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Wikipedia

Performativity

Performativity is the concept that language can function as a form of social action and have the effect of change.[1] The concept has multiple applications in diverse fields such as anthropology, social and cultural geography, economics, gender studies (social construction of gender), law, linguistics, performance studies, history, management studies and philosophy.

The concept is first described by philosopher of language John L. Austin when he referred to a specific capacity: the capacity of speech and communication to act or to consummate an action. Austin differentiated this from constative language, which he defined as descriptive language that can be "evaluated as true or false". Common examples of performative language are making promises, betting, performing a wedding ceremony, an umpire calling a foul, or a judge pronouncing a verdict.[1]

Influenced by Austin, gender studies philosopher Judith Butler argued that gender is socially constructed through commonplace speech acts and nonverbal communication that are performative, in that they serve to define and maintain identities.[2] This view of performativity reverses the idea that a person's identity is the source of their secondary actions (speech, gestures). Instead, it views actions, behaviors, and gestures as both the result of an individual's identity as well as a source that contributes to the formation of one's identity which is continuously being redefined through speech acts and symbolic communication.[1] This view was also influenced by philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser.[3]

Defining performance edit

Performance is a bodily practice that produces meaning. It is the presentation or 're-actualization' of symbolic systems through living bodies as well as lifeless mediating objects, such as architecture.[4] In the academic field, as opposed to the domain of the performing arts, the concept of performance is generally used to highlight dynamic interactions between social actors or between a social actor and their immediate environment.

Performance is an equivocal concept and for the purpose of analysis it is useful to distinguish between two senses of 'performance'. In the more formal sense, performance refers to a framed event. Performance in this sense is an enactment out of convention and tradition. Founder of the discipline of performance studies Richard Schechner dubs this category 'is-performance'.[5] In a weaker sense, performance refers to the informal scenarios of daily life, suggesting that everyday practices are 'performed'. Schechner called this the 'as-performance'.[5] Generally the performative turn is concerned with the latter, although the two senses of performance should be seen as ends of a spectrum rather than distinct categories.[5]

History edit

The performative turn is a paradigmatic shift in the humanities and social sciences that affected such disciplines as anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, ethnography, history and the relatively young discipline of performance studies. Previously used as a metaphor for theatricality, performance is now often employed as a heuristic principle to understand human behaviour. The assumption is that all human practices are 'performed', so that any action at whatever moment or location can be seen as a public presentation of the self. This methodological approach entered the social sciences and humanities in the 1990s but is rooted in the 1940s and 1950s. Underlying the performative turn was the need to conceptualize how human practices relate to their contexts in a way that went beyond the traditional sociological methods that did not problematize representation. Instead of focusing solely on given symbolic structures and texts, scholars stress the active, social construction of reality as well as the way that individual behaviour is determined by the context in which it occurs. Performance functions both as a metaphor and an analytical tool and thus provides a perspective for framing and analysing social and cultural phenomena.

Origins edit

The origins of the performative turn can be traced back to two strands of theorizing about performance as a social category that surfaced in the 1940s and 1950s. The first strand is anthropological in origin and may be labelled the dramaturgical model. Kenneth Burke (1945) expounded a 'dramatistic approach' to analyse the motives underlying such phenomena as communicative actions and the history of philosophy. Anthropologist Victor Turner focussed on cultural expression in staged theatre and ritual. In his highly influential The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Erving Goffman emphasized the link between social life and performance by stating that 'the theatre of performances is in public acts'. Within the performative turn, the dramaturgical model evolved from the classical concept of 'society as theatre' into a broader category that considers all culture as performance.

The second strand of theory concerns a development in the philosophy of language launched by John Austin in the 1950s. In How to do things with words[6] he introduced the concept of the 'performative utterance', opposing the prevalent principle that declarative sentences are always statements that can be either true or false. Instead he argued that 'to say something is to do something'.[7] In the 1960s John Searle extended this concept to the broader field of speech act theory, where due attention is paid to the use and function of language. In the 1970s Searle engaged in polemics with postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida, about the determinability of context and the nature of authorial intentions in a performative text.

J. L. Austin edit

The term derives from the founding work in speech act theory by ordinary language philosopher J. L. Austin. In the 1950s, Austin gave the name performative utterances to situations where saying something was doing something, rather than simply reporting on or describing reality. The paradigmatic case here is speaking the words "I do".[8] Austin did not use the word performativity.

Breaking with analytic philosophy, Austin argued in How to Do Things With Words that a "performative utterance" cannot be said to be either true or false as a constative utterance might be: it can only be judged either "happy" or "infelicitous" depending upon whether the conditions required for its success have been met. In this sense, performativity is a function of the pragmatics of language. Having shown that all utterances perform actions, even apparently constative ones, Austin famously discarded the distinction between "performative" and "constative" utterances halfway through the lecture series that became the book and replaced it with a three-level framework:

  • locution (the actual words spoken, that which the linguists and linguistic philosophers of the day were mostly interested in analyzing)
  • illocutionary force (what the speaker is attempting to do in uttering the locution)
  • perlocutionary effect (the actual effect the speaker actually has on the interlocutor by uttering the locution)

For example, if a speech act is an attempt to distract someone, the illocutionary force is the attempt to distract and the perlocutionary effect is the actual distraction caused by the speech act in the interlocutor.

Influence of Austin edit

Austin's account of performativity has been subject to extensive discussion in philosophy, literature, and beyond. Jacques Derrida, Shoshana Felman, Judith Butler, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick are among the scholars who have elaborated upon and contested aspects of Austin's account from the vantage point of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, and queer theory. Particularly in the work of feminists and queer theorists, performativity has played an important role in discussions of social change (Oliver 2003).

The concept of performativity has also been used in science and technology studies and in economic sociology. Andrew Pickering has proposed to shift from a "representational idiom" to a "performative idiom" in the study of science. Michel Callon has proposed to study the performative aspects of economics, i.e. the extent to which economic science plays an important role not only in describing markets and economies, but also in framing them. Karen Barad has argued that science and technology studies deemphasize the performativity of language in order to explore the performativity of matter (Barad 2003).

Other uses of the notion of performativity in the social sciences include the daily behavior (or performance) of individuals based on social norms or habits. Philosopher and feminist theorist Judith Butler has used the concept of performativity in their analysis of gender development, as well as in analysis of political speech. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes queer performativity as an ongoing project for transforming the way we may define—and break—boundaries to identity. Through her suggestion that shame is a potentially performative and transformational emotion, Sedgwick has also linked queer performativity to affect theory. Also innovative in Sedgwick's discussion of the performative is what she calls periperformativity (2003: 67–91), which is effectively the group contribution to the success or failure of a speech act.

Postmodernism edit

The performative turn is anchored in the broader cultural development of postmodernism. An influential current in modern thought, postmodernism is a radical reappraisal of the assumed certainty and objectivity of scientific efforts to represent and explain reality.
Postmodern scholars argue that society itself both defines and constructs reality through experience, representation and performance. From the 1970s onwards, the concept of performance was integrated into a variety of theories in the humanities and social sciences, such as phenomenology, critical theory (the Frankfurt school), semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, deconstructionism and feminism.[4] The conceptual shift became manifest in a methodology oriented towards culture as a dynamic phenomenon as well as in the focus on subjects of study that were neglected before, such as everyday life. For scholars, the concept of performance is a means to come to grips with human agency and to better understand the way social life is constructed.

