Introduction: Performativity, Media, Identities

J.L. Austin, who coined the term "performative" and founded the theory of speech acts, 1 as well as his immediate followers did not consider language as a medium functioning in a particular social and cultural environment.In spite of attempting to examine performative utterances with respect to their possible failuresdescribed, rather vaguely and unsystematically, as "infelicities" 2 -Austin abstracted away from their contexts.He also excluded fictional uses of language in literature, particularly onstage, calling them "parasitic" or "etiolations." 3Thus, the only criterion of the objectivity of his theory was a questionable claim of the truthfulness or falsity of the utterance and the real existence of its circumstances.Following Austin, John Searle tried to avoid the debatable moments in his approach and emphasized the functional aspect of performatives, their dependence on the "rules of use," claiming that "meaning is a matter of rules of use."In his view, performativity was reduced to "a rule-governed form of behaviour."The limited number of rules (typical of structuralist notions of systems) was divided into "regulative" and "constitutive," the latter having the 1