Spoken Discourse Five

So this is what’s been bugging me about performatives: they’re not really, are they? They don’t, in and of themselves, change anything at all.

I know that they’re meant to be the conditions for the performatives to function as such, but surely it’s those themselves that ‘change the world’ and not the words themselves? A ship doesn’t get a name until it’s written on the side, a couple isn’t married until they’ve signed the register, and a student doesn’t get house points until they’ve been written down in the record book. It's not all magic, y’know?

Claiming that it’s the saying of these things which causes them to happen is rather missing the point, I feel. It’s like the whole energy thing in The Matrix, where humans act as batteries when ‘coupled with a form of cold-fusion’. It’s the ‘cold-fusion’ that’s doing all the work there.

Likewise, it’s the ‘conditions’ that carry the burden of changing things. I used to work as a doorman and that’s why people had to wear backstage passes, because it doesn’t matter how famous someone is there’ll be someone who doesn’t recognize them and just saying, “Don’t you know who I am?” isn’t enough (in fact it’s usually counter-productive).

I guess you could make a finer distinction, if you were of a mind, in that spoken performatives might well ‘alter the world’ but it’s the written record (which ultimately is nothing more than a tool for creating consensus) which proves that it was changed. Trees falling in forests and all that.

There’s a link here with power and investment of authority, almost at a sociolinguistc level. Who (i.e. which group) gets granted the authority, and thus who gets to ‘change the world’? The whole classroom role-play section (notes p16) did rather put me in mind of the Stanford Prison Experiment, and that’s a whole can of worms right there…