164
C O N C E P T S
evaluation made possible a broadly based rethinking not just o f how lan
guage works but o f signifying action generally. Austins setting aside o f the
ater, poetry, and jokes provides an easy route for such rethinking, leading
us to ask what is accomplished by this act o f exclusion and whether the
marginal is not central, so that the literary, the theatrical, the fictionalized
performatives make themselves felt on the scene o f the generalized per
formative. This legacy o f reconfiguration, despite its divergences (Derrida
and de Man, for instance, stress rather different aspects o f the problem of
the performative), enables us to address key problems in literary and cul
tural studies.
Let me, in conclusion, list some o f these issues.
— First, how to think about the shaping role o f language: do we try
to limit it to certain specific acts, where we think we can say with confi
dence what it does, or do we try to gauge its broader effects, as it organizes
our encounters with the world? Obviously, we ought to do both, while at
tempting to specify the level at which we are working.
— Second, how should we conceive o f the relation, in the cultur
al realm, between social conventions— the constitutive conventions that
make possible social life— and individual acts? It is tempting, but clear
ly too simple, to imagine that social conventions are like the scenery or
background against which we decide how to act; the various accounts of
the performative offer more complicated accounts o f the entanglement o f
norm and action, whether presenting conventions as the condition o f pos
sibility o f events, as in Austin, or, as in Buder, seeing action as an assign
ment o f repetition, which may nevertheless occasionally deviate from the
norms. Literature, which is supposed to “make it new” in a space o f con
vention, provides yet another case. Grasping this relationship through ap
propriately complex models is surely crucial for any truly pertinent cultur
al studies, as well as for literary studies.
— Third, how should one conceive o f the relation between what lan
guage does and what it says? This is the basic problem o f the performa
tive— the question, yet to be resolved, o f whether there can be a harmoni
ous fusion o f doing and saying or whether there is an ineluctable tension
here that governs and undermines all textual activity. Whereas once it was
assumed that aesthetic achievement depended on harmonious fusion, the
ineluctability o f tension now seems better established.
— Finally, how, in this postmodern age, should we think of the event?
It has become commonplace in the United States, for instance, in this age
o f mass media, to say that what happens on television “happens, period,” is
a real event. Whether the image corresponds to a reality or not, the media
event is an event to be reckoned with. The problematic o f the performa
tive can help us to explore in a more sophisticated way the issues that are
often crudely addressed in terms o f the modern blurring o f the boundar
ies between fact and fiction or the problem of pseudoevents, but Derridas
reminder that the true event is the unforeseen, that “the force o f the event
is always stronger than the force o f a performative,” can prevent a simple
celebration o f performativity as creativity. And the problem o f the nature
o f the literary event, o f literature as act, because o f its obvious complexity,
may help us to avoid the temptation to oversimplify the problem in other
domains.
In sum, rather than try to restrict or simplify the performative’s do
main, by choosing one strand o f reflection as the correct one, we ought to
accentuate and pursue the differences between them— so as to increase our
chances o f grasping the different levels and modes in which events occur.
This is a project requiring the cooperation— albeit the inevitably conten
tious cooperation— o f philosophy and literary theory and the possibility
of reconnecting with the domain o f performance theory in theater stud
ies and the social sciences, so that in the “carnivalesque echolalia o f what
might be described as extraordinarily productive cross-purposes,” of which
Parker and Sedgwick speak, we might indeed come both to enjoy the car
nivalesque and to find these cross purposes productive.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
