To do what they do

In his seminal 1955 lectures and subsequent book How to Do Things with Words, J.L. Austin set out to investigate a peculiar dual functionality of words, in which certain ways of using language achieve more than just communicate the content of words. Taking reference from everyday social uses of language, Austin distinguishes two types of speech: acts of language that merely say something, constatives such as he is running and those which actually do something, performatives such as I do (take thee to be my lawfully wedded spouse). Within Austins methodology, the difference between the two originates in how a certain utterance can be evaluated as one or the other, and similarly, how what is said can be apprehended and understood by who hears the speech act. Preliminarily, if it can be deemed either true/false it would be a constative, or if it can be deemed what Austin calls happy/unhappy it would be a performative. Conceptualizing the way in which these two are differentiated through these means of evaluation forces Austin early on to introduce a further distinction within the speech act itself, between language and its situatedness within a milieu (Austin, 14). While constatives may be relatively easy to judge based on familiar empirical modes of seeing, the notion of context becomes necessary to evaluate a performative. To use his famous example, saying I do to someone does not necessarily make one married to them. Instead, in order to determine whether saying I do does in fact make one married to an other it is necessary to assess certain situational conditions such as the place it is enunciated (from the building to its contents to the culture), the person it is being said to, and even the sentiments of those saying it. Therefore, when we judge speech, it is not necessarily only the language that is being judged, but at times even more importantly the conditions of propriety of speaking and acting. While originally used as the basis for distinguishing one type of speech from the other, both these metrics of evaluation are subsequently demonstrated at length to be constitutive characteristics of all speech acts, whether constative or performative. Instead of invalidating their potential for distinction, this dual constituency of performative speech acts posits a more fundamental similarity between the two and as such a fundamental constituent of speech itself so that we can craft a more operative

way of looking at what our saying does. Speech can, is, and must be judicable - as true/false, felicitous/infelicitous, proper/improper, etc./etc. - for it to be understood. In all cases of judgment, it is pertinent to ask what it is specifically that is being judged. Be it consciously done or based on preconceived convention, as words are not the things they refer to but instead themselves refer to things, what is necessarily susceptible to evaluation is whether the things that language refers to are brought into relation through the performative act of speech. Said in other words, what is determined is whether that which is being referred to is related to the situation of speech. The various binary metrics above thus merely serve to describe particular types of judgment ascribed to their respective ways in which language refers to things, and, even a way of looking at different types of things themselves. Austin himself deals with this distinction between reference and relation, between referring to things with words and relating those things being referred to to other things. The first takes place in his early analysis of performatives as a distinct category of speech: much like the judicative metric of happy/unhappy, Austin attempt to provide another test to determine whether an utterance as performative or not. Towards these ends the ability to make a certain utterance explicit or not is proposed, under the presupposition that if an utterance can be made explicit it would be not constative but performative, and vice versa. Although easy to find examples of explicit utterances that are not performative but instead constative and descriptive, such as I run, the specific functionality of making an utterance explicit reveals another basic constituent of making speech act. The type of speech used as a prime example of the function of explicitness is a performative that is, an utterance said not to communicate information but to catalyze action the imperative. Despite the fact that which is being said in the two examples of go and I order you to go are the same, the imperative to go, what makes one differ from the other is that in the latter contains words which explicate the intersubjective relational situation of the act itself, such as I, you, etc. While Austin claims that explicitness makes clearer the force, or how [the utterance] is to be taken (Austin, 73), particular emphasis should be placed not necessary on how but by whom. In addition to attempting the resolution of a certain indeterminacy inherent to all speech acts, the determination of exactly what is being said, whether the utterer is ordering

