Reconstructing Austin: Joan Retallack’s How to Do Things With Words

Joan Retallack’s Volume of Poems Entitled How To Do Things With Words (1998) intervenes in a philosophical conversation about the status of poetic language and its relationship to the ways of doing things with words labeled by the term speech acts. She uses the general thesis of J. L. Austin’s speech act theory, that by means of words we perform distinct types of actions beyond proposing statements, in order to contest his methodological exclusion of “non-serious” or “parasitic” language, such as poetry, from this theory’s purview. His 1955 lecture series at Harvard, collected under the title How to Do Things with Words in 1962, is the fullest elaboration of Austin’s theories concerning performative utterances, that is, utterances “in which to say something is to do something; or in which by saying or in saying something we are doing something.”¹ One can quickly surmise from its title that Retallack’s book engages the ideas of Austin’s speech act lectures. In the poems of her book, she draws passages from the self-described “serious” discourse of his philosophy into the allegedly “non-serious” matrix of her poetic text. Through such inclusions, she questions the validity of distinctions that would relegate poetry to a parasitic use of language dependent on the stability of serious, normal usage for its meaning. Her adoption of Austin’s title for her own poetic volume, her selection of epigraphs, and her incorporation of passages from Austin’s writings all call attention to the ideological implications of his exclusion of poetry from the theory of performative utterances and highlight the fundamental instability of distinctions between serious and non-serious uses of language. Through her disruption of this particular binary, she suggests that similarly hierarchical pairings inhabiting the conventions of language are also potentially spurious. Subsequent textual analysis will demonstrate that her poems are indeed performative in Austin’s general sense of the term, capable of the types of action that he associates with performative utterances. Retallack’s poems enact a “complex realist” aesthetic in their investigation of living at the interstices of purportedly exclusive, hierarchically binary categories, thereby continuing the “poethical” project that she takes up from the work of John Cage. They thus make a case for the real, if limited, effects that poetry can achieve within the context of individual readings and exemplify ways in which texts can model forms of extra-textual behavior.

As readers familiar with Austin’s theoretical reception will realize, Retallack’s critique of his distinction between serious and non-serious uses of language recalls Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive reading of Austin’s lectures in “Signature Event Context,” first delivered in 1971. Retallack and Derrida both approach Austin’s work with a revisionary attitude, each questioning the validity of opposing serious and non-serious language in Austin’s exclusion of the latter from his theory of speech acts. Retallack’s own critical project can be described with the phrase that she takes as the title of her book of essays: The Poethical Wager (2003). Through poems and essays that risk unintelligibility in enacting complex natural and social processes, she seeks “to act against the odds in composing contemporary language (both lightly and with great seriousness)—presum[ing] the mess of complexity, the near-automatic pilot of large cultural trajectories along with constantly changing local configurations” (13). As this quotation shows, this project requires that her language be at once playful and serious, in direct contrast to Austin’s opposition of the categories of the serious and the non-serious yet in keeping with his own methods of injecting humor into his philosophical expositions.

Likewise, Derrida incorporates serious play into his writings; his works constantly draw upon playful yet rigorous readings of etymologies and other structural characteristics of language in deconstructing the fundamental oppositions that structure Western philosophy, particularly this tradition’s privileging of speech and/as presence over writing and/as absence. He describes a general strategy of deconstruction as follows: “In a traditional philosophical opposition we have not a peaceful coexistence of facing terms but...