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Performative text


In the philosophy of language, the notion of performance conceptualizes what a spoken or written text can bring about in human interactions.

In the 1950s the philosopher of language J. L. Austin introduced the term ‘performative utterance’ to make clear that ‘to say something is to do something’. Developing this idea, scholars have theorized on the relation of a spoken or written text to its broader context, that is to say everything outside the text itself. The question whether a performative is separable from the situation it emerged in is relevant when one addresses for example the status of individual intentions or speech as a resource of power. There are two main theoretical strands in research today. One emphasizes the predetermined conventions surrounding a performative utterance and the clear distinction between text and context. Another emphasizes the active construction of reality through spoken and written texts and is related to theories of human agency and discourse. The ideas about performance and text have contributed to the performative turn in the social sciences and humanities, proving their methodological use for example in the interpretation of historical texts.

Early theories acknowledge that performance and text are both embedded in a system of rules and that the effects they can produce depend on convention and recurrence. In this sense, text is an instance of ‘restored behaviour’, a term introduced by Richard Schechner that sees performance as a repeatable ritual. The focus here is largely on individual sentences in the active first person voice, rather than on politics or discourse. The syntactical analyses are firmly anchored in analytical epistemology, as the distinction between the research object and its context is not conceived as problematic.

J. L. Austin introduced the performative utterance as an additional category to ‘constatives’, statements that can be either true or false. Language not only represents, but also can make something happen. Austin distinguishes between two types of performative speech acts. The illocutionary act is concerned with what an actor is doing in saying something (e.g. when someone says ‘hello’, he is greeting another person). The perlocutionary act involves the unintended consequences of an utterance and refers to that what an actor is doing by saying something (e.g.when someone says ‘hello’ and the greeted person is scared by it).


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