[-empyre-] Vernacular languages can persuade us but not execute actions

[marcus bastos <bastos.marcus@gmail.com>]

<<<<Vernacular languages can persuade us but not execute actions.>>
but: Is it certainly so? Could you describe how?

I like the idea of 'performatives', developed by Austin in the book
"Quand dit c´est faire". He says that the promise (made by the lover),
as well as the conviction (declared by the judge), are examples of
"words" that execute actions. For Austin, when the judge declares
somene guilty, those are not mere words, but also instructions for the
repressive instances of society to put the guilty one away. In other
words, they are the program for the execution of that order.
(Deleuze goes a lot into that on his critique of linguistic postulates
I mentioned before; a similar mechanism is described by Foucault, when
he shows how the 'Stultifera navis' was a device of exclusion)

<<It seems to me that they don't have precedents in our cultural traditions.>>
I agree with that!!!! Of course the idea of a performative instance in
laguage is very different from the processes of coding executable
texts. I don´t want to imply, with the prior comments, that there´s
nothing different about digital texts, I just want to lean a bit more
about what differences you´d point as relevant...