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Performativity and Language

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Article in Critical Inquiry in Language Studies March 2004

DOI: 10.1207/s15427595cils0101_1

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Alastair Pennycook
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CRITICAL INQUIRY IN LANGUAGE STUDIES: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL, 1(1), 119
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Drawing analogies with the crisis in understandings of culture that led
to the development of cultural studies, I suggest in this article that a
similar crisis in the understanding of language may give an important
impetus to the development of language studies. Arguing for the need to
rethink the notion of language as commonly formulated in linguistics
and applied linguistics, I take up the notion of performativity as a way
of thinking about language use and identity that avoids foundationalist
categories, suggesting that identities are formed in the linguistic per-
formance rather than pregiven. Such a view of language identity also
helps us to see how subjectivities are called into being and sedimented
over time through regulated language acts. This further provides the
ground for considering languages themselves from an anti-
foundationalist perspective, whereby language use is an act of identity
that calls that language into being. And performativity, particularly in
its relationship to notions of performance, opens up ways to understand
how languages, identities and futures are refashioned.

Perhaps, suggested Clifford (1988) some years ago, the culture concept has
served its time (p. 274). While he nevertheless insisted that this did not mean
that all conceptions of cultural difference should be discarded, at issue was
the over-determined sense of cultural fixity, with its long ties to colonialism and
anthropology. The concept of culture used by anthropologists had been in-
vented by European theorists to account for the collective articulations of human
diversity, but for all the supposed relativism of the notion of culture, the con-
cepts model of totality, basically organic in structure, was not different from the
19th century concepts it replaced (p. 273) Whatever was used to transcend the
concept of culture, he argued, should at least no longer be closely tied to no-
tions of organic unity, traditional continuity, and the enduring grounds of lan-
guage and locale (p. 274). What was needed, he went on, was a set of relations
that preserves the concepts differential and relativist functions and that avoids
the positing of cosmopolitan essences and human common denominators (pp.
274275). There is perhaps an irony here that Clifford was writing as part of that
new and burgeoning field of cultural studies. Some years later, the concept of
culture he was arguing against has been reconfigured within a diverse and dy-
namic space.

Requests for reprints should be sent to Alastair Pennycook. E-mail: alastair.pennycook@uts.edu.au

2 PENNYCOOK

Perhaps, I would like to suggest (rewriting Clifford), the moment has ar-
rived to argue that the language concept too has served its time. Such a proposal
would not mean that all conceptions of linguistic difference should be discarded,
but rather that the over-determined sense of linguistic fixity, with its long ties to
colonialism and linguistics needs to be profoundly questioned. The concept of
language used by linguists was invented by European theorists to account for the
diverse modes of articulation by different human groups, but for all the sup-
posed relativism of the notion of language, the concepts model of totality, basi-
cally organic in structure, is no different from the nineteenth-century concepts it
replaced. Whatever we may use to transcend the concept of language should at
least no longer be closely tied to notions of organic unity, traditional continuity,
and the enduring grounds of culture and locale. What we need is a set of rela-
tions that preserves the concepts differential and relativist functions and that
avoids the positing of cosmopolitan essences and human common denominators.
Perhaps the advent of language studies can presage such a shift, not doing
away with language but relocating its linguistic formulations differently.
But one of the many obstacles to such a move is the disciplinary boundaries
set up by the disciplines of applied and unapplied linguistics. I have two prob-
lems with applied linguistics, one with the notion of applied, the other with
the notion of linguistics. Many of us who work under this broad rubric which
cuts across language education, translation, language in the workplace, language
policy, and so forth, neither apply theory to practical contexts, nor use linguis-
tics as a foundational framework for knowledge. For many of us, the tired de-
bates of the last century over linguistics applied versus applied linguistics
(e.g., Widdowson, 2001) are simply irrelevant. We are engaged in a quite differ-
ent project that tries to understand language in diverse contexts by drawing on
cultural studies, philosophy, literary theory, postcolonial studies, sociology, his-
tory, gender studies, and more. The concept of language studies, particularly by
analogy with cultural studies, perhaps presents us with a more useful framework
for pursuing such goals.
To move forward we need to do at least three things: First, we need to tran-
scend the disciplinary constraints imposed on us by linguistics and applied lin-
guistics. I shall sketch out some of the issues here in the next section. Second,
we do indeed need to disinvent language (see Makoni & Pennycook, in press),
so that we can rethink what it is that we are dealing with here. I will discuss the
notions of language and disinvention in the following section. And third, we
need a reconstructive program to find new ways of thinking about language. In
the main part of this article I will discuss the notion of performativity as one
such concept that can provide significant insights into the social operation of
language. The notion of performativity, I argue, opens up new ways of thinking
about language, identity and change, and presents an interesting potential agenda
for research in language studies.
 PERFORMATIVITY AND LANGUAGE STUDIES 3

