Felicity/Infelicities

In Austin's theory, any speech act can be assessed as either 'felicitous' or 'infelicitous'. To be considered 'felicitous' or ‘happy’, a speech act is made successfully: it is appropriate to the entire speech situation it is uttered within and generates the illocutionary force necessary to achieve the act it seeks to perform. In attending to the performative as distinct from the constative, unable to assess such statements in their isolated utterance by a measure of truth or falsity, but still concerned for the assessment of their validity, Austin maps a primary range of infelicities that can trouble a speech act: ways in which a performative utterance can fail to act. Austin tabulates six rules governing the felicity of a performative as such:

(A.1) There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances, and further,

(A.2) the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked.

(B.1) The Procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and

(B.2) completely.

(y.1) Where, as often, the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain thoughts or feelings, or for the inauguration of certain consequential conduct on the part of the participant, then a person participating in and so invoking the procedure must in fact have those thoughts or feelings, and the participants must intend so to conduct themselves, and further

(y.2) must actually so conduct themselves subsequently

If all of these conditions are met then a performative can be said to be successful, ‘happy’ or ‘felicitous’, in Austin’s preferred terminology. It need only fail to achieve one of these conditions, suffer one of these ‘infelicities’ to be ‘infelicitous’ or ‘unhappy’. The first four rules marked from A.1 to B.2 contain the conventional, cultural procedures necessary for the accomplishment of the performance. A breach of these rules Austin terms ‘misfires’, and an infelicity of this type will cause a performative to fail. If I say “I do” in a conventional catholic marriage ceremony but my wife is a goat and the priest only has the authority of a paperboy, while far from conventional my performance may satisfy rule A.1 though it spectacularly fails the conditions of A.2. As a result my performative utterance fails, and I cannot say I have successfully married. Failures of these first four rules are to be distinguished from the final two, marked by the greek letter ‘y’. Breaches of these rules to not result in the failure of the performative, but are infelicities of a different kind, which Austin terms ‘''abuses’. ''In these instances the performative has not failed to take place, what we have instead is something like a failure of intention in y1 and of accomplishment in y2. These infelicities do not result in a void or invalid performance, they do not fail to act. If I promise to pay a bet, without ever intending to keep that promise, the promise can still be said to have been made, the promise is performed, whether taken seriously or not. The truth of the statement of the bet is not in question, what concerns us here is the felicity of the performative utterance.