Performative

When I hear the word performative on the news, I think back to graduate school, where I spent considerable time thinking and writing about speech-act theory. In speech-act theory, the word performative is both noun and adjective. Performatives, or performative utterances, are statements that satisfy these conditions:

A. they do not “describe” or “report” or constate anything at all, are not “true or false”; and

B. the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as, or as “just,” saying something.

J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975).

“I bet you a nickel,” “I bequeath you one thin dime”: given the appropriate circumstances, to say it (or write it) is to do it. That’s a short explanation of performative utterances.

Performative as an adjective invoked on the news is quite different. Here is Merriam-Webster’s definition:

disapproving : made or done for show (as to bolster one’s own image or make a positive impression on others).

A Merriam-Webster citation, from Alia E. Dastigir:

But when expressing outrage is as easy as posting a hashtag, a meme, or an empty black square, there’s a question of whether that outrage is genuine or performative.

So in speech-act terms, a performative is a statement that does something. In current everyday use, performative describes a statement that pretends to do something, that is merely a performance, that substitutes for doing anything of substance. One can of course bet or bequeath merely to bolster one’s image or make a positive impression. Still, such a bet or bequest is genuine, unless the bettor or bequeather is acting in bad faith. But something “made or done for show” is inherently ungenuine, not a matter of commitment to one’s statement, not a matter of obligation to another person (as a bet or bequest must be). It’s only an attempt to convince another of something about one’s self. Look at me: see how good I am?

Thus performative has become what H.W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage calls a “worsened word,” a formerly neutral or commendatory word that has acquired a pejorative meaning. Alas, that shift makes perfect sense when discourse, of all sorts, is too often a form of cheap performance. (Cue some senator reading Dr. Seuss.) One might imagine a book about the role of such performance in our politics. I bet it would do well.

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Dear Abby and J.L. Austin

[“Worsened words” is an entry in the second edition of Modern English Usage, revised and edited by Sir Ernest Gowers. Among Gowers’s examples of worsened words: academic, epithet. Please notice that my “I bet” is not a performative. It’s a way I stating what I would anticipate. No stakes, no taker of a bet.]