How to do things with words
por opmartinez
Austin presents a new notion in language with the introduction of the performative utterance. This kind utterance doesn’t describe an action like a constatative utterance, but indicates an action in itself. He gives some examples being the expression “I promise” the most referenced to in the text, what’s particular about this expression is that its corresponding action takes place spiritually no physically. That’s the first thing I found interesting, how can one study language in terms of the spiritual act that occurs when certain phrases are being uttered? Austin sort of answers this question when he continues to talk about the impossibility of studying performatives in a true/false basis. According to him this kind of utterances should be considered in terms of felicities or infelicities which occur when the set of “conditions” that surround the performatives in order for them work appropriately are successfully met or not, respectively.
Conditions like expressing the utterance within the boundaries of an accepted conventional procedure and having this done by the person who is conventionally entitled to perform this procedure. Every person who participates in the procedure must follow correctly and step by step its conventional rules and in some cases participants need also to have the adequate feelings and thoughts to go with a particular action. If these conditions are not met the action is then considered “hollow”. I don’t know if I have understood correctly the implications of Austin’s ideas, however, it appears as what seemed to be the introduction of notions that liberated language from the restrictiveness form with all these conditions it seems to be providing only with more bars to encage it. He transforms the true/false dichotomy into a right/wrong one.
In a related idea, Austin admits that every performative utterance that is based on a convention is naturally susceptible to infelicities and that there are many non performative utterances that may suffer the same infelicities, with that in mind it could be said that most (every?) utterances are speech acts and in that case there are more “unhappy” performatives than happy ones, right?
Finally, in reference to the performatives used in theater Austin says that these are also hollow and calls them “etiolations”, this is probably the same case of the ones used in literature. So how does this theory help us approach a literary text?
Olga says: 
Even though Austin admits that every performative utterance wihch is based on a convention is naturally susceptible to infelicities, we know Austin gave lots of restrictions–or we can say «felicity conditions» to assure the functioning of permatives, it seems like there are more possibilities for performatives to suffer infelicities, I’m a little confused about this question as well, but I think Austin was trying to illustrate the characteristic of utterances, it’s not a question about quantity, we could not assert that there must be more «unhappy» utterances than «happy» ones.
As to the performatives used in theater, on stage or in a poem, Austin said they are hollow, and took them as «non-serious» in terms of performatives, however, their inherent values could not be denied, Austin provided a method to analyse them from a peculiar perspective, and it won’t impede literary theory study.