ABSTRACT
After all, Austin’s title questions how to do things with words, suggest ing that words are instrumentalized in getting things done. Austin, of course, distinguishes between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts of speech, between actions that are performed by virtue of words, and those that are performed as a consequence of words. The distinction is tricky, and not always stable. According to the perlocutionary view, words are instrumental to the accomplishment of actions, but they are not themselves the actions which they help to accomplish. This form of the performative suggests that the words and the things done are in no sense the same. But according to his view of the illocutionary speech act, the name performs itself’ and in the course of that performing becomes a thing done; the pronouncement is the act of speech at the same time that it is the speaking of an act. O f such an act, one cannot reasonably ask for a “referent,” since the effect of the act of speech is not to refer beyond itself, but to perform itself, producing a strange enact ment of linguistic immanence.