Disciplining language
First of all, I want to point to the very considerable institutional constraints
on rethinking language. In order to appreciate this, we need to understand the
construction of a science of language (linguistics) in relationship to applied lin-
guistics. This will be a necessarily cursory view (for a broader discussion, see
Pennycook, 2002). A central problem here is an entelechial assumption that lan-
guages are real objects waiting to be discovered. Continuing the analogy with
anthropology for a moment, it is interesting to substitute linguistic and lin-
guistics for cultural and anthropology in the following discussion by Scott
(1999), who suggests that [linguistic] objects are not simply given in advance
of [linguistic] projects, but are constructed in conceptual and ideological do-
mains that themselves have historiesvery often colonial histories. unless
[linguistics] attends in an ongoing and systematic way to the problem of the
conceptual-ideological formation of the objects that constitute its discourse, it
will not be able to avoid the reproduction of colonialist discourse (p. 13).
This analogy with anthropology raises two significant points: First that the
objects of study of linguistics (languages), like cultures, are not pregiven entities
but rather are the products of the mode of study; and second, this process of
forming languages is deeply embedded within colonial projects of knowledge
formation. Descriptions of languages, as Errington (2001) points out, had collat-
eral uses so that language difference could become a resourcelike gender,
race, and classfor figuring and naturalizing inequality in the colonial milieux
(p. 20). As colonial authorities conquered and coerced communities into a new
colonial polity, they also measured and described people, places, territories, lan-
guages, cultures into a vast colonial archive. According to Cohn (1996), Europe-
ans took control by defining and classifying space, making separations between
public and private spheres; by recording transactions such as the sale of prop-
erty; by counting and classifying their populations, replacing religious institu-
tions as the registrar of births, marriages and deaths; and by standardizing lan-
guages and scripts (p. 3). The invention of Indian languages has to be seen in
the context of this larger colonial archive of knowledge. The British, as Lelyveld
(1993) points out, developed from their study of Indian languages not only
practical advantage but an ideology of languages as separate, autonomous ob-
jects in the world, things that could be classified, arranged, and deployed as me-
dia of exchange (p. 194).
Central to this process, then, were a series of assumptions about languages
as bounded territorial entities. Colonial authorities and missionaries shared a
territorial logic that was similarly inscribed in colonial linguistic work, presup-
posing mappings of monolithic languages onto demarcated boundariesWithin
these bounded confines were conceived to be ethnolinguistically homogeneous
groups that were localized, and naturalized, as tribes or ethnicities (Erring-
ton, p. 24). Comparative philology, like many sections of the European colonial
knowledge archive, emerged simultaneously with colonial expansion in Asia,
Africa and the Middle East in the 19th century. As it then developed into mod-
ern linguistics, with its hierarchies, fixed languages, language trees, and so forth,
4 PENNYCOOK

it carried with it many of the assumptions of the colonial collateral that brought
about its emergence. According to Errington (2001), the central philological
trope of comparative philology and missionary linguistics was the conception
of language as organism which informed images of language change in natu-
ral, entelechial processes of articulation, predetermined by languages originary
conditions and communities (p. 32). This led to constructions of language fami-
lies, organic differences between language types, language trees, and so on, and
became closely tied to the scientific racism of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Disciplinarity
The new science of linguistics stepped into this already defined space of ter-
ritorialised and ethnicised languages, though with various important twists. As
the founder of structuralist linguistics, Saussure made a number of significant
moves that continue to define the linguistic enterprise today. First, he massively
narrowed the scope of linguistics, disregarding everything which does not be-
long to its structure as a system; in short everything that is designated by the
term external linguistics (1915/1983, p. 21). History, politics, society, eco-
nomics, culture were gone. One effect of the Saussurean rejection of diachronic
relations in language was not only that linguistic theory was thus removed from
its colonial past but that it also became impossible to address it. The linguistics
that Saussure ushered in was, as much of it still is, tied to colonial constructions
of language, one of the cultural constructions of colonialism (Pennycook,
1998) par excellence; by concentrating on internal linguistics and rejecting ex-
ternal linguistics, there was no longer any mode of reflection for looking at what
linguistics was and what it had invented.
Second, by insisting from a structuralist perspective that words did not rep-
resent objects, but rather were part of a self-contained system held in place by
mutual agreement, linguistics developed what Taylor (1990) calls an institu-
tional view of meaning, whereby language comes to reside in a fixed, institu-
tionalised system. This enabled the view that rather than words being a pale re-
flection of reality, a second cousin to the real world, they were in fact part of
reality, that is language was an objective fact and thus could be studied accord-
ing to the same scientific principles as other objective domains of the real world:
Once liberated from its status as but a pale shadow of the world of things into
its proper place standing alongside those things, then language could join those
other items of reality in the privileged status of scientific object (Crowley,
1996, p. 18). Thus, as Taylor (1990) suggests, access to an understanding of the
meaning of words was only to be had through the institutional construction of
language as described by experts. Real knowledge about language is only avail-
able to the real linguist.
Thus, third, Saussure and subsequent linguists have placed huge emphasis
on the scientific nature of their enterprise. As Harris (1981) explains, The ver-
sion of the language myth propounded by modern linguistics has it that there is
only one descriptive standpoint which allows us to proceed to a systematic
analysis of linguistic phenomena (p. 35). He goes on to explain that A study of
 PERFORMATIVITY AND LANGUAGE STUDIES 5

