Austin’s early distinction between the constative and the performative is useful for thinking about how we might begin to distinguish a performative paradigm from the qualitative and quantitative paradigms and make an alternative “truth claim”. While constative utterances and statements establish a correspondence between the description or modelling of the world and something in the world, performative utterances productions do something in the world. Constative statements and descriptions are the propositional or discursive statements of qualitative and quantitative research. Quantitative and qualitative research methodologies rely on constative statements or utterance to establish truth claims. Here truth is seen as correspondence. In other words: they are representationalist.
Performativity offers an alternative model, one that is no longer grounded in the truth as correspondence, but sets up a different paradigm altogether. Here I propose to return to the foundational understanding of performativity. Firstly, we have established that the performative model of language is not based on the correspondence between a statement and the facts of the situation, but the utterance/production is actually already part of the facts. The performative act doesn’t describe something, but rather it does something in the world. This “something” has the power to transform the world.
Secondly we have identified that the underlying principle of performativity is iterability, and a priori iterability is subject to the dynamics of différance. Thus good performances, bad performances, playful performances and the excessive performances are all generative of difference. Thought in terms of différance, performative research necessarily begins to bud and grow in a disorderly fashion. While operating against the backdrop of convention, re-iteration and citation produce repetition with difference, rather than repetition of the same. According to this principle, as I have argued elsewhere, even representation is mutable.33