Introducing Performative Pragmatics

Douglas Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136578687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This user-friendly introduction to a new 'performative' methodology in linguistic pragmatics breaks away from the traditional approach which understands language as a machine. Drawing on a wide spectrum of research and theory from the past thirty years in particular, Douglas Robinson presents a combination of 'action-oriented approaches' from sources such as J.L. Austin, H. Paul Grice, Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman.

Paying particular attention to language as drama, the group regulation of language use, individual resistance to these regulatory pressures and nonverbal communication, the work also explains groundbreaking concepts and analytical models.

With a key points section, discussion questions and exercises in every chapter, this book will be an invaluable resource to students and teachers on a variety of courses, including linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics and interpersonal communication.

Part I
Introduction

1 Metaphors of language

•	Language as drama
•	Language as machine
•	A comparison of constative and performative linguistics
•	Key points
•	Discussion
•	Exercises
•	Suggestions for further reading

THESIS: The metaphors we use for language will shape our approach to it, so that if we think about it as drama, we will focus our attention on what the actors do to each other with words; and if we think about it as a machine, we will focus our attention on mechanical structure.

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

(William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2.7: 139–43)

Scripts even in the hands of unpracticed players can come to life because life itself is a dramatically enacted thing. All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify.

(Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: 72)

Long before we see a play on stage, it starts in the mind of a playwright, who generates the script; and the script provides the actors with their lines. However, this leads to a problem with Goffman’s classic metaphor of everyday life – because our everyday conversations do not have a script. This is the first key fact about conversations – they are creative because there is no script. Because we don’t have a script, we have to improvise our lines.

(R. Keith Sawyer, Creating Conversations: 7)

Language as drama

If Shakespeare is right – and Erving Goffman and R. Keith Sawyer both seem to think he mostly is – human social life is like a play performed on stage. We are all actors, and our interactions are dramatic. Our conversations are alive with dramatic purpose: we seek to impose ourselves on our audiences, and our audiences, who are actors in their own right, seek to impose themselves on us. We all work together to give our conversations dramatic meaning and coherence. Of course, this isn’t an objective truth about social life; it’s a metaphor. It’s a way of thinking about conversation. It’s a way of seeing conversation in terms of drama, as like drama.

And once we start applying that metaphor to conversation, it guides our thinking in interesting ways. It makes us ask questions like: how do we become actors? Are there auditions? Is there training? Do we have rehearsals for our performances? If the world is a stage, are there stage hands who build it, set up props, handle lights? Is there a director? Is there a prompter? Is there a script? And if, as Sawyer says, there usually isn’t one, how do we know what to say? How do the other actors understand us? How do they figure out how to respond to us?

These questions not only orient us metaphorically to conversation as drama; they also help us see the ways in which the metaphor doesn’t work. There is training, for example – all our lives we are in training for this kind of acting – but it is not usually recognized as such. There are stage hands, but they usually aren’t building for us, for our specific conversations. There are no auditions, and (usually) no director. Rehearsals are rare, but they do happen. Sometimes, in carefully scripted performances like weddings, there is a director and a rehearsal; and we do sometimes practice what we want to say before entering into an especially important conversation, usually alone, occasionally with someone else (“Okay, you be my mother and I’ll be me . . .”).

So there are limits to the usefulness of this dramatic or performative metaphor for speech; and in a moment we’ll see how using that metaphor to organize our thinking about language actually blinds us to whole realms of language that it cannot “see,” and so ignores. But it also helps us see things that we would not necessarily see without it.

For example, scripts. Sawyer says in that passage I set as an epigraph that “our everyday conversations do not have a script. This is the first key fact about conversations – they are creative because there is no script. Because we don’t have a script, we have to improvise our lines” (2001: 7). But that’s an early rough formulation; a few pages later, he is qualifying that:

In everyday situations like getting a haircut, we often use lines that we’ve heard other people use – we don’t always make up completely new things to say. When the barber says “How’s all the family?” no one would claim that he’s being creative. These aren’t really his own words, because thousands of people have said exactly that line in exactly that situation before. Like the barber, we often use catchphrases in conversation – phrases like “Could I talk to you for a minute?” or “Give me a break.” Because a million people have said exactly the same sentence, we could think of these sentences as scripted lines. Linguists call these little bits of script formulaic speech.

(2001: 24)

However, even when we use catchphrases, we have to know when to use them – and that requires improvisational skill. This is, Sawyer notes, one of the hardest things to learn in a foreign language: not only what people always say, but when they say it. In precisely what circumstances is it appropriate to say “Give me a break”? (Comic writers often mimic this difficulty by having foreigners use catchphrases inappropriately: the foreigner cheerfully cries out “Give me a break!” when he’s really happy and excited about something.)

The barber has said “How’s the family?” a thousand times to his customers, but he isn’t just mindlessly or mechanically repeating a catchphrase; he’s doing something with it, playing a role with it. He’s setting a politely friendly but not particularly intimate mood for the conversation. His implicit message is something like “Don’t feel like you have to tell me about your family if you don’t want to, I’m not that interested, I’m just making polite conversation.” Sawyer (2001: 24) comments:

And in the same way, we often use catchphrases as a distancing mechanism, to indicate to the other person that we don’t want to enter a truly creative, conversational performance. When we speak more spontaneously, improvising rather than using formulas, it sends the message that we are ready to enter into a more intimate conversation – fully focusing on our listener, our words personalized and created just for them.

