The mystery of performative magic is thus resolved in the mystery of ministry (to use a pun close to the heart of medieval canonists), i.e. in the alchemy of representation (in the different senses of the term) through which the representative creates the group which creates him: the spokesperson endowed with the full power to speak and act on behalf of the group, and first of all to act on the group through the magic of the slogan, is the substitute for the group, which exists solely through this procuration. Group made man, he personifies a fictitious person, which he lifts out of the state of a simple aggregate of separate individuals, enabling them to act and speak, through him, ‘like a single person'. Conversely, he receives the right to speak and act in the name of the group, to ’take himself for' the group he incarnates, to identify with the function to which ‘he gives his body and soul’, thus giving a biological body to a constituted body. Status est magistratus; ‘I'Etat. e'est moi’. Or, what amounts to the same thing, the world is my representation.
<p>3</p><p>Authorized Language</p>The Social Conditions for the Effectiveness of Ritual Discourse
Suppose, for example, I see a vessel on the stocks, walk up and smash the bottle hung at the stem, proclaim '1 name this ship the Mr Stalin' and for good measure kick away the chocks: but the trouble is, 1 was not the person chosen to name it. ..
J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words
The naive question of the power of words is logically implicated in the initial suppression of the question of the uses of language, and therefore of the social conditions in which words are employed. As soon as one treats language as an autonomous object, accepting the radical separation which Saussure made between internal and external linguistics, between the science of language and the science of the social uses of language, one is condemned to looking within words for the power of words, that is. looking for it where it is not to be found. In fact, the illocutionary force of expressions cannot be found in the very words, such as 'performatives’, in which that force is indicated or, better, represented - in both senses of this term. It is only in exceptional cases (in the abstract and artificial situations created by experimentation) that symbolic exchanges are reduced to relations of pure communication, and that the informative content of the message exhausts the content of the communication. The power of words is nothing other than the delegated power of the spokesperson, and his speech - that is, the substance of his discourse and, inseparably, his way of speaking - is no more than a testimony, and one among others, of the guarantee of delegation which is vested in him.
This is the essence of the error which is expressed in its most accomplished form by Austin (and after him, Habermas) when he
THE NEW LITURGY OR THE MISFORTUNES OF PERFORMATIVE VIRTUE*
'I must admit that we are utterly dismayed by the encouragement being given to desert the churches in favour of celebrating the Eucharist in small communities /I/, at home 12}, or in chapels [2] where one helps oneself {1} to the communion wafer served on trays by lay people fl}, in order to take communion wherever one finds oneself [2}, etc.' (p. 47).
'You will always be able to say a prayer for your church. But what would be the meaning of such a prayer in a church deprived of the holy sacrament /2}? One might as well recite it at home' (p. 48).
'We no longer celebrate mass in our little church, we say it in somebody's home [2}' (p. 59).
