Speech Acts and Performative Utterances

Speech Act Theory is the application to spoken and written language of the philosophy of action developed by John L. Austin. Austin was particularly interested in conventionalized actions, which have a special significance thanks to their social or institutional context. Although he emphasized that such actions could also be carried out through non-verbal means, Austin is mostly remembered for his analysis of the ways in which they can be carried out through the utterance of words—hence the term “Speech Act Theory,” and the title under which his lecture series on the topic was posthumously published (i.e., How to Do Things with Words). He described utterances that perform such actions as “performative utterances.” But he also effectively argued that all utterances are performative—or rather, that all utterances have a performative or “illocutionary” aspect. Austin’s analysis of speech as action provides scholars with a way of looking at verbal behavior that relates spoken and written utterances to the circumstances of their production and deployment without reducing their meanings to authorial intentions conceived as mental states. As such, it has intrinsic appeal to scholars of literature, who have since the 1970s often distanced themselves both from psychological and from purely formal conceptions of literature. However, engagements with Speech Act Theory by literary and cultural theorists have often been superficial (for example, in the commonplace but spurious association of Austin’s account of performative utterances with the unrelated idea that gender is performative). Indeed, the fundamental concepts of Speech Act Theory have usually been misunderstood and misrepresented within literary studies because its core concerns are quite alien to that discipline’s central preoccupation: that is, the critical interpretation of literary texts.