By making reference to a category elaborated by John L. Austin… in the field of the philosophy of language, it can submitted that a convention, that convention which we have seen acting on the financial markets, is the fruit of a series of performative utterances, that is, utterances which do not describe a state of things but which immediately produce real facts. If we consider language to be not only an instrument used in institutional reality to describe facts, but also to create them, then in a world in which institutions like money, property, marriage, technologies, work itself, are all linguistic institutions, what molds our consciousness, language becomes at the same time an instrument of production of those same real facts. Facts are created by speaking them. “It is well known that John L. Austin defines as performative such utterances as ‘I take this woman to be my lawfully wedded wife,’ ‘I baptize this baby Luke,’ ‘I swear I’ll come to Rome,’ ‘I bet a thousand lire that Inter will win the championship,’ etc. The speaker does not describe an action (a wedding, a baptism, an oath, a wager), he does it. He does not speak about what he is doing, but he does something by speaking” (Virno, 2001).

John Searle sees in today’s money a demonstration of Austins theory of performative utterances…. When the U.S. Treasury prints on a twenty dollar bill, “This bill is legal tender for all public and private debts,” it is not merely describing a fact, it is, in reality, creating one. A performative utterance is one in which saying something makes that something true.