In this week's column I demand a halt to people saying "performative"https://www.gawker.com/politics/youre-being-performative-i-dont-like-it …
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Replying to @lionel_trolling
I don’t exactly disagree with this—I too have turned up my nose at the bogus use of “performative.” But I have also succumbed to it, and used it to mean “flamboyant, yet vapid”, which I think is how many others use it these days. But the thing is: language is socially determined
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Replying to @yeselson @lionel_trolling
Yes and no. Language is a differential system of signs that gets organized (socially) into conceptual oppositions: if the oppositional sense flips diachronically, it's made possible by a formal rule—why the inversion happens is the interesting question, imo. (Sorry to weigh in).
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Replying to @re_colston @lionel_trolling
Ok, but I think we can ask that question, while simultaneously acknowledging what is happening “on the ground.”
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Replying to @yeselson @lionel_trolling
Okay, well, then why did the sense flip? I think John is pretty much correct that it's a weird condensation of trying to call something bullshit and theatrical (which in my more speculative reading is perhaps what people thought of the term "performativity" in the first place).
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But performative in the vernacular sense is a good & fitting word. I feel like the philosophers who use it in the totally different J.L. Austin way should be forced to come up with another term. Majority rules.
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Yeah, exactly—as I called it, “flamboyantly vapid.” The word is *useful* to condense exactly that. And when readers see it now—both those who wish it wasn’t used this way and those who do use it this way—they *understand what the writer is trying to convey.* So whats the problem?
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Yeah, that's the best response. People understand what the word means contextually (and in fact in actual language all words only have contextual meaning) so there is no problem.
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You seem very confident that you have the signifying sense of "what the writer means," and what I'm saying is, no, you probaby don't—by your own logic! You can't tack between a pragmatist closure to a theoretical premise of unclosability—or you can, but your listeners hear that.
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