Tracing My Steps

I am going through Austin's book trying to retrace exactly where and how I started to abstract his formula intended to clarify distinguish act that performative a change from acts that describe the environment...


A performative act changes the environment, but it is grammatically identical to a constative, which describes the environment.
Austin's Example:

“‘It is yours' may be taken as equivalent to either 'I give it you' or 'it (already) belongs to you'.” (Austin 62)

In the interest of clarity, Austin offers the performative formula:

“Thus what we should feel tempted to say is that any utterance which is in fact a performative should be reducible, or expandable, or analyzable into a form with a verb in the first person singular present indicative active (grammatical). This is the sort of test we were in fact using above (performative formula).” (Austin 61-62) Thus: “Guilty' is equivalent to 'I find, pronounce, deem you to be guilty.” (Austin 62)

He goes on to describe "felicities" and "infelicities" (scenarios when the act fails due to poor reception, misrepresentation, and so on). Ronald Grimes used this as the foundation for his work on ritual critique.

I started looking at narrative work as a performative statement, enacting a psychological change in the audience. I thought the transformative properties of the performative formula might be used as a bridge between the two mediums. Through my analysis of the locution, illocution, and perlocution of my work, I realized one of my scenes was already doing this.