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Performativity
How does telling stories make a difference? Having made an arborescent narrative that is also a description of the TSR2 project, this is the next question I want to explore.
In one way we already know the answer. It is built into the semiotics that subjects perform objects and objects perform subjects. It is built into the structure of the book. Telling always makes a difference 174 Arborescences of one kind or another. But if some stories make more of a difference
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176 Arborescences |
than others, then we need to think harder about interferences and the conditions of possibility. And if we start to ask questions of this kind—and in particular about interferences—then we blunder into a place inhabited by linguistic philosophers, and in particular a place that is occupied by the words ‘‘I do.’’ Philosopher J. L. Austin (1966; 1970, 235) argued that if these particular words are uttered at the right moment and in the right place, under what he called “felicitous” circumstances, then they are also actions and not just words. But what is the ‘‘right place’’? In this context, it is a properly constituted marriage ceremony where, for instance, neither of the prospective partners is already married. Under these circumstances if I say ‘‘I do’’ at just the ‘‘right moment,’’ I end up married. Such is his definition of the performative: it is a word or a set of words that is also an action. Let’s displace the example a little. Staying with the humanist theme of romance, if I say ‘‘I love you’’ to a person in ‘‘real life’’ (to be sure, the definition of what should count as real life is precisely one of the issues at stake), then this has another kind of effect. In Austin’s terms it would be a constative; that is, it states something. It is a description, which means, at least in the paradigm case, that it is either true or false. But it is also in some sense performative, and this is what’s important here. The question is, what is it performing? If it were said in good faith and all the rest, it would be a performance of love. But it might also (and here the uncertainties crowd in) be the start of a love affair, or (no doubt equally uncertain) its reaffirmation. Or, if it were said in the ‘‘wrong way’’ or under the ‘‘wrong circumstances,’’ it might be the end of a love affair or a friendship. So what do we learn? The answer is that to say ‘‘I love you’’ is probably performative too. Like ‘‘I do’’ it also makes a difference. It enacts something and it has force. But at the same time it is also clear that the focus of attention has started to shift from a relatively clear set of conditions that secure a specific form of performativity (‘‘I do’’), a specific outcome, to a whole lot of uncertainties both in degree and in quality—which uncertainties are interesting, indeed crucial, if we are concerned to make a difference and think about the kind of differences that are made when stories overlap. Let’s displace the example once more, or better, replace it with something entirely different. If I say, ‘‘The government has fallen,’’ |
then this is different again, isn’t it? If I’ve just heard it from the BBC news (as opposed to a novel by Anthony Trollope), then something else is happening. Commonsensically, we could say that I’m reporting on a state of affairs or the affairs of state. This means that it is a constative and not a performative at all. Thus we could also add that what I say doesn’t make much difference, indeed perhaps no difference at all, not, at any rate, to the government. This is because the toppling of the government has happened, as it were, ‘‘out there,’’ and my words simply report on something. They are not (how to say this?) a part of the action. They perform, instead, a kind of perspectivalism and belong to epistemology instead of ontology.
Let’s make one further displacement, again on the political theme to do with the falling of governments. If I say ‘‘the government will fall tomorrow,’’ then here we have something different yet again. Once more it sounds a little like a report, a perspective taken on something that is out there—or will be out there. This sounds like the world of the constative, but the difference between ‘‘is out there’’ and ‘‘will be out there’’ is crucial, for now we are starting to move back toward the earlier declarations of love. The prospects are uncertain, and, as a part of that, the declaration itself may turn out to be performative—as it was when, for instance, tens of thousands of brave people stood and clinked their keys in Wenceslas Square in Prague on what turned out to be the eve of the Velvet Revolution. ‘‘Your time is up,’’ they clinked.
And the clinking (it turned out) performed the departure of that sad and vicious government. ‘‘The government will fall tomorrow’’: these words have become, albeit uncertainly, a part of the action. Constative and performative both, they are constative precisely because they are performative.
I don’t much care for such armchair examples. Michel Foucault’s work teaches us that philosophy is better pursued by empirical means, which is why I have written this book in the way that I have, as a book ‘‘about’’ an aircraft. But before we move on, look at what happens if we put the four ‘‘philosophers’ examples’’ that I’ve created side by side (table 8.1).
This helps to make the story that I’m trying to tell clear, or so I hope. Sometimes words, stories, and no doubt pictures are also actions. That is, they make the worlds that they describe. And sometimes they aren’t, and they don’t. And then again (a somewhat differ – Arborescences 177
”I do” ”I love you” ”The government ”The government will fall tomorrow” has fallen”
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Report |
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ent but equally important distinction), sometimes words and stories act in clear and unambiguous ways, and sometimes they don’t. Such is the space that I would like us to investigate, the performativity of narrative, as overlap and interference with other narratives.
Back to the empirical.
