In Defense of Being Performative |
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In Defense of Being Performative
The critics of “performative politics” misunderstand something fundamental: Democracy survives only when citizens perform it.
He’s probably reading Elena Ferrante—and that’s fine!
If you’ve spent any time online over the past one to two years, you’ve probably noticed the growing popularity of “performative”—or, especially in right-wing circles, “virtue signaling”—as a term of derision. Maybe you’ve read the trend pieces about performative males or seen people on social media poking fun at performative reading. You might have noticed that one of the more common knocks on the anti-Trump “No Kings” demonstrations, particularly from the left, is that they are performative.
It can sometimes be difficult to make sense of this genre of criticism; tagging a public demonstration as performative is less a cutting dismissal than a tautology. For that matter, it always struck me as a bit strange that a softboi with a preference for matcha and Clairo could be described as a “performative male” but not someone performing the more traditional markers of masculinity.
Attacks on performativity are usually taken as a demand for authenticity. If you are doing something performatively, that means your motives for doing it are suspect. Performative protest is intended to make protesters look righteous, not bring about meaningful change; a performative male is a pickup artist who manipulates women into sex by playacting a sort of feminist gentleness instead of engaging in manosphere-style peacocking. Anything deemed performative is taken to be unreal or inauthentic.
But before the emergence of “performative” as an insult, generations of US thinkers had considered performative actions as part of a democratic society’s foundation. They understood that citizenship—not as a legal status but as positive, active engagement with democratic life—is inherently performative and that abandoning the performance of democratic life means courting democratic collapse.
Part of what’s striking about modern use of “performative” is how far it strays from past meanings of the word. The concept of a performative utterance originates in the work of the mid-century philosopher of language J.L. Austin. In How to Do Things With Words, which records a series of lectures he delivered at Harvard University in 1955, Austin said that describing a spoken utterance as performative “indicates that the issuing of the utterance is the performance of an action—it is not normally thought of as just saying something.” One of the quintessential examples of a performative utterance, in Austin’s telling, is when a bride or groom says “I do” at the climax of a wedding ceremony. Someone who speaks those words isn’t just expressing an opinion on whether or not they are married; they become married by speaking them in the context of their wedding.
Other theorists, including John Searle and Jacques Derrida, developed this concept further. Today, the theorist most people associate with the concept of the performative is probably Judith Butler. In 1990’s Gender Trouble, they wrote: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.” Someone who uses “performative” exclusively in its modern, disparaging sense might take Butler to mean that there is something fundamentally dishonest about gender performance. But as Butler clarifies elsewhere in Gender Trouble, “To claim that gender is constructed is not to assert its illusoriness or artificiality.” In Austinian terms, someone’s gender becomes real through their performance of it.
Butler is more attentive than Austin to the social and political dimensions of the performative. But they are far from the first major theorist to concern themselves with how performance can construct a social world. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville dwells at length on the role of “customs” in sustaining a democracy. Similarly, John Dewey viewed the transmission and reproduction of democratic customs as key to the long-term survival of a democratic society. But very few people have understood the importance of performance to democratic citizenship better than those who were systematically excluded from it. As the political theorist Melvin Rogers has noted, Black thinkers in the American small-r republican tradition have always concerned themselves with questions of performance.
In The Darkened Light of Faith, his recent survey of some of the........