Using Words to Change the World
Words Don't Just Describe the World—They Construct It
MY WRITING BLOG
The Social Rules Behind Language
For a performative statement to actually work—or to be "felicitous," as Austin put it—it relies on custom, law, and shared social agreements.Some speech acts require strict legal authority. You can't walk up to a cruise ship, shout "I christen thee the S.S. Paddleboat!", and expect anyone to care unless you actually own the boat.
Other performatives are accessible to almost everyone. Anyone can make a promise or place a bet:
"I'll probably show up around five."
vs.
"I promise I'll be there at five."
Notice the shift in weight between those two sentences? The moment you move from a prediction to a promise, you invite a whole network of social obligations and legal consequences. If you break the promise, people get angry—not because you were wrong about the time, but because a social contract was created and then breached.
History is littered with moments where implied performatives went horribly wrong. When King Henry II famously vented to his court about Sir Thomas Becket—asking, "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?"—his knights didn't hear a rhetorical question. They heard a performative command. They rode out to Canterbury Cathedral and murdered the Archbishop, leaving the King to deal with the fallout of a speech act he claimed he never explicitly ordered.
The Politician’s Great Rhetorical Trick
This brings us to one of the most effective tricks in the entire rhetorical playbook: blurring the line between performatives and nonperformatives.
Speakers who want power love to make things sound like solemn promises while leaving themselves an exit strategy. Politicians do this constantly.
When a candidate stands at a podium and declares, "If elected, I will lower gas prices," they are invoking the emotional weight of a promise. But here's the catch: a president doesn't actually hold the power to unilaterally set fuel prices. When gas prices fail to drop a year later, the politician slides smoothly out of the performative realm and into neutral description: "Well, I submitted the bill, but Congress blocked it." They gained the trust that comes with a promise without ever having the authority to fulfill it.
When we analyze the language spoken around us—whether in politics, marketing, or daily arguments—we have to look past the surface meaning of the words. The real question is always: Is this speaker delivering information, or are they attempting to execute an act that changes the rules of the room?
Say it out loud in polite conversation and people immediately picture slick politicians dodging questions, overblown speeches, or manipulative sales pitches. We throw around phrases like "just a bunch of rhetoric" to dismiss ideas we think are empty or disingenuous. But if you strip away the modern cynicism, rhetoric is simply the art of using language to change the world.
Not the physical world directly—a sentence won't move a boulder or build a bridge. But words fundamentally alter the social world. And once you reshape human expectations, obligations, and institutions, those social shifts eventually move the physical world too.
When Saying Something Is Doing Something
Back in the 1950s, Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin published a slender, groundbreaking book titled How to Do Things with Words. His core argument laid the foundation for what we now call Speech-Act Theory: speaking isn't just about transmitting cold facts from one brain to another. Speech is an action. To see what Austin meant, look at how subtle shifts in phrasing change reality:
Scenario A: Someone looks at a couple and says, "John and Susan are married."
Scenario B: A judge stands before them and says, "I now pronounce you husband and wife."
In the first scenario, the speaker is just sharing information. If you didn't know John and Susan were married, now you do. Nothing about the universe actually changed when those words were spoken. In the second scenario, the entire world shifts. The moment the judge utters those specific words, John and Susan’s legal status, tax obligations, and social relationship instantly transform. Austin called this a performative utterance. You aren't just saying something; you are doing something through the act of speech itself.
The same thing happens on a baseball field. A fan in the bleachers can scream "He's out!" all afternoon, and it's just noise. But when the designated umpire makes the exact same call, the runner really is out. The game changes because the speaker possesses the social authority required to make the words stick.
