“Performative,” Part I

Earlier today, Tom Ewing (this guy) used the word “performative” in a blog post to describe a particular form of online mediation.  The specifics of Tom’s vague use of the word weren’t as important as the fact that someone used the word in a blog post.  In my particular realms of academia, performative is a highly-contested, flexible and at times controversial term.  So I excitedly asked him in the comments to specify the way he was using it.

Because Tom is, well Tom, instead of explaining himself in the comment section, he did some research and wrote another post on the matter, explaining that he intended the word as an adjective to describe something “performance-y.”  This is, of course, a completely acceptable and very common usage of the word, and I’m relatively certain that the readers of his blog understood it this way.  In my graduate studies, I’ve heard several highly respected performance studies folks use performative in this way–no biggie.

Tom’s quick research, however, led him to the most-used definition of the term, which I’d like to talk about for a second (or, several seconds–they’ll be consecutive, I promise).  As Tom briefly mentions, in linguistics, performative is still used as an adjective, but a very specific one.  In particular, to what J.L. Austin dubbed a “speech act”–which is a way to, quite literally, do something with words.  A justice of the peace uttering the phrase “I now pronounce you man and wife,” or a police officer saying “you’re under arrest,” are both ways for people granted particular forms of power to change the state of worldly affairs for another person–their marital status and tax bracket perhaps, their freedom and right to vote, etc.

A speech act is “performative,” then, because it enacts that which it names.  But that’s not the extent of “performative,” not by a long shot.  With this post, I’d like to talk about a few other ways that people have stretched out the term, to give an idea of its broad utility.  Next time, I’ll apply the concept directly to music, and maybe even try to work Vampire Weekend in there.  For now, though, a very light tiptoe through some other examples:

First, there’s Judith Butler’s concept of “performativity,” a coinage that she used to describe the discursive ways in which power works through human sexuality and the materiality of bodies.  Building off Derrida’s idea of “citationality,” Butler claims that performativity isn’t an act as much as a reiteration of regulatory norms that materializes sex by repeating these norms–which are shot through with power relations, etc.–over and over again until they start to form boundaries.  For example, when a woman goes to her OB/GYN for an ultrasound and the doctor tells her “it’s a girl,” that pre-child is placed into a realm of unequal power relations simply because the doctor, who has medical authority to do so, cites the word “girl,” which has gained a force of its own through repeated iterations.  As a result, before the girl is even a human being, her body is created and her capacities thus limited, simply by the doctor’s citation of that one word.  For Butler, then, sex isn’t just biological, and bodies aren’t just meat.  They’re performative, which means that they acquire being through citations of power.

Butler took “performative” out of the realm of tangible, beginning-and-end actions, and into the more nebulous worlds of discourse, law, and power.  Building directly off Butler but applying the concept to the realm of intellectual property, is Rosemary Coombe.  In an article about rights disputes between Second Life gamers and the creators of the online world, Coombe and her co-authors argue that the debates performatively reiterates a Lockean theory of property–with a unique author with sole rights to his creations–despite the fact that their labor in these MMORPGs is inherently collaborative.  The language they use, in other words, performatively obscures their actual productive labor.

My personal favorite use of performative, however, is that of Actor-Network theorists, of which Bruno Latour is the most popular representative and advocate.  Actor-Network Theory emerged in part out of a disillusionment with the research paradigm of “social” and “cultural” forces with enough magical agency to compel people to behave in certain ways.  Latour and his buddies would eventually develop ANT, which argues that society (or culture) aren’t pre-ordained givens that can be used to explain human action (”it’s part of their culture,” “a social ill”), but are instead micro-level associations between people and things that are continually altering and disappearing, need to be continually maintained, lest they disintegrate.  The social, then, is “the name of a type of momentary association which is characterized by the way it gathers together into new shapes.”

As a result, the job of ANT sociologists is not to use the social to explain human action, but the much larger and more responsible task of reassembling the social by tracing these associations.  It’s probably pretty obvious that ANT is a great methodology for researching social networks, or really any sort of online community with eminently traceable connections between people and things.

Where does “performative” come in, though? I’m glad you asked.  Because ANT is such a profoundly relational form of research, which makes its practitioners follow minute connections as far as they go without jumping to “culture” or “society” as an all-encompassing explanation, all interactions are performative.  At the moment people come together in a particular arrangement, and depending upon the networks in which the people themselves are embedded, the connections they have to others, etc., something new is created–an idea, a truth, a fact.

Think about the ever-contested term “indie,” for example. In certain networks of certain actors, at certain points in history, it can become very, very stable–as a DIY methodology amongst punks, as a separatist economic ideology amongst critics, and so on.  “Indie” as an idea, truth, or fact, then, is a combustible concept precisely because it’s inherently reliant on the interactions amongst specific people, saying specific things, in specific places, at specific times.  I think there’s a reason that, in the realm of discourse at least, “indie” (or “pop,” or “rock”) has become ever-more fragile as Web forums have provided so many more networked public spaces (such as Tom’s own baby ILX) for its discussion.

Next time: music censorship and the blurred lines between performers and people as two possible results of misrecognizing song lyrics as speech acts.

Filed under: academia  Actor-Network Theory  Bruno Latour  indie rock  intellectual property  Judith Butler  performative  Rosemary Coombe  Tom Ewing