performance and performativity - linguistic imperialism
TRANSCRIPT
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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!