Postmodernism and 'the performative' In the late 20th century, speech act theory engaged the attention of many philosophers in what may loosely be called postmodernist schools of thought. Jean- Francois Lyotard (1984) adopted Austin's concept of performative language in developing his ideas about modes of discourse, and used notions of performativity to explain the legitimisation of knowledge in an era he saw as characterised by disbelief in metanarratives. For Paul Ricoeur (1971, pp. 537-544), an 'action-event' resembles a speech act, but both written texts and 'action-events' can be dissociated from the conditions of their production and from the intentions of authors or actors. Michel Foucault, too, although often seeking to distance himself from Austin and Searle, frequently drew on their work in his analysis of discursive practices and the power of language (Foucault, 1972; Mottier, 2008; cf. Dreyfus Rabinow, 1983, p. 46). Among these philosophers, the most sustained engagement with speech act theory was that of Jacques Derrida. Initially drawn to Austin's thinking because it presented 'the performative' as non-referential, Derrida (1988, pp. 13-14) observed that Austin had seemingly shattered the notion that oral or written communication was confined to 'the transference of semantic content dominated by an orientation toward truth'. However, Derrida (1988, pp. 14, 137) repudiated Austin's assumptions about the conscious presence of a speaker (or writer) and a definable context in which a speech act is performed, and argued that the finiteness of contexts is 'never secured'. He insisted on what he called the 'iterability' of utterances: their potential for infinite repetition and citation, which - according to Derrida (1988, pp. 17-18) - calls into question the possibility of a 'pure' performative speech act. Much of Derrida's later writing was formulated from within his critique of Austin's work (Ortiz-Robles, 2005). This was evident, for example, when he returned to the ideas surrounding his well-known affirmation that 'the archivization produces as much as it records the event' (Derrida, 1996, p. 17), in his comments on the terrorist attacks of September 2001. For Derrida, an event of this kind 'is made up of the "thing" itself and the impression that is given' when it is inscribed or recorded; 'inscription produces a new event, thereby affecting the presumed primary event it is supposed to retain [and] archive' (Borradori, 2003, p. 89; Derrida, 2002, p. 113). In themselves, these thoughts were not greatly different from his earlier ideas, but when he came to describe the processes of inscription or 'saying the event', he incorporated concepts of 'the performative' derived from his interpretation of Austin; he observed that there is 'a dimension of saying the event that overtly presents itself as performative' (Derrida, 2007, p. 447). Moreover, although 'the performative says and produces the event that it speaks of', it also - according to Derrida (2007, p. 460) - attempts to 'neutralize' and 'reappropriate' the event. In embracing notions of performativity, Derrida reinvented them to suit his own ends. Postmodernist thinkers are often ambivalent about speech act theory. While welcoming its rejection of the belief that the sole purpose of language is to communicate facts about the world, they are usually suspicious of its systematising tendencies and its claim that utterances can perform definable actions or change the world in a determinate manner.14 When applied to records, speech act theory reminds us that records are linked to acts performed on specific occasions; it perplexes those critics who insist that there can be no distinct originary moments. Whereas the Foucauldian tradition maintains that discourse or text must be understood without reference to the intentions of speakers or writers, speech act theory invites us to recognise an original 'first writing' that effects an action. Words and phrases are undoubtedly iterable, but 'performances of speech acts (whether written or spoken) are datable singular events in particular historical contexts' (Searle, 1977, p. 208). Viewed in this light, the singularity of an event implicates, and is implicated by, the singularity of its context. In Bakhtin's words, while 'each utterance is filled with echoes of other utterances to which it is related' (1986, p. 91), every utterance also has an 'unrepeatable individual context' (1986, p. 88). From Derrida's perspective, however, contexts can never be self-identifying, and attempts to fix the contexts of utterances are always political (1988, p. 136). Other commentators have responded to Derrida's concerns by emphasising that the contexts in which speech acts are performed are not autonomous but are, to some degree, a matter of mutual agreement and shared assumptions. A written utterance can establish a permission or obligation because the members of a community jointly assume that such phenomena can be generated through writing in agreed contexts. Where shared assumptions of this kind are absent, a speech act is unlikely to be successful (Fish, 1999, p.70). Moreover, speech acts themselves create and sustain the social settings in which speech acts occur; contexts and activities are mutually constitutive (Dourish, 2004, p. 28; Fish, 1980, p. 216). This interdependency enables records to function and underpins our ability to use them to perform actions in the world. Information and representation Finally, let us return to the topic of 'information', with which this essay began. Our reflection on speech act theory leads us away from the ingenuous perception of records as mere purveyors of facts, and underscores their intimate association with contextualising and contextualised action; in the light of this, it seems clear that we must relinquish any beliefs that records are simply 'information objects' or that records and information are near-identical. Where, then, might we accommodate ideas about information in a view of records that takes account of speech act philosophy? Most obviously, information can be sought in records that Searle's taxonomy labels assertive. Many records of this kind merely set out a proposition, but occasionally we find records whose creators explicitly claim to be 'informing' others. In the following example dating from ca.1065 (given here in modern English translation, archives in liquid times 106 geoffrey yeo information, records, and the philosophy of speech acts 14 See, for example, Derrida (2002) and (2007). Although in these writings much of Derrida's interest was focused on what speech act theorists call assertive acts, such as journalistic reporting of terrorist attacks, he also gave voice to ideas about other performative speech acts. He readily agreed that 'when I make a promise, I'm not saying an event; I'm producing it by my commitment; "I promise" is a saying that produces the event' (2007, pp. 446, 458). But he was more hesitant about 'harder' forms of commitment. Ideally, perhaps, he would have liked to dismiss contracts, 'civil status', and the law - emblems of a world in which speech acts generate deontic phenomena - as 'so many fables' (2002, p. xvi). Insofar as performatives succeed in creating 'what is held to be juridically incontestable public truth', this - in Derrida's view - should be problematised or condemned as 'performative violence' (2002, pp. 51, 231). 107

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