me to go or merely advising, entreating, or what not me to go (Austin, 32, emphasis added), the explication of performativity additionally attempts to resolve the question whether what is being said and what it refers to relates to the situation in which it is judged or not; whether it refers to me or you, this or that, or anything or nothing. Although making explicit performativity reveals the subjects to whom the speech act pertains, this does not necessarily imply that what is being referred to and related with will in any way become made effective. An explicit performative it is still susceptible to objections of propriety as well as other common infidelities that were first exposed in the analysis between speech and its context. What comes to light through this analysis of explication is a peculiar temporal structure in which the relation to a speech acts situation serves as a precondition for the relation with that which language is referring to. Although explication may be the most successful ways subjects become subjectivized within a speech act, it is one of numerous speech-devices which have always been used to perform the same function (Austin, 73). While explicitness it is incapable of making any speech act effective solely by itself, explicative performativity does reveal a particular potentiality in which the utterance of a performative speech act can itself forge the intersubjective situation in which it takes place, and as such reveals relationality and contextuality as a constituent element to the effective performance of a speech act. If explicit performances dealt with how speech acts relate certain subjects within a situation, though insufficient in solely guaranteeing its efficacy, the question of how speech acts refer to and mean certain things within an utterance comes to the foreground. The way in which Austin most convincingly elucidates the way utterances carry and convey meaning is by investigating the cause of certain communicational failures in constative, descriptive statements. The first example of this is the present King of France is bald (Austin, 20, 136), where it is not impossible to understand what is being said in this sentence but to make sense out of it, as one of the things it explicitly references, the present King of France, does not exist (France, as something which could theoretically have a King, does not). What is commonly accepted as having

happened here is that the utterance fails, but this failure is not necessary1. This utterance reveals a chasm within the association between relation and reference, between signifier and signified, in which the receiver is performatively called forth and demanded to be the factor of determination whether the performance is a success or failure. For success to be the case in this example, a process of poetic interpretation would need to be undertaken and new objects of reference or situations of relationality actively created by apprehending the utterance not as a grammatically correct linguistic formation but a tenuous chain made up of links, breaking down into its individual word components to questioning the way in which the idea King relates to the idea of France in its present state. While this statement might have appeared from the outset as one describing facts, for it to be evaluated as either true or false it is first necessary for it to be related to as successfully performative or not, where the adjudication of the former is itself dependent and constituted by that of the latter. Another case in which speech acts can fail to communicate meaning is when what is being referred to may exist, but the accuracy of the claims, what it is saying about that which it refers to, is impossible to verify as true. Repositioning the previous example, this would presuppose that regardless of whether there is a present King of France whether he is bald or not cannot be known. The example Austin uses in particular is there are fifty people in the next room (Austin, 137), where by nature of being in this room and not the next, it is impossible to know its exact contents. According to this, the only way in which the statement from above regarding the King of Frances baldness could be true is both if there is a present King of France and we are with him, observing the hairs on his head. Not wishing to delve neither into the infinite reductionism of defining baldness nor liminal conditions of presence and surveillance technologies, these examples have gone to demonstrate the interdependence of performative speech acts on both a positive condition of referentiality and relationality as constituent dependencies for the potential success of a performative speech act. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! "!"!#$%&!'((&)*+,!-.!(%&!/-)01!*12!*+0&&02!'1'3445!32!-)!&6&+!!"#2!4&30*+,!*+7*0&+(!*+!(%&!8&).-)93+7&!
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We have schematized two primary components of a performative speech act based on Austins exposition: its reference to things through the use of words and its relation of things through the use of force. But if the positive evaluation of both these two constituencies are incapable of guaranteeing the effectiveness of a performance, we should perhaps return to our preliminary characteristic of performative speech acts, its judicable nature, and see how it fits within the first two. From the outset, we can distinguish between what a performative speech act refers to and relates with its judicability in a very basic manner: the utterer is the one who refers to and relates by uttering but is incapable of judging it, whereas the receiver is unable to control what references and relations they are being subjected to by receiving but is capable of judging it and subsequently being effected and acting accordingly. Up until this point the problematic concept of intention has haunted these pages. For example, while the utterer is indeed the one who refers to and relates things, this does not mean that the utterer intends to refer to and relate everything that is grasped as such. Instead, as is most evident in the cases of communicational failure, certain references and relations that are undeniably intentional - i.e. presentness, King, France and baldness - can generate unintentional understandings and judgments. As with how the notion of a King can relate to the present state of France and how the description of baldness can catalyze that interpretation, this indeterminability of what will be interpreted only furthermore stresses the point that just because a statement is posited does not mean its intention is to be received as such. If it is impossible to say that performative speech acts essentially intend to be truthful, happy, or whatnot, is it possible to declare that an absolute disposition? What would it take to craft the concept of success as the intrinsic propensity of performance? Let us return to one of Austins last examples in which the nuances of performative success are placed front and center in its problematic (in)determinability, from which we will attempt to grasp a better understanding not of the conditions of success but its pertinence; not what is successful or even what makes something successful but what success is.
Suppose that we confront 'France is hexagonal' with the facts, in this case, I suppose, with France, is it true or false? Well, if you like, up to a point; of course I can see what you mean by

saying that it is true for certain intents and purposes. It is good enough for a top-ranking general, perhaps, but not for a geographer. (Austin, 142)

