How To Do Things With Tunes

What, finally, is the importance of all this about pretending? I will answer this shortly, although I am not sure that importance is important: truth is.¹

—J. L. Austin

J. L. Austin’s paper “Pretending,” whatever might now be its status amongst professional philosophers—and Austin’s reputation remains high in many quarters—contains, in its examples, passages which deserve to rank with the best of twentieth-century comic prose.²

The paper minutely discriminates among the many different senses in which people might or might not be supposed to be pretending. It is part of Austin’s long campaign against the supposed perfect ineffability of supposedly interior affects, the same campaign which leads him, in another work, to call “expressing” an “odious word,” or to add, after his first introduction of the term “emotion,” a sarcastic wish for its long continuance in good health.³ At one point in the essay, Austin is considering the question of whether what someone in fact does matters to the question of whether they were really pretending or not:

On a festive occasion you are ordered, for a forfeit, to pretend to be a hyena: going down on all fours, you make a few essays at hideous laughter and finally bite my calf, taking, with a touch of realism possibly exceeding your hopes, a fair-sized piece right out of it. Beyond question you have gone too far.* Try to plead that you were only pretending, and I shall advert forcibly to the state of my calf—not much pretence about that, is there? There are limits, old sport. This sort of thing in these circumstances will not pass as “(only) pretending to be a hyena.” True—but then neither will it pass as really being a hyena.

*In these circumstances. But if Nero ordered you, in the arena, to pretend to be a hyena, it might be unwisely perfunctory not to take a piece right out.⁴

The debt to P.G. Wodehouse is clear. But critical to the passage’s effect is the perfectly timed deadpan of its central sentence; “Beyond question you have gone too far.” It is one of the few sentences one can remember in the writings of any other author which sounds as though it might not feel not at home in Samuel Beckett’s prose; it hits a note of appalled mock-gravity, undecidably grim or comic, which Beckett knew how to touch like no other.⁵ It may be suspected, although hardly demonstrated, that, to invert Coleridge, no one was ever yet a profound philosopher without being at the same time a great poet; in which case Austin’s prose rhythm, for example, might be an essential element of his thinking, rather than a supernumerary feature of its gift wrap.⁶

Austin, in fact, has a little more to say than we might expect about aspects of language which it has sometimes been customary to treat as elements of form, although I shall be asking, here, whether we really need the word “form” to think about them, or whether we might not, perhaps, do just as well without it. I want to think about the these days rather neglected and even rather unrespectable topic of prose rhythm; but, to get to it, I shall have first of all to leap right into the center of Austin’s thinking, his theory of performative utterances, to discover, there, something surprising, a sort of capsule philosophy of history.

At a critical moment in his lectures on “How to Do Things with Words,” lectures given at Harvard more than half a century ago now, Austin makes a surprising and slightly uncharacteristic excursus. He wants to draw a distinction between what he calls an “explicit performative”—as an example of which he gives the utterance, “I promise that I shall be there”—and what he calls a “primary performative”: “I shall be there.” This is one more move among the many complicated classifications of various kinds of utterance which are undertaken in Austin’s lectures. What happens next, however, is rather more surprising. Austin suggests that we can...