Back around 1980 a student friend Gary Biester dropped by my house to present me with a gift of the Bruce Springsteen album “The River.” I had not heard of “The Boss” so I was interested to explore whatever it was that Gary thought was so special about him and his music. I very soon became a devoted fan of Bruce and his unique musical style. As it turned out, the lead song on the “The River” album soon became my favorite of Bruce’s vast and diverse repertoire.
Living in the Philadelphia area I soon realized that I was surrounded by a very large number of devoted fans, including many of my students. The raw power of both Bruce’s sound, together with his insights into the frustrations of the working-class experience in contemporary America, made it clear that he was a genuine phenomenon that was here to stay. His own personal story gives clear testimony to the authenticity of his vision and music. Forty-five years later Bruce’s music is still an enormous cultural force in our society.
The details of his early struggle to learn how to play and sing, of how he had to overcome his father’s disdain for his dreams and talent, and his evolvement into voice for strong ethical and political values, have all contributed to the current “Boss’s” popularity and influence. Springsteen’s songs, such as “Born to Run”, “The River”, “Born in the USA”, and “Independence Day”, have all found their way into the minds and hearts of at least two, if not three American generations, and there seems to be no end in sight to his popularity.
The media have long been full of details about Springsteen’s youth and adult life, and I will not try to rehearse such things here. What I can do is share what his songs have come to mean to me as a long-time adult enthusiastic fan. His life and lyrics resonate with my own adolescent struggles with trying to find out who I was and what I should become. A confusing family life, a seeming lack of any special talent, struggles with school and teenage romance, and finally the challenges of a complex adult are as universal as they are unique for everyone.
In particular, Bruce’s feelings and insights concerning teenage romance strike me as ever so authentic and poignant. Teenage love is all so important and real, yet so universal and mostly transitory. The feelings of a need to “escape”, to “run” from it all sometimes crowd out whatever else is on one’s radar. And then, in addition to school, which hardly gets first billing in a teenager’s consciousness, there is work. Bruce often sings about “putting; down the asphalt” and not being able to land or keep a job. No wonder kids sometime feel as though they were “born to run”. Going “down to the river” provides some temporary relief.
The other night Mari and I watched a film titled “Blinded by The Light” which tells the story of a young Pakistani boy living in England who in the midst of his teenage struggles with school, other kids, and his own traditionalist father discovers Bruce’s his music and follows it in fulfilling his own dream to be a writer. It’s a fun if painful story, but the boy becomes a young man as he discovers himself and his calling. He tries hard to follow in Springsteen’s footsteps and discovers himself in the process. Frequently Bruce’s lyrics literally help him with his own life struggles. It’s an interesting and fun flick, full of “The Boss’s” music and British pop-culture.
As a matter of fact, it is revealed after the film is over that the boy the story is about actually got to know Springsteen and collaborated with him in the making of this very film. Quite an interesting and unique story. We found it as delightful as it was informative. And, of course, the highpoint of the film is Mr. Springsteen’s music which underscores the plot. I recommend the film to all and any of “The Boss’s” fans. It’s not actually about him, and yet it really is!

Back in the 1950s a philosopher named John L. Austin taught at Oxford University and has become famous for his detailed analytical examination of the later philosophy of one Ludwig Wittgenstein. However, rather than engage in broad generalizations about the importance of ordinary language in sorting out the various philosophical puzzles to which traditional theorizing had led traditional thinkers, Austin devoted himself to the careful analysis of the patterns and logic of everyday speech by way of helping the fly, to use Wittgenstein’s image, “find the way out of the fly bottle” (a device used before fly-paper).
Austin’s little book How to Do Things with Words is an excellent example of linguistic philosophy at its best, although it is painfully detailed and a bit tedious. What I wish to focus on here is his analysis of what he called “performative utterances”, those in which one is actually ACCOMPLISHING’ a deed in addition to uttering a sentence. We are all familiar with the usual grammatical distinctions between declarative statements and their various partners, such as questions and exclamations, etc. What Austin “discovered” are what he called “performatives”, that is, statements in which the speaker actually performs another linguistic act when speaking, an act in addition to uttering the words of his or her statement.
It is an actual fact that prior to Austin’s analysis no philosopher seems to have noticed such “performative utterances”. In this sense it is then appropriate to say that he “discovered” them. His point was that in certain instances a speaker may well accomplish a deed in addition to that of making a statement or uttering a proposition. In baseball, for instance, when the umpire utters the words “Strike one” he is not only giving a description of where he believes the pitcher’s ball was in relation to the home plate, but he is in addition performing the act of declaring that the pitcher has thrown a “strike”. He is not merely describing where the ball was in relation to the home plate, but he is announcing that the pitcher has thrown a “strike” against the batter. If it is the third strike, the batter is “out”.
To take another example, when I say “I am sorry” I am not only saying those words, but I am, as a matter of fact, performing the act of apologizing. Or again, when I, as an ordained Minister, utter the words “I pronounce you husband and wife” in the proper circumstances I am “performing” the act of actually marrying two people in addition to uttering those words. I am making a statement AND I am marrying two people. Here, then, is a speech act in which a speaker actually performs a “social act” as well as a linguistic one. Thus, Austin has shown us “how to do things with words” and he has discovered this particular common, yet extremely important, aspect of the everyday speech. At least, no other thinker seems ever to have been given credit for doing so.
In addition to being an important discovery about a very significant aspect of human linguistic activity, Austin’s insight here underscores the broader fact that language is a “many splendored thing” in and of itself. It is, indeed, the very thing the later Wittgenstein worked so hard to bring to the fore. At the very beginning of his major work, Philosophical Investigations, he speculated about the many different ways the meaning of one word utterance, such as “March”, can be construed. First, as an answer to a question about which month we are in, or as an order to a group of soldiers on the parade ground, etc. Context is everything.
I am reminded here of the sort of muddles we linguistic people get ourselves into when we fail to properly read the context of our utterances. Think of the depth of confusion perpetrated by Lou Costello and Bud Abbott in their famous skit about the question “Who’s on First?” Is “who” a person or the first word of a question? Or of the difficulties ensuing from my subtle directive to my ten-year-old son that “The door is open”, which he insisted on interpreting as an observation rather than as a directive to go shut the door he had left open. Language is, indeed, a many splendored thing! And a rather slippery thing, as well.