J.L. Austin's William James Lectures became How to Do Things with Words, posthumous, 1962. Performatives are not true or false; they are happy or unhappy, felicitous or botched: a wedding vow fails if the officiant lacks authority, a promise fails if insincere. Austin then dissolved his own distinction: statements too are acts, subject to felicity conditions, and every utterance carries locution, the saying, illocution, the doing in the saying, and perlocution, the effect on the hearer. Stating, he concluded, has no unique position among verdictives, exercitives, commissives, behabitives, and expositives.
Law and liturgy always ran on performatives: guilty ends the trial, I baptize you begins the member, mazel tov breaks the glass, case dismissed empties the courtroom. The magic traditions are the same technology unlicensed: the incantation is a performative without a licensed officiant, which is why the state and the church spent centuries distinguishing their performatives, sacraments, verdicts, from everyone else's, spells. Austin's five categories map almost perfectly onto legal Latin's vocabulary. The courtroom and the grimoire share a filing system.
The claim: civilization is the licensing regime for performatives, I pronounce you married works because the state deputized the officiant, and the affirmation industry sells unlicensed versions of the same mechanism, I am abundance as a self-deputized verdict; the words work identically on the speaker in both cases, which is the part the licensing regime prefers you not test. Verdict: Austin's felicity conditions actually support the reading, authority is what licenses the public spell, while sincerity licenses the private one. The archive's note: the wedding and the decree both rewire the speaker. Only one charges a fee. Ask who collects.
If saying can be doing, which of your sentences today were actions disguised as descriptions?