the development of modern linguistics makes it clear that the entrenchment of

the language myth as a basic theoretical assumption arose from the need to es-
tablish for linguistic studies respectable academic status as a science (p. 37).
As each new linguistic revolution marched in to contest the old, they kept in
place the centrality of language myths and scientific investigation: One
achievement of the so-called Chomskyan revolution has been to appropriate this
sort of status for linguistics more successfully than previous or alternative para-
digms. (Cameron, 1990, pp. 8384).
As a result, linguistics has on the one hand tended to close in on itself, look-
ing neither at external relations of language nor at alternative knowledge forma-
tions. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) observe, As long as linguistics confines
itself to constants, whether syntactical, morphological, or phonological, it ties
the statement to a signifier and enunciation to a subject and accordingly botches
the assemblage; it consigns circumstances to the exterior, closes language in on
itself, and makes pragmatics a residue (p. 82) On the other hand, as the disci-
pline at the centre of the scientific, structuralist enterprise, it has tended to have
more invested in maintaining its disciplinarity. This in turn has resulted in deep-
seated normativity, to the extent that it has been unable to see that what it con-
ceives as description is no less normative that the prescriptions of the much-
derided applied linguist (Parakrama, 1995; Taylor, 1990). As Harris (1981) puts
it, the linguistics introduced by Saussure placed theoretical constraints upon the
freedom of the individual speaker no less rigid than the authoritarian recom-
mendations of the old-fashioned grammarian-pedagogue. But instead of the
rules being imposed by educational pedants, they were envisaged as being im-
posed from within the language itself (p. 46).
Such normativity has also led to profoundly exclusionary practices, espe-
cially in the insistence on itself as a science. The disciplinary boundaries, the
lists of exclusions, the claims to scientificity made by linguistics, therefore, lead
to the dismissal of many other possible interests in language. As Foucault asked,
What types of knowledge do you want to disqualify in the very instant of your
demand Is it a science? (1980, p. 85). Of course, as we have already seen, the
types of knowledge that linguistics sought to exclude were many, but, perhaps
even more significant were the types of knowledge it sought to disqualify: all
those non-scientific, interpretive, exploratory, open-ended questions about lan-
guage and life. As Poynton (1993) observes, even an interest in fairly uncontro-
versial aspects of external linguistics is often characterised as not sufficiently
linguistic, providing the perfect excuse for real linguists not to engage seri-
ously with it. There is a particular arrogance about most linguists concerning
what it is necessary to know about language, so that only those who really
know are regarded as having proper authority (p. 4).
And meanwhile, the great misfortune for applied linguistics is that in order
to attain academic credibility it has desperately sought to be as scientific as lin-
guistics, celebrating its increasing scientificity with an emphasis on narrow un-
derstandings of language and narrow approaches to research. The model of lan-
guage developed in linguistics and adopted by applied linguistics offers little
6 PENNYCOOK

prospect for an understanding of the non-autonomy of language. As Bourdieu

puts it, "As soon as one treats language as an autonomous object, accepting the
radical separation which Saussure made between internal and external linguis-
tics, between the science of language and the science of the social uses of lan-
guage, one is condemned to looking within words for the power of words, that
is, looking for it where it is not to be found" (1991, p. 107). My point here is not
that linguistic knowledge is of no use; such a claim would be as arrogant as the
claims by linguists that other forms of knowledge are insignificant. Rather the
point is to find ways of using linguistic knowledge within a broader paradigm of
language studies.

Disinvention, reinvention and performativity

We need, then, to work towards the disinvention (Makoni & Pennycook, in
press) of language in order to be able to reconstruct a way of doing language
studies. One way forward is to follow the work of Roy Harris and others. In a
sustained critique of linguistics (e.g., Harris, 1980, 1981, 1988), culminating in
the development of what he terms integrational linguistics (1998), Harris has
argued that linguistics (or segregational linguistics as he calls orthodox linguis-
tics) has profoundly misconstrued language through its myths about the auton-
omy, systematicity and rule-bound nature of language, its privileging of suppos-
edly expert, scientific, linguistic knowledge over everyday understandings of
language, its belief in the primacy of spoken language and the existence of ho-
mogeneous speech communities, and its belief in a telementational model of
communication (whereby meaning is communicated from one head to another
via language). An integrationalist redefinition of linguistics, Harris (1990, p.
45) suggests, can dispense with at least the following assumptions: (i) that the
linguistic sign is arbitrary; (ii) that the linguistic sign is linear; (iii) that words
have meanings; (iv) that grammar has rules; and (v) that there are languages. In
place of these language myths, Harris argues for a model that makes language a
by-product of communication. A related position can be found in Hoppers
(1998) concept of emergent grammar (discussed later) in which the apparent
regularities of grammar are accounted for in terms of categories of observed
repetitions in discourse (p. 156). Both Harris and Hopper, therefore, take issue
with the assumption that languages or grammars have an ontological status prior
to their emergence in communication.
Although Harris and Hoppers projects are predominantly aimed at pulling
apart linguistics from the insidewhile my interest here is more in exploring
how we can develop a more useful sense of language for the diverse contexts of
applied linguistic workthis integrational perspective can help us in a number
of ways: First, it no longer isolates language from other social behaviours and
semiotic systems, allowing for a broader approach to multimodality (see, e.g.,
Kress, 2003). Not only can we then include the body, music, dance and other
modes of representation into an understanding of meaning, but language studies
necessarily engages, like cultural studies, with a much broader set of integrated
meaning-making practices. And second, we no longer need to maintain the per-
 PERFORMATIVITY AND LANGUAGE STUDIES 7

nicious myth that languages exist. Thus we can start to develop an anti-
foundationalist view of language as an emergent property of social interaction
and not a prior system tied to ethnicity, territory, birth, or nation.
The approach that Sinfree Makoni and I are currently taking (Makoni &
Pennycook, in press), is that we need to disinvent current notions of language in
order to be able to reinvent them for use in a new politics of language studies.
The view of language we are suggesting has major implications for many of the
treasured icons of liberal-linguistic thought. Not only do the notions of language
and languages become highly suspect, but so do many related concepts that are
premised on a notion of discrete languages, such as language rights, mother
tongues, multilingualism, or code-switching. It is common in both liberal and
more critical approaches to issues in sociolinguistics to insist on plurality, some-
times strengthened by a concept of rights. Thus, there are strong arguments for
mother tongue education, for an understanding of multilingualism as the global
norm, for understanding the prevalence of code-switching in bi- and multi-
lingual communities, and for the importance of language rights to provide a
moral and legal framework for language policies. Our position, however, is that
although such arguments may be preferable to blinkered views that take mono-
lingualism as the norm, they nevertheless remain caught within the same para-
digm: They operate with a strategy or pluralization rather than a questioning of
the inventions at the core of the whole discussion. Without strategies of disin-
vention, most discussions of language rights, mother tongue education, code-
switching, or language rights reproduce the same concept of language that un-
derlies all mainstream linguistic thought.

