Philosophy and Literature: The Fortunes of the Performative Jonathan Culter English, Corel! ‘Abstract ‘The notion of the performative —an utterance that accomplishes the act that it designates —was proposed by the philosopher J. L. Austin to describe a type of utterance neglected by philosophers. This article follows the vicissitudes af the con- cept in literary and cultural theary to show (1) why it appeared useful for literary theary and what happens when literature is construed as fimdamentally performa- tive; (a) how it functions in theory and criticism associated with deconstruction, and (3) what role it plays in recent work in gender studies and queer theary, where Judith ‘Butler has developed a performative theary of gender. The shifts in this concept pose questions about how to think about the constitutive force of language, the nature of discursive events, and literature as an act. I propose to consider the vicissitudes of a concept that has flourished in lit- erary and cultural theory in the United States in recent years and whoee for- ‘tunes illustrate same complerities of the relation between philosophy and literature, or philosophy and literary theory. The concept of performative utterance was developed by J. L.. Austin in the 1950s. After briefly describ- ing his account, I will look at what happens when the notion is adopted by literary theorists and critics to deacribe literary discourse. Then 1 will take up the fortunes of the term in what we in the United States call “deconstruc- tion,” where it is the tension between the performative and the constative functions of language that becomes the object of attention and, indeed, a basic structure of texts ofall sorts, Finally, J shall look at the performative in Portions of this argument appeared in Culler 1997. Pectics Today 21:3, (Fall 2000) Gopyright © 2000 by the Porter Institute for Poetics and504 Poets Today 21:3 feminist theory and gay and lesbian studies or “queer theory.” This point of arrival, with talk ofa performative concept of gender, is very different from the point of departure, Austin’s conception of performative utterances, but to make your fortune, as the genre of the picaresque has long shown us, you have to leave home and, often, travel a long way . . ‘The notion of the performative is proposed by J. L, Austin, in a book published after his death called Hoew to Do Things with Words. “Ii was for too long the assumption of philosophers,” writes Austin (1975: 1), “that the busi- ness 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.” The normal utter- ance was conceived as a true or falsc representation of a state of affairs, and utterances that failed to fit this model were treated either as unimpor- tant exceptions or as deviant “pseudo-statemments.” “Yet,” Austin continues (ibid.: 2), “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 Teally set out to be ‘statements’ at all.” Austin thus proposes to attend to cases treated as marginal and to take them as an independent type. He proposes a distinction between consta- tive utterances, which make a statement, describe a state of affairs, and are true or false, and another class of utterances that are not true or false and that actually perform the action to which they refer: performatives. To say “T promise to pay you” is not to describe a state of affairs but to perform the act of 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 “E 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,” f do not describe anything, says Austin—I do it; “I am not reporting 6n a marriage: I am in- dulging in it” (1975: 6). When I say “[ promise to pay you tomorrow” or “I order you to stop,” these performative utterances are neither true or false; they will be, depending on the circumstances, appropriate or inappropri- ate, “felicitous” or “infelicitous,” in Austin’s terminology. If I say “I order you” but have no right to do so, or if you are not doing the thing ] order you to stop doing, my utterance will be inappropriate, infelicitous, a fail- ure. If I say “I do,” ] roay 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 “misfire,” says Austin. The utterance will be unl —and so, no doubt, will the bride-or groom, or perhaps both. The essential thing about performative utterancesCuller - The Fortunes of the Performative 505 3 that they do not desribe st perform maceedlly or mmuoneslly— the action they designate. It is in pronouncing these that I promise, order, or marry. A simple test for the performative is the possibility of add- ing “hereby” in English before the verb: “I hereby promise”; “We hereby declare our independence”; “Lhereby order you. ..”; but not “Thereby walk tant difference between types of utterances and has the great virtue of alert- ing us to the extent to which language performs actions rather than merely reports on them, But in How fo Do Things with Words, as Austin pushes fur- ther in his account of the performative, he encounters difficulties. It seemed initially that to identify performatives you might draw up a list of the “per- formative verbs”: verbs that in the first of the indicative (I promise, Forder, I dociae) perform the action they desigse, while inher perform them, as in: “I promised to come”; “Yeu ordered him to stop”; “He will declare war if they continue,” But Austin notes that you can’t define instance, the utterance “Stop it at once!” can constitute the act of order- ing you to stop just as much as can “I order you to stop.” And the appar- ently constative statement, “I will pay you tomorrow,” 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 of such “implicit performatives,” where there is no explicitly performative verb, you have to admit that any utterance can \ bean implicit performative. For exaruple, in English the sentence “The eat is on the mat” is for some reason the stock example of a simple declarative sentence, your basic constative utterance. But “The cat ison the mat" could be seen, rather, as the elliptical version of “I hereby affirm that the cat is on the mat,” a performative utterance that accomplishes the act of affirming to which it refers. Austin concludes that what we need to do for the case of stating and, by the same token, describing and reporting is to realize that they are speech acts no less than all those other speech acts described as the distinc- Gon between constatives and performatives, Austin changes tack, abandon-506 = Poetics Today 21:3 ing “the initial distinction between performatives and constatives and the program of finding a list of explicit performative words” and considering instead “the senses in which to say something is to do something” (1975: 121). 121) He distinguiahes the eeutionaty act, which isthe act of speaking a sen- tence, from the illocutionary act, which is the act we perform by speaking this sentence, and from. act, which is an act accomplished (cffects secured) by performing the illocutionary act. Thus uttering the sen- tence “I promise” is a locutionary act. By performing the act of uttering act of promising, and finally, by promising I may perform the perlocution- ary act of reassuring you, for example. Or when I perform the illocutionary act of affirming that Montpellier is in France, 1 may accomplish the per- Jocutionary act of bringing you to know it. Thus, instead of two types of utterance, constative and performative, we end up with three dimensions or aspects of every speech act, of which the locutionary and illocutionary are particularly important to a theory of language. The result of Austin's heuristic trajectory is radically to change the status of the constative statement: it began as the model for all Language use, then became one of two general uses of language, and finally, with the identifi- cation of aporias that prevent the firm separation of constative from perfor- mative, subsists not a3 an independent class of utterance but as one aspect of language use. For literary critics, though, it bas not made much difference whether we think of performative language as a special type, asin Austin’s original char- acterization, or whether we focus instead on the performative dimension of all speech acts. The essential thing is that, against the traditional model that saw language as essentially making statement about what is the case, Astin has provided an account of the active, creative fumetioning of tan- Critics have found the idea of performative language valuable for char- acterizing literary discourse. Since literary criticism involves attending to what literary language does as much as to what it says, the concept of the performative seems to provide 2 linguistic and philosophical justification for this idea: there are uteranees that above 8ll do something. Moreover like the performative, the literary not refer to a prior state of affairs and is not true or false. The li cmates the state of affairs to which infor in eal seca Fi and coer ump respects. First and most of Joyce’s Ubuses, “Stately Mulligan came from the sairhead bearing a bow! of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed” (ggg: 475), does not refer to same prior state of affairs but creates this character