Was it necessary to employ so much ingenuity to discover that when my doing consists in my saying, what I do is necessarily what I say? But by pushing to the limit the consequences of the distinction between the linguistic and the extra-linguistic, on which it purports to base its autonomy (notably with regard to sociology), pragmatics demonstrates by reductio ad absurdum that illocutionary acts as described by Austin are acts of institution that cannot be sanctioned unless they have, in some way, the whole social order behind them. ‘Whereas one clearly must be “entitled” to open the meeting, it is not necessary to be in a position of superiority to give an order; a soldier can give an order to his commanding officer, even though his order has little chance of being obeyed’.6 Or, again: ‘To claim legitimately to open the meeting, one needs to be authorized by the institution and not everyone is; but everyone has the authority to accomplish a speech act like an order, so that everyone can claim to accomplish such an act’.7 The construction of these ‘pure’ performatives, represented by explicit performatives, has the virtue of bringing out a contrario the presuppositions of ordinary performatives, which imply a reference to the social conditions for their success. From a strictly linguistic point of view, anyone can say anything and the private can order his captain to ‘clean the latrines’; but from a sociological point of view (the one adopted in fact by Austin when he reflects on the conditions of felicity), it is clear that not anyone can assert anything, or else does so at his peril, as with an insult. ‘Anybody can shout in the public square, “I decree a general mobilization,” and as it cannot be an act because the requisite authority is lacking, such an utterance is no more than words, it reduces itself to futile clamour, childishness, or lunacy.’8 The logical exercise of separating the act of speech from its conditions of execution shows, through the absurdities that this abstraction engenders, that the performative utterance, as an act of institution, cannot socio-logically exist independently of the institution which gives it its raison d'etre, and if it were to be produced in spite of everything, it would be socially deprived of sense.9 Since an order, or even a password, can work only if it is backed up by the order of things and its accomplishment depends on all the relations of order which define the social order, one would have to be crazy, as they say, to dream up and give an order for which the conditions of felicity are not fulfilled. The anticipated conditions of felicity help to determine the utterance by allowing it to be thought of and experienced as
reasonable and realistic. Only a hopeless soldier (or a ‘pure’ linguist) could imagine that it was possible to give his captain an order. The performative utterance implies ‘an overt claim to possess such or such power’,10 a claim that is more or less recognized and therefore more or less sanctioned socially. This claim to act on the social world through words, i.e. magically, is more or less crazy or reasonable depending on whether it is more or less based on the objectivity of the social world.11 Thus we can counterpose two acts of magical naming that are. socially, very unequally guaranteed: the insult (‘you're only a professor’) which, lacking authorization, risks rebounding against its author, and the official naming or ‘nomination’ (‘J appoint you professor'), powerfully invested with all the authority of the group and capable of instituting a legitimate, that is, universally recognized, identity.
