Excerpt from the Conduit Interview
Mr. Lears’ Big Chance
Jackson Lears is the author of Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, and most recently, Something for Nothing: Luck in America. Mr. Lears spoke to us from his office at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he is Board of Governors Professor of History and the editor of the journal Raritan.
conduit: So can
we consider poetry, or at least a certain strain of poetry, to be “performative,” that
is, based on performative speech acts as opposed to empirical speech acts? For example,
Wallace Stevens famously said “The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”
Can we consider that a performative expression?
lears: Absolutely. I think that is one of the great liberating in-sights
of this whole Austinian tradition. Whether Austin him-self fully recognized it or
not is another question, but I would say that it really opens up an alternative—viewing
language outside the framework of empirical description—and I think that’s
one of the great connections between archaic rituals and modernist poetry. They both
share in this performative dimension.
Johan Huizinga, the great Dutch historian and theorist of play, talked about the
element of play-acting in sacred rituals, that the gesture was both meant to be taken
seriously and at the same time there was an element of theatricality and play-acting
in it. This again points to that ambiguity, that we don’t ask poetry or ritual
to conform to the same kinds of empirical criteria of truth-telling that we ask scientific
experiments to conform to. To make that demand on those uses of language and gesture
is to commit what philosophers call a category mistake, because it’s a different
form of knowledge than empirical knowledge. I would certainly argue that a great
deal of poetry, even though it may be rooted in very precise observation of the natural
or social world, is nevertheless engaged in that same kind of attempt to perform
truth rather than merely report it.