Question: Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale" in *The Canterbury Tales* is a weird story about an older Miller, his young, beautiful wife who sleeps with a young Oxford student, and an admiring young clergyman involved in a strange sexual relationship. In "A Whiter Shade of Pale", is the miller's tale a reference to the Miller's Tale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales?

Answer: 
Culler's point here (well, Austin's point) is that a promise is performative: the act of saying "I promise" itself constitutes the promise. If I make a promise without intending to keep it, I have nevertheless made a promise. So *whatever my intentions*, saying "I promise" means I have promised.

For example: If, under conventionally appropriate conditions, I say: "I promise that on February 1, I will repay you the $100 I owe you," I have made a promise. Even if I keep my fingers crossed behind my back while saying those words. My intention is irrelevant. And if on February 1 I tell you, "No, I never intended to repay you; the promise was just words," I am *still breaking my promise*. I cannot claim that I never *really* promised to repay you simply because I never *truly* intended to do so. The promise is not merely an outward form of words that represents or misrepresents my inner intentions; the act of saying "I promise" *is* the promise, whatever my intentions.

So: for certain speech acts, such as promising (or apologizing, or making a bet), my intentions are irrelevant. It isn't so much that I make the promise "without intending to"; it's that my saying "I promise" constitutes the promise, whatever my intentions may have been when I said that.

(As an aside: my then four year old niece, who was just beginning to learn to read, saw me reading Austin's *How to Do Things with Words* and remarked, "I know how to do things with words! You spell them!")
It seems that Austin is tending towards a contractual theory of speech, rather than performative. After all, if I sign a contract, then it matters not one whit if I was signing it whilst crossing my fingers behind my back or making faces to signify what I really thought of the contract. The contract is signed and that is that. If I tried to contest it in court, then the court would throw out the case unless I could prove that *false representations* were made by the other party, or that I was *forced* to sign against my will. In which case, the court would quite rightly throw the contract out of court, and so we see quite directly intentions matter.

[Performative speech](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performative_utterance), is speech that aren't prescribed a truth value. In fact, Austin:

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> (1) Performative utterances are not true or false, that is, not truth-evaluable; instead when something is wrong with them then they are "unhappy", while if nothing is wrong they are "happy".
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> (2) The uttering of a performative is, or is part of, the doing of a certain kind of action (Austin later deals with them under the name illocutionary acts), the performance of which, again, would not normally be described as just "saying" or "describing" something
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Thus Cullers should describe what he terms 'performative' as an 'illocutionary act' and not performative per se. As for the performative aspect of 'promise', a highly pertinent exchange is recorded in an essay at the Nobel Prize for Literature site between Tagore and Gandhi (and which, incidently Tagore won for is book of poems, *Gitanjali* in 1913):

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> On one occasion when Mahatma Gandhi visited Tagore’s school at Santiniketan, a young woman got him to sign her autograph book. Gandhi wrote: “Never make a promise in haste. Having once made it fulfill it at the cost of your life.” When he saw this entry, Tagore became agitated. He wrote in the same book a short poem in Bengali to the effect that no one can be made “a prisoner forever with a chain of clay.” He went on to conclude in English, possibly so that Gandhi could read it too, “Fling away your promise if it is found to be wrong.”
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