In other words, Sawyer says, even highly scripted conversations are more like improvisational theater than they are like traditional scripted plays, where the actors memorize their lines and perform them exactly as written. Improv actors typically have an instantaneous command of hundreds of scripted lines and styles from popular movies and television shows, which they use creatively in the scenes they improvise, to create drama to which the other actors and the audience can easily relate.

These catchphrases are dramatic “shorthand”: they encapsulate for anyone who knows them a whole attitude toward life, not just whole characters but whole groups of characters and the dramatic contexts from which we know them. “When someone says, ‘Wow, heavy, man,’ in a dazed tone, everyone thinks of a ’60s-era stoner; if someone hunches his shoulders and speaks with an exaggerated German accent, it suggests a ‘mad scientist’ character, recognizable from a multitude of late-night B movies” (Sawyer 2001: 25).

And when we are not using scripted language, our conversations are even more obviously like improv theater. There is no director; there is no script. Someone sets the scene by saying something; the others respond. Whoever speaks first gets to decide the topic of conversation; but of course others can resist that topic, say “Let’s not talk about that,” say “Oh, yes, let’s talk about that in a minute, but first I have some great news,” or whatever. There is no set structure for the conversational drama. It can go anywhere the “actors” want it to go. They make it up as they go along, reacting to each other out of their own needs and desires, sometimes out of whims that they don’t fully understand themselves.

Sawyer, who spent two years playing the piano for an improv group, taping all the performances and interviewing the actors, notes that improv actors go through training, and are always taught the same three principles: “don’t deny” (always accept what the other person gives you and add something new to it); “don’t write the script in your head” (don’t plan ahead and try to force your imagined structure on the drama); and “listen to the group mind” (act as a group, not as a collection of wayward individuals). A longish quote will illustrate these principles clearly (Sawyer 2001: 18–19):

Think of a conversation where you felt like the other person wasn’t hearing what you were saying. Your comments weren’t responded to; instead, that person seemed to be responding to something you didn’t actually say. Often this is because that person was writing the script in his or her head, thinking ahead to the next comment rather than listening and responding to you. Or, think of a conversation that was very important to you, where you were thinking hard to make sure you didn’t forget what you wanted to say. You’re waiting for just the right moment in the conversation to bring up an important point. The problem is that you’re not listening – you need to shift the focus from your own plan, to the group mind.

An example from jazz will show what I mean by “listen to the group mind.” Like improv theater, jazz performances are group collaborations. When I was learning how to improv jazz on the piano, I bought an album of songs by the famous saxophonist John Coltrane. But this was not your usual Coltrane album – it had no saxophone track, only piano, bass, and drums. When I turned the stereo balance all the way to the left, the piano dropped out, and I heard only bass and drums. Then I sat at my piano and played along with the stereo, imagining that I was Coltrane’s pianist, McCoy Turner . . .

But any jazz musician will tell you that this is nothing like playing jazz with a live band. What makes it different? When all of the musicians are improvising together, everyone is responding to everyone else. You don’t know what the drummer or pianist will do next; you have to be prepared for the unexpected. All of the musicians create something new together, and the performance emerges out of their musical conversation. When I played with the Music Minus One album, there was no collaboration, no group responsiveness – it was not really a conversation.

Real conversation, Sawyer says later (2001: 40), is emergent collaboration. It is emergent in the sense that it has no preset structure, but is constantly coming into being; and it is collaborative in the sense that the conversing group creates it together, responding to each other. (For more on this “group mind” or “emergent collaboration” or “joint action” approach to conversation, see Clark 1996 and Robinson 2003: 95–99.)

Viewed through this performative metaphor, then, language is always human social interaction. It is, to use J. L. Austin’s famous line, people “doing things with words” (Austin 1962/1975). And specifically it is people doing things to each other, and with each other. It is people trying to manipulate others, trying to comfort others, trying to make things better by apologizing for past failures and promising future successes. It is people joking, lying, telling stories, making friends, hiding their faults, exaggerating their strengths, or exaggerating their faults in a humorous way so that others will see that it isn’t really true, and will think better of them. It is people responding to each other, collaborating in the creation of an emergent conversational reality.

And when people in this drama say things, it does actually create reality, change reality. Words don’t have magical powers, exactly, but they might as well have – in fact, the kind of power that words have in this drama was once thought of as magical. We now see it not as a supernatural but rather as a social phenomenon: words change human realities because people believe in them, because words have an enormous impact on us. Somebody tells a story, and everybody else in the room laughs, or cries, or falls into a sudden uneasy silence. The social reality in that room has been changed – by words. The right kind of person says a few words, and a couple is married, or a baby is named, or a defendant is convicted or acquitted of a crime. People do things to each other in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Speech acts
• Part III: Implicatures
• References
• Index