Friday, October 14, 2011

Performative oaths

A masterly but light-of-touch riff on JL Austin casts a new light on the importance of oaths, & in particular on why it was considered so important for President Obama to do it again & properly – something which I had previously considered overly lawerly & legalistic.

Comes from Is That A Fish In Your Ear?, the new book by David Bellos on translation & the meaning of everything.

Austin introduced the notion of ‘performative verbs’ to the study of language – verbs which don’t just describe actions but are, in their utterance, actions themselves, as in ‘I warn you to stay away from the edge of the cliff.’

Such a verb is not necessarily performative however – the non-linguistic context or circumstances in which it is uttered also matter.

One example Bellos gives is “I name this ship The Royal Daffodil” which, if uttered by the right royal personage accompanied by the smashing of a champagne bottle across the bow, does indeed result in a naming, but is merely a conceit when uttered by a man gazing out to sea while sitting on deckchair on Southend Pier.

Austin calls these circumstances the ‘conditions of felicity’

The incident of ?President? Obama & the oath shows a nice double twist on this. The attempt to correct the original fault, of getting the words wrong, was almost stymied by the absence of one of the proper conditions of felicity, namely the presence of a Bible in the Oval Office.


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