In chapter 7, Culler traces the history of “performative language” from Austin through Butler, showing how a concept that originated in the philosophy of language can illuminate several key questions facing the field that Culler calls “theory.”
Beginning with Austin’s distinction between constative and performative utterances—whereby constative utterances “describe a state of affairs,” while performative utterances “perform the action to which they refer” (94)—Culler then shows how even constative utterances can in certain contexts become performative—and vice versa.
Culler attributes the adoption of these terms by literary critics to several factors. First, literary language was recognized to be a kind of performative language: “the literary utterance too creates the state of affairs to which it refers” (96). Once literary language was recognized as possessing performative qualities, literature can be conceived “as act or event” (96). Second, performative language raises literature’s status: “literature is not frivolous pseudo-statements but takes its place among the acts of language that transform the world” (96). Finally, Austin’s barometer of performatives’ effectiveness—their “felicity” or efficacy—brings to literary scholars an increased awareness of the several factors that contribute to a “successful” functioning of a work of literature.
Here enter Derrida and Butler, each of whom put the concept of the performative to use. Derrida, who famously seized upon Austin’s casual dismissal of “non-serious” utterances as beyond the scope of his consideration, showed both how “the possibility of repetition is basic to language” (98) and how “both the political and the literary act depend on a complex paradoxical combination of the performative and constative” (99). Derrida’s insights produce a sense of the performative-constative poles as existing in tension with each other; while every utterance can be considered as both performative and constative, the constative element, which describes a stable state of affairs, is always undermined by the performative element, which unstably brings into being a new state of affairs. Butler takes Austin’s linguistic distinction in an unexpected direction with her theory of gender performance, which attributes the creation of gender to “repeated acts, which, like Austin’s performatives, depend on social conventions” (103).
Culler acknowledges the oddity of placing Austin and Butler together, since their interests seem so divergent. But Culler claims that their concerns—“mak[ing] something happen” and the production of “historical and social realities” (105)—are in fact two ways of considering the literary event: one the one hand, literature as a singular event, subject to an analysis how its parts combine to accomplish something; and on the other hand, literature as that which succeeds by “a massive repetition that takes up norms and, possibly, changes things” (106).
Culler notes four questions that performative language can illuminate within “theory” (106-07):
1. “the shaping role of language”
2. “the relation between social conventions and individual acts”
3. “the relation between what language does and what it says”
4. the characteristics of “the event”
The story that Culler tells is sketchy and brief, of course, but I’ll be honest: I’m not well-read enough in performance theory to find much to criticize here. Something about Culler’s tone I’ve always found immensely persuasive (in all of his writings), and in this book, especially. What strikes me most strongly, however, is simply the choice to give “Performative Language” its own chapter (yes, near the back, but still…). Did Culler (in 1997) think that performatives would become the next big thing, bigger than, say, “Identity, Identification, and the Subject”? Or did he think that performatives truly are a more fruitful subject for ‘theory’ than some of the topics that only merited a subheading in the final chapter?
great minds. whoops!
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