Performativity
In order to reconstruct usable notions of language, we need to rethink a
number of ways of understanding language. I want to suggest that the notion of
perfomativity gives us one such way forward. At first glance, performativity, as
developed by the philosopher J. L. Austin and subsequently incorporated into
speech act theory, might seem a rather lacklustre concept to try to reclaim, since
it is generally relegated to a small category of verbs or acts that do what they say
(I sentence you to five years in prison, etc.). Yet, while on the one hand re-
maining a rather obscure corner of language philosophy, the notion of the per-
formative has at the same time generated huge interest from a very wide range
of thinkers, including Derrida, Bourdieu, Butler, Habermas, Deleuze and Guat-
tari, and Laclau. It has become a key term in anti-foundationalist notions of gen-
der, sexuality and identity. It has also at this point encountered a second version
of the performative as it has emerged from performance (drama, music, ritual)
studies. In this section I shall make a case for the importance of the notion of
performativity as a term in language studies, since it opens up several significant
ways of thinking about language and identity, languages as entities, and lan-
guage as part of transmodal1 performance. It also provides a useful means to
bring back performance into the competence-heavy domain of mainstream ap-
plied and unapplied linguistics.
8 PENNYCOOK

The notion of performativity has been important as a way forward for think-
ing in non-essentialist terms. The key location of the development of this term is
Judith Butlers (1990a, 1990b) work on gender and identity: Butler (1990a) ar-
gues that gender proves to be performativethat is, constituting the identity it
is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by
a subject who might be said to preexist the deed (p. 25). Performativity, then,
following Butler, can be understood as the way in which we perform acts of
identity as an ongoing series of social and cultural performances rather than as
the expression of a prior identity. As she goes on to argue: Gender is the re-
peated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regula-
tory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a
natural sort of being (p. 33). Butlers concern is that the foundational belief in
gendered or sexed identities is paradoxical since it predetermines and fixes the
subjects it aims to liberate. These arguments have been most influential in queer
studies, where the questioning of categories of sexual and gender identity have
allowed a framing of sexuality that goes beyond lesbian and gay identification
and instead embraces the broader category of queer (Jagose, 1996; Nelson,
1999).
It is worth pointing to several key ideas here: First, Butler explains perfor-
mativity as constituting the identity it is purported to be. It is crucial to under-
stand here not only that the performative constitutes identity, and thus is a pro-
ductive act, but also that what it constitutes is what it is purported to be, and thus
it is involved in a form of circular, self-producing activity. Second, this process
of self-production is by no means a question of free-willed choice to take up
some form of identity or another but rather occurs within a highly rigid regula-
tory frame. Identities are a product of our ongoing performances of acts that are
largely pre-scribed. Butlers conception has been taken up in a number of ways,
some of which overemphasized the relationship to performance as theatrical and
optional, suggesting that gender could be performed as an actor takes on a role.
This position Butler carefully refuted in her 1993 book, Bodies that Matter, ar-
guing that performativity is neither free play nor theatrical self-presentation;
nor can it simply be equated with performance (1993, p. 95). As Butler con-
ceives the term, it gives us important ways of understanding the local contingen-
cies of identity formation.
In terms of my interest in opening up alternative ways of thinking about
language, Butlers development of the notion of performativity has several sig-
nificant implications:

It opens up a way of thinking about language use and identity that

avoids foundationalist categories;
It suggests ways of understanding how subjectivities are interpellated
into being;
It provides the ground for considering languages themselves from an
anti-foundationalist perspective; and
 PERFORMATIVITY AND LANGUAGE STUDIES 9

It gives us a way of thinking about language performance in relation-

ship to other modes of performance, such as ritual, music and dance.

