How Not to Do Things with Words

I first used the word at a workshop on racism in higher education that took place at Leeds University in 2002. It popped right out of my mouth when I was asking a question. I am sure it came out like that because it gave expression to a sentiment that was being shared by many of us in the room. We were discussing how easy it was for universities to commit to anti-racism without doing anything that provided evidence of that commitment. Even saying this is saying something: it implies a commitment can be given in order to provide evidence of something. I will return to why and how evidence matters in due course. And the word that came to mind for an action that was followed through was non-performative. A commitment is often understood as a performative: it is describing or denoting something; a commitment commits. But what seemed to be the case was that commitments were makeable because they were doable: it seems you can make a commitment because commitments do commit institutions to a course of action. Commitments might even become a way of doing by appearing to do something. Understanding the role or function of institutional commitments was to understand how institutions do do things with words, or how institutions use words as a way of doing things. I often wonder if there is an instruction manual somewhere with this as an unofficial title: Diversity, or how to do things with words.The idea that not doing something could be an unofficial instruction manual is suggestive. Not doing is still an action; it might even be a technique that is perfected over time. The action being performed is just the action made explicit by the utterance. So a commitment is still doing even when it is committing something.How can doing be an action? Many actions might be necessary in order for to be done or for an attempt to transform to lead to a transformation of something. And the reproduction of an existing order might depend on the failure to modify that order. Reading through the papers for this special issue is like being given an object lesson in how much the reproduction of a world depends upon the containment of our efforts to transform worlds. We learn how easily diversity can be adopted by an institution as a word, or even as a motto of a city, as Shana Almeida explores in her analysis of Toronto, or as a style of leadership or management, as Mechthild Nagel discusses, with the implied intonation of diversity as civility, as getting on or getting along. We can, as Eike Marten does, tell the story of words like diversity as a story of usage as well as travel, how some words might be used more the more they imply has been overcome. Policies can be adopted, words can be uttered; decisions can be made, without anything really changing. Sometimes we refer to this as the lip service model of diversity. To use a word like is to reveal about institutional mechanics: how things are reproduced by the very appearance of being transformed.So, for me, using the term non-performativity was itself a performative utterance: I was doing something, or trying to do something, and just say something, about how institutions can reproduce themselves at the very moments they appear to be reproducing themselves: how diversity can be about how whiteness reappears, for instance. So it is important for me to state that I first used this word non-performativity before doing the empirical project on diversity work in higher education, which I draw on in my book On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012). And by talking to diversity practitioners, I began to think more explicitly about the consequences of non-performativity for our own work as diversity workers; whether we are employed as practitioners or academics or are both. If institutions do words to do things, then we have work to do, which often means work to do on these words - work to do with these words. …

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