Abstract

Secondly, as utterances, our performances are also heir to certain other kinds of ill which infect all utterances. And these likewise, although again they might be brought into a more general account, we are deliberately at present excluding. I mean, for example, the following: a performative utterance will be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. This applies in a similar manner to any and every utterance — a sea-change in special circumstances. Language in such circumstances is in special ways — intelligibly — used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use — ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of language. All this we are excluding from consideration. Our performative utterances, felicitous or not, are to be understood as issued in ordinary circumstances.