In a 1955 lecture series, later published as How to Do Things with Words, J. L. Austin argued against a positivist philosophical claim that the utterances always "describe" or "constate" something and are thus always true or false.
According to Austin, in order to successfully perform an illocutionary act, certain conditions have to be met (e.g. a person who pronounces a marriage must be authorized to do so).
[3]: 165 This focus on effect implies a conscious actor and Searle assumes that language stems from an intrinsic intentionality of the mind.
The question whether a performative is separable from the situation it emerged in is relevant when one addresses for example the status of individual intentions or speech as a resource of power.
Another emphasizes the active construction of reality through spoken and written texts and is related to theories of human agency and discourse.
Early theories acknowledge that performance and text are both embedded in a system of rules and that the effects they can produce depend on convention and recurrence.
In this sense, text is an instance of 'restored behaviour', a term introduced by Richard Schechner that sees performance as a repeatable ritual.
The syntactical analyses are firmly anchored in analytical epistemology, as the distinction between the research object and its context is not conceived as problematic.
[Notes 1] The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida holds with Austin and Searle that by illocutionary force, language itself can transform and effect.
[6]: 133 Indebted to the work of Michel Foucault, Butler expounds how subjects are produced by their context, because the possibilities of speech are predetermined.
[6]: 129 Performativity has a political aspect that consists in what Derrida has described as the breaking force, by which an utterance changes its context.
[6]: 160 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari define language as the totality of all performative utterances, which they call order-words.
"[7] The historian Quentin Skinner developed classical and postmodern theories on performative texts into a concrete research method.
Using Austin's vocabulary, he seeks to recover what historical authors were doing in writing their texts, which corresponds with the performance of illocutionary acts.
[8]: 7 Skinner therefore proposes to study historical sources in order to retrieve the convictions the author held, reflect on their coherence and investigate possible motives for the illocutionary act.
[8]: 119 This practical method seeks to deal with the blurred distinction between text and context and offer a meaningful way of interpreting historical reality.