Forgiving as a Performative Utterance

When A wrongs B, A incurs an obligation to make atonement to B by apologizing with repentance, making reparation, and perhaps also doing a bit more for B, which I call “penance.” For B to forgive A (in the morally most important sense of “forgive”) is for B to promise to treat A in the future as someone who has not wronged B. It is normally good for B to forgive A after A has made at least some attempt at making atonement, but B has no obligation to forgive. To wrong someone is analogous to occurring an (unauthorized) debt to the person, and forgiving is deeming the debt to have been paid. Christ taught that, in order to forgive humans, God requires them to apologize with repentance. But God requires no reparation or penance (apart from that provided for us by Christ’s life and death) and imposes a condition on forgiving us—that we should forgive other humans who seek our forgiveness.

Literary scandal in cubo-futurism poetics and the communicative behaviour of recipients

The article deals with a ‘literary scandal’ as a mode and a script of communication within cubo-futurists poetic circles as far as the communication between poets and their addressees during a public performance is concerned. The latter is an essential component of the “literary everyday routine” of the poetic circles analysed. Not only does scandal betray an intention of insulting the recipient but also it is due to the scandal that the avant-garde author could find the addressee, become closer to him and make him more engaged in a poetic happening. The goal of the study (based on the evidence of cubo-futurist public performances) is to describe a scandal as a communicative script, a frame, identify a potential addressee, single out reception profiles and analyse communication orientations underlying those profiles. Drawing on the understanding of a literary scandal suggested by Reitblat, we trace a connection between a scandal and the public (recipients). According to Warner, the public are people actively par­ticipating in an event. Participatory strategies of the cubo-futurists public could be nar­rowed down to three types of reception: a sceptic, a critic, and a potential ally. Using the speech act theory (Austin, Derrida) and the actor-network theory (Callon’s opposition of framing and overflowing), we analyse how the performative utterance functions in a given context. We show how the performative utterances carrying a seed of a potential scandal were construed (or could have been construed). The article analyses the interpretation of a scandal and com­municative strategies chosen by recipients. While the critic prefers to frame the utter­ance in a predictable way by placing it into a fixed context and literally interpreting the ut­terance, the ally, on the contrary, is open to a variety of contexts and is ready to participate in a play of the pragmatic unfolding of an utterance. The latter type of reception underlies the possibility of the recipient’s creative engagement with a communicative experiment of the avant-garde.

Performative Utterance in Dans le leurre du seuil

This chapter investigates how Bonnefoy develops a theatrical model of poetic performance in the long sequence of poems ‘La Terre’, published in Dans le leurre du seuil in 1975. Examining how the poet repeatedly stages apostrophes to a flame and acts of address to a lover, it explores how he models his poetic performance on the fleeting movement of the light and the restless interactions between the lovers’ bodies. It analyses how Bonnefoy develops an inherently rhythmic conception of the act of relation, presenting it as an ecstatic gesture that has to be repeated endlessly. Investigating how both Bonnefoy and Nancy present this rhythmic act of relation as a generative worldly dynamic, this chapter scrutinizes how they develop a mobile and relational conception of ontology, conceiving of it as an open-ended and ongoing performance.

Strategies of Conflict Resolution and Mitigation: The Potential of the Speech Act of Apologizing in the Perspective of Intercultural Pragmatics

The article considers the linguistic and communicative nature of an apology (a request for forgiveness) as a corrective action that is aimed at preventing or mitigating conflict. By analyzing speech situations from Russian and Austrian culture and their illustrations in literary sources, it is established that apology occupies an intermediate position between performative and non-performative utterance. There have been recorded the situations, where even serious damage can be removed by an apology or an apology in combination with compensation. There are three categories of apologies: metacommunicative, conventional and substantive apologies. The latter two are described in the article. The hypothesis of the study is substantiated by the thesis that the apology depends not only on the severity of the damage, but also on the traditions of culture and peculiarities of the communicative situation. This issue is one of the insufficiently studied questions of linguistics. The article allocates the cultural universals of apologetic speech actions and culturally specific features of apology situations in Russian and Austrian cultures. It is shown that in the sphere of politics, even decades after the infliction of serious harm, a sincere apology for an insult or violation of the norms of behavior, uttered by the responsible person or his descendant, can be the basis for improving inter-state relations.

