John L. Austin introduced the expression “performative” in the mid-1950s, he was referring to the active character of speech. The underlying proposition of his argument is that under certain conditions language creates the reality it describes, so that one actually does something with words. In the 1990s, Judith Butler gave Austin’s linguistic theories a social and political horizon by emphasizing the constitutive and the restrictive powers of conventions; both are prerequisites to giving the individual the performative power to create a reality.
Butler’s wider application of the performative subsequently was adopted by cultural studies, in that it is also possible to examine the performativity of visual art as a specific area of social praxis. In my view, however, this extension of Austin’s theory also led to the loss of an essential aspect of the concept: Austin not only describes how we take action with words, but also develops a way of speaking in his own presentation in which his saying and doing with words are related to one another in a performative manner.
Austin’s lectures, published posthumously in 1962 as How to Do Things with Words, operate as a kind of instruction manual; establishing the existence of a performative level of speech by demonstrating how the production of meaning can be created through “doing” while speaking. This view of Austin is also suggested by Shoshana Felman and Sybille Krämer (independently of one another and with different emphases), both of whom I draw on here.40 Their reading of his text varies from the usual one inasmuch as they understand How to Do Things with Words not only as a proposition, but also as a staging; not only as a text that speaks about doing things with words, but that also does something through speech. According to Krämer, “understanding Austin not only means listening to what he says, but also looking at what he is doing by saying it.”41 But what does Austin do? He begins his lectures by aspiring to formulate a theoretical definition of the performative, based on the distinction between a performative-generative and an asseverative-constative use of language. Austin very soon realizes, however, that this distinction is untenable, as there is no unequivocal criterion by which the performative and the constative can clearly be differentiated. At this point he decides to “go back to fundamentals,” as he puts it.42 He examines a series of criteria and rules through which he continually awakens new expectations of a theoretical systemization. As the newly conceived rules become more and more complex, the reader begins not only to doubt their validity, but also to wonder whether Austin is even interested at all in establishing a clear theoretical definition of the performative. He contrives a wealth of situations in which the performative power of the act of speech comes to fail: he marries donkeys, baptizes penguins, appoints horses as consuls. In the end, every absurd and at times mysterious attempt to fix the meaning of the term performative demonstrates the failure of the rule. For most academic readers, Austin’s lectures are a seminal but flawed attempt to define a theory of the performative, and therefore in need of improvement.43 Read with Felman and Krämer, however, How to Do Things with Words seems more like a performance of the failure to establish the meaning of the performative—with the effect that, precisely because the performative cannot be determined in a conventional manner, a different modus operandi is needed to approach the concept and elucidate its meaning.
Austin, who taught at Oxford University, belonged to a continental tradition of analytic philosophy, a system of thought characterized by seeking meaning in concepts themselves, and not in their efficacy. In How to Do Things with Words he initially operates within this tradition—as his excessive use of examples illustrates—but eventually causes its internal logic to collapse. Austin shows that in saying there is always a doing and that this doing always brings forth meaning. Finally he demonstrates how this interaction can be configured. Austin devises a concept that eludes its own determinability, but that through a praxis, through use, becomes concrete, and in its application provides the most consistent definition of its own idea. Because of his subtle ability to connect various points of view and ways of thinking, the Wittgenstein philologist Georg Henrik von Wright dubbed Austin the “doctor subtilis” of Oxford postwar philosophy, recalling a 13th-century Oxford colleague who had been given this epithet. Wright sees a similar talent in Austin, describing him as “the unrivalled master in detecting conceptual shades of linguistic usage—superior in this art even to Wittgenstein.”44
From this perspective Austin’s failure to reach a theoretical definition of the performative is not a methodical failure, but a failure with method. In How to Do Things with Words, his speech employs aspects of an aesthetic model of tension that is not only rhetorical but also dramatically staged between the levels of saying and showing, message and performance, in which words come to act and through this to mean. Within this conceptual frame, Austin can be seen not primarily as the theorist of a basic but deficient classification of the performative, but rather as a thinker who introduces a new relationship between act and referent. In the separation between word and deed, between the sign and what it signifies, there is a foundation of enlightened thinking that underlies every cultural praxis. “This is the nerve centre of the idea of ‘representation’: not epiphany, i.e., presentness, but rather surrogacy, i.e., envisioning, is what signs have to accomplish for us,” writes Krämer.45 This kind of relationship to the world, which is rooted in the semiotics of representation, is countered by Austin, in his concept of the performative, an approach that substitutes an ontological distinction between sign and being, word and deed with an intertwining and mediating of these levels. In How to Do Things with Words Austin shows that action can be taken with words and also how such action is organized and given significance. He demonstrates, accentuates and frames a performative level of speech, while at the same time providing a model for the consequences of shifting the production of meaning onto this performative level: the perception of the meaning of an utterance or text not only, or not even primarily, in what it says , represents or depicts, but above all in what it does, i.e., the real effects it brings about.
There is a methodical challenge in this emphasis shift from saying to doing that, as I think, can be made productive to the understanding of works of art. What is the relationship between an artwork’s meaning and its effect? How do contemporary artists work with different modes of production of meaning? Every work of art functions by bringing forth a moment of aesthetic experience that can endure, yet is repeatable, thus enabling the work of art to exist in historical time. On a thematic level, Coleman’s Box allegorizes this temporal existence of a work of art as an experience and portrayal of time. Performatively, however, it shows how the artwork itself can bring about these various levels of temporality and make them tangible—in an artwork that creates a moment that is both now and historical. Coleman’s works thematize the practices of cultural memory, consciously aware of being a part of such a praxis which they also modify and form. Coleman sets up relationships between the portrayal and the creation of history; he gives expression within the work of art to a discontinuous understanding of history, and also intervenes formatively and transformatively in the similarly discontinuous passing on of his work into historical record. Understanding this approach as significant and as an element of his artistic message—in other words, to perceive the saying of doing—requires the methodical shift of emphasis that Austin instigated with his concept of the performative and put into effect with How to Do Things with Words.
Box and Minimal Art: Historicity and Experience
Coleman alludes to the distinctive iconographic feature of Minimal Art with the title Box and, at the same time, to a certain extent also takes up what Rosalind Krauss calls the primacy of Minimalist sculpture’s “lived physical perspective,” namely its spatial orientation to the viewer’s body.46 Minimal Art fundamentally changed the relationship between the object and its viewer, between art and its venue, by shifting the meaning of the object completely to the experience that is made with and through the object. The level of representation and that of narration both step behind the object’s impact
