Performative Act
My apologies for my tardiness on this blog post. This exercise of discovering or explaining what a performative act was in class was very fun and intriguing. I noticed that I had thought of the same examples as some other people in class and had to quickly rethink about what I wanted to perform. I chose the symbol of a handshake. Shaking someone's hand could mean a million different things. It could be a job acceptance, a greeting, an introduction, a goodbye, or an establishment of receiving recognition. My performance of placing out my hand in front of someone is the action taking place waiting to receive the action of another hand to be accepting of the handshake. My action is mine alone; it is up to the person that I am performing the action to, to make up their mind of how to respond to me.
I was playing around with the idea of how would someone who does not understand the formality of a handshake would respond to me if I offered my hand out to them. They may think it's a high five, or some posed threat. I really enjoyed all the different examples of performative utterances such as the hand symbol from Star Trek "Live Long and Prosper", the words for bestowing a knight hood on someone, and also a simple apology being accepted.
http://youtu.be/_RgCbcT8eEU - Probably the funniest performative utterance I enjoy to watch. Claiming the "triple dog dare" trumps the "double dog dare" in this instance and seeing how the boys react to these few silly words makes me giggle.
I ran into the same problem with my blog. I like the fact that you chose something as simple yet complex as the handshake. Their is always that awkward moment of trying to figure out which form to use when meeting someone.
ReplyDeleteI love this! It's such a good example of something very simple that does and says something all at the same time. I also thought of the part in the movie "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" where Lucy holds out her hand for Mr. Tumnus to shake it, but he doesn't have a clue what that means or what she's trying to do. So he "shakes" it, but not in the traditional way that we think of shaking hands. He just sort of wiggles it because he's never heard of it and the concept just sort of baffles him! But if both people know what it means, then it can be very important or symbolic. Especially if it's two people shaking on an agreement or a promise. It can mean something very deep.
ReplyDeleteHere's a link to the clip from the movie. If you fast forward to 2:55, that's the part where they shake hands.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Yn8LN20-S0