ABSTRACT
The most powerful and precarious speech act public health professionals utter is declaring a pandemic, but J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words neglected medical utterances. This essay examines the speech acts of healers, physicians, epidemiologists, and health officials in a 1992–1993 Venezuelan cholera epidemic that killed some 500 Indigenous people. Ethnography suggests that their efforts to imbue pronouncements, especially statistical ones, with authority ironically rendered them precarious. Assertions of performative autonomy extended their relational dependence on other actors, including patients and bacteria. Moreover, their distributed quality did not simply reiterate chains of speech acts – as Austin critics Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler argued – but embedded seemingly opposing contexts, utterances, and forms of authority within them. The conclusion extends this effort to recuperate lost elements of Austin’s argument and challenge his neglect of relational and distributed performativity by analyzing US battles starting in 2020 over pandemic performativity associated with COVID-19.
