Editing Performative utterance (section)

==Performative text==
Building on the notion of performative utterances, scholars have theorized on the relation of a spoken or written [[Text (literary theory)|text]] to its broader context, that is to say everything outside the text itself. The question whether a performative is separable from the situation it emerged in is relevant when one addresses for example the status of individual intentions or speech as a resource of power. There are two main theoretical strands in research today. One emphasizes the predetermined conventions surrounding a performative utterance and the clear distinction between text and context. Another emphasizes the active construction of reality through spoken and written texts and is related to theories of [[human agency]] and [[discourse]]. The ideas about performance and text have contributed to the [[performative turn]] in the [[social sciences]] and [[humanities]], proving their methodological use for example in the interpretation of historical texts.

Early theories acknowledge that performance and text are both embedded in a system of rules and that the effects they can produce depend on convention and recurrence. In this sense, text is an instance of 'restored behaviour', a term introduced by [[Richard Schechner]] that sees performance as a repeatable ritual.<ref>{{cite book|last=Schechner |first=Richard |title=Performance Studies, an Introduction |publisher=Taylor & Francis |location=New York |year=2006 |page=36}}</ref>  The focus here is largely on individual sentences in the active first person voice, rather than on politics or discourse. The syntactical analyses are firmly anchored in analytical epistemology, as the distinction between the research object and its context is not conceived as problematic.

===Postmodernist theories===
The second set of theories on performance and text diverged from the tradition represented by Austin and Searle. Bearing the stamp of [[postmodernism]], it states that neither the meaning, nor the context of a text can be defined in its entirety. Instead of emphasizing linguistic rules, scholars within this strand stress that the performative utterance is intertwined with structures of power. Because a text inevitably changes a situation or discourse, the distinction between text and context is blurred.

Austin and Searle thought in terms of demarcated contexts and transparent intentions, two issues that in the 1970s led Searle into polemics with [[postmodern]] thinker [[Jacques Derrida]].<ref group=Notes>In 1972 Jacques Derrida published the article 'Signature Événement Contexte', in which he criticises several aspects of Austin's theory on the performative utterance. The first English translation appeared in 1977 in the first volume of Glyph. In the second volume (1977) Searle published an article called: 'Reiterating the differences: a reply to Derrida', in which he defended Austin's theories. Derrida responded with the essay 'Limited Inc a b c...', (1977).</ref>

The postmodern philosopher [[Jacques Derrida]] holds with Austin and Searle that by illocutionary force, language itself can transform and effect.<ref name="Derrida 1988">{{cite journal|last=Derrida |first=Jacques |title=Signature Event Context |journal=Limited Inc |year=1988 |pages=1–23}}</ref>{{rp|13}} However, he criticizes the notion of 'felicity conditions' and the idea that the success of a performative utterance is determined by conventions. Derrida values the distinctiveness of every individual [[speech act]], because it has a specific effect in the particular situation in which it is performed.<ref name="Derrida 1988"/>{{rp|9}} It is because of this effect or 'breaking force' that Derrida calls the possibility of repeating a text 'iterability', a word derived from Latin ''iterare'', to repeat.

According to Derrida, the effects caused by a performative text are in a sense also part of it. In this way, the distinction between a text and that what is outside it dissolves. For this reason it is pointless to try to define the context of a speech act.<ref name="Derrida 1988"/>{{rp|3}}

Besides the consequential effects, the dissolution of the text-context divide is also caused by iterability. Due to the possibility of repetition, the intentions of an individual actor can never be fully present in a speech act.<ref name="Derrida 1988"/>{{rp|18}} The core of a performative utterance is therefore not constituted by animating intentions, as Austin and Searle would have it, but by the structure of language.

The philosopher [[Judith Butler]] offers a political interpretation of the concept of the performative utterance. Power in the form of active censorship defines and regulates the domain of a certain discourse.<ref name="Butler 1997">{{cite book|last=Butler |first=Judith |title=[[Excitable speech: A politics of the performative]] |publisher=Routledge |location=New York |year=1997}}</ref>{{rp|133}} Indebted to the work of [[Michel Foucault]], Butler expounds how subjects are produced by their context, because the possibilities of speech are predetermined.

Notwithstanding such social restraints, Butler underscores the possibility of agency. The boundaries of a discourse need continuous re-demarcation and this is where speech can escape its constriction. The emphasis on the limits of what is allowed to be said also frames that what is silenced.<ref name="Butler 1997" />{{rp|129}}
Performativity has a political aspect that consists in what Derrida has described as the breaking force, by which an utterance changes its context.<ref name="Butler 1997" />{{rp|145}} Butler assigns an important role to what Austin has called infelicities and parasitic uses of language. Quotations, parodies and other deviations from official discourse can become instruments of power that affect society.<ref name="Butler 1997" />{{rp|160}}

In [[A Thousand Plateaus]], [[Gilles Deleuze|Deleuze]] and [[Félix Guattari|Guattari]] define language as the totality of all performative utterances, which they call order-words. They write "We call order-words, not a particular category of explicit statements (for example, in the imperative), but the relation of every word or every statement to implicit presuppositions, in other words, to speech acts that are, and can only be, accomplished in the statement. Order-words do not concern commands only, but every act that is linked to statements by a "social obligation." Every statement displays this link, directly or indirectly. Questions, promises, are order-words. The only possible definition of language is the set of all order-words."<ref>{{Cite book |last=Deleuze |first=Gilles |title=A Thousand Plateaus |date=1993 |publisher=University of Minnesota Press |isbn=978-0-8166-1402-8 |pages=79}}</ref>

===Historical methodology===
The historian [[Quentin Skinner]] developed classical and postmodern theories on performative texts into a concrete research method. Using Austin's vocabulary, he seeks to recover what historical authors were doing in writing their texts, which corresponds with the performance of illocutionary acts.<ref name="Skinner 2003">{{cite book|last=Skinner |first=Quentin |title=Visions of Politics |volume=1 regarding method |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2003}}</ref>{{rp|vii}} According to Skinner, philosophical ideas are intertwined with claims of power. Every text is an act of communication that positions itself in relation to the status quo it seeks to change.<ref name="Skinner 2003"/>{{rp|115}}

Skinner agrees with Derrida that contexts in their entirety are irretrievable but nevertheless states that there is a relevant context outside the text that can be described in a plausible way.<ref name="Skinner 2003"/>{{rp|121}} Extensive research is required to relate historical texts to their contemporary discourses. According to Skinner 'there is a sense in which we need to understand why a certain proposition has been put forward if we wish to understand the proposition itself'.<ref name="Skinner 2003"/>{{rp|115}} He values agency over structure and stresses the importance of authorial intentions.<ref name="Skinner 2003"/>{{rp|7}} Skinner therefore proposes to study historical sources in order to retrieve the convictions the author held, reflect on their coherence and investigate possible motives for the illocutionary act.<ref name="Skinner 2003"/>{{rp|119}} This practical method seeks to deal with the blurred distinction between text and context and offer a meaningful way of interpreting historical reality.