Edwards
Interesting quote by Edwards coming from his Rhetoric and Educational Discourse, he starts by quoting Derrida:
A Standard act depends as much upon the possibility of being repeated, and thus potentially of being mimed, cited, played, simulated, or in general ‘parasited’, since all these possibilities depend upon the possibility said to be opposed to it.
(Derrida 1988: 91-2)
“This implies that there is no substantial difference between, for example, promising on stage and promising in ‘real life’. Both are performances that the speaker/actor has witnessed and internalized as the ways other speakers/actors have of saying/doing a thing (promising), but which are realized as acts only in the performing or iterating of them. To put this simply, we are always acting, in both senses of the word, regardless of whether we have memorized our lines from a specific script for a specific play or, more generally, from ‘life’, from previous speech encounters. Our acting always relies on that script, the iterable or ‘always already’, a socially regulated pattern for our behaviour that is nonetheless located in situated and dynamically contingent contexts. Furthermore, speech acts embodied in figurative or metaphorical language are just as much speech acts with performative force as are those embodied in ‘serious’ or non-figurative language, even if they make work in different ways for different purposes and audiences.”