Performativity /Performativity

Language in Life, and a Life in Language: Jacob Mey – A Festschrift Edited by Bruce Fraser and Ken Turner © 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited. All rights reserved. 38 PERFORMATIVITY1/PERFORMATIVITY2 J. Hillis Miller My way of paying homage to Jacob Mey is to perform in his honor a small exercise in what Wikipedia calls “disambiguation.” My perspective, as he knows, is that of a literary critic and theorist who is interested in the utility of speech act theory for reading literary works. I have elsewhere argued, in a paper originally presented at a conference in Oslo,1 that an equivocation exists in the word “performativity,” and that this double meaning has caused some intellectual confusion. I call these two meanings performativity sub one and performativity sub two. The confusion has led some scholars in performance studies, especially, perhaps, those in feminist performance studies, to accept an intellectual lineage that goes from J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things With Words, to Jacques Derrida’s Limited Inc, to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, to performance studies of various sorts, in dance, music, theater, and everyday life. This lineage, I hold, is a mistake. I have no disagreement, however, with Butler’s idea that gender is constructed by the coerced repetition of socially approved gender roles, though I think one needs to think a little about Butler’s extremely infl uential ideas before accepting them outright. Butler’s theory is oddly ambivalent. On the one hand, she holds, gender and selfhood generally are not innate. We are born blank slates. That means we could be different from what we have become. That is a cheerful hypothesis, though a little uneasy-making in its implication that we are not ever really anybody, just a role we have adopted. On the other hand, Butler holds that the force of socially iterated repressive imposed roles is so great that they are extremely diffi cult to resist. 1 See Miller (2007). A different version of this essay will appear in spring 2009 as part of chapter seven of my For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press). The fi rst version of this paper was given at a conference in Oslo held on May 3–5, 2006, on “Performativity in Music and Literature.” 308 J. Hillis Miller That is a gloomy hypothesis. Perhaps, however, the strength of the Butlerian theory lies in this doubleness. The mistake lies in claiming support for this in Austin or Derrida, though I think Althusse- rian “interpellation” may perhaps be legitimately claimed as an antecedent. Austin did not mean anything quite like Butler’s “performativity” by what he called “performatives.” An Austinian performative (performativity sub one) is a mode of speech act that is a way of using words to make something happen, as in the minister’s “I pronounce you man and wife.” Austin’s “felicitous” performatives presuppose a pre-existing fi xed and stable selfhood (the self that says “I pronounce,” or “I promise”), as well as fi xed rules and conventions, fi rmly in place, that determine which performatives are going to work to do something with words. Austin is for law and order. He wants to make sure that when the judge says, “I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until dead,” the sentence is really carried out. Austin explicitly disqualifi es performance in the sense of playing a role. For a performative utterance to be felicitous, he says fi rmly, I must not be acting on the stage or writing a poem. Becoming another gender by dressing in drag and “performing” another gender is foreign to Austin’s thought. By “iterability,” moreover, Derrida, in his critique of Austin, means that performative enun- ciations such as “I christen thee,” “I pronounce you man and wife,” or “I sentence you…” have as a feature of their “felicity” that they may be used over and over and in many different social contexts, including odd and anomalous ones. Derrida wants to break down Austin’s distinction between felicitous and infelicitous speech acts, as well as Austin’s claim that the context can be “saturated.” This is alien to Butler’s notion that social repressive iteration makes me think, mistakenly, that I have a pre-existing stable and fi xed gender. “Iterability” is used in two different ways in the two cases. The mistake sometimes (I don’t say always) made by those in “performance studies” is to confuse two quite different things, performance, as in, “She performed Ophelia,” “He performed a Mozart sonata,” or “She was forced to perform a feminine role until it seemed to her, and to those around her, innate” (performativity sub two), and a performative speech act, as in “I pronounce you man and wife” (performativity sub one). I exemplifi ed these distinctions in the essay referred to in footnote one by way of two pas- sages in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876). In one passage, Daniel promises to carry on Mor- decai’s work after the latter’s death: “Everything I can in conscience do to make your life effective I will do.”2 This echoes an earlier promise to Mordecai: “I will be faithful” (Chapter 40: 564). Both these statements seem to be, in all strictness, forms of the speech act Austin calls a “performative,” performativity sub one. They are examples of how to do things with words. What do they do? They put Daniel in a new position, the position of someone who in the future will either keep his promise or fail to keep it. All promises do that. Promises are paradigmatic examples of performatives in How To Do Things With Words. Daniel, it happens, keeps his promises. 2 See Eliot (1974), Chapter 43, p. 600, henceforth indicated by chapter and page numbers in parentheses..

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