Judith Butler edit

Philosopher and feminist theorist Judith Butler offered a new, more Continental (specifically, Foucauldian) reading of the notion of performativity, which has its roots in linguistics and philosophy of language. They describe performativity as "that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains."[9] They have largely used this concept in their analysis of gender development.[10]

The concept places emphasis on the manners by which identity is passed or brought to life through discourse. Performative acts are types of authoritative speech. This can only happen and be enforced through the law or norms of the society. These statements, just by speaking them, carry out a certain action and exhibit a certain level of power. Examples of these types of statements are declarations of ownership, baptisms, inaugurations, and legal sentences. Something that is key to performativity is repetition.[11] The statements are not singular in nature or use and must be used consistently in order to exert power.[12]

Performance theory and gender perspectives edit

Butler explains gender as an act. An act that people come to perform in the mode of belief which has been rehearsed much like a script. It is further asserted that people make a reality through repetition (just as actors who make a script). Butler sees gender not as an expression of what one is, rather as something that one does. Furthermore, they see it not as a social imposition on a gender neutral body, but rather as a mode of "self-making" through which subjects become socially intelligible. According to Butler's theory, homosexuality and heterosexuality are not fixed categories. For Butler, a person is merely in a condition of "doing straightness" or "doing queerness".[13]

"For Butler, the distinction between the personal and the political or between private and public is itself a fiction designed to support an oppressive status quo: our most personal acts are, in fact, continually being scripted by hegemonic social conventions and ideologies".[14]

Theoretical criticisms edit

Several criticisms have been raised regarding Butler's concept of performativity. The first is that the theory is individual in nature and does not take into consideration such factors as the space within which the performance occurs, the others involved, and how others might see or interpret what they witness. Also overlooked are the unplanned effects of the performance act and the contingencies surrounding it.[13]

Another criticism is that Butler is not clear about the concept of subject. It has been said that in Butler's writings, the subject sometimes only exists tentatively, sometimes possesses a "real" existence, and other times is socially active. Also, some observe that the theory might be better suited to literary analysis as opposed to social theory.[15]

Others criticize Butler for taking ethnomethodological and symbolic interactionist sociological analyses of gender and merely reinventing them in the concept of performativity.[16][17] For example, A. I. Green[17] argues that the work of Kessler and McKenna (1978) and West and Zimmerman (1987) builds directly from Garfinkel (1967) and Goffman (1959) to deconstruct gender into moments of attribution and iteration in a continual social process of "doing" masculinity and femininity in the performative interval. These latter works are premised on the notion that gender does not precede but, rather, follows from practice, instantiated in micro-interaction. Butler builds off of this notion of gender's constructed nature to enhance the frames of analysis for recognizing and understanding marginalized and oppressed identities and groups.

Jean-François Lyotard edit

In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979, English translation 1986), philosopher and cultural theorist Jean-François Lyotard defined performativity as the defining mode of legitimation of postmodern knowledge and social bonds, that is, power.[18] In contrast to the legitimation of modern knowledge through such grand narratives as Progress, Revolution, and Liberation, performativity operates by system optimization or the calculation of input and outputs. In a footnote, Lyotard aligns performativity with Austin's concept of performative speech act. Postmodern knowledge must not only report: it must do something and do it efficiently by maximizing input/output ratios.

Lyotard uses Wittgenstein's notion of language games to theorize how performativity governs the articulation, funding, and conduct of contemporary research and education, arguing that at bottom it involves the threat of terror: "be operational (that is commensurable) or disappear" (xxiv). While Lyotard is highly critical of performativity, he notes that it calls on researchers to explain not only the worth of their work but also the worth of that worth.

Lyotard associated performativity with the rise of digital computers in the post-World War II period. In Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, historian Tony Judt cites Lyotard to argue that the Left has largely abandoned revolutionary politics for human rights advocacy. The widespread adoption of performance reviews, organizational assessments, and learning outcomes by different social institutions worldwide has led social researchers to theorize "audit culture" and "global performativity".

Against performativity and Jurgen Habermas' call for consensus, Lyotard argued for legitimation by paralogy, or the destabilizing, often paradoxical, introduction of difference into language games.

Jacques Derrida edit

Philosopher Jacques Derrida drew on Austin's theory of performative speech act while deconstructing its logocentric and phonocentric premises and reinscribing it within the operations of generalized writing. In contrast to structuralism's focus on linguistic form, Austin had introduced the force of speech acts, which Derrida aligns with Nietzsche's insights on language.

In "Signature, Event, Context," Derrida focused on Austin's privileging of speech and the accompanying presumptions of the presence of a speaker ("signature") and the bounding of a performative's force by an act or a context. In a passage that would become a touchstone of poststructuralist thought, Derrida stresses the citationality or iterability of any and all signs.

Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the current sense of this opposition), in a small or large unit, can be cited, put between quotation marks; in doing so it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. This does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchorage [ancrage]. This citationality, this duplication or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is neither an accident nor an anomaly, it is that (normal/abnormal) without which a mark could not even have a function called "normal." What would a mark be that could not be cited? Or one whose origins would not get lost along the way?[19]

Derrida's stress on the citational dimension of performativity would be taken up by Judith Butler and other theorists. While he addressed the performativity of individual subject formation, Derrida also raised such questions as whether we can mark when the event of the Russian revolution went awry, thus scaling up the field of performativity to historical dimensions.

John Searle's reformulation edit

In A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts, John Searle takes up and reformulates the ideas of his colleague J. L. Austin.[20] Though Searle largely supports and agrees with Austin's theory of speech acts, he has a number of critiques, which he outlines: "In sum, there are (at least) six related difficulties with Austin's taxonomy; in ascending order of importance: there is a persistent confusion between verbs and acts, not all the verbs are illocutionary verbs, there is too much overlap of the categories, too much heterogeneity within the categories, many of the verbs listed in the categories don't satisfy the definition given for the category and, most important, there is no consistent principle of classification."[21]

His last key departure from Austin lies in Searle's claim that four of his universal 'acts' do not need 'extra-linguistic' contexts to succeed.[22] As opposed to Austin who thinks all illocutionary acts need extra-linguistic institutions, Searle disregards the necessity of context and replaces it with the "rules of language".[22]

Elaborations and related concepts edit

The concept of performance has been developed by such scholars as Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, Erving Goffman, John Austin, John Searle, Pierre Bourdieu, Stern and Henderson, and Judith Butler.

Performance studies edit

Performance studies emerged through the work of, among others, theatre director and scholar Richard Schechner, who applied the notion of performance to human behaviour beyond the performing arts. His interpretation of performance as non-artistic yet expressive social behaviour and his collaboration in 1985 with anthropologist Victor Turner led to the beginning of performance studies as a separate discipline. Schechner defines performance as 'restored behaviour', to emphasize the symbolic and coded aspects of culture.[23] Schechner understands performance as a continuum. Not everything is meant to be a performance, but everything, from performing arts to politics and economics, can be studied as performance.[5]

Performativity edit

A related concept that emphasizes the political aspect of performance and its exercise of power is performativity. It is associated with philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler. It is an anti-essentialist theory of subjectivity in which a performance of the self is repeated and dependent upon a social audience. In this way, these unfixed and precarious performances come to have the appearance of substance and continuity. A key theoretical point that was most radical in regards to theories of subjectivity and performance is that there is no performer behind the performance. Butler derived this idea from Nietzsche's concept of "no doer behind the deed." This is to say that there is no self before the performance of the self, but rather that the performance has constitutive powers. This is how categories of the self for Judith Butler, such as gender, are seen as something that one "does," rather than something one "is."

Habitus edit

In the 1970s, Pierre Bourdieu introduced the concept of 'habitus' or regulated improvisation, in a reaction against the structuralist notion of culture as a system of rules (Bourdieu 1972). Culture in his perspective undergoes a shift from 'a productive to a reproductive social order in which simulations and models constitute the world so that the distinction between real and appearance becomes erased'.[24] Though Bourdieu himself does not often employ the term 'performance', the notion of the bodily habitus as a formative site has been a source of inspiration for performance theorists.

Occasionalism edit

The cultural historian Peter Burke suggested using the term 'occasionalism' to stress the implication of the idea of performance that '[...] on different occasions or in different situations the same person behaves in different ways'.[25]

Non-representational theory edit

Within the social sciences and humanities, an interdisciplinary strand that has contributed to the performative turn is non-representational theory. It is a 'theory of practices' that focuses on repetitive ways of expression, such as speech and gestures. As opposed to representational theory, it argues that human conduct is a result of linguistic interplay rather than of codes and symbols that are consciously planned. Non-representational theory interprets actions and events, such as dance or theatre, as actualisations of knowledge. It also intends to shift the focus away from the technical aspects of representation, to the practice itself.[26]

Various applications edit

Performance offers a tremendous interdisciplinary archive of social practices. It offers methods to study such phenomena as body art, ecological theatre, multimedia performance and other kinds of performance arts.[27]

Performance also provides a new registry of kinaesthetic effects, enabling a more conscientious observation of the moving body. The changing experience of movement, for example as a result of new technologies, has become an important subject of research.[28]

Moreover, the performative turn has helped scholars to develop an awareness of the relations between everyday life and stage performances. For example, at conferences and lectures, on the street and in other places where people speak in public, performers tend to use techniques derived from the world of theatre and dance.[29]

Performance allows us to study nature and other apparently 'immovable' and 'objectified' elements of the human environment (e.g. architecture) as active agents, rather than only as passive objects. Thus, in recent decades environmental scholars have acknowledged the existence of a fluid interaction between man and nature.