Performative speech acts

Before showing the significance of these ideas for my broader project, how-
ever, it is worth briefly locating the notion of performativity within a longer
intellectual history. Many with a linguistic or applied linguistic background may
well already be familiar with the concept from Austins much-discussed work in
the 1950s/60s. The term performative was coined by J. L. Austin (1962) in his
book How to do Things with Words to describe a particular type of speech act
that does what it says, or performs an act in the doing. Typical examples of per-
formatives include I pronounce you man and wife; I sentence you to 10 years
in prison I name this ship and so on. Austin distinguished between consta-
tives and performatives: the first describe a state of affairs (which can be true
or false), while the latter accomplish something in their enunciation. The signifi-
cance of this distinction needs to be understood in part in relationship to the pre-
vious history of language philosophy and its particular relationship to formal
logic (and logical positivism) with its focus on truth conditions. For Austin, the
significance of performatives was that they were not bound by truth conditions
but rather could succeed or not succeed (felicitous or unfelicitous rather than
true or false), their success depending on contextual factors such as following
the conventional procedure, the right words being uttered by the right people in
the right circumstances, and the whole having the right effect.
Austin went on to divide his performatives into several subsets of verbs, in-
cluding verdictives (e.g., convict, diagnose), exercitives (appoint, excommuni-
cate, recommend), commissives (promise, bet), behavitives (apologize, thank,
welcome) and expositives (affirm, deny, inform). He also argued that it was pos-
sible for these verbs to be absent (Ill do it has the same performative force as
I promise Ill do it), thus opening the way for a distinction between explicit
and implicit performatives (the first includes a verb that describes the action; the
latter does not). There are a number of difficulties here, however: Once the con-
cept of a performative is opened up to include all these possible items, and once
a distinction is made to allow implicit performatives, it is hard to maintain any
clear category of the performative. As Austin himself acknowledged, once you
went down this route, it was not in fact so clear that his basic constative/ per-
formative distinction could be maintained: Now we must ask ourselves whether
issuing a constative utterance is not, after all, the performance of an act, the act,
namely, of stating. Is stating an act in the same sense as marrying, apologizing,
betting, etc.? (Austin, 1971, p. 20).
Austin attempted, and then abandoned, the idea that performatives could be
linguistically defined. For a while, linguists attempted to define the syntactic
structure of performatives, suggesting that performative utterances had the fol-
lowing characteristics: 1. First person subject (I/we); 2. Simple present tense
verb (state, ask etc.); 3. Indirect object you; 4. Possibility of inserting hereby;
and 5. Not negative (see Leech, 1974). Such attempts immediately ran into prob-
10 PENNYCOOK

lems, however, since they did not allow for the implicit performatives, (I bet
you five dollars versus Five bucks says youll never make it), left out those
explicit performatives that did not adhere to this formula (You are hereby
warned that), and did not allow for the possibility that even some of the
pure performatives like I name this ship might not actually depend as much
as it was claimed on the actual words being spoken (might not a judge just say
Five years! or a ship launcher proclaim Titanic!?). Other attempts were
made to construct categorizations over several levels, for example, 1. Performa-
tives where the I and verb and ritual behaviour are central to the performance
(I name this ship); 2. Those that are not ritualised and where the verb may be
omitted ([I promise] Ill do it); and 3. Those which may or may not be per-
formative depending on the context (Theres a bull in the field may be an im-
plicit performative if it is intended as a warning).
For a short while, performative analysis became a key theme in genera-
tive semantics, the argument being that the deep semantic structure of all utter-
ances is a performative: Itll rain tomorrow, for example, having a deep struc-
ture: I state that [itll rain tomorrow], or I predict that [itll rain tomorrow].
Ultimately, however, the possibility of defining performative acts or of describ-
ing all language use in these terms was largely abandoned. Performatives were
put back into the box, defined as that small, quirky and slightly undefinable
category of language acts that performed the act in the saying as part of a ritual
activity. By and large, the performative, from a linguistic point of view, has
been relegated to a fairly insignificant corner of language theory. Austin himself
had started afresh by exploring the notion of locutionary (the act of saying
something), illoccutionary (what we do in saying somethingapologising, de-
scribing etc.), and perlocutionary (the purpose or effect of the utterance) acts.
While a sense of performativity was still attached to Austins use of illocution-
ary speech acts, this was largely lost as his ideas were taken up and changed by
John Searle and subsequent speech act theorists. Performativity was back in the
box.

Performativity, power, iteration, identity

It is worth recalling, however, that Austin was a philosopher concerned with
the question of how we do things with words (as part of a larger philosophy of
action): How is it that language can function as a form of social activity, achiev-
ing different effects, causing people to act, bringing multiple reactions? If the
take-up of such questions within the domain of linguistics was always hobbled
by the linguistic obsession with the interiority of language, for many others, the
question of how we do things with words (and how words do things to us) re-
mained a key pursuit. Given the broader interest in the idea of how we do things
with words - the role ascribed to discourse in poststructuralism, for example, as
the site where our subjectivities are formed and reality is producedthe can of
worms opened up by Austin has been regularly reopened.
Derrida (1986) got into the act in his debate in Signature Event Context with
Searle, by challenging Austins exclusions. In determining the conditions under
 PERFORMATIVITY AND LANGUAGE STUDIES 11

which performatives were felicitous, such as being said sincerely by the right
person in the right circumstances, Austin made a number of exclusions of what
he termed etiolationslanguage uses that were not serious or real, such as jokes,
plays and so forth. But were the cases that Austin excluded, asked Derridathe
non-serious, theatrical, and so forth not part of a more general citationality,
where the citation, iteration and repetition of the actor is not a separate case but
rather akin to all forms of language use? Derrida objected to the serious/non-
serious distinction, seeing it as too closely linked to notions of intention and
presence, and further raised the question of originality in writing. For Austin, a
signature was a performativeby signing ones name, one does the act of sign-
ing, but in his debate with the language philosopher John Searle, Derrida asks
whether such acts as signing do not gain their power from the general citational-
ity and iterability of language.
Habermas (1984) also visited Austins work, and it is worth noting how
central this was to Habermas key project of communicative action, which lies at
the heart of nearly all his later work. For Habermas, a principal fault with the
post-Cartesian philosophy of consciousness on which much critical theory rested
was the reliance on instrumental reason presupposed by the concept of a subject
isolated from other subjects and a material world. Habermas set out to under-
stand how a relationship to the world was intersubjectively established and how
the communicative function of language was central to this process. In order to
make this argument, he needed to demonstrate that the original and primary
mode of language use was communication aimed at reaching understanding.
And to construct this argument, Habermas turned to Austin, arguing that illocu-
tionary (as opposed to strategically oriented perlocutionary language use) is fun-
damentally communicative. As Rasmussen (1990) suggests, this thesis regard-
ing the primacy of the communicative mode constitutes the major theoretical
insight sustaining the entire edifice Habermas has built (p. 28). What Habermas
was trying to do here was to use the philosophy of language to justify the project
of modernity.
Unfortunately, such a project is hard to achieve, and rests on many dubious
claims about speech acts (see, e.g., Culler, 1985). A central problem here is that
it is hard to argue that illocutionary acts are centrally communicative while per-
locutionary are strategic, since illocutionary acts are often concerned with get-
ting somebody to do something. Furthermore, it is not possible, as Habermas
would have it, to understand speech acts without taking into account the pur-
posive activity that underlies them. In order to show how both ideology and ra-
tional-purposive thought were perversions of the essential communicative func-
tion of language, Habermas constructs a highly normative account of language
and intention. Thus, although Habermas interestingly stresses performative as-
pects of language in the achievement of intersubjectivitystressing the need to
understand the meaning of the performativeand not the referentialuse of
the expression I within the system of personal pronouns (1984, p. 397)his
emphasis on a normative version of language use as essentially for the purpose
of communication and the realization of rational understanding reduces this use
12 PENNYCOOK

