Well, I guess I'll put forward what I understand as performativity. Here
goes...

>From my perspective I think a performance/performativity distinction is
useful. However, I get the impression that the terms are almost
interchangeable for many. And they are similar in some respects.

As I understand it--and I'm eager to look into the cites Simon
provided--performance involves an intentional representational act, that
is, the act of communication is foregrounded by the performer. Acting or
performing seeks to engage others in the social act of the performance.
Socially significant categories are realized and relayed through the act,
and both performer and audience recognize the act as a communicative medium
which relies on metaphor, analogy, satire, etc. 

The performative act, however, regardless of intention does not necessarily
foreground the act itself. It seems its real conceptual value lies in a
recognition that social *actions* take place with communicative *acts*. For
Austin (and formalist Searle and revisionist Butler) certain speech acts
are social action (and just as powerful). The term performative, in fact,
denotes the performative verb, which imparts--by its utterance--an action:
"I dub thee the Duchess Parker Bowles" could be one such action qua act.
That is, by its utterance in the right social context (right people and
place), socially significant categories are aligned or mobilized. Butler
engages Austin (and Althusser) in order to challenge the necessity of
material effect in qualifying a speech act as performative action. To do so
she considers the reproduction of