Performativity as Emergent Linguistic Practice — Epoche B2
Austin's Conventions Are Institutions, Not Language The question J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words (1962 [1] ) begins from the observation that saying something is often doing something. Saying 'I promise', 'I name this ship', 'I bequeath', 'I apologise' is not describing an act but performing one. Austin then asks what has to be in place for such an utterance to come off, and his answer is a list of conditions on convention. It is this answer, rather than the original observation, that has produced the longest-running dispute in the theory of speech acts: is the performative character of an utterance a matter of convention at all? The dispute is usually conducted as though 'conventional' named one property that illocutionary acts either have or lack. This essay argues that it names two, that Austin ran them together, and that separating them settles the question. The conventionality of an accepted procedure holds only for a narrow class of acts — the institutional ones — while the conventionality of meaning holds for all utterances but is not what Austin's felicity conditions are about. Once the classes are separated, there is no residue of the phenomenon that theories of emergent or evolving performativity are constructed to explain. The essay closes by testing the classification against a case Kwasi Wiredu describes [2] , which turns out to fall squarely on the institutional side and therefore to confirm Austin's conditions rather than to strain them. Austin's conditions, and the two ways they fail Austin's list, given in Lecture II, opens with the requirement that matters here: There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances. The further conditions require that the persons and circumstances be the right ones, that the procedure be executed completely and correctly, and — separately — that those taking part have the thoughts and feelings the procedure presupposes and behave accordingly afterwards. Austin is careful about the difference between failing the earlier conditions and failing the later ones, and it is a difference the secondary literature often loses. Failures of the first sort he calls misfires: the act is not achieved, it is null and void, nothing has happened. Failures of the second sort he calls abuses: the act is achieved, but hollowly. A person who says 'I promise' with no intention of performing has promised, and has done something objectionable, precisely because the promise is real. An insincere marriage is a marriage. Treating insincerity as a species of misfire, as though the words simply failed to take effect, erases the phenomenon Austin's distinction was built to capture. The first class: acts constituted by a procedure Look at the examples that motivate the conditions. Naming a ship, marrying, sentencing a defendant, opening a session, bequeathing, adjourning. Each has a recognisable common structure. There is an office, and only its holder can perform the act. There is a designated occasion. And there is a determinate legal or social state of affairs that the act brings into being, which did not exist a moment earlier. Nullity is available in this class, and this is its signature. If the person conducting a marriage lacks the authority, no marriage occurs. Not a defective marriage; none. The couple's intentions are irrelevant to this result, however clear and however mutually recognised: sincerity does not confer authority. Austin's conditions describe this class exactly, because the class is the class of acts whose existence depends on an institution's saying so. The second class: acts secured by recognised intention Now take warning, protesting, congratulating, apologising, reassuring, and promising as it occurs between friends. Peter Strawson's 'Intention and Convention in Speech Acts' (1964 [3] ) argued that these behave quite differently, and the argument has held up. To warn someone is to say something with the intention that they take it as a warning, and with the intention that they recognise that very intention. The mechanism is the one Grice had described for meaning generally [4] : an audience works out what a speaker is doing by working out what the speaker intends them to work out. The diagnostic difference is that nullity is not available here. There is no office of warner and no ceremony of warning. A stranger can warn me; a child can warn me; someone can warn me in a language I barely speak, by tone and gesture. What can go wrong is that the audience does not take it up, and that failure is not the voiding of an act by an unmet condition — it is the act's not getting through. Where Austin's institutional cases can fail with the audience fully understanding, these can fail only by not being understood. This is the classification the theory needs, and it does two things at once. It preserves what is right in Austin — the felicity conditions are an accurate account of a real and important class — while explaining why they have always looked over-general. They are conditions on institutions that happen to be enacted in words, not conditions on language. What the classification does to talk of emergent convention The impulse to say that performative force can emerge, ahead of any convention that would license it, comes from cases that look like this. Someone speaks in a way no rule sanctions; the utterance nonetheless does something; over time the way of speaking becomes normal. If all illocutionary acts required an accepted procedure, this would be a genuine puzzle, and one would have to postulate acts that create the conventions they need. On the two-class account there is no puzzle, because the cases divide. Where the act belongs to the second class, no antecedent procedure was ever required: a novel form of words can warn or protest on its first outing, provided the audience can see what the spea