HENRY MCDONALD

THE PERFORMATIVE BASIS OF MODERN LITERARY THEORY

THE TERM PERFORMATIVE is undoubtedly among the more complex and ambiguous in the vocabulary of modern literary theory. It was coined by J. L. Austin in the 1960s to convey language’s ability not just to communicate information but also to bring about or effect actions—from marrying and promising to christening and declaring war—in accordance with social conventions.1 In the wake of the John Searle-Jacques Derrida debate of the late seventies and early eighties, however, the term acquired a very different connotation: that language “performs,” but is not a form of action in any usual sense, because the performance may always negate itself by failing to convey its intended meaning. Such uncertainty of meaning is illustrated by literary productions in which the results effected by the writer may be contrary to, or at least at some remove from, his or her purposes. Whereas Austin and Searle had defined performative utterances as rule-governed speech acts grounded in the social circumstances and intentional processes of the agent, the dominant connotation of the term that emerged from the Searle-Derrida debate—a debate that most literary critics thought Derrida had “won”—was that of autonomous, self-referential “text acts,” whose occurrence was decidedly non-rule-governed. As Martin Heidegger, often acknowledged by Derrida to be his most important philosophical influence, put it, “we do not speak language”; rather, “language speaks us” by fashioning meanings that we can sensitize and attune ourselves to but never fully determine or control. Derridean deconstruction and Heideggerian “destruction” are philosophical practices intended to heighten our attunement to language in the latter sense. Both valorize language as an ungrounded mode of being.

In this essay, I trace some of the historical and philosophical forces that underlie this valorization. I begin with an historical and philosophical overview of the concept of “performative” language, comparing it with “allegorical” and “symbolic” languages as a means of bringing out some of the richness and complexity of the former’s meaning. I then argue that the key feature of modern literary theory’s valorization of language is that it subverts the “metaphysical” role traditionally given language as a reflection or mimesis of reality, substituting in its place an “ontological” role of language as an ungrounded mode of being. Finally, I maintain that the engine of such ontologization is modern aesthetics and its anti-mimetic, anti-didactic, and language-based account of art. My effort throughout is to show that the rise of modern aesthetics gains a greater philosophical coherence when it is viewed against the backdrop of a radically new idea of “reality,” one which did something classical metaphysics, the metaphysics of presence, had never done: it invested language with ontological significance.

The demise of speech act theory as an active influence in literary studies in this country after the Searle-Derrida debate was coincident, roughly, with the rise of poststructuralism and postmodernism.  Indeed, it constituted one of the many factors that set the agenda for literary theory in the following decades. In order to gain a broader perspective on these issues, we need to “rotate” the theoretical orientation of literary criticism in a direction away from the dispute between analytic and continental traditions over whether language is referentially grounded or not, and toward what I will characterize as a much more basic disjuncture between “pre-modern” and “modern” perspectives. From such a vantage point the term “performative” has a radical and at the same time subtle ambiguity.