[Reader-list] on happiness, or the performative without condition?

[Inder Salim]

On happiness, or the performative without conditions?     Note

“Hello.”

Saying hello is a performative. It is neither true nor false. By
saying hello, I do something. I greet you, or maybe I’m just kidding.
(Or I may give you an example, just now.)

Derrida focuses on the performative nature of the
professional/university field of utterances. University, he suggests,
is the domain of performatives, and not of constatives. The proper
speech act of the professor is performative; the profession of the
professor is placed in the moment of engagement and responsibility.
Later on, it is suggested that at the university constatives and
performatives co-exist, in the classical alliance of constative and
performative. As a whole, in the vision of the
professor/professionalism and new Humanities, it is the performative
of the professor which is underlined.

Derrida himself has some doubts about the performative/constative
distinction. Although he pretends to use these terms without
reservations, in the last section of his lecture (and in the
introductory chapter) he refers to the deconstruction of the
distinction, to the mocking of both terms: “le débordement du
performatif et de l’opposition constatif/performatif.” He arrives,
then, to a conclusion which has been prefigured in Austin’s work. As
you will remember, Austin’s distinction did not survive the eleventh
chapter of his lectures: Austin himself deconstructs the opposition,
challenges the borders between the terms. As if the distinction was
forged just in order to be deconstructed, to show the Austinian way of
making our clear-cut, simple, evident concepts collapse. A constative,
then, is no more special or outstanding or distinguished a speech act
than a performative is, and vice versa: we always perform, just in
some cases our performatives happen to be statements.

Still, one may wish to preserve the distinction, however
deconstructed. The question is, whether it is a distinction in and by
itself, or it is brought about, fait arrivée. Is in not made via a
performative act of distinguishing? And what are the conditions of
speaking in a performative or else in a constative way? Are there
conditions of their having their proper place, let it be at the
university or anywhere else?

For Austin, the conditions of the constatives are truth conditions,
whereas for the performatives, happiness (or felicity) conditions.
While a statement can be true or false, a promise is neither true nor
false, but it can be kept or it can go wrong in a way or another. If
we can preserve the constative/performative distinction, it is only
because we have this distinction of their conditions. Constatives may
not have a distinguished place among utterances; but truth seems to
have a very special place in our culture, and, consequently,
utterances which can be judged along the dimension of truth/falsity
still seem to have a particular position.

By uttering performatives, we do not want to say the truth. We may
keep our promises, but maybe we won’t. We warn somebody and may punish
him, maybe we won’t. We say hello, and we cannot help meaning it. All
these utterances are not meant to get closer to some truth; they are
uttered in order to secure the smooth operation of things, to make
things happen, les faire arrivée. But if we use the unqualified term
of performative, regardless of their specific nature, we will miss the
point where professing differs from any other activity. What
performatives do a professor or a professional use? Saying hello,
warning, banishing? Certainly not. What Derrida must have in mind (and
he also refers to it) is promising. But is promising the only, or the
most outstanding, or central performative of the
professiona/professor?

If we tend to preserve the distinction between constative and
performative, how far are the utterances of the professional or the
professor performatives? Are they performatives because they are meant
to produce something, to make something arrive, to bring about
something, rather than to belong to the realm of truth conditions?
Derrida seems to suggest that what is going on at the universities is
much more a declaration or expression of responsibility and engagement
than that of a truth. But is this declaration unconditional?

What about happiness?

What are the happiness conditions of the performatives of the
professional? Are the words of the professional performatives by
themselves? Are they really performatives? Are there any conditions of
their being performatives and of their being well formed
performatives? What do they bring about? What do they do if once they
are uttered? Do they have any common with the constatives at all -
that is, do they have anything to do with truth?

Although performatives, if and inasmuch as they exist, are considered
by their happiness conditions, the moment of truth is always present
in their utterances. When I make a promise, I am responsible of
something to take place in the future, for the truth of some future
event; when I ask something, I make an inquiry about the truth; and
when I order, I wish that something be the case. Similarly, the
performatives of the professional express a relation to truth, let it
be a confession, a challenge, a wish, or a promise of truth. But their
conditions are not truth conditions. A performative is well formed not
only if the speaker feels it expresses his or her confession,
challenge or whatever; but it also must be understood, taken account
of, it must have the proper audience on the proper place, it must
invoke a particular procedure, etc. To be a professor, to be a
professional, to speak in a performative way, then, is not a solitary
activity.

What is a profession and what is a professor? Is it (or is he or she)
what it (he/she) is by virtue of what is said, that is, by virtue of
(his or her) performatives? Or, rather, is it a function of some
conditions? (And, I add, these must be happiness conditions, rather
than truth conditions.) Is not being a professor or a professional a
function of some institutions? When Derrida confronts the profession
of the lawyer or the professor and the “mastery” (métier) of the
season worker, on the grounds that the lawyer and the professor and
the doctor has a responsibility, a vocation, an engagement. But is it
only a function of the free decision of these professionals? Certainly
not. The lawyer, the doctor, the professor is woven into a intricate
network of institutions and conditions which make their word their
bond. One is not a professor by the performatives; rather,
performatives are produced by the conditions of being a professor. It
is the institutional conditions of the professor, the invocation to
the procedure of professing which makes a professional performative,
and not, or not exclusively, the vocation of the professional.

On Derrida’s scene of the university, there is the professor
professing, the speaker speaking and performing his or her
performatives; what is missing, though, for me, is the dialogue; the
voices interrupting and distracting the lonely performative acts and
the voices elicited by the speaker. If the professor must have a
profession, if he or she has a vocation, then there also must be a
pro-vocation in his or her utterance, giving place for other voices.
What should be present in the profession is not only the invocation of
the procedures, but also the provocation of perhaps the same
procedures, or the provocation of the position of the participants in
the procedure, or the provocation of the seemingly unconditional
relation to truth, etc. For Derrida, professing and profession in the
professors’ performatives seems to be a solitary action. There is no
room for the voice of the other, the uptake and the participation.

As a whole, I am not really happy with the re-introduction of the
constative/performative distinction. Not only because Austin himself
has shown long ago that stating is an action just as any full-blood
performative; not only because I have theoretical reservations. But
also because by using these terms, and by associating performative
with the active, devoted, responsible personality (the professor, the
professional, the university citizen), and assigning a special
position to this behavior, one can be trapped by a drifting and
charming rhetoric, a rhetoric which renders the subversive Austinian
thought a comfortable and domesticated dichotomy, a rhetoric which
will obscure the specific conditions of being a professional, the
happiness conditions of uttering a performative, of the difference
between saying hello and promising (or warning) to see you again.

Hello, I’ll see you again.



Note

This is a contribution to the round table discussion of Jacques
Derrida's lecture entitled L'université sans conditions, in Pecs,
Hungary, October 2000. To appear, hopefully, in Neohelicon.


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