Performance and Performativity - Linguistic Imperialism

7/29/2019 Performance and Performativity - Linguistic Imperialism

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PERFORMANCE AND

PERFORMATIVITYMargarita Febrica N. Putri

Marsha Alethia

Regina Vika Pramesti

Sarah Shahnaz Ilma


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To learn a language therefore is not a question of acquiring

grammatical structure but ofexpanding 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

From Competence to Embodied

Performance


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Shusterman, 2000

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 sciencesplaces language use in a different context.


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History, tradition and identity are all performances. The

result will depend on the actors who place themselves in a

complex reality.


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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


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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)


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Performative utterances had the

following characteristics

First person subject

Simple present tense verb

Indirect object you

Possibility of inserting bereby Not negative


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Austin had started afresh by exploring the

notion of locutionary, illoccutionary, and

perlocutionary acts


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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


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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


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Derrida challenged the type of speech acts that

were exclude fromAustins 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.


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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.


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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 socialpositionsto which they are mimetically related.

Therefore, Butler suggests that the society need to havea theory of how social transformation operates through

linguistic use rather than seeing all language use as

mirroring the social.


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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 useand identity that avoids foundalist categories.


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Thus..

We are not as we are becauseof some inner being, butbecause of what we do.

(Pennycook, 2007:70)


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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.


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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 transitivelygirled over time.


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Le Page and Tabouret-Kellers

(1985) Argument

They argue that we need to understand how we

constitute linguistic and cultural identitites

through the performance ofacts of identity.

Language (or in this case, grammar) itself

should be seen as a product of perfomative acts.


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Thus..

Gender, like grammar, like many other forms of

identity...is a sedimentation of acts repeated

over time within regulated contexts. (Pennycook,

2007:72)


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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)


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Language = an underlying set of structures

as a social, ideological, historical and discursiveconstruction, the product of ritualized socialperformatives that become sedimented intotemporary system.

acts of identity, investment and semiotic(re)construction (Kandiah, 1998)

English, like any other language, does not existas a prior system but is produces andsedimented through acts of identity.


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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)


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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)


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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 identitytransgressively it performatively creates new

identities


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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 open-

ended free display and, on the other hand, the pull

towards oversedimentation


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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.


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References

Pennycook, Alistair. 2007. Global Englishes andTranscultural Flows.Wiltshire: Antony Rowe

Ltd.


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THANK YOU!

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Performance and Performativity - Linguistic Imperialism