The truth or falsity of statements is affected by what they leave out or put in and by their being misleading, and so on. Thus, for example, descriptions, which are said to be true or false or, if you like, are 'statements', are surely liable to these criticisms, since they are selective and uttered for a purpose. It is essential to realize that 'true' and 'false', like 'free' and 'unfree', do not stand for anything simple at all; but only for a general dimension of being a right or proper thing to say as opposed to a wrong thing, in these circumstances, to this audience, for these purposes and with these intentions. (Austin, 143-144)

What can be glimpsed from these two statements is a certain asymmetrical structure taking form within performative speech acts which led Austin to declare only a few pages earlier that what we have to study is not the sentence but the issuing of an utterance in a speech situation (Austin, 138). I would like to supplant this pseudoconclusion with the following: what we have to study is not only the sentence nor only its issuance nor only the speech situation, but instead what the correspondence between them all does. This is to say, while it is imperative to study both the sentence and the issuing of an utterance and its speech situation, what is ultimately of importance as the metric of success is what effect the speech act has on the situation, i.e. what happens after, yet because of, the performance. In other words, the success of a performative speech act is the degree to which it can be retroactively traced back and situated within a chain of causality. While it seems as though we have made a definition here for success-as-retrocausality, there is a basic functional problem in this formation, for if the disposition of speech is conjecturally to be successful, yet success can only be gauged after its performance, how is it possible to perform a speech act according to its disposition? This confrontation between the radical unknowability of the effects of performing with the pre-established incessancy and impossibility of doing anything else (Austin, 138) is quite vertiginous. This absolute ambiguity not only demands a response, but in the very relentlessness of its questioning, necessarily receives one as each second passes with the performance of time. To clearly state the question: if we must perform, yet cannot know the effects of our actions, how should we act? If all we can know is our intention, how should we intend?

If performance, and along with it both intention and consequence, are unavoidable, one common response this ethical dilemma is to adopt the mentality of minimalism in which the most proper response is judged as intending as little consequence as possible. Unfortunately, this approach is both logically self-undermining and easily appropriated as the vehicle for other, non-intentional, performances, often the ones in which minimization is performed in response to as an act of protest. What causes this approach to undermine itself is the tacit presupposition that the less we intend the less we effect. What has been made clear within the analysis of intention and consequence as they relate to performativity is that not only can we not know what effects are produced as a consequence of our performance and as such calibrate our intentions, but also that we cannot rely on any sort of inherent causal relation between what we do intend and what effect it does have. Instead, what is proposed with the concept of success-as-retrocausality is the severance in conception between the effects of the performance and the performance itself. Said in a different way, the only thing that is possibly subject to intentionality is the act of performance, and as such, consequences should be themselves comprehended as impossible to intend. This is not to say that effects cannot be influenced but merely that the distinction between influence and intention must be made. This is perhaps a topic we will have to return to later, or even at another time, but it will have to suffice for now to make the following claim: the intentional performance produces a dispositional object, which is itself what creates effects (as opposed to the aforementioned conception where the performance is what effects). Unbeknownst to us while doing it (and certainly without intending it), while being displaced for a brief moment into the situation where speech acts perform, the question of success has been surreptitiously reintroduced into the performance of speech acts themselves. But yet we are not too far to be unable to take reference from Austin; we can note an uncanny parallel between this notion of success-as-retrocausality and one of the specific families of speech acts Austin finishes his book with, expositives. Expositives make plain how our utterances fit into the course of an argument or conversation (Austin, 151). Expositives are similar to explicit performatives, but whereas in the latter speech makes explicit the relation between the one who speaks and

the one who hears, in the former speech exposes the conditions in which speaking, hearing and listening can occur. Expositives offer a working answer to the problematic of success-as-retrocausality by positing that not only the effects themselves, but that the ways that effects can be detected and measured can originate from the performative act. If the metrics of evaluation can originate from the performance of the speech act and every performance necessarily is evaluated as a speech act, the expositive as a potential posits that because we can and it is, we should, we must. If we are therefore to return to the necessary implications of performance as such, intention and consequence, considering that consequence cannot be intended yet intention can be con-sequential, we could perhaps maximize the use of intentionality to expose the conditions of interpretation, the metrics which determine success. Rather than searching for a way to make performance universally successful, we should perhaps instead aim to have our performances be as undeniably successful as possible.

Bibliography
1. Austin, J.L.. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962