of the performative into little more than the grounds for achieving rational
consensus.
More useful for taking the notion of performativity forward has been
Bourdieus (1991) argument that the linguistic focus on competence lacks social
and historical dimensions, treating language as an autonomous object, and oblig-
ing the linguist to look within language for explanations of its social function
and power. This, suggests Bourdieu, is the error that Austinand Habermas in
his discussion of communicative actionmake. For Bourdieu, Language at
most represents this authority, manifests and symbolizes it (p. 109), and the
notion of a performative implies not just Austins felicity conditions but rather
an institution and a set of social relations to make it work. A speaker must be
authorized to speak. Hence Bourdieu is also critical of Habermas, whose use of
speech act theory relies on the notion of the ideal speech situation, devoid of
relations of power. The inquiry into the specifically linguistic principle behind
the illocutionary power of discourse thus gives way to the distinctly sociologi-
cal inquiry into the conditions in which an individual agent can find
him[/her]self and his[/her] speech invested with such power. The real source of
the magic of performative utterances liesin the social conditions of the institu-
tion of the ministry, which constitutes the legitimate representative as an agent
capable of acting on the social world through words (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 75)
For Bourdieu, performative utterances must always fail if the speaker does not
have the institutional power to speak. What Austin came across was a particular
set of expressions which appear to possess in themselves the source of power
which in reality resides in the institutional conditions of their production and
reception (p. 111).
Butler (1997) suggests, however, that Bourdieus conservative account of
the speech act presumes that the conventions that will authorize the performative
are already in place (p. 142), a view which fails to account for Derridas dis-
cussion of context or the power of words in themselves. She argues that lan-
guage should not be seen as a static and closed system whose utterances are
functionally secured in advance by the social positions to which they are mi-
metically related (p. 145). Thus, by making social institutions static, Bourdieu
fails to grasp the logic of iterability that governs the possibility of social trans-
formation (p. 147); and by claiming that performative utterances are only ef-
fective when they are spoken by those who are (already) in a position of social
power to exercise words as deeds, Bourdieu inadvertently forecloses the possi-
bility of an agency that emerges from the margins of power (p. 156). This is a
crucial insight. While Bourdieu usefully shows that both the linguistic and the
Critical Theory (Habermas) approaches to performativity fail to conceptualize
the local contingencies of power that enable a performative to work, Butler
shows that this implies a static vision of the relationship between language and
the social, by which power in language is determined only by prior power in the
social domain. As she explains elsewhere (1999) the problem with Bourdieus
account of performative speech acts is the assumption that the subject who ut-
ters the performative is positioned on a map of social power in a fairly fixed
 PERFORMATIVITY AND LANGUAGE STUDIES 13

way and this position will determine the efficacy of the performative (p. 123).
He thus confuses being authorized to speak and speaking with authority.
Butler, by contrast, wants to ask what forms of performative can be enacted
by those who are not socially sanctioned to do so: I would argue that it is pre-
cisely the expropriability of the dominant, authorized discourse that constitutes
one potential site of its subversive resignification. What happens, for instance,
when those who have been denied the social power to claim freedom or de-
mocracy appropriate those terms from the dominant discourse and rework or
resignify those highly cathected [sic] terms to rally a political movement?
(1997, pp. 157158) And what, she asks, is the performative power of appro-
priating the very terms by which one has been abused in order to deplete the
term of its degradation or to derive an affirmation from that degradation, rally-
ing under the sign of queer or revaluing affirmatively the category of black
or of woman? (p. 158). We need, therefore, to have a theory of how social
transformation operates through linguistic use rather than seeing all language
use as mirroring the social. The performative, then, is not merely an act used by
a pregiven subject, but is one of the powerful and insidious ways in which sub-
jects are called into social being, inaugurated into sociality by a variety of dif-
fuse and powerful interpellations (1999, p. 125).

