Performativity!
Farewell to an idea
There is apparently no end to the American tendency to treat front-page consensus as though it were secret knowledge, something to whisper furtively among trusted comrades or declaim loudly as a defiant truth-teller. Nothing, it seems, is worth saying or even knowing unless it’s something some imagined majority doesn’t want to hear. Of course, this is most evident in right-wing media, where every day one can read every establishment cliche regurgitated in a high, prophetic tone, reassuring the faithful few that, I don’t know, capitalism is a rising tide that lifts all boats, or that the Left is intolerant of alternate opinions.
It’s a fascinating little ritual to shore up the status-quo, getting people to defend the reigning order as though it were their own idea. And, of course, the practice is not unique to the Right. It’s everywhere, folded into daily language and cultural discourse as a compulsive, even reflexive way of asserting one’s own insight into something everyone else has noticed, too.
This is what I think is going on with the word “performative.” The word has a shockingly long shelf-life, returning in waves not only of use but of self-conscious, defiant assertion: when people, en masse, notice that they are once again saying that something or or someone is “performative,” it is literally front-page news. The latest iteration of this self-congratulations came in the form of the “performative male,” the collective noticing of the presumably young man who reads books in public, perhaps while also drinking wine or smoking, wearing some kind of hip accessory, in the hope of getting attention and, ultimately, laid.
Now, as an arguably young man who reads books in public, I take exception this ascription of malign intent (though it may not apply to me, since when I read I tend to hunch, pull compulsively at my hair, occasionally allow my mouth to hang open, and, anyway, I’m happily married.) But there is something else here that has been nagging at me, a kind of parapraxia that I want to unpack, as we say.
As many people already know, this word is used almost exclusively incorrectly. Born in midcentury social theory and philosophy of language, it was originally intended to describe how apparently artificial practices have a constructive social function: performances, though in some sense contingent or even arbitrary, make real things happen. The famous example of a performative speech act given by philosopher J.L. Austin is that of a wedding ceremony. “I now pronounce you man and wife,” though nothing more than a sentence, changes the identity of the people to whom it applies, their status in the community, even their legal rights and obligations. The term got new life when appropriated by Judith Butler, who argued that when we talk about gender, we are referring not to a biological fact but a socially constructed network of significations, a series of roles that we learn, internalize, and perform.
The important point here is nowhere is it suggested that a performative act is fake; to the contrary, it is a central component in the production of our social reality. All it means is that our social reality, the ways we live with and among one another, is open for discussion and, to a certain extent. And, considering the near-infinite variety of human culture, who, generally speaking, could disagree?
Of course, all of this has been said before, and, as Bellow said, a fool can throw a stone in a pond that a hundred wise men can’t recover. The game is over, the battle is lost. I’m under no illusions about that. The fact that words like “poseur,” and “posturing,” far more appropriate words that my friends and I gleefully wielded against the phonies of the world, sit moldering on the shelf does nothing to neutralize the electric thrill of calling someone “performative.” Those words may be more apt, but they lack the crucial function of signaling that I, too, have noticed both what everyone else has noticed and that everyone else has noticed it.
That’s the function of any trend, any expression that becomes idiomatic. But why this word? Without making a whole thing about it—though it might be a bit late for that—I think there are two main factors at work in the perpetuation of this error. First and most obviously is the evident anti-social quality to the phenomenon. There is something really odious about the adolescent impulse to point out someone else’s everyday, ordinary social ambition, and to condemn them for it. Someone wants favorable attention? Who doesn’t? On the specific subject of the ‘performative male’: I read in cafes and bars because it’s nice, usually because I’ve been working at my desk all day and would like a change of scenery, but of course there are occasions, too, when, in the back of my mind, I’m also wondering if someone interesting will be there and strike up a conversation. Sue me. And if some men do read in public in hopes of sexual conquest, staring blankly, turning pages automatically, positioning the cover just so… Well, I think we can all agree that it’s pretty low in the ranks offenses carried out for that purpose.
But all that would be covered by “poseur,” “posturing,” “phony,” or “pretentious.” There are good reasons to use these words, and they are just as revealing of one’s own sour heart if one gets too much pleasure in deploying them. So what accounts for the rise of “performative” in their place? I think it has precisely to do with the term’s original meaning and intent, which was to denaturalize supposedly fixed social essences, and to demonstrate at once how complex human identity is in its emergence, allowing no source to take full credit or, more importantly, full ownership of its current state, and, despite that complexity, how subject to debate and even revision so much, if not all of life is, or can be. It’s an incredibly useful idea, one that seems particularly well-suited to help snap us out of our increasingly repressive and conformist culture, which increasingly resembles the social context of the 1950s out of which the term first arose.
Not to put too fine a point on things, but I would suggest that, in the rise to ubiquity of this clunky bit of formerly arcane jargon, there is a convergence of every kind of repressive philistinism threatening to overtake our entire society. Of course it is trained on an easy target: the bumbling boy pretending to be something he’s not. But he is, after all, reading. At a minimum, he’s assuming the cultural value of reading to get what he wants. In this semi-literate country, isn’t that something to encourage or, at least, let slide? More seriously, I can’t help notice that the term’s most proximate source is Judith Butler, whose work on gender is among the most important and influential among the general public, and whose fundamental contribution—that gender is always a doing, that is a performance—is increasingly incomprehensible to a population for whom “performative” means fake. As gender has become a cudgel for both moral panic and legislative tyranny, it seems a shame to let this term go to waste.
I’ll actually go a step, or several steps further. To use “performative” as a sneer is evidence of the fascism of thought that has already taken root in our collective intelligence. It is a not simply an evolving definition, but a testament to a historic loss. To make this completely clear: The emergence of “performativity” as a theoretical term in the middle of the twentieth century was a genuine advance in modern human self-understanding. It was a moment when the resources of the social sciences were wrested away from their historic function of the legitimation of power and the disciplining of nations and turned toward the cause of freedom. It was part of a civilizational trend, from cultural studies to critical theory to poststructuralism, when the finest minds of the period seemed to converge on a single imperative: You must think for yourself.
Ever since, the forces of reaction have been trying to undermine and undo this revolution in thought, convincing people that it is, in fact, the revolution is the oppressor, and the old order the liberator. Universal higher education, we are told, is a ridiculous pipe dream, and anyway, the professors are the enemy. Gender theory is not an experiment in liberation, it is a threat to families. Performativity doesn’t describe our freedom to remake our shared life, it reveals our falseness and our shame.
Our current predicament is this counterrevolution’s greatest triumph. The creeps and thugs are back in full force. They hold enormous power over all of our institutions, rewriting laws and punishing dissent. Don’t let them into your head, too.