Performatives, Performativities and Education Ian Munday Institute of Education, University of London
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Performatives, Performativities and Education Ian Munday Institute of Education, University of London Abstract This thesis considers the various ways in which J.L. Austin's discussion of the performative utterance—of what is done with words and, indeed, of what words "do"—has been taken by philosophers. It shows how different understandings of the performative dimension of language can illuminate thinking about language and education. Austin notes that some (performative) utterances "do things" (such as "I christen this ship the..."). Certain kinds of utterance "perform" an action. What is particularly interesting about Austin's discovery is his conclusion that truth statements (what he calls "constative utterances") are, in different ways, also doing things. Despite the fact that the "ordinary language philosophy" with which Austin is particularly associated is normally understood as a development within analytic philosophy, his impact goes well beyond this, and his ideas have sometimes found themselves in some strange places. This brings us to the first appearance of "performativity", the term ""coined by French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard. First appearing in Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition, the term purports to describe the state of knowledge within postmodern society. For Lyotard, Enlightenment narratives have been replaced by an obsessive concern with "effectiveness". Here Austin's performative is used as a metaphor. The second treatment of the word "performativity" considered originates with Judith Butler. Butler argues that "truths" pertaining to gender are not "rooted" in anything other than linguistic performances. When reiterated, such truths come to be perceived as constitutive. The ideas pertaining to performatives mentioned above will be interspersed with other work on the performative utterance drawn from philosophy and social theory. Here I draw on the work of Habermas, Derrida and Cavell amongst others. The philosophical analysis provides the backdrop for a discussion of language, ethics and education. Signed Declaration The work presented in this thesis is my own work Word Count: 79508 Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: What's it all about? 1 Chapter 1: Austin and Speech Act Theory 20 Chapter 2: Performativity, Agonistics and Silence 48 Chapter 3: Derrida, Iterability and the Arrivant 94 Chapter 4: It's a Kind of Magic: Performativity and Social Difference 126 Chapter 5: Passionate Utterance and Moral Education 146 Chapter 6: Dionysos, Intensity and Rhizomes 169 Conclusion 193 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following; my supervisor Paul Standish for all his fabulous help and support over the last five years (which went well beyond the call of duty!); Carine Seimandi for her love and support during the vast majority of the time I spent working on the thesis; Pamela Munday for being the sort of parent who has always been caring and devoted, despite having to put up with the darker moods that working on PhDs can give rise to; my brother Tim and Granma (she doesn't like the (d)) for all their love and support; Jennie Francis for her support and friendship during the final stages of writing up; colleagues—Mary Hilton, Jo- Anne Dillabough, Peter Huckstep and David Whitley—who gave me a place to stay when I was commuting to Cambridge and/or put me up during the final stages of the writing process; colleagues at the University of Cambridge including Morag Styles, Ian Frowe, Christine Doddington, Natalie Heath, Dominic Wyse, Pam Burnard, Liz Taylor, Mike Younger, Sylvia Woolfe and many others; fellow students at the Institute of Education such as Naomi Hodgson, Mandy Fulford and Anna Strhan amongst others; friends at various universities in Belgium and at the University of Kyoto, whose probing questions during conferences and colloquia had a considerable impact on the writing of this thesis; former colleagues at Dinnington Comprehensive School; my students at the University of Cambridge. Slightly different versions of some parts of this thesis have been published including "Passionate Utterance and Moral Education" in the Journal of Philosophy of Education, 4(1) and "Derrida, Butler and an Education in Otherness" in Clinical Pedagogy Record, 10. "Derrida, Teaching and the Context of Failure" has been published in The Oxford Review of Education, 37(3). "Performativity, Statistics and Bloody Words" appears as a chapter in Educational Research: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics. "Improvisation in the Disorders of Desire: Performativity, Passion and Moral Education" has been accepted with changes by Ethics and Education, 5(3). Chapter 1 Introduction: What's it all about? Let us begin with some blunt remarks. This thesis examines the various ways in which J.L. Austin's discussion of the performative utterance is taken up by a number of philosophers (and in some cases sociologists) to develop interesting ways of thinking about what is done with words