How to Do Nothing with Words, or Waiting for Godot as Performativity

Abstract

This essay analyzes how Waiting for Godot exposes the structural logic of both rhetorical and dramatic performativity. Drawing on the languagephilosophy of J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Begam considers what happens to ‘‘performative’’ locutions – statements that actually make things happen, such as ‘‘I now pronounce you man and wife’’ – when they are theatrically represented. Austin claims that such locutions when uttered on stage are rendered intransitive – i.e., they lose their performative force – and are therefore relegated to the Kantian realm of the purely aesthetic. Yet Beckett’s play spends two acts demonstrating that the primary function of language is not ‘‘constative’’ – not meant to give us a picture or representation of reality. Rather, Beckett’s conception of language – drawn from his reading of Mauthner – is essentially performative. But if words, phrases, and sentences all function performatively, if all descriptive uses of language are, in fact, instrumental uses, then the larger effect is to return illocutionary or transitive force to the theatre. As a result, Beckett’s play breaks through the wall not only of Ibsenian realism but also of Kantian aestheticism, reclaiming for the dramatic event the kind of ‘‘there-ness’’ that Alain Robbe-Grillet discovered in the first performances of Godot.