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The Law of Lyric and Speech-Act Theory

It is indisputable that Austin's speech act theory has been largely discussed in literary theory, albeit this discussion has been confined to the study of narrative fiction. In her article Poetry and Performative Language (1977), Barbara Johnson dared reconsider what sustains Austin's claim that one “must not be joking, for example, nor writing a poem“ when one performs a speech act. Intention – also referred to as force by Austin – is bound up with a performative utterance, while a poem, especially a modern one – at least since Baudelaire – divorces its language from any intention whatsoever. According to Austin, poetry in general is an instance of “etiolations“ in language, a parasitic type of discourse. Yet, “literature is a primary example of the performative functioning of language (Culler 2000), insofar as “a performative utterance is originally a self-referential speech act“, as is the case with literature, so the production of a performative utterance is “simultaneously the production of a new referent into the world“ (Johnson 1977), which is also true of a poem. Conventionality of both reading and writing could be viewed in terms of the law of literature, and the law of genre in particular, as Derrida argued. But, as Johnson (1977) warned us, “if one considers the conventionality of all performative utterances, on which Austin often insists, can it really be said that the Chairman who opens a discussion or the Priest who baptizes a baby or the Judge who pronounces a verdict are persons rather than personae?“ Thus, “behind the fiction of the subject stands the fiction of Society“ (ibid). It could then be said there is no “speaker“ in a poem but rather a prosopopeia, an intersymbolic mask put on something faceless, i. e. language, as figure's etymology suggests (from the Greek: prosopon - poiein). Moreover, this view is by and large supported by the development of modern lyric, as Hugo Friedrich argued in his seminal Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik. Thus, I would like to examine how Austin's speech act theory could be addressed to rethink how readers read and understand poems, as well as to re-examine some received notions of reading lyric poetry. One of them is an idea proposed by Culler in his 2009 article Lyric, History, and Genre. According to Culler, a reader invariably identifies with the speaker of the poem. Yet, one should not forget that “the speaking subject is only a persona, an actor, not a person“ (Johnson 1977), as well as the fact that a performative utterance should be conventional if it is to be “played“ by all the partipants. This however means that we can also “non-play“ it. So, while Austin opens up a space for “felicity“ of every speech act, Culler seems to believe that poems are not prone to it. In short, while philosophy is indebted to Austin's speech act theory, I would argue that poetry makes visible what both philosophy and speech act theory presuppose and do not question.

performatives; speech act theory; deconstruction; lyric subject; lyric poetry

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