Sign, Design, Communication - Principia Designae: Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design - page 34

Derrida claims Austin that he appears to consider speech acts only as acts of
so-called ordinary communication so that he seeks to the limit of the context where
the original, intended, serious and normal, but not abnormal or parasitic meaning
will be expressed and this force will be worked. Austin says that “a performative
utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor
on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy” (Derrida 1990 ,
p. 16, Austin 1962 , pp. 21-22). In those cases, language is used “not seriously”. The
proper force of utterance occurs under the presence of a proper context or condition.
Derrida ask; “could a performative utterance succeed ... if the formula I
pronounce in order to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not
identifiable as conforming with an iterable model, if it were not then identifiable
in some way as a 'citation?'” (Derrida 1988 , p. 18). Forgery of the signature is
always possible; the possibility of transgression is always inscribed in speech acts.
Derrida points out that even though Austin recognizes the possibilities of the risk or
exposure to infelicities, he does not ponder a possible risk, and considers solely the
context and the conventionality constituting the context and aims the presence of a
total context to speech act. Austin seems also to share the tradition of the meta-
physics of the presence.
At the same time, Derrida appreciates Austin: “Austin's notions of illocution and
perlocution do not designate the transference or passage of a thought-content, but,
in some way, the communication of an original movement” as “an operation and the
production of an effect”. Performative communication “would be tantamount to
communicating a force through the impetus [impulsion] of a mark”. A performative
utterance “does not describe something that exists outside of language and prior to
it. It produces or transforms a situation, it effects” (Derrida 1988 , p. 13).
Of course, a sign or a mark is involved to iterability as a primary condition, while
it gives rise to so-called communication as a secondary effect; an effect is subor-
dinated to a cause, emerging from the system but never controlling the whole
system. The intention of the design, its function or intended purpose (e.g., to
solve a problem) and its cause or the motive of the design (e.g., social, political,
technological demands), are, therefore, secondary effects for the design.
As a secondary effect, any utterance has a force to build relations between
people. By saying “I promise,” a social relation is built up and responsibility to
the utterance will occur. Austin says that conventions constituting the context
support it. However, if the utterance has an iterable character and the context can
be variable, and the utterance works without conventions, the responsibility of the
speaker is limited because he or she cannot control every variable.
Design also seems to be performative. Artistic design, as well as industrial
design and engineering design, does not merely describe a fact. Its function has
the power to produce or transform a situation. In other words, the design has some
influence in forcing us to act, produce, or communicate—it reifies social commu-
nication and, because of agreement during the development phase, ensures that the
design and communication will probably circulate. However, the social communi-
cation reveals itself to us only in a familiar form (e.g., as a social or technological
demand). “What is familiarly known is not properly known, just for the reason that