The performative turn has provided additional tools to study everyday life. A household for example may be considered as a performance, in which the relation between wife and husband is a role play between two actors.

Economics and finance edit

In economics, the "performativity thesis" is the claim that the assumptions and models used by professionals and popularizers affect the phenomena they purport to describe; bringing the world more into line with theory.[30][31] It also refers, more largely, to the idea of economic reality as a ceaselessly provoked reality and of things such as performance indicators, valuation formulas, consumer tests, stock prices or financial contracts constituting what they refer to.[32] This theory was developed by Michel Callon in The Laws of the Markets, before being further developed in Do Economists Make Markets edited by Donald Angus MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa and Lucia Siu, and in Enacting Dismal Science edited by Ivan Boldyrev and Ekaterina Svetlova.[33][34] The most important work in the field is that of Donald MacKenzie and Yuval Millo[35][36] on the social construction of financial markets. In a seminal article, they showed that the option pricing theory called BSM (Black-Scholes-Merton) has been successful empirically not because of the discovery of preexisting price regularities, but because participants used it to set option prices, so that it made itself true.

The thesis of performativity of economics has been extensively criticized by Nicolas Brisset in Economics and Performativity.[37] Brisset defends the idea that the notion of performativity used by Callonian and Latourian sociologists leads to an overly relativistic view of the social world. Drawing on the work of John Austin and David Lewis, Brisset theorizes the idea of limits to performativity. To do this, Brisset considers that a theory, in order to be "performative", must become a convention. This requires conditions to be met. To take a convention status, a theory will have to:

  • Provide social actors with a representation of their social world allowing them to choose among several actions ("Empiricity" condition);
  • Indicate an option considered relevant when the agreement is generalised ("Self-fulfilling" condition);
  • Be compatible with all the conventions constituting the social environment ("Coherency" condition);[38]

Based on this framework, Brisset criticized the seminal work of MacKenzie and Millo on the performativity of the Black-Scholes-Merton financial model.[39] Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Brisset also uses the notion of Speech Act to study economic models and their use in political power relations.[40]

MacKenzie's approach was also criticized by Uskali Maki for not using the concept of performativity in accordance with Austin's formulation.[41] This point gave rise to a debate in economic philosophy.[42][43]

Management studies edit

In management, the concept of performativity has also been mobilized, relying on its diverse conceptualizations (Austin, Barad, Barnes, Butler, Callon, Derrida, Lyotard, etc.).[44]

In the study of management theories, performativity shows how actors use theories, how they produce effects on organizational practices and how these effects shape these practices.[45][46]

For instance, by building on Michel Callon's perspective, the concept of performativity has been mobilized to show how the concept of Blue Ocean Strategy transformed organizational practices.[47]

Journalism edit

The German news anchorman Hanns Joachim Friedrichs once argued that a good journalist should never act in collusion with anything, not even with a good thing. In the evening of November 9, 1989, the evening of the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, Friedrichs reportedly broke his own rule when he announced: "The gates of the wall are wide open." („Die Tore in der Mauer stehen weit offen.”) In reality, the gates were still closed. According to a historian, it was this announcement that encouraged thousands of East Berliners to march towards the wall, finally forcing the border guards to open the gates. In the sense of performativity, Friedrichs's words became a reality.[48][49]

Video art edit

Theories of performativity have extended across multiple disciplines and discussions. Notably, interdisciplinary theorist José Esteban Muñoz has related video to theories of performativity. Specifically, Muñoz looks at the 1996 documentary by Susana Aiken and Carlos Aparicio, "The Transformation."[50]

Although historically and theoretically related to performance art, video art is not an immediate performance; it is mediated, iterative and citational. In this way, video art raises questions of performativity. Additionally, video art frequently puts bodies and display, complicating borders, surfaces, embodiment, and boundaries and so indexing performativity.

Issues and debates edit

Despite cogent attempts at definition, the concept of performance continues to be plagued by ambiguities. Most pressing seems to be the paradox between performance as the consequence of following a script (cf. Schechners restored behaviour) and performance as a fluid activity with ample room for improvisation. Another problem involves the discrepancy between performance as a human activity that constructs culture (e.g. Butler and Derrida) on the one hand and performance as a representation of culture on the other (e.g. Bourdieu and Schechner). Another issue, important to pioneers such as Austin but now deemed irrelevant by postmodernism, concerns the sincerity of the actor. Can performance be authentic, or is it a product of pretence?

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ a b c Cavanaugh, Jillian R. (10 March 2015). "Performativity". Anthropology. doi:10.1093/OBO/9780199766567-0114. Retrieved 10 October 2017.
  2. ^ Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge.
  3. ^ Cultural Studies and Discourse Analysis – Barker & Galasinski
  4. ^ a b McKenzie (2005)
  5. ^ a b c d Schechner (2006), p. 38
  6. ^ Austin (1962)
  7. ^ Austin (1962), p. 12
  8. ^ Austin, J L (1962). How To Do Things With Words. p. 5.
  9. ^ Butler, Judith (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge. pp. xii. ISBN 9780415903660.
  10. ^ This idea was first introduced in 1988 in an issue of Theatre Journal (Brickell, 2005).
  11. ^ Halberstam, Jack (2014-05-16). "An audio overview of queer theory in English and Turkish by Jack Halberstam". Retrieved 29 May 2014.
  12. ^ Hall, Stuart (2008). "Who Needs Identity?". In Du Gay, Paul (ed.). Identity: a reader. Identity. London: Sage Publ. [u.a.] ISBN 978-0-7619-6916-7.
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  17. ^ a b Green, Adam Isaiah (March 2007). "Queer Theory and Sociology: Locating the Subject and the Self in Sexuality Studies". Sociological Theory. 25 (1): 26–45. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9558.2007.00296.x. ISSN 0735-2751.
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  28. ^ Wells (1998)
  29. ^ Thrift (1997)
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  32. ^ Muniesa, Fabian (2014). The Provoked Economy: Economic Reality and the Performative Turn. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-138-96180-7.
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  46. ^ Gond, Jean-Pascal; Carton, Guillaume (2022), Neesham, Cristina; Reihlen, Markus; Schoeneborn, Dennis (eds.), "The Performativity of Theories", Handbook of Philosophy of Management, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 1–25, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-48352-8_56-1, ISBN 978-3-319-48352-8, retrieved 2023-02-23
  47. ^ Carton, Guillaume (2020-02-03). "How Assemblages Change When Theories Become Performative: The case of the Blue Ocean Strategy". Organization Studies. 41 (10): 1417–1439. doi:10.1177/0170840619897197. ISSN 0170-8406. S2CID 213852753.
  48. ^ "Zum Jubiläum - der schönste Fehler in 40 Jahren "Tagesthemen"".
  49. ^ Sarotte, Mary Elise (November 2009). "Mary Elise Sarotte -- How an accident caused the Berlin Wall to come down".
  50. ^ Muñoz. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.