and, indeed, what words "do". In the process I hope to show how various understandings of the performative dimension of language can illuminate ways of thinking about language and education. John Langshaw Austin was born in Lancaster and educated at Balliol College, Oxford. He became White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford. Austin was a staunch advocate for examining the way words are used in order to elucidate meaning. He is generally regarded as a British-American analytic philosopher. The school of twentieth century analytic philosophy (which to some extent is also Austrian-German) has two main sub-branches. The first is the logical positivist branch of philosophy that includes the work of Frege, Russell, Mach and indeed, early Wittgenstein. The most famous philosophical works deriving from this movement include Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein, 1922) and A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic (1946). Logical positivist ideas were developed in the work of Rudolf Carnap and Carl Hempel (amongst others) in what became known as the Vienna Circle. 1 As legend has it, the second branch of analytic philosophy emerged out of weekly discussions held sometime between 1936 and 37 in Oxford. Austin is credited with initiating these discussions and is thought to be their leading spirit up until the war. What emerged from these discussions is generally known as "ordinary language philosophy." It was taken up especially after the end of World War II, centering most fully in Oxford and is sometimes called "Oxford philosophy". Austin tends to be treated as the leading exponent of that form of analytic philosophy, though some argue that the movement begins with G.E. Moore. The former's work appealed to those philosophers (including Searle, Strawson and Grice) who were attracted to analytic philosophy but shared a distaste for logical empiricism. Austin's most famous writings include Sense and Sensibilia (1964), 'A Plea for Excuses' (1961), 'How to Talk: Some simple Ways' (1953) and How to do Things with Words (1962). As regards the performative utterance, the main tenet of Austin's discovery is fairly straightforward: there are kinds of utterance that do not simply state or describe things, but "do things" in being said. So, when a priest utters the words "I now declare you man and wife" he has not just said something to the bride and groom, he has "married them". We can therefore say that certain kinds of utterance "perform" an action in being said. This all seems fairly straightforward and in the case of explicit performatives it is. However, Austin comes to the conclusion that truth statements (what he calls constative utterances) are, in different ways, also doing things. The "impact" (consider what has happened to this word—what it now "does") of Austin's performative (and theory of speech acts) on the world of philosophy is particularly unusual given the philosopher's background. What I mean by this last remark is that Austin's performative shows up at the kind of party that would not normally be frequented by his peers from the tradition he is usually placed in. One does not tend to find much reference to Moore, Russell, Ayer, Strawson, Grice, Searle, etc. in poststructuralist philosophy, gender studies, queer theory, sociology or debates on the historical/cultural status of knowledge within the university. Indeed, it is amusing to imagine Austin looking down from the kind of metaphysical dimension he had no time for at the kinds of work he had inspired. I do not use the word "inspired" lightly— there is nothing sneering, hostile or wholly critical about Austin's reception in these various domains. 2 That is not to say that the responses to Austin (which will feature throughout this thesis) are wholly sympathetic or uncritical. By the same token, the performative utterance can be adopted rather hastily and used in ways that may seem a little forced. This brings us to the first appearance of the word "performativity". The term "performativity" was coined by French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard. It first appears in The Postmodern Condition (first published in French in 1979 though not translated into English until 1984). Performativity denotes the systematic functioning of knowledge within postmodern society (Austin would certainly be appalled by a sentence such as this one!). Lyotard describes a situation in which the narratives of the Enlightenment have been replaced by a concern for "efficiency" or "effectiveness"— for what works. Here the performative acts as much as a metaphor as anything else. Truth (the constative) becomes coterminous with whether or not it is efficient. This has little to do with what Austin meant when he noted the constative and performative dimensions of the utterance. Indeed, Lyotard's philosophy of language is rather Austinian in certain respects. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. The second treatment (chronologically, and in terms of the structure of this thesis) of the word "performativity" that we will be considering here originates with philosopher, feminist critic and queer theorist, Judith Butler.