ABSTRACT
In a striking passage from Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela gives his account
of the initial hearing of the Rivonia Trial on 15 October, 1962 (Mandela, 1994a, pp.
311-312, my emphasis on ‘embodiment’):
The emphasis on performance here is unmistakable. The public becomes a ‘crowd
of supporters’; the ‘spectators’. Mandela in full traditional regalia ‘electrifies’ the
crowd: he is a spectacular ‘sign’, a ‘symbol’, an embodied cipher of more than
could possibly be subsumed in a thematised, linear narrative. This is one way of
understanding performance: that is to say, as theatre. But I would like to explore
the implications of the ‘performative’ in language in its specifically linguistico-
philosophical sense.2 As a point of departure (but one that will have become more
complicated by the end of this chapter) I refer to a handy distinction made by the
linguist, Roman Jakobson – the distinction between what he calls the ‘speech event’
and the ‘narrated event’ (Jakobson, 1990, p. 390). The ‘speech event’ is the situation
of address: the accent is on the speaker and auditors; the writer and the readers. It
has to do with the sites of response to any discourse (spoken, written, imaged). The
narrated event is the thematic content of the speech event – that which is spoken
about in the speech event. It is at the level of the narrated event that meaning is
most commonly assumed to inhere, but in this chapter, I focus on the meaningful
inflections of the speech event itself. With regard to the excerpts from Mandela’s
speeches, the question is therefore not exclusively, ‘what is Mandela talking about?’
– the question has to do with the antecedent fact that his speeches and writings talk
