Do You Know What “Performative” Means?

Day 9
We spent the entire class today discussing essays by Emerson on history and the abolitionist movement of the 1800’s. This may seem strange for a class ostensibly designed to instruct the class in effective argumentation—but such is the wandering mind of our professor. It would, of course, be different if we diagramed the distinctive qualities of the various positions made and how they were effective or not, persuasive or not, impactful or not. Instead we wholly shy away from such productive analysis that might be germane to the title of our course.

He made a telling slip of the tongue in today’s lecture. In describing some point made in an assigned essay he said, “The statement has a certain ‘performative’ quality. Do you all know what ‘performative’ means?”

I raised my hand and was called upon. I had to remind the professor that the class indeed did know about the concept of performative utterances because we had studied it as part of the course work in the first few days of this very class—that it was part of the core curriculum of the session. The professor laughed and said that he “forgot” that was part of this class.

To sum up—he spent so much time in civil rights discourse over the last few weeks that he forgot one of the core concepts he was supposed to be focusing on.

This simple faux pas says more than I am capable of relaying and any attempt to add further emphasis would likely bring diminishment.

Be well,