How to do identity with words

This discussion of performativity, then, has opened up several significant
ways for rethinking language and identity. Crucially, it provides a way of think-
ing about relationships between language and identity that emphasize the pro-
ductive force of language in constituting identity rather than identity being a
pregiven construct that is reflected in language use. As Cameron suggests,
Whereas sociolinguistics traditionally assumes that people talk the way they do
because of who they (already) are, the postmodernist approach suggests that
people are who they are because of (among other things) the way they talk
(Cameron, 1997, p. 49). The question for language and gender studies, then, is
not how do men and women talk differently, as if males and females preexisted
their language use as given categories of identity, but ratherrecalling Austin
once againhow to do gender with words.
This does not mean that we do not constantly perform gendered identities
through language but rather that we constitute through language the identity it is
purported to be. It is in the performance that we make the difference. As Butler
(1999) suggests, Being called a girl from the inception of existence is a way
in which the girl becomes transitively girled over time (p. 120). Appropriat-
ing Althussers notion of interpellation to the question of performativity, Butler
argues that such processes of hailing subjects into being are social perfoma-
tives, ritualized and sedimented through time (p. 120). Thus, the interpellation
as performative establishes the discursive constitution of the subject as inextri-
cable from the social constitution of the subject (p.120). Here, then, a number
of points come together: We are able to go beyond the language/society divide
that Bourdieu perpetuates; we are able to see how social subjects are constituted;
14 PENNYCOOK

and we can see how the sedimented intepellation of the subject produces per-
formative effects.
Crucially too, the notion of perfomativity fills that gap in poststructuralist
theory to do with the making of the subject: From a poststructuralist point of
view, the subject is produced in discourse. In the ways in which this has been
taken up so far in applied linguistic work (see [Norton-] Peirce, 1995, e.g.; and
for a critique see Price, 1996), the relationship between subject and discourse,
however, has been conceived in largely static terms, whereby a subject chooses
to take up a subject position in a pregiven discourse. The problem here, then, is
that, like objects waiting to be named, these subject positions preexist the dis-
cursive engagement of the subject. Price (1999), by contrast, argues for a view
in which discourse is seen as a practice in which both discourse and subject are
performatively realized (p. 582). An understanding of performativity, therefore,
allows us to view the production of identity in the doing. As Laclau (1989) ar-
gues in his introduction to LHNVThe sublime object of ideology, if the
unity of the object is the retroactive effect of naming itself, then naming is not
just the pure nominalistic game of attributing an empty name to a preconstituted
subject. Thus, if the process of naming objects amounts to the very act of their
constitution, then the essentially performative character of naming is the pre-
condition for all hegemony and politics (p. xiv).

Doing language with words

Questioning the ways in which sociolinguistic studies of variety assume the
prior existence of languages within which variation occurs, Le Page and
Tabouret-Keller (1985) argue that we need instead to understand how we consti-
tute linguistic and cultural identities through the performance of acts of identity.
If gendered and other identities are seen in a non-foundational light, so may lan-
guage itself be seen as a product of performative acts. It is instructive in this
context to compare Butlers comments on gender with Hopper on what he calls
emergent grammar: The subject is not determined by the rules through which it
is generated because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated
process of repetition (Butler, 1990a, p. 145). For Hopper, the apparent struc-
ture or regularity of grammar is an emergent property that is shaped by dis-
course in an ongoing process. Grammar is, in this view, simply the name for
certain categories of observed repetitions in discourse (Hopper, 1997, p. 156).
Thus, just as Butler (1999) argues that identities are a product of ritualized social
performatives calling the subject into being and sedimented through time (p.
120), so for Hopper there is no natural fixed structure to language. Rather,
speakers borrow heavily from their previous experiences of communication in
similar circumstances, on similar topics, and with similar interlocutors. Sys-
tematicity, in this view, is an illusion produced by the partial settling or sedi-
mentation of frequently used forms into temporary subsystems (pp. 157158).
The idea of sedimentation is potentially productive in this way of thinking.
It also links to Derridas (1986) contention that a performative only works with
the force of iterability: the performative achieves an accumulated force by dint
 PERFORMATIVITY AND LANGUAGE STUDIES 15

of its citationality, which also simultaneously positions the speaker as the sup-
posedly original and intentional utterer of the speech act. From a view of sedi-
mentation (or iterability), gender, like grammar, like many other forms of iden-
tity or apparently structured properties, is a sedimentation of acts repeated over
time within regulated contexts. And while giving the appearance of substance,
of representing an underlying reality, it is actually a result of the repeated layer-
ing of acts that purport to correspond to an identity but actually produce it in the
doing.
Such a position also ties in to Bakhtins view of the dialogic nature of lan-
guage, suggesting that all language use carries histories of its former uses with
it. Our speech, that is, all our utterances, are therefore filled with others
words, varying degrees of otherness and varying degrees of our-own-ness,
varying degrees of awareness and detachment. These words of others carry with
them their own expression, their own evaluation tone, which we assimilate, re-
work and reaccentuate (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 89). The word, according to Bakhtin
(1981, p. 293) is half someone else's, [and] becomes 'one's own' only when the
speaker populates it with his[/her] own intention, his[/her] own accent, when
[s/]he appropriates the word, adapting to his[/her] own semantic and expressive
intention." Commenting on the importance of this idea of appropriating others
words for language learning, Lensmire and Beals (1994) suggest that We are
born and develop, learn to speak, read and write, awash in the words of others. .
. . Our words are always someone elses words first; and these words sound with
the intonations and evaluations of others who have used them before, and from
whom we have learned them (p. 411). Hoppers view of sedimentation ties in
interestingly here; indeed in the very echoes of others words, his argument ap-
pears to perform what it argues: We say things that have been said before. Our
speech is a vast collection of hand-me-downs that reaches back in time to the
beginnings of language. The aggregation of changes and adjustments that are
made to this inheritance on each individual occasion of use results in a constant
erosion and replacement of the sediment of usage that is called grammar
(p. 159).
What this does, crucially, is challenge the centrality of competence (under-
lying system) over performance. Thus, by looking at the performativity of lan-
guagethe ways in which in the doing it does that which it purports to bewe
can start to question the foundation of linguistic belief in system, and go beyond
mere reporting of performance. Instead, this opens up the space to explore how
sedimentation occurs (and can be opposed). More generally, we can start to raise
broader questions about the whole ontological status of the notion of language
and languages. Languages are no more pregiven entities that preexist our lin-
guistic performances than are gendered or ethnic identities. Rather they are the
sedimented products of repeated acts of identity.

