Performativities
Performativities” is not a concept (it’s not, in truth, a word) so much as a chimera—a blank space where an intellectual history is needed. The bulk of readers will be familiar with this term, having encountered it not only in academic literature on “performance” or in fields such as “performance studies” but also in colloquial language and news media—such is the saturation of the concept today.
This course attempts to give at least one answer to a polyvalent question. First stated: how did we get here? How is it that performativity has successfully left the confines of theoretical vocabulary where other 20th century concepts have not? Telling this story will also require us to reformulate this same question as follows: if giving an intellectual history of performativity means returning to the putative original moment(s) of the concept, can those moments reliably be thought to be talking about the same thing? In other words, is performativity a cohesive concept and opportunity for interdisciplinary thinking across the fields that use it, or is it rather a false friend—equivalently naming modes of thinking and concepts that are actually entirely different at their bases? Departing from the proposition that these two questions are, in fact, the same question, the course, thus titled “Performativities”, employs a method that pursues a historiographical project through philosophical thinking, and a philosophical project through historiographical inquiry. It is not, exactly, your usual “history of ideas”.
This course will proceed in an order that is largely chronological, beginning in the middle of the 20th century with the “Speech-Act Theory” of J. L. Austin, proceeding to notions of performativity in the poststructuralist theories of the ‘70s and ‘80s, then moving to the performativity concept in economics and finance, formalized in the ‘90s and popularized during the beginning of the 21st century. Our penultimate study will be on the notion of technical performance, which mobilizes largely contemporary, 21st-century literature. We, for the last unit, abandon our chronological progression and return to theories of violence in the 20th century based on creative and productive (n.b. this does not mean “good”) aspects of violence, such as the Schmittian state of exception.
