The secret and the performative

As I read J. L. Austin's "Constatives and Performatives" excerpt from How to Do Things with Words, I found myself distracted and thinking about another book that seemed to roll out a concept harking back to his question: "Can saying make it so?" (683). Rhonda Byrne's The Secret, plays with the concept of making things materialize through either word play or, more importantly, thought. Because of the book's positive message, the distraction was a welcome one; however, focus must be shifted back to Austin's writing. Would Austin consider the mentioned book to be chock full of "performative sentence[s]" aimed at inspiring action in thought (683). Austin indicates that perfomatives are derived from action, "[indicating] that the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action - it is not normally though of as just saying something" (683).

One of the take-away messages from Byrne's book is an age-old concept: ask and you shall receive. Is the act of asking something Austin would consider a performative? He says that "many performatives are contractual ("I bet") or declaratory ("I declare war") utterances" (683). Asking seems to be more of a question and less of declaratory statement, so this certainly blurs the line between the two. Yet, when Austin says that "The uttering of the words is, indeed, usually a, or even the, leading incident in the performance of the act [...]," it is possible to see the act of asking as performative. Asking for a bowl of ice cream, for instance, would usually be followed by an action to secure the possibility of getting what is asked for. In Byrne's book, that action is considered positive thought. Positivity does play a seemingly active role in the notion of getting what you ask for, so would the act of asking be the performative or does that actually rest on the thought that follows?