Grasping at Performance through Burke

While reading Burke's "Rhetoric of Hitler's 'Battle'", I circled a section and wrote, "Is this performance?" to the side: "And the deployments of politics are, you might say, the charting of Hitler's private mind translated into the vocabulary of the nationalistic events. He says what he thought in terms of what parties did" (210). Instead of qualifying his rhetoric as thoughts, Hitler wrote them as if they were actions already bound to happen. I wish I had some sort of example from Mein Kampf to look at, but none of the excerpts provided appeared to touch on this (at least in a way that was obvious to me). 

I read a few different definitions of J.L. Austin's "performance" online, but an article on Wikipedia put me in mind most succinctly with this paragraph. What stood out to me most in the article was that Austin’s “performance” required causality. In order for a word to be performative, it must imply some sort of effect made possible by its utterance.

The article, too, defines Eve Sedgwick's concepts on "performance": "performative utterances can be 'transformative' performatives, which create an instant change of personal or environmental status, or 'promisory' performatives, which describe the world as it might be in the future." 

Upon its utterance, “I promise” implies some action will be performed in the future. The “I promise” is an action in that it causes an implication to become manifest (the effect), not the promised action. For example, let’s say that I promised to do the dishes. My act of saying “I promise to do the dishes” causes the possibility that I might do the dishes. It does not actually cause me to do the dishes. In other words, the “I promise” creates a space in which action can occur. I think this speaks most closely to Richards and Ogden’s language pyramid. The symbol causes the reference or idea to become present in a person’s mind. “I promise” causes the idea in the listener’s mind that an action could be possible.

Hitler’s Mein Kampf is a promisory action in that it “describes the world as it might be in the future.” Hitler presents a world, his own world, which does not match current society. The presentation of this yet unrealized world as being reality implies that it is possible for reality to become this. The idea of such a world being possible is manifested (effect) by the difference between Hitler’s presented world and actual society (cause). 


Derrida's concept of "differance" helps to make Mein Kampf performative. The text is the space in which Hitler's world exists, where the world of his mind exists. Actual reality is the reality perceived by the readers before reading Mein Kampf. Hitler doesn't acknowledge this perceived reality. He doesn't define his world in terms of something that can become possible in actual reality. His world has already become.  Hitler's ignorance of this perceived reality deconstructs the difference between actual politics of the time and his politics. To him, no difference exists. Thus, his style of writing encourages the reader to do the same as him, disregard the perceived difference. To see the world as he sees it, the reader (of the time) must pretend no such actual reality exists.