Refashioning ourselves with words

This view of language also opens up significant possibilities for understand-
ing agentive action in the refashioning of language and identity. Language per-
16 PENNYCOOK

formance, from this point of view, can be viewed not as the incompetencies of
the real world but as the site where language and identity are made. Here we can
start to link the notion of the performative with performance studies, which had
their origins in the theatre but have now grown to encompass a broader concept
of performance, including ritual, dance, music and so on (see, e.g., Case, 1990).
This notion of performance can open up our understanding of language as a
transmodal performance. It is interesting to note that a number of the authors
discussed above (e.g., Bourdieu, Butler) emphasize the embodied nature of lan-
guage. Here too, then, we overcome the segregationist nature of linguistics (see
Harris 1980, 1981) but not through the addition of nonverbal communication
or paralinguistics (e.g., Pennycook, 1985) but rather through an integrated
understanding of the body as interlinked with other social and semiotic
practices.
Relating performativity to a broader sense of performance has both benefits
and dangers. As with the challenges to Butlers view of the performativity of
gender, which suggested that she regarded gender as too easily pulled on and
taken offas if gender were something we performed like a playso we need
to be cautious not to suggest that language is merely a site of identity perform-
ance. Thus, while it is useful to view language and identity as interrelated acts,
we should also try to avoid a view that suggests that they are acts that we can
easily choose. To paraphrase Butlers (1990a, 1990b) discussion of gender:
Fashioning language and identity implies a set of repeated acts within a highly
rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of
substance.
Nevertheless, as Walcott (1997) observes in his discussion of Black dias-
poric language and culture, in the face of the extraordinary oppressions of slav-
ery, it became necessary to be able to act out identities: Black people in the
Americas have had an immediate relationship to identity and identification as
twin acts which constitute performativity. This stems from the ways in which
slavery produced spaces for particular forms of identity, identifications and dis-
identifications. Being forced to perform for the master in a number of different
ways meant that a relationship to identity for diasporic black people manifested
itself as something that could be invented, revised and discarded when no longer
useful. (Walcott, 1997, p. 98) Such an acting out of identity, also discussed as
orthopraxy by J. Scott (1985, 1990), remains a significant and necessary way in
which identity is performed by many disenfranchised people. These weapons
of the weakthese simple acts of false compliance, parody, pretense, and mim-
icking are the strategies by which the marginalized detach themselves from the
ideologies of the powerful, retain a measure of critical thinking, and gain some
measure of control over their life in an oppressive situation (Canagarajah,
2000, p. 122).
Alongside such performative acts of orthopraxy, however, there are also
those ways of performing identity as a means of refashioning the self. Here, as
Walcott goes on to argue, we can understand performativity as a form of the
(re)writing of English, Spanish, Dutch, French and Portuguese;the
 PERFORMATIVITY AND LANGUAGE STUDIES 17

(re)invention of musical sound; and a plethora of other act(ion)s that make clear
a notion of fashioning and invention of the self (p. 99). Black folks, says
Walcott, do not only perform language, but their language is made to perform,
to work in the service of revising and altering the wor(l)d (p. 104). Perform-
ance in the sense it is being used here provides the way of seeing agency in the
refashioning of the self, going beyond a notion of the original and mimicry to
include parody and appropriation: Black postmodern speech acts and language
performance play with the notion of the original (if there is an original English
at all), questioning origins while revealing the traces of residue from the origi-
nal as important for the new invention (p. 106). It is this sense of how futures
are refashioned (see Scott, 1999) in the transmodal performances of popular
culture that is crucial for seeing how language and identity are constantly per-
formed and remade.

Conclusion
I have tried to present a case here for understanding language, identity and
refashioning in terms of performativity. I have also tried to suggest that such a
conceptualization might form a central aspect of language studies, understood as
an interest in diverse questions to do with language. Such a conceptualization
can help us, I believe, escape from some of the strictures imposed by the disci-
plinary constraints of linguistics, or the unhelpful linguistics/applied linguistics
division. Performativity opens up a way of thinking about language use and
identity that avoids foundationalist categories, suggesting that identities are
formed in the linguistic performance rather than pregiven. Such a view of lan-
guage identity also helps us to see how subjectivities are called into being and
sedimented over time through regulated language acts. This further provides the
ground for considering languages themselves from an anti-foundationalist per-
spective, whereby language use is an act of identity that calls that language into
being. And performativity, particularly in its relationship to notions of perform-
ance, opens up ways to understand how languages, identities and futures are
refashioned.

Note
1. I use the term transmodal in preference to multimodal for several reasons: a.
The notion of multimodality has become tied to a rather fixed set of views about
modalities (see Kress, 2003); b. Multimodality seems to imply a series of sepa-
rate but co-occurring modalities rather than an integrated set of practices; and c.
I am developing this as part of a broader series of interrelated theories, encom-
passing the transcultural, translational and so forth.

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