Concept
Performativity
Overview
Performativity is the concept that language can function as a form of social action and have the effect of change. The concept has multiple applications in diverse fields such as anthropology, social and cultural geography, economics, gender studies (social construction of gender), law, linguistics, performance studies, history, management studies and philosophy.
The concept is first described by philosopher of language John L. Austin when he referred to a specific capacity: the capacity of speech and communication to act or to consummate an action. Austin differentiated this from constative language, which he defined as descriptive language that can be "evaluated as true or false". Common examples of performative language are making promises, betting, performing a wedding ceremony, an umpire calling a foul, or a judge pronouncing a verdict.
The concept of performance has been developed by such scholars as Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, Erving Goffman, John Austin, John Searle, Pierre Bourdieu, Stern and Henderson, and Judith Butler.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Every mature art possesses a host of conventions as a basis: in so far as it is a language. Convention is a condition of great art, _not_ an obstacle to it.... Every elevation of life likewise elevates the power of communication, as also the understanding of man. _The power of living in other people's souls_ originally had nothing to do with morality, but with a physiological irritability of suggestion: "sympathy,"…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Will to Power
States what Performativity is; the author is tied to Performativity in the knowledge graph.
Writing seems to have consisted originally of pictures, which gradually became conventionalized, coming in time to represent syllables, and finally letters on the telephone principle of "T for Tommy." But it would seem that writing nowhere began as an attempt to represent speech it began as a direct pictorial representation of what was to be expressed. The essence of language lies, not in the use of this or that…
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
States what Performativity is.
Just as the sound shows itself as a sand-figure, in the same way the enigmatical _x_ of the Thing-in-itself is seen first as nerve-stimulus, then as percept, and finally as sound. At any rate the genesis of language did not therefore proceed on logical lines, and the whole material in which and with which the man of truth, the investigator, the philosopher works and builds, originates, if not from Nephelococcygia…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays Collected Works, Volume Two
The author is tied to Performativity in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Performativity
Related ideas
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- History
- Pierre Bourdieu
- Feminism
- Philosophy
- John Searle
- Judith Butler
- Queer theory
- Ethnography
- Analytic philosophy
- Jürgen Habermas
- Jurisprudence
- Language
- Archaeology
- Performance
- Linguistics
- Psychoanalysis
- Postmodernism
- J. L. Austin
- Jean-François Lyotard
- Post-structuralism
- Social science
- Semiotics
- Continental philosophy
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Analytic philosophy.