make its fortune.
6. Jacques Derrida links the peфrm ante to the efficiency o f a machine, but
“performativity will never be reduced to technical performance” (see Jacques Der
rida, “Typewriter Ribbon,” in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf [Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2002], 74).
7. Eve Sedgwick and Andrew Parker, eds., Performativity and Performance
(New York: Routledge, 1995), i-
The notion o f the performative is proposed by J. L. Austin, in a
book published posthumously. Plow to Do Things with Words. “It was for
too long the assumption o f philosophers,” he writes, “that the business o f
a ‘statement’ can only be to ‘describe some state o f affairs,’ or to state some
fact, which it must do either truly or falsely.”** The normal utterance was
conceived as a true or false representation o f a state o f affairs, and utter
ances that failed to fit this model were treated either as unimportant ex
ceptions or as deviant “pseudo-statements.” “Yet,” Austin continues, “we,
that is, even philosophers, set some limits to the amount of nonsense we
are prepared to admit that we talk, so that it was natural to go on to ask, as
a second stage, whether many apparently pseudo-statements really set out
to be ‘statements’ at all” (2).
Austin thus proposes to attend to cases treated as marginal and to
take them as an independent type. He proposes a distinction between con-
stative utterances, which make a statement, describe a state o f affairs, and
are true or false, and another class o f utterances, which are not true or false
and which actually perform the action to which they refer: performatives.
To say “I promise to pay you” is not to describe a state o f affairs but to per
form the act o f promising; the utterance is itself the act.
The example Austin uses to illustrate the performative (and this will
be significant for some later theorists) is the utterance “I do,” by which
bride and groom in the Anglo-American wedding ceremony undertake to
wed one another. When the priest or civil official asks, “ Do you take this
woman to be your lawful wedded wife,” and I respond “I do,” I do not
describe anything, says Austin; I do it. “ I am not reporting on a marriage:
I am indulging in it” {How, 6). When I say “I promise to pay you tomor
row” or “I order you to stop,” these performative utterances are neither
true nor false; they will be, depending on the circumstances, appropriate
or inappropriate, “felicitous” or “infelicitous” in Austin’s terminology. I f I
say “ I order you” but have no right to do so, or if you are not doing the
thing I order you to stop doing, my utterance will be inappropriate, infe
licitous, a failure. If I say “I do,” I may not succeed in marrying— if, for
example, I am married already or if the person performing the ceremony is
not authorized to perform weddings in this community. The utterance will
8.
J.
L. Austin,
How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1975), i; hereafter abbreviated How and cited parenthetically in
the text.
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