Academe and Performative Speech Acts

I was tempted to just go to bed at 7 tonight because the weather has been cold rainy and miserable lately and I have been feeling equally miserable about the state of things I am seeing in Higher Ed lately. But I decided instead to write a bit of a blog post for this week since these thoughts have been running around my head as I have watched my friends, peers, colleagues, and myself be harmed by this thing that tends to happen in academic communication around institutions and conferences and that is the use of the performative speech act. I

So I have been a big fan of performative speech acts and speech-act theory since grad school. J.L. Austin is someone that I returned to a lot during that time, and I continue to think of now so many years later. Mainly because I really am taken by this idea of a performative speech act. Now a performative speech act is a relatively nuanced thing to explain. I mention this because if you expect this to be a blog post as a whole nuanced article on speech-act theory and performative utterances this is not what this blog post is. However, it is important for you to understand high-level what performative speech act could be before I go into the examples of them that tend to surround us in academe. This 4-minute captioned Ted Talk gives a high level explanation of the difference between a constative and performative statement. Basically a performative speech act is supposed to do an action by the act of it being said. Like when someone says "bless you" that saying of bless you is in fact "doing" the blessing.

We see a lot of these in academe. Think of people who say "this is a safe space" when talking about an educational environment basically trying to perform that safety into being by saying it. We all know that this is impossible, and there has been a lot of conversation about safe, brave, and accountable spaces. What I want to reflect on today is how a lot of academe is premised on this performative speech act as a way to get out of being accountable for doing the actual work of making the thing they are talking about happen.

This is similar to what Sara Ahmed has said about how folk in equity roles become the doing of the equity just by the fact that a role with the title of the thing they want to appear exists. Institutions perform the equity by having someone embody the title, whether or not that work happens or not. This is why it is easy to get rid of roles of people who have those kinds of titles when the tide does not seem to care about equity or inclusion anymore because the belief is if you get rid of the person with the name of an equity thing in their title, it will automatically make that equity thing disappear from that space. This rhetorical magic is a lot of "yes, and" that I would like you to hold on to as you read on. 

We see a lot of this performative speech act in academe. You see it in associations with the name Open in their title but their conference organization practices demonstrate that they are anything but Open. In fact their lack of access in scheduling means that the Open in the name of their association becomes the performance of Open. We are Open because it is in our title, not because we are transparent or accessible or inclusive in our practices. We are Open because we say we are, not because the board members are holding the principles of Open and accountability in their practices, not because they take the time to realize the health issues they are creating for neurodivergent and disabled members and apologize for it (another performative act that would do the apology in the uttering).

We see it in communications that come from places that call themselves and their programs "barrier breaking" when the work being done is barely foundational. We are Barrier Breaking because our comms folk say we are not because we are doing anything barrier breaking. The breaking of barriers is done in the performative, in the announcing of being barrier breaking, not in the doing. 

This is also why I never add folk to LinkedIn who call themselves "change agents" or something super performative like that. Calling yourself a change agent is like calling yourself an ally. You cannot call yourself an ally. If you are an ally it is because other people see you as an ally, not because you have declared yourself to be an ally. Allyship is relational, change is relational, Open is relational, breaking barriers is relational. None of it comes from performative speech acts, it comes in the actual and hard work of doing and acknowledging the gaps and harm being caused and resourcing the work that needs to be done appropriately.

In a time when HigherEd is dealing with lack of funding, getting rid of people and roles who would actually do the work of change or the work of understanding barriers, performative speech acts do the kind of rhetorical "everything is fine work" that actually continues to break trust in spaces that are already deeply in a crisis of trust. It is deeply unethical to rely on performative speech acts and eventually this is how associations, institutions, and groups lose the very people they need to support the equity and inclusion work that needs doing.