vienna

“SALE” is such a performative utterance, then the seasonal sale has
to be a procedure with a predetermined result in which the word “sale”
is uttered at the right moment, in our case at the end of the season.
People and circumstances have to fit the evoked procedure. All those
involved have to execute it fully and in the right way. And finally, when
opinions and feelings are expressed during the procedure, all those
involved have to intend to behave according to these expressions. At
the end, all the people involved must behave as intended. Should any
one of these six rules be violated, the performative utterance would
fail. “SALE” means that the seasonal collection of the past season is
no more in fashion. According to Austin, the sale can fail, for example,
when the seasonal sale is not announced at the end of the season.
When one single store announces the seasonal sale a few weeks before
Christmas, it could confuse the customer for it is not the time set
for it. Neither would it work if we were to enter a shop and proclaim
“sale”, for it is the retailer who utters the words not the customer.
Austin gives another example of misuse where the procedure fails. He
hypothesises that if we happen to be at a ship’s christening ceremony
to which we are not invited, take a bottle, smash it against the ship
and give it a wrong name, the performative gesture would fail because
although we fulfilled all the formal criteria we were not responsible for
naming it. 484 The same happens when a new collection is introduced.
“NEW” is also a performative utterance. Like Austin’s speech acts, the
“new” also changes social reality. People who wear the new things are
in fashion; they find this fashion good, because it is new. The interesting
thing about performative utterances is that they are neither right
nor wrong. They are either accepted or they are not. 485 And the same
has to be considered for rituals. Stanley Tambiah referred to Austin’s
speech acts in his performative theory of the ritual:
“Ritual is a culturally constructed system of symbolic communication.
It is constituted of patterned and ordered sequences of words
and acts, often expressed in multiple media, whose content and
arrangement are characterised in varying degree by formality
(conventionality), stereotypy (rigidity), condensation (fusion), and
redundancy (repetition). Ritual action in its constitutive features
is performative in these three senses: in the Austinian sense of
performative wherein saying something is also doing something as a
conventional act; in the quite different sense of a staged performance
that uses multiple media by which the participants experience the
484 Austin (1986:23).
485 Ibid., p. 153.
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