THE PERFORMATIVE UTTERANCE IN HAMLET: NOTES

• A play about a man who couldn't make real what was found in his mind.
• He does not waver a bit as to his decision towards his understanding of his duty to complete it with dedication.
• He wavers to convert his mental dedication towards physical space.
• The entire play is spent on Hamlet's narrative to enact his determination and duty towards his dad and murder Claudius: he's able to speak and think but not do.
• J.L. Austin's work, How to do Things with Words (1962), captures the idea: "how certain language does not merely describe action but acts in being spoken."
• Performative language acts: can affect real change in the world.
• Three forces of performative language: the locutionary force, the illocutionary force, and the perlocutionary force.
• Locutionary force: ability of language to deliver a message, the force of mutual intelligibility.
• Illocutionary force: what is done in being said; denying a request or giving an order.
• Perlocutionary force: what is achieved by being said, the consequences of one's utterance; an order being followed.
• Philosophy of doing-language: represents a bridge between the business of language and the business of the "real."
• Sky Marsen: "use utterance strategically in combination with physical act so as to influence the surrounding reality and contest the mistaken philosophical belief that speakers produce only statements that describe this reality."
• Harold Bloom in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998): "Shakespeare's characters frequently develop through "self-overhearing."
• Thought to language to action: locutinary meaning of an utterance creating the illocutionary effect of that utterance which in turn drives the perlocutionary effect.