Words create the social: How language changes society

Abstract

This paper looks at the potential of language to change social structures and conditions. I reconstruct Judith Butler’s concept of a language’s performativity and present recent examples which show the inherent potential of language and its effects on a society if people use their language in specific ways and therewith actively shape their social surroundings. I demonstrate how Butler uses Louis Althusser’s model of interpellation, John L. Austin’s theory of performative speech acts and Jacques Derridas concepts of iteration, différance and the event to formulate her own concept of language and society. It will become manifest that she can analytically include both stability and dynamics as characteristic elements of societies.Language as the constitutive element both for changes of social conditions and for their (temporal) stabilization is understood as an active means for performing these transformations and stabilizations. Thus, a genuine emancipatory and critical potential which can be conceptualized with Butler’s concept of performativity is inherent in language.