Performing language

I’ve had a few questions about my Pronouns post, and I want to take a moment to clear up a possible confusion about “performing.”

In English, the word perform has various connotations, of which we can differentiate two main themes. When actors perform a part, they are, to be crude, pretending to be someone they aren’t. By extension, we sometimes use the word to mean “putting on a show” or even faking. I grew up hearing people dismiss another person’s distress with a comment like, “That’s quite a performance.” So, for some of us, the word perform has a connotation of deceit or falsehood.

But think about what we mean when we say, for instance, that a surgeon is performing an appendectomy, or a pianist is performing Beethoven’s Emperor concerto. Presumably, we don’t mean they’re faking it. Rather, we mean that the person in question is “enacting” a capability, revealing it to others, making it active in the world.

Now let’s think about the first kind of performing, say, an actor performing a role. If you think about it, that’s also a matter of enacting a capability in the world: acting is a skill and an art, as much as surgery or playing the piano. It’s just that we’ve carried over the relationship between the actor and the role they’re playing — which is not an identity — and that aura of “falsehood” sort of stuck.

Oddly enough, this analysis of everyday meanings of an everyday word opens the door to an interesting philosophical connection between performing and the narrative self. To the extent that our statements about our selves are future-directed, they are, in a peculiar way, “false” — at least because we are “not yet” who we are talking about being. To continue the example from my post, I don’t say “I liked boys and girls” unless I want to say that something about me has changed. When I say, “I like boys and girls,” I am saying something not merely about the past me, but I’m indicating a “preparedness” to act and respond in certain ways in the future. This is, more or less, what J. L. Austin means by the claim that language is performative: He realized that speaking about things is also acting in and on the world.

And this is what makes the narrative self so fascinating — and so powerful. The narratives we tell about who we are are never merely descriptive; they are simultaneously “constitutive.” This means that, in telling the stories of who we are, we both affirm and make ourselves — over and over again, as often as we tell our stories. And it’s also fascinating to think that I am part of the world I am shaping through those stories: I am also the “intended audience,” and in a sense, I am telling myself who I am as much as I am addressing others. The world I am shaping includes the me I am shaping.

But who is the narrator? Who tells the stories that make the self? A few weeks ago, I wrote about Kant’s notion of the transcendental ego — the subject of our cognitions that, no matter what we do, can never be one of those cognitions. This is a philosophical way of saying that we can never know the knower in the act of knowing. But this also gives us a hint about how to think about the self. As a practical matter, we have an apparently innate drive to contextualize our experiences in narrative. Just as the brain attempts to synthesize the disparate inputs of our senses into a unitary “sensor,” a subject to whom these sensory experiences are happening — in an analogous way, we synthesize various facets of experience into a subject who experiences and acts in and on the world. Think about what your experience — sensory or otherwise — would be like without this synthesizing: It would be, as William James put it, a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” Only worse: there would be no sense of a subject to feel confused.

None of this means you can wake up tomorrow and literally be whoever you want. You and I are parts of a world already in progress, and there are things about that world over which we cannot exercise voluntary control. But the fact that there are constraints on what we can choose to be does not reduce our identities to a slogan like “biology is destiny.” The fact that I am 5’11” means that I cannot choose to be 6’3”, starting tomorrow. But it does not follow from the fact that I cannot choose to change my height that my entire identity is determined. Just as we are parts of a world in progress, we are in progress as well, and one of the factors that shapes our future selves is the very knowledge that the self is a future-leaning narrative in the first place.

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