Bibliography and further reading edit

  • Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  • Austin, J. L. 1970. "Performative Utterances." In Austin, "Philosophical Papers", 233–52. London: Oxford University Press.
  • Bakhtin, Mikhail. "Discourse in the Novel", The dialogic imagination : four essays; edited by Michael Holquist; translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist Austin: University of Texas Press, c1981.
  • Bamberg, M., Narrative. State of the Art (2007).
  • Barad, Karen. 2003. "Posthumanist Performativity: Toward and Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28.3: 801–831.
  • Boldyrev, Ivan and Svetlova, Ekaterina. 2016. Enacting Dismal Science: New Perspectives on the Performativity of Economics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Bourdieu, P., Outlines of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge 1972).
  • Burke, Peter, 'Performing history: the importance of occasions', in: Rethinking history 9 afl. 1 (2005), pp. 35–52.
  • Brickell, Chris. 2005. "Masculinities, Performativity, and Subversion: A Sociological Reappraisal." Men and Masculinities 8.1: 24–43.
  • Brisset, Nicolas. 2017. "On performativity: Option Theory and the Resistance of Financial Phenomena". Journal of the History of Economic Thought. 39(4) : 549–569. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1053837217000128
  • Brisset, Nicolas. 2019. Economics and Performativity. Exploring limits,Theories and Cases. Routledge INEM Advances in Economic Methodology.
  • Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London and New York: Routledge.
  • Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. London and New York: Routledge.
  • Butler, Judith. 2000. "Critically Queer", in Identity: A Reader. London: Sage Publications.
  • Butler, Judith. 2010. "Performative Agency", in Journal of Cultural Economy 3:2, 147–161. doi:10.1080/17530350.2010.494117.
  • Callon, Michel. 1998. "Introduction: the Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Economics". In M. Callon (ed.), The Laws of the Markets. Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Carlson, M., Performance: A Critical Introduction (London 1996).
  • Chaney, D., Fictions of Collective Life (London 1993).
  • Crane, M. T. 'What was performance?', in: Criticism 43, afl. 2 (2001), pp. 169–187.
  • Davidson, M., Ghostlier Demarcations. Modern Poetry and the Material Word (Berkeley 1997).
  • Davis, T. C., The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies (Illinois 2008).
  • Derrida, Jacques. 1971. "Signature, Event, Context", in Limited, inc., Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1988.
  • Dirksmeier, P & I. Helbrecht, 'Time, Non-representational Theory and the "Performative Turn"—Towards a New Methodology in Qualitative Social Research', Forum: Qualitative Social Research 9 (2008), pp. 1–24.
  • Dunn, R.G. 1997. "Self, Identity and Difference: Mead and the Poststructuralists." Sociological Quarterly 38.4: 687–705.
  • Farnell, B., 'Moving Bodies: acting selves', Annual Review in Anthropology 28 (1999), pp. 341–373.
  • Felluga, Dino. "Modules on Butler". Retrieved on 10/30/06 from Modules on Butler II: Performativity.
  • Felman, Shoshana. 1980/2003. The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan With J.L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages. Translated by Catherine Porter. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
  • Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
  • Geertz, C., Negara: the Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton 1980).
  • Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Anchor.
  • Glass, Michael & Rose-Redwood, Reuben. 2014. Performativity, Politics, and the Production of Social Space. New York: Routledge.
  • Goffman, Erving. 1976. "Gender Display" and "Gender Commercials." Gender Advertisements. New York: Harper and Row.
  • Goffman, Erving. 1983. "Frame Analysis of Talk." The Goffman Reader, Lemert and Branaman, eds., Blackwell, 1997.
  • Green, Adam Isaiah. 2007. "Queer Theory and Sociology: Locating the Subject and the Self in Sexuality Studies." Sociological Theory 25.1: 26–45.
  • Green, B., Spectacular Confession: Autobiography, Performative Activism and the Sites of Suffrage, 1905–1938 (London 1997).
  • Hall, Stuart. 2000. "Who Needs Identity?" In Identity: A Reader. London: Sage Publications.
  • Hawkes, David. 2020. The Reign of Anti-logos: Performance in Postmodernity (Palgrave Insights into Apocalypse Economics), London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Hymes, D., 'Breakthrough into performance', in: D. Ben-Amos and K.S. Goldstein (eds.) Folklore: Performance and Communication (The Hague 1975).
  • Ingold, T., 'The temporality of Landscape'. World Archeology 25 (1993), pp. 152–174.
  • Kapchan, D., 'Performance' in: Journal of American Folklore 108, pp. 479–508.
  • Kessler, Suzanne, and Wendy McKenna. 1978. Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Kulick, Don (April 2003). "No". Language & Communication. 23 (2): 139–151. doi:10.1016/S0271-5309(02)00043-5.
  • Lloyd, Moya. 1999. "Performativity, Parody, Politics", Theory, Culture & Society, 16(2), 195–213.
  • McKenzie, J., 'Performance studies', The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (2005).
  • Matynia, Elzbieta. 2009. Performative Democracy. Boulder: Paradigm.
  • Membretti, Andrea. 2009. "Per un uso performativo delle immagini nella ricerca-azione sociale", Lo Squaderno n.12 (http://www.losquaderno.professionaldreamers.net/?p=1101)
  • McKenzie, Jon. "Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance." London: Routledge, 2001.
  • McKenzie, Jon, Heike Roms, and C. J. Wan-ling. Wee. "Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research." Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
  • Muñoz, Performing Disidentifications. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. 1999.
  • Oliver, Kelly. 2003. "What Is Transformative about the Performative? From Repetition to Working Through." In Ann Cahill and Jennifer Hansen, eds., Continental Feminism Reader.
  • Parker and Sedgwick, Introduction: Performativity and Performance. Performativity and Performance. 1995.
  • Pickering, Andrew. 1995. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Porter, J.N., 'Review Postmodernism by Mike Featherstone', Contemporary sociology 19 (1990) 323.
  • Robinson, Douglas. 2003. Performative Linguistics: Speaking and Translating as Doing Things With Words. London and New York: Routledge.
  • Robinson, Douglas. 2006. Introducing Performative Pragmatics. London and New York: Routledge.
  • Roudavski, Stanislav. 2008. Staging Places as Performances: Creative Strategies for Architecture (PhD, University of Cambridge)
  • Rosaldo, Michele. 1980. The things we do with words: Ilongot speech acts and speech act theory in philosophy. Language in Society 11: 203–237.
  • Schechner, Richard, Performance Studies. An Introduction (New York 2006).
  • Schieffelin, E., 'Problematising Performance', in: Hughes-Freeland, F., (ed) Ritual, Performance, Media (London 1998), pp. 194–207.
  • Searle, John. 1969. "Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  • Stern and Henderson, Performance: Texts and Contexts (Londen 1993).
  • Thrift, N. en J. Dewsbury, 'Dead geographies – and how to make them live', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18 (2000), pp. 411–432.
  • Thrift, N. J., 'The still point: resistance, expressive embodiment and dance', in: Pile, S. (ed), Geographies of Resistance (London 1997), pp. 125–151.
  • Thrift, N. J., Spatial Formations (London 1996).
  • Weiss, B., The Making and Unmaking of the Haya Lived World: Consumption, Commodization, and Everyday Practise (Durham 1996).
  • Wells, P., Understanding Animation (London 1998).
  • West, Candace and Don Zimmerman. 1987. "Doing Gender." Gender and Society 1.2: 121–151.

