Date: Mon, 07 Dec 1998 16:49:10 -0500 (EST)
From: mnunes-AT-gpc.peachnet.edu
Subject: Re: THE Metanarrative


Jumping in, without having followed the thread...

> 
> Huechroma-AT-aol.com wrote:
> 
> I'm also confused.  I think a previous post related performativity to
> Austin. In Le Differend it is related to phrases such as "the meeting
> is open", or "war is declared".

It's important to distinguish between performativity as Lyotard uses it 
and the performative speech act. Performativity functions as a 
metaprescriptive for the language game of science in a world of computer 
networks and databases. Performatives are a class of speech acts that 
have a specific set of pragmatic determinants (how they define the 
relation between sender, addressee and referent). See pp 9-10.

Performativity, or the "logic of maximum performance" has some relation 
to performative speech acts, but it is only at the level of legitimation, 
not utterance. In other words: Austin spends a lot of time distinguishing 
between true/false claims in langauge and felicity/infelicity assessments 
in performatives. A performative is not "false" if it goes awry: it 
"misfires." To understand why a performative succeeds or fails, one would 
have to be able to understand what Austin terms "the total speech act in 
the total speech situation."

Poststructuralists nod at this point; of course, this "total" can never 
be determined. But cybernetic theories of language don't really have a 
problem with this. Why can't we determine the total? We will simply 
define all that indeterminate/interminable stuff as "noise....

Do you see how a "logic of maximum performance" starts to emerge out of 
this?

Lyotard, of course, is not thrilled with the notion of performativity *as 
defined by a logic of maximum performance*. Instead, he imagines how with 
all this information available "we" might be able to search out the 
paralogical--to identify the metaprescriptives and suggest ways and means 
for adopting new ones: ones based on "openness" and "justice" rather than 
communicability. That's how i interpret the last few pages.

I hope that clears up the performative/performativity stuff.

--mark