Performatives are, even without a Butlerian slant, fecund arena for legal interrogation.Īlthough Butler does not strictly adhere to an Austianian notion of speech-act theory, occasionally (re)citing John Searle, Derrida and many others, the notion that speech does something beyond the intended semantic and syntactical meanings remains a central aspect of her writings. Performatives are utterances that engender formative force per the utterance (formative + per (utterance) = performative). “bride(s)/groom(s)”, that allow them to say “I do” for those utterance to enact “marriage.” Saying “I do” at a rehearsal dinner will not enact marriage. The bride(s)/groom(s) must fit into socially constructed roles, i.e. When an utterance meets the social conventions it is has felicitous uptake making it into a performative that transforms. All utterances are performed, but not all utterances are performatives. Without going into too much nuanced details of Austin’s theory, one should attend to the distinction between performance and performative. marriage), while perlocution is the effect (upon listeners and in society) by saying something. The illocution is the effect intended in saying something (the locution determined by social conventions in particular situations, i.e. Every utterance is a locution, the noise of an utterance when “saying something.” 3 Jacques Derrida, Signature Event Contest, in Limited Inc. An example is when a bride/groom and groom/bride say “I do” at a wedding, they may then actually become married.
For Austin a ‘performative utterance’ was a speech act that creates events or relations in the world. Although each sentence may be said to be true or false, sentences do more than provide true or false pictures of the world. His project, somewhat similar to late Wittgenstein’s, theorized how speech-acts do or mean things in ways other than generating true and false sentences.
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Austin, How to Do Things with Words 1-11 (1962). Austin analyzed performative utterances in three parts: locution, illocution and perlocution. 1 Stanely Cavell, The Claim of Reason 206-7 (1972). Ordinary language philosophers tend to collapse the use/meaning distinction and replace it with the notion that the meaning of a word is its use. John Austin was an “ordinary language” philosopher who is credited with initiating the study into performatives.
This brief review will provide an abbreviated history on the conceptual genesis of the term “performativity,” how Butler (re)defines and employs it, and finally how Butler’s account may be useful for critical legal thinking. For Butler, performativity is not solely an extension of discourse theory as her later works suggest bodies “speak” without necessarily uttering. Her focus on performance has been widely influential because performance and performativity enable discussants to move beyond analyses of legal definition or status to consider the political and social discursive forces that construct and normalize legal or political practice. Butler’s notion of ‘performativity’ is most famously associated with her views on gender and is important for critical legal thinkers because performativity is deeply entangled with politics and legality.
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