Morals of Encounter in Steve Jobs

In this article, the author argues for the probative value of ordinary language philosophy for the discipline of film studies by way of an analysis of the conversational protocols discernible in the film Steve Jobs (2015). In particular, the author focuses on the work of J.L. Austin, specifically his theory of speech acts and his formulation of the performative utterance, and Stanley Cavell, specifically his extension of Austinian speech act theory and his formulation of the passionate utterance, and analyzes the interactions between the titular character and his daughter through this unique Austinian/Cavellian lens. In so doing, the author endeavors to encourage more scholars in the field of film-philosophy to explore the key concepts and arguments in ordinary language philosophy for use in analyzing films. Despite its having been virtually ignored by film scholars over the last half century, one of many regrettable effects of the Continental bias of film scholars generally and film-philosophers specifically, the author contends that ordinary language philosophy provides powerful tools for the analysis of dialogue and communication in film, with Steve Jobs serving as a particularly insightful test case of the broad utility of ordinary language philosophy for film studies.

Queering Geographic Information information Systems

What’s the relationship between GIS and the political subject? In an effort to address this question, this paper traces the movement from the map to GIS. The map is shown to be the performative utterance of the state, one that supports its national discourse and narrative. GIS, on the other hand, is shown to be a device of neoliberal governmentality, its non-representational economic practices, divided discourse and subjectivities. Despite the seemingly hopeless situation surrounding GIS, however, certain simulation and modelling practices are attempting to construct subjectivities out of economic neoliberalism’s fractured narratives. They do this by reading meaning into otherwise mathematical datasets and models. These practices could form a basis for queering GIS.

What is Musical Meaning? Theorizing Music as Performative Utterance

In this article, I theorize a new conception of musical meaning, based on J. L. Austin’s theory of performative utterances in his treatise How to Do Things with Words. Austin theorizes language meaning pragmatically: he highlights the manifold ways language performs actions and is used to “do things” in praxis. Austin thereby suggests a new theoretic center for language meaning, an implication largely developed by others after his death. This article theorizes an analogous position that locates musical meaning in the use of music “to do things,” which may include performing actions such as reference and disclosure, but also includes, in a theoretically rigorous fashion, a manifold of other semiotic actions performed by music to apply pressure to its contexts of audition. I argue that while many questions have been asked about meanings of particular examples of music, a more fundamental question has not been addressed adequately: what does meaning mean? Studies of musical meaning, I argue, have systematically undertheorized the ways in which music, as interpretable utterance, can create, transform, maintain, and destroy aspects of the world in which it participates. They have largely presumed that the basic units of sense when it comes to questions of musical meaning consist of various messages, indexes, and references encoded into musical sound and signifiers. Instead, I argue that a considerably more robust analytic takes the basic units of sense to be the various acts that music (in being something interpretable) performs or enacts within its social/situational contexts of occurrence. Ultimately, this article exposes and challenges a deep-seated Western bias towards equating meaning with forms of reference, representation, and disclosure. Through the “performative” theory of musical utterance as efficacious action, it proposes a unified theory of musical meaning that eliminates the gap between musical reference, on the one hand, and musical effects, on the other. It offers a way to understand musical meaning in ways that are deeply contextual (both socially and structurally): imbricated with the human practices that not only produce music but are produced by it in the face of its communicative capacities. I build theoretically with the help of various examples drawn largely from tonal repertoires, and I follow with lengthier analytical vignettes focused on experimental twentieth and twenty-first century works.

Queer Performativity

The aim of this chapter is to present and re-read Judith Butler’s well-known performativity theory. The main argument advanced here is that, even though Butler’s work is widely viewed as instigating the field of queer studies, it is perhaps time to revisit performativity in order to queer it. The act of queering should be understood in the context of this chapter in two ways. First, it entails going against the sociolinguistic grain and troubling the linguistic core of performativity in a way that engages with “aspects of experience and reality that do not present themselves in propositional or even in verbal form” (Sedgwick 2003: 6), such as affect, embodiment, and the materiality of the built environment. The embodied and affective aspects of performativity are illustrated with the help of examples from gender and sexual activism in Israel, which show how multi-semiotic and sensory meanings are performatively brought into being in order to stake political claims. Second, queering performativity entails questioning the antinormative mantra encoded in the very notion of queer. This requires going back to a performative utterance par excellence—“I do” in wedding ceremonies—in order open up an uneasy self-reflection about (anti)normativity in queer scholarship.

Folklore and Folklife of American Family and Friends

The folklore of family and friends is a primary social frame of traditional knowledge, promoting distinctive values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Their associated narratives share certain characteristics. They have long been mined by folklorists as popular forms of personal experience narrative, and their transmission is somewhat gender dependent. Unlike friendship narrative, however, family narrative is widely studied in its own right. This chapter argues for a deeper study of friendship narrative, given (1) its role as a performative utterance, reflecting agency that helps form and maintain the group; (2) its horizontal, egalitarian mode of transmission; (3) the effect of the relative ephemerality of friendships; and (4) the role of gossip. The tension between tradition and innovation in American society and the growing importance of friendship groups in the culture, particularly through social media, make friendship narrative an increasingly compelling area of folklore scholarship and a potential means for countering intergroup hostilities.