Performative — In the philosophy of language, a performative utterance neither describes a state of affairs nor possesses a truth-value: it performs an action in the very act of being uttered, in appropriate circumstances. The concept was introduced by John Langshaw Austin in How to Do Things with Words (a posthumous work edited by J.O. Urmson in 1962, drawn from lectures delivered in 1955). Austin first opposed constative utterances — which describe facts and can be true or false, as in “snow is white” — to performatives, which do what they say: “I promise that I will come”, “I name this ship Mary”, “I declare the session open”. To say “I promise” is not to report a promise but to make one. Performatives are not true or false but happy or unhappy, depending on whether they satisfy the felicity conditions: an accepted conventional procedure, the appropriate persons and circumstances, complete and correct execution, and the required intentions — failing which the act is void. Austin later abandons the rigid distinction and proposes the theory of speech acts, distinguishing the locutionary act (saying something meaningful), the illocutionary act (what one does in saying it: promising, ordering, declaring), and the perlocutionary act (the effect produced on the hearer). John Searle, in Speech Acts (1969), systematised this theory, classifying illocutionary acts and grounding them in constitutive rules. Later, Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble (1990), transposed the notion of performativity to the theory of gender: gender would be not a prior essence but the effect of a reiterated, citational repetition of norms — not what one is, but what one does.
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