PERFORMANCE AND PERFORMATIVITY

Margarita Febrica N. Putri Marsha Alethia

Regina Vika Pramesti

Sarah Shahnaz Ilma

From Competence to Embodied Performance

To learn a language therefore is not a question of acquiring
grammatical structure but of expanding a repertoire of communicative contexts. consequently, there is no date or age at

which the learning of language can be said to be complete. New

contexts, and a new occasions of negotiation of meaning, occur constantly. A language is not circumscribed object but a

confederation of available and overlapping social experiences.

Hopper, 1998

Performance also shifts the focus from internal, abstracted competencies to public, bodily enactments. The emergence of the body through the somatic turn in the social sciences places language use in a different context.

Shusterman, 2000

History, tradition and identity are all performances. The result will depend on the actors who place themselves in a complex reality.

Performativity: from speech act to sedimented performance

Performativity as developed by the philosopher J.L. Austin and subsequently incorporated into

speech act theory

It has become a key term in anti-foundationalist

notions of gender, sexuality and identity

 The term performative was coined by J.L. Austin

in his book How to Do Things With Words:

describe a particular type of speech act that does what it says, or performs an act in the doing Now we must ask ourselves whether issuing a constative utterance is not, after all, the performance of an act, the act namely, of stating. Is stating an act in the same sense marrying,

apologizing, betting, etc.? (Austin, 1971, p.20)

Performative utterances had the following characteristics

First person subject Simple present tense verb Indirect object you Possibility of inserting bereby

Not negative

 Austin had started afresh by exploring the notion of locutionary, illoccutionary, and perlocutionary acts

The social magic of performatives

The history of the performative from the point of view
of lingustics, which is primarly concerned with trying

to define language use from the inside

Butler (1997), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative Lyotard defines performativity as the optimization of the global relationship between input and output

 Habermas attempt to use the philosophy of language of justify the project of modernity

His attempt to show how both ideology and

rational purposive thought were perversions of

the

essential

communicative

function

of

language produces a highly normative account of language and intention

 Derrida challenged the type of speech acts that were exclude from Austins model

For Austin, a signature was a performative by

signing ones name, one does the act of signing

but Derrida asks whether such acts as signing do

not gain their power from the general citationality and iterability of language.

Bourdieus (1982, 1991) Argument

Bourdieu focuses centrally on how it is that words come to have power. For Bourdieu, performative uterrances must always

fail if the speaker does not have the institutional

power to speak. According to Bourdieu, the possibility that language can have social effects is always dependent on prior social conditions of power.

Butlers (1997) Argument

Butler argues that language should not be seen as a static and closed system whose utterances are functionally secured in advance by the social positions

to which they are mimetically related.

Therefore, Butler suggests that the society need to have

a theory of how social transformation operates through

linguistic use rather than seeing all language use as mirroring the social.

Thanks to Butler....
Performativity may be understood as the way in which we perform acts of identity as an ongoing series of social and cultural performances rather than as the expression of a prior identity. It opens up a way of thinking about language use and identity that avoids foundalist categories.

Thus..

We are not as we are because of some inner being, but because of what we do. (Pennycook, 2007:70)

How to Do Identity and Language with Words

The discussion of performativity provides a way of thinking about relationships between language and identity that emphasize the productive force of language in constituting identity rather than identity being a pregiven

construct that is reflected in language use.

 The question for language and gender studies is how we do gender with words. Pennycook states that it is in the performance that we make the difference. Butler (1999) suggests, Being called a girl from

the inception of existence is a way in which the

girl becomes transitively girled over time.

Le Page and Tabouret-Kellers (1985) Argument

They argue that we need to understand how we constitute linguistic and cultural identitites

through the performance of acts of identity.

Language (or in this case, grammar) itself

should be seen as a product of perfomative acts.

Thus..
Gender, like grammar, like many other forms of identity...is a sedimentation of acts repeated

over time within regulated contexts. (Pennycook,

2007:72)

Hoppers view of sedimentation

We say things that have been said before. Our speech is a vast collection of hand-me-downs that reaches back in time to the beginnings of language. The aggregation of changes and adjustments that

are made to this inheritance on each individual

occasion of use results in a constant erosion and replacement of the sediment of usage that is called grammar (Hopper, 1998, p. 159)

 Language = an underlying set of structures as a social, ideological, historical and discursive construction, the product of ritualized social performatives that become sedimented into temporary system. acts of identity, investment and semiotic (re)construction (Kandiah, 1998) English, like any other language, does not exist as a prior system but is produces and sedimented through acts of identity.

Refashioning ourselves with words

A view of language performance as more than the

incompetencies of the real world, furthermore, helps relate

language use to performance studies. The somatic turn takes us beyond logocentric interest in discourse A move to overcome a segregationist approach to language as an autonomous system (see Chapter 2 and 3)

 A focus on performance emphasizes the notion of activity, of acts of identity.

As Walcott (1997) observes in his discussion of black diasporic language and culture, in the face of the extraordinary oppressions of slavery, it

became necessary to be able to act out identities:

(page 75)

 Performance and performativity provide ways of understanding the refashioning of the self, going beyond a notion of the original and mimicry to include parody and appropriation. And by performing language and identity

transgressively it performatively creates new

identities

From performative to transformative

Performativity opens up a way of thinking about language use and identity that avoids foundationalist

categories, suggesting that identities are formed in the

linguistic performance rather than pregiven. In order to have a usable notion of performativity, we need to avoid the pull towards performance as openended free display and, on the other hand, the pull towards oversedimentation

The importance of the notion of performance is not so much in the spectacle, the acting out in front of people, as it is in the interactions that performance calls forth. It is the sense of performance as interactive, most obvious when performing live, that opens up the circle of

performance and performativity.

References
Pennycook, Alistair. 2007. Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. Wiltshire: Antony Rowe Ltd.

THANK YOU!