External links edit

  • Performance and architecture
  • Performance and collective action

performativity, concept, that, language, function, form, social, action, have, effect, change, concept, multiple, applications, diverse, fields, such, anthropology, social, cultural, geography, economics, gender, studies, social, construction, gender, linguist. Performativity is the concept that language can function as a form of social action and have the effect of change 1 The concept has multiple applications in diverse fields such as anthropology social and cultural geography economics gender studies social construction of gender law linguistics performance studies history management studies and philosophy The concept is first described by philosopher of language John L Austin when he referred to a specific capacity the capacity of speech and communication to act or to consummate an action Austin differentiated this from constative language which he defined as descriptive language that can be evaluated as true or false Common examples of performative language are making promises betting performing a wedding ceremony an umpire calling a foul or a judge pronouncing a verdict 1 Influenced by Austin gender studies philosopher Judith Butler argued that gender is socially constructed through commonplace speech acts and nonverbal communication that are performative in that they serve to define and maintain identities 2 This view of performativity reverses the idea that a person s identity is the source of their secondary actions speech gestures Instead it views actions behaviors and gestures as both the result of an individual s identity as well as a source that contributes to the formation of one s identity which is continuously being redefined through speech acts and symbolic communication 1 This view was also influenced by philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser 3 Contents 1 Defining performance 2 History 2 1 Origins 2 2 J L Austin 2 2 1 Influence of Austin 2 3 Postmodernism 3 Judith Butler 3 1 Performance theory and gender perspectives 3 2 Theoretical criticisms 4 Jean Francois Lyotard 5 Jacques Derrida 6 John Searle s reformulation 7 Elaborations and related concepts 7 1 Performance studies 7 2 Performativity 7 3 Habitus 7 4 Occasionalism 7 5 Non representational theory 8 Various applications 8 1 Economics and finance 8 2 Management studies 8 3 Journalism 8 4 Video art 9 Issues and debates 10 See also 11 References 12 Bibliography and further reading 13 External linksDefining performance editPerformance is a bodily practice that produces meaning It is the presentation or re actualization of symbolic systems through living bodies as well as lifeless mediating objects such as architecture 4 In the academic field as opposed to the domain of the performing arts the concept of performance is generally used to highlight dynamic interactions between social actors or between a social actor and their immediate environment Performance is an equivocal concept and for the purpose of analysis it is useful to distinguish between two senses of performance In the more formal sense performance refers to a framed event Performance in this sense is an enactment out of convention and tradition Founder of the discipline of performance studies Richard Schechner dubs this category is performance 5 In a weaker sense performance refers to the informal scenarios of daily life suggesting that everyday practices are performed Schechner called this the as performance 5 Generally the performative turn is concerned with the latter although the two senses of performance should be seen as ends of a spectrum rather than distinct categories 5 History editThe performative turn is a paradigmatic shift in the humanities and social sciences that affected such disciplines as anthropology archaeology linguistics ethnography history and the relatively young discipline of performance studies Previously used as a metaphor for theatricality performance is now often employed as a heuristic principle to understand human behaviour The assumption is that all human practices are performed so that any action at whatever moment or location can be seen as a public presentation of the self This methodological approach entered the social sciences and humanities in the 1990s but is rooted in the 1940s and 1950s Underlying the performative turn was the need to conceptualize how human practices relate to their contexts in a way that went beyond the traditional sociological methods that did not problematize representation Instead of focusing solely on given symbolic structures and texts scholars stress the active social construction of reality as well as the way that individual behaviour is determined by the context in which it occurs Performance functions both as a metaphor and an analytical tool and thus provides a perspective for framing and analysing social and cultural phenomena Origins edit The origins of the performative turn can be traced back to two strands of theorizing about performance as a social category that surfaced in the 1940s and 1950s The first strand is anthropological in origin and may be labelled the dramaturgical model Kenneth Burke 1945 expounded a dramatistic approach to analyse the motives underlying such phenomena as communicative actions and the history of philosophy Anthropologist Victor Turner focussed on cultural expression in staged theatre and ritual In his highly influential The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life 1959 Erving Goffman emphasized the link between social life and performance by stating that the theatre of performances is in public acts Within the performative turn the dramaturgical model evolved from the classical concept of society as theatre into a broader category that considers all culture as performance The second strand of theory concerns a development in the philosophy of language launched by John Austin in the 1950s In How to do things with words 6 he introduced the concept of the performative utterance opposing the prevalent principle that declarative sentences are always statements that can be either true or false Instead he argued that to say something is to do something 7 In the 1960s John Searle extended this concept to the broader field of speech act theory where due attention is paid to the use and function of language In the 1970s Searle engaged in polemics with postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida about the determinability of context and the nature of authorial intentions in a performative text J L Austin edit The term derives from the founding work in speech act theory by ordinary language philosopher J L Austin In the 1950s Austin gave the name performative utterances to situations where saying something was doing something rather than simply reporting on or describing reality The paradigmatic case here is speaking the words I do 8 Austin did not use the word performativity Breaking with analytic philosophy Austin argued in How to Do Things With Words that a performative utterance cannot be said to be either true or false as a constative utterance might be it can only be judged either happy or infelicitous depending upon whether the conditions required for its success have been met In this sense performativity is a function of the pragmatics of language Having shown that all utterances perform actions even apparently constative ones Austin famously discarded the distinction between performative and constative utterances halfway through the lecture series that became the book and replaced it with a three level framework locution the actual words spoken that which the linguists and linguistic philosophers of the day were mostly interested in analyzing illocutionary force what the speaker is attempting to do in uttering the locution perlocutionary effect the actual effect the speaker actually has on the interlocutor by uttering the locution For example if a speech act is an attempt to distract someone the illocutionary force is the attempt to distract and the perlocutionary effect is the actual distraction caused by the speech act in the interlocutor Influence of Austin edit Austin s account of performativity has been subject to extensive discussion in philosophy literature and beyond Jacques Derrida Shoshana Felman Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick are among the scholars who have elaborated upon and contested aspects of Austin s account from the vantage point of deconstruction psychoanalysis feminism and queer theory Particularly in the work of feminists and queer theorists performativity has played an important role in discussions of social change Oliver 2003 The concept of performativity has also been used in science and technology studies and in economic sociology Andrew Pickering has proposed to shift from a representational idiom to a performative idiom in the study of science Michel Callon has proposed to study the performative aspects of economics i e the extent to which economic science plays an important role not only in describing markets and economies but also in framing them Karen Barad has argued that science and technology studies deemphasize the performativity of language in order to explore the performativity of matter Barad 2003 Other uses of the notion of performativity in the social sciences include the daily behavior or performance of individuals based on social norms or habits Philosopher and feminist theorist Judith Butler has used the concept of performativity in their analysis of gender development as well as in analysis of political speech Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes queer performativity as an ongoing project for transforming the way we may define and break boundaries to identity Through her suggestion that shame is a potentially performative and transformational emotion Sedgwick has also linked queer performativity to affect theory Also innovative in Sedgwick s discussion of the performative is what she calls periperformativity 2003 67 91 which is effectively the group contribution to the success or failure of a speech act Postmodernism edit The performative turn is anchored in the broader cultural development of postmodernism An influential current in modern thought postmodernism is a radical reappraisal of the assumed certainty and objectivity of scientific efforts to represent and explain reality Postmodern scholars argue that society itself both defines and constructs reality through experience representation and performance From the 1970s onwards the concept of performance was integrated into a variety of theories in the humanities and social sciences such as phenomenology critical theory the Frankfurt school semiotics Lacanian psychoanalysis deconstructionism and feminism 4 The conceptual shift became manifest in a methodology oriented towards culture as a dynamic phenomenon as well as in the focus on subjects of study that were neglected before such as everyday life For scholars the concept of performance is a means to come to grips with human agency and to better understand the way social life is constructed Judith Butler editMain article Gender performativity Philosopher and feminist theorist Judith Butler offered a new more Continental specifically Foucauldian reading of the notion of performativity which has its roots in linguistics and philosophy of language They describe performativity as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains 9 They have largely used this concept in their analysis of gender development 10 The concept places emphasis on the manners by which identity is passed or brought to life through discourse Performative acts are types of authoritative speech This can only happen and be enforced through the law or norms of the society These statements just by speaking them carry out a certain action and exhibit a certain level of power Examples of these types of statements are declarations of ownership baptisms inaugurations and legal sentences Something that is key to performativity is repetition 11 The statements are not singular in nature or use and must be used consistently in order to exert power 12 Performance theory and gender perspectives edit Butler explains gender as an act An act that people come to perform in the mode of belief which has been rehearsed much like a script It is further asserted that people make a reality through repetition just as actors who make a script Butler sees gender not as an expression of what one is rather as something that one does Furthermore they see it not as a social imposition on a gender neutral body but rather as a mode of self making through which subjects become socially intelligible According to Butler s theory homosexuality and heterosexuality are not fixed categories For Butler a person is merely in a condition of doing straightness or doing queerness 13 For Butler the distinction between the personal and the political or between private and public is itself a fiction designed to support an oppressive status quo our most personal acts are in fact continually being scripted by hegemonic social conventions and ideologies 14 Theoretical criticisms edit Several criticisms have been raised regarding Butler s concept of performativity The first is that the theory is individual in nature and does not take into consideration such factors as the space within which the performance occurs the others involved and how others might see or interpret what they witness Also overlooked are the unplanned effects of the performance act and the contingencies surrounding it 13 Another criticism is that Butler is not clear about the concept of subject It has been said that in Butler s writings the subject sometimes only exists tentatively sometimes possesses a real existence and other times is socially active Also some observe that the theory might be better suited to literary analysis as opposed to social theory 15 Others criticize Butler for taking ethnomethodological and symbolic interactionist sociological analyses of gender and merely reinventing them in the concept of performativity 16 17 For example A I Green 17 argues that the work of Kessler and McKenna 1978 and West and Zimmerman 1987 builds directly from Garfinkel 1967 and Goffman 1959 to deconstruct gender into moments of attribution and iteration in a continual social process of doing masculinity and femininity in the performative interval These latter works are premised on the notion that gender does not precede but rather follows from practice instantiated in micro interaction Butler builds off of this notion of gender s constructed nature to enhance the frames of analysis for recognizing and understanding marginalized and oppressed identities and groups Jean Francois Lyotard editIn The Postmodern Condition A Report on Knowledge 1979 English translation 1986 philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Francois Lyotard defined performativity as the defining mode of legitimation of postmodern knowledge and social bonds that is power 18 In contrast to the legitimation of modern knowledge through such grand narratives as Progress Revolution and Liberation performativity operates by system optimization or the calculation of input and outputs In a footnote Lyotard aligns performativity with Austin s concept of performative speech act Postmodern knowledge must not only report it must do something and do it efficiently by maximizing input output ratios Lyotard uses Wittgenstein s notion of language games to theorize how performativity governs the articulation funding and conduct of contemporary research and education arguing that at bottom it involves the threat of terror be operational that is commensurable or disappear xxiv While Lyotard is highly critical of performativity he notes that it calls on researchers to explain not only the worth of their work but also the worth of that worth Lyotard associated performativity with the rise of digital computers in the post World War II period In Postwar A History of Europe Since 1945 historian Tony Judt cites Lyotard to argue that the Left has largely abandoned revolutionary politics for human rights advocacy The widespread adoption of performance reviews organizational assessments and learning outcomes by different social institutions worldwide has led social researchers to theorize audit culture and global performativity Against performativity and Jurgen Habermas call for consensus Lyotard argued for legitimation by paralogy or the destabilizing often paradoxical introduction of difference into language games Jacques Derrida editPhilosopher Jacques Derrida drew on Austin s theory of performative speech act while deconstructing its logocentric and phonocentric premises and reinscribing it within the operations of generalized writing In contrast to structuralism s focus on linguistic form Austin had introduced the force of speech acts which Derrida aligns with Nietzsche s insights on language In Signature Event Context Derrida focused on Austin s privileging of speech and the accompanying presumptions of the presence of a speaker signature and the bounding of a performative s force by an act or a context In a passage that would become a touchstone of poststructuralist thought Derrida stresses the citationality or iterability of any and all signs Every sign linguistic or nonlinguistic spoken or written in the current sense of this opposition in a small or large unit can be cited put between quotation marks in doing so it can break with every given context engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable This does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchorage ancrage This citationality this duplication or duplicity this iterability of the mark is neither an accident nor an anomaly it is that normal abnormal without which a mark could not even have a function called normal What would a mark be that could not be cited Or one whose origins would not get lost along the way 19 Derrida s stress on the citational dimension of performativity would be taken up by Judith Butler and other theorists While he addressed the performativity of individual subject formation Derrida also raised such questions as whether we can mark when the event of the Russian revolution went awry thus scaling up the field of performativity to historical dimensions John Searle s reformulation editIn A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts John Searle takes up and reformulates the ideas of his colleague J L Austin 20 Though Searle largely supports and agrees with Austin s theory of speech acts he has a number of critiques which he outlines In sum there are at least six related difficulties with Austin s taxonomy in ascending order of importance there is a persistent confusion between verbs and acts not all the verbs are illocutionary verbs there is too much overlap of the categories too much heterogeneity within the categories many of the verbs listed in the categories don t satisfy the definition given for the category and most important there is no consistent principle of classification 21 His last key departure from Austin lies in Searle s claim that four of his universal acts do not need extra linguistic contexts to succeed 22 As opposed to Austin who thinks all illocutionary acts need extra linguistic institutions Searle disregards the necessity of context and replaces it with the rules of language 22 Elaborations and related concepts editThe concept of performance has been developed by such scholars as Richard Schechner Victor Turner Clifford Geertz Erving Goffman John Austin John Searle Pierre Bourdieu Stern and Henderson and Judith Butler Performance studies edit Performance studies emerged through the work of among others theatre director and scholar Richard Schechner who applied the notion of performance to human behaviour beyond the performing arts His interpretation of performance as non artistic yet expressive social behaviour and his collaboration in 1985 with anthropologist Victor Turner led to the beginning of performance studies as a separate discipline Schechner defines performance as restored behaviour to emphasize the symbolic and coded aspects of culture 23 Schechner understands performance as a continuum Not everything is meant to be a performance but everything from performing arts to politics and economics can be studied as performance 5 Performativity edit A related concept that emphasizes the political aspect of performance and its exercise of power is performativity It is associated with philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler It is an anti essentialist theory of subjectivity in which a performance of the self is repeated and dependent upon a social audience In this way these unfixed and precarious performances come to have the appearance of substance and continuity A key theoretical point that was most radical in regards to theories of subjectivity and performance is that there is no performer behind the performance Butler derived this idea from Nietzsche s concept of no doer behind the deed This is to say that there is no self before the performance of the self but rather that the performance has constitutive powers This is how categories of the self for Judith Butler such as gender are seen as something that one does rather than something one is Habitus edit In the 1970s Pierre Bourdieu introduced the concept of habitus or regulated improvisation in a reaction against the structuralist notion of culture as a system of rules Bourdieu 1972 Culture in his perspective undergoes a shift from a productive to a reproductive social order in which simulations and models constitute the world so that the distinction between real and appearance becomes erased 24 Though Bourdieu himself does not often employ the term performance the notion of the bodily habitus as a formative site has been a source of inspiration for performance theorists Occasionalism edit The cultural historian Peter Burke suggested using the term occasionalism to stress the implication of the idea of performance that on different occasions or in different situations the same person behaves in different ways 25 Non representational theory edit Within the social sciences and humanities an interdisciplinary strand that has contributed to the performative turn is non representational theory It is a theory of practices that focuses on repetitive ways of expression such as speech and gestures As opposed to representational theory it argues that human conduct is a result of linguistic interplay rather than of codes and symbols that are consciously planned Non representational theory interprets actions and events such as dance or theatre as actualisations of knowledge It also intends to shift the focus away from the technical aspects of representation to the practice itself 26 Various applications editPerformance offers a tremendous interdisciplinary archive of social practices It offers methods to study such phenomena as body art ecological theatre multimedia performance and other kinds of performance arts 27 Performance also provides a new registry of kinaesthetic effects enabling a more conscientious observation of the moving body The changing experience of movement for example as a result of new technologies has become an important subject of research 28 Moreover the performative turn has helped scholars to develop an awareness of the relations between everyday life and stage performances For example at conferences and lectures on the street and in other places where people speak in public performers tend to use techniques derived from the world of theatre and dance 29 Performance allows us to study nature and other apparently immovable and objectified elements of the human environment e g architecture as active agents rather than only as passive objects Thus in recent decades environmental scholars have acknowledged the existence of a fluid interaction between man and nature The performative turn has provided additional tools to study everyday life A household for example may be considered as a performance in which the relation between wife and husband is a role play between two actors Economics and finance edit In economics the performativity thesis is the claim that the assumptions and models used by professionals and popularizers affect the phenomena they purport to describe bringing the world more into line with theory 30 31 It also refers more largely to the idea of economic reality as a ceaselessly provoked reality and of things such as performance indicators valuation formulas consumer tests stock prices or financial contracts constituting what they refer to 32 This theory was developed by Michel Callon in The Laws of the Markets before being further developed in Do Economists Make Markets edited by Donald Angus MacKenzie Fabian Muniesa and Lucia Siu and in Enacting Dismal Science edited by Ivan Boldyrev and Ekaterina Svetlova 33 34 The most important work in the field is that of Donald MacKenzie and Yuval Millo 35 36 on the social construction of financial markets In a seminal article they showed that the option pricing theory called BSM Black Scholes Merton has been successful empirically not because of the discovery of preexisting price regularities but because participants used it to set option prices so that it made itself true The thesis of performativity of economics has been extensively criticized by Nicolas Brisset in Economics and Performativity 37 Brisset defends the idea that the notion of performativity used by Callonian and Latourian sociologists leads to an overly relativistic view of the social world Drawing on the work of John Austin and David Lewis Brisset theorizes the idea of limits to performativity To do this Brisset considers that a theory in order to be performative must become a convention This requires conditions to be met To take a convention status a theory will have to Provide social actors with a representation of their social world allowing them to choose among several actions Empiricity condition Indicate an option considered relevant when the agreement is generalised Self fulfilling condition Be compatible with all the conventions constituting the social environment Coherency condition 38 Based on this framework Brisset criticized the seminal work of MacKenzie and Millo on the performativity of the Black Scholes Merton financial model 39 Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu Brisset also uses the notion of Speech Act to study economic models and their use in political power relations 40 MacKenzie s approach was also criticized by Uskali Maki for not using the concept of performativity in accordance with Austin s formulation 41 This point gave rise to a debate in economic philosophy 42 43 Management studies edit In management the concept of performativity has also been mobilized relying on its diverse conceptualizations Austin Barad Barnes Butler Callon Derrida Lyotard etc 44 In the study of management theories performativity shows how actors use theories how they produce effects on organizational practices and how these effects shape these practices 45 46 For instance by building on Michel Callon s perspective the concept of performativity has been mobilized to show how the concept of Blue Ocean Strategy transformed organizational practices 47 Journalism edit The German news anchorman Hanns Joachim Friedrichs once argued that a good journalist should never act in collusion with anything not even with a good thing In the evening of November 9 1989 the evening of the fall of the Berlin Wall however Friedrichs reportedly broke his own rule when he announced The gates of the wall are wide open Die Tore in der Mauer stehen weit offen In reality the gates were still closed According to a historian it was this announcement that encouraged thousands of East Berliners to march towards the wall finally forcing the border guards to open the gates In the sense of performativity Friedrichs s words became a reality 48 49 Video art edit Theories of performativity have extended across multiple disciplines and discussions Notably interdisciplinary theorist Jose Esteban Munoz has related video to theories of performativity Specifically Munoz looks at the 1996 documentary by Susana Aiken and Carlos Aparicio The Transformation 50 Although historically and theoretically related to performance art video art is not an immediate performance it is mediated iterative and citational In this way video art raises questions of performativity Additionally video art frequently puts bodies and display complicating borders surfaces embodiment and boundaries and so indexing performativity Issues and debates editDespite cogent attempts at definition the concept of performance continues to be plagued by ambiguities Most pressing seems to be the paradox between performance as the consequence of following a script cf Schechners restored behaviour and performance as a fluid activity with ample room for improvisation Another problem involves the discrepancy between performance as a human activity that constructs culture e g Butler and Derrida on the one hand and performance as a representation of culture on the other e g Bourdieu and Schechner Another issue important to pioneers such as Austin but now deemed irrelevant by postmodernism concerns the sincerity of the actor Can performance be authentic or is it a product of pretence See also editDramaturgy sociology Erving Goffman Frame analysis John Searle Performance Performance studies Performative text Performative utterances Speech actReferences edit a b c Cavanaugh Jillian R 10 March 2015 Performativity Anthropology doi 10 1093 OBO 9780199766567 0114 Retrieved 10 October 2017 Butler Judith 1990 Gender Trouble New York Routledge Cultural Studies and Discourse Analysis Barker amp Galasinski a b McKenzie 2005 a b c d Schechner 2006 p 38 Austin 1962 Austin 1962 p 12 Austin J L 1962 How To Do Things With Words p 5 Butler Judith 1993 Bodies that Matter On the Discursive Limits of Sex New York Routledge pp xii ISBN 9780415903660 This idea was first introduced in 1988 in an issue of Theatre Journal Brickell 2005 Halberstam Jack 2014 05 16 An audio overview of queer theory in English and Turkish by Jack Halberstam Retrieved 29 May 2014 Hall Stuart 2008 Who Needs Identity In Du Gay Paul ed Identity a reader Identity London Sage Publ u a ISBN 978 0 7619 6916 7 a b Lloyd Moya April 1999 Performativity Parody Politics Theory Culture amp Society 16 2 195 213 doi 10 1177 02632769922050476 ISSN 0263 2764 Felluga Dino Introduction to Judith Butler Module on Performativity www cla purdue edu Retrieved 2006 10 30 Brickell Chris July 2005 Masculinities Performativity and Subversion A Sociological Reappraisal Men and Masculinities 8 1 24 43 doi 10 1177 1097184X03257515 ISSN 1097 184X Dunn Robert G 1997 09 01 Self Identity and Difference Mead and the Poststructuralists The Sociological Quarterly 38 4 687 705 doi 10 1111 j 1533 8525 1997 tb00760 x ISSN 0038 0253 a b Green Adam Isaiah March 2007 Queer Theory and Sociology Locating the Subject and the Self in Sexuality Studies Sociological Theory 25 1 26 45 doi 10 1111 j 1467 9558 2007 00296 x ISSN 0735 2751 Lyotard Jean Francois 1986 The Postmodern Condition A Report on Knowledge Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press ISBN 978 0816611737 Derrida Jacques 1988 Limited Inc Evanston Northwestern University Press p 12 ISBN 978 0810107885 Searle John 1979 Expression and meaning studies in the theory of speech acts Cambridge University Press Searle John 1979 Expression and meaning studies in the theory of speech acts Cambridge University Press p 12 a b Searle John 1979 Expression and meaning studies in the theory of speech acts Cambridge University Press p 7 Schechner 2006 p 34 Porter 1990 p 323 Burke 2005 p 36 Dirksmeier 2008 p 19 20 Carlson 1996 Wells 1998 Thrift 1997 Healy Kieran 2015 The Performativity of Networks PDF European Journal of Sociology 56 2 175 205 doi 10 1017 S0003975615000107 S2CID 152199942 Retrieved 2015 11 19 Doing Economics Milton Keynes The Open University 2010 p 493 ISBN 978 1 8487 34692 Muniesa Fabian 2014 The Provoked Economy Economic Reality and the Performative Turn Routledge ISBN 978 1 138 96180 7 Do Economists Make Markets 21 July 2008 ISBN 9780691138497 Enacting Dismal Science New Perspectives on the Performativity of Economics Ivan Boldyrev Palgrave Macmillan MacKenzie Donald Millo Yuval 2003 Constructing a Market Performing Theory The Historical Sociology of a Financial Derivatives Exchange American Journal of Sociology 109 1 107 145 doi 10 1086 374404 ISSN 0002 9602 JSTOR 10 1086 374404 S2CID 145805302 Mackenzie Donald March 2006 Is Economics Performative Option Theory and the Construction of Derivatives Markets Journal of the History of Economic Thought 28 1 29 55 doi 10 1080 10427710500509722 ISSN 1469 9656 S2CID 14201125 Brisset Nicolas 2018 Economics and Performativity Routledge Brisset Nicolas 2016 04 02 Economics is not always performative some limits for performativity Journal of Economic Methodology 23 2 160 184 doi 10 1080 1350178X 2016 1172805 ISSN 1350 178X S2CID 148033117 Brisset Nicolas December 2017 On Performativity Option Theory and the Resistance of Financial Phenomena Journal of the History of Economic Thought 39 4 549 569 doi 10 1017 S1053837217000128 ISSN 1053 8372 S2CID 158017241 Brisset Nicolas 2018 01 02 Models as speech acts the telling case of financial models Journal of Economic Methodology 25 1 21 41 doi 10 1080 1350178X 2018 1419105 ISSN 1350 178X S2CID 148612438 Maki Uskali 2013 Karakostas Vassilios Dieks Dennis eds Performativity Saving Austin From Mackenzie EPSA11 Perspectives and Foundational Problems in Philosophy of Science Springer pp 443 453 retrieved 2020 04 14 Guala Francesco 2015 05 10 Performativity Rationalized Rochester NY SSRN 2616814 a href Template Cite journal html title Template Cite journal cite journal a Cite journal requires journal help Brisset Nicolas 2017 09 01 The Future of Performativity Œconomia History Methodology Philosophy 7 3 439 452 doi 10 4000 oeconomia 2746 ISSN 2113 5207 Gond Jean Pascal Cabantous Laure Harding Nancy Learmonth Mark 2016 What Do We Mean by Performativity in Organizational and Management Theory The Uses and Abuses of Performativity PDF International Journal of Management Reviews 18 4 440 463 doi 10 1111 ijmr 12074 ISSN 1468 2370 S2CID 54218711 Marti Emilio Gond Jean Pascal July 2018 When Do Theories Become Self Fulfilling Exploring the Boundary Conditions of Performativity PDF Academy of Management Review 43 3 487 508 doi 10 5465 amr 2016 0071 ISSN 0363 7425 S2CID 59273544 Gond Jean Pascal Carton Guillaume 2022 Neesham Cristina Reihlen Markus Schoeneborn Dennis eds The Performativity of Theories Handbook of Philosophy of Management Cham Springer International Publishing pp 1 25 doi 10 1007 978 3 319 48352 8 56 1 ISBN 978 3 319 48352 8 retrieved 2023 02 23 Carton Guillaume 2020 02 03 How Assemblages Change When Theories Become Performative The case of the Blue Ocean Strategy Organization Studies 41 10 1417 1439 doi 10 1177 0170840619897197 ISSN 0170 8406 S2CID 213852753 Zum Jubilaum der schonste Fehler in 40 Jahren Tagesthemen Sarotte Mary Elise November 2009 Mary Elise Sarotte How an accident caused the Berlin Wall to come down Munoz Disidentifications Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics Bibliography and further reading editAustin J L 1962 How to Do Things with Words Oxford Clarendon Press Austin J L 1970 Performative Utterances In Austin Philosophical Papers 233 52 London Oxford University Press Bakhtin Mikhail Discourse in the Novel The dialogic imagination four essays edited by Michael Holquist translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist Austin University of Texas Press c1981 Bamberg M Narrative State of the Art 2007 Barad Karen 2003 Posthumanist Performativity Toward and Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 3 801 831 Boldyrev Ivan and Svetlova Ekaterina 2016 Enacting Dismal Science New Perspectives on the Performativity of Economics Basingstoke Palgrave Macmillan Bourdieu P Outlines of a Theory of Practice Cambridge 1972 Burke Peter Performing history the importance of occasions in Rethinking history 9 afl 1 2005 pp 35 52 Brickell Chris 2005 Masculinities Performativity and Subversion A Sociological Reappraisal Men and Masculinities 8 1 24 43 Brisset Nicolas 2017 On performativity Option Theory and the Resistance of Financial Phenomena Journal of the History of Economic Thought 39 4 549 569 DOI https doi org 10 1017 S1053837217000128 Brisset Nicolas 2019 Economics and Performativity Exploring limits Theories and Cases Routledge INEM Advances in Economic Methodology Butler Judith 1993 Bodies that Matter On the Discursive Limits of Sex London and New York Routledge Butler Judith 1997 Excitable Speech A Politics of the Performative London and New York Routledge Butler Judith 2000 Critically Queer in Identity A Reader London Sage Publications Butler Judith 2010 Performative Agency in Journal of Cultural Economy 3 2 147 161 doi 10 1080 17530350 2010 494117 Callon Michel 1998 Introduction the Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Economics In M Callon ed The Laws of the Markets Oxford Blackwell Carlson M Performance A Critical Introduction London 1996 Chaney D Fictions of Collective Life London 1993 Crane M T What was performance in Criticism 43 afl 2 2001 pp 169 187 Davidson M Ghostlier Demarcations Modern Poetry and the Material Word Berkeley 1997 Davis T C The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies Illinois 2008 Derrida Jacques 1971 Signature Event Context in Limited inc Evanston Northwestern Univ Press 1988 Dirksmeier P amp I Helbrecht Time Non representational Theory and the Performative Turn Towards a New Methodology in Qualitative Social Research Forum Qualitative Social Research 9 2008 pp 1 24 Dunn R G 1997 Self Identity and Difference Mead and the Poststructuralists Sociological Quarterly 38 4 687 705 Farnell B Moving Bodies acting selves Annual Review in Anthropology 28 1999 pp 341 373 Felluga Dino Modules on Butler Retrieved on 10 30 06 from Modules on Butler II Performativity Felman Shoshana 1980 2003 The Scandal of the Speaking Body Don Juan With J L Austin or Seduction in Two Languages Translated by Catherine Porter Stanford Stanford University Press Garfinkel Harold 1967 Studies in Ethnomethodology Englewood Cliffs NJ Prentice Hall Geertz C Negara the Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali Princeton 1980 Goffman Erving 1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Garden City NY Anchor Glass Michael amp Rose Redwood Reuben 2014 Performativity Politics and the Production of Social Space New York Routledge Goffman Erving 1976 Gender Display and Gender Commercials Gender Advertisements New York Harper and Row Goffman Erving 1983 Frame Analysis of Talk The Goffman Reader Lemert and Branaman eds Blackwell 1997 Green Adam Isaiah 2007 Queer Theory and Sociology Locating the Subject and the Self in Sexuality Studies Sociological Theory 25 1 26 45 Green B Spectacular Confession Autobiography Performative Activism and the Sites of Suffrage 1905 1938 London 1997 Hall Stuart 2000 Who Needs Identity In Identity A Reader London Sage Publications Hawkes David 2020 The Reign of Anti logos Performance in Postmodernity Palgrave Insights into Apocalypse Economics London and New York Palgrave Macmillan Hymes D Breakthrough into performance in D Ben Amos and K S Goldstein eds Folklore Performance and Communication The Hague 1975 Ingold T The temporality of Landscape World Archeology 25 1993 pp 152 174 Kapchan D Performance in Journal of American Folklore 108 pp 479 508 Kessler Suzanne and Wendy McKenna 1978 Gender An Ethnomethodological Approach Chicago University of Chicago Press Kulick Don April 2003 No Language amp Communication 23 2 139 151 doi 10 1016 S0271 5309 02 00043 5 Pdf Lloyd Moya 1999 Performativity Parody Politics Theory Culture amp Society 16 2 195 213 McKenzie J Performance studies The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism 2005 Matynia Elzbieta 2009 Performative Democracy Boulder Paradigm Membretti Andrea 2009 Per un uso performativo delle immagini nella ricerca azione sociale Lo Squaderno n 12 http www losquaderno professionaldreamers net p 1101 McKenzie Jon Perform or Else From Discipline to Performance London Routledge 2001 McKenzie Jon Heike Roms and C J Wan ling Wee Contesting Performance Global Sites of Research Basingstoke UK Palgrave Macmillan 2010 Munoz Performing Disidentifications Disidentifications Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics 1999 Oliver Kelly 2003 What Is Transformative about the Performative From Repetition to Working Through In Ann Cahill and Jennifer Hansen eds Continental Feminism Reader Parker and Sedgwick Introduction Performativity and Performance Performativity and Performance 1995 Pickering Andrew 1995 The Mangle of Practice Time Agency and Science Chicago University of Chicago Press Porter J N Review Postmodernism by Mike Featherstone Contemporary sociology 19 1990 323 Robinson Douglas 2003 Performative Linguistics Speaking and Translating as Doing Things With Words London and New York Routledge Robinson Douglas 2006 Introducing Performative Pragmatics London and New York Routledge Roudavski Stanislav 2008 Staging Places as Performances Creative Strategies for Architecture PhD University of Cambridge Rosaldo Michele 1980 The things we do with words Ilongot speech acts and speech act theory in philosophy Language in Society 11 203 237 Schechner Richard Performance Studies An Introduction New York 2006 Schieffelin E Problematising Performance in Hughes Freeland F ed Ritual Performance Media London 1998 pp 194 207 Searle John 1969 Speech Acts An Essay in the Philosophy of Language Cambridge Cambridge University Press Sedgwick Eve Kosovsky 2003 Touching Feeling Affect Pedagogy Performativity Durham NC Duke University Press Stern and Henderson Performance Texts and Contexts Londen 1993 Thrift N en J Dewsbury Dead geographies and how to make them live Environment and Planning D Society and Space 18 2000 pp 411 432 Thrift N J The still point resistance expressive embodiment and dance in Pile S ed Geographies of Resistance London 1997 pp 125 151 Thrift N J Spatial Formations London 1996 Weiss B The Making and Unmaking of the Haya Lived World Consumption Commodization and Everyday Practise Durham 1996 Wells P Understanding Animation London 1998 West Candace and Don Zimmerman 1987 Doing Gender Gender and Society 1 2 121 151 External links editPerformance and architecture Performance and collective action Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Performativity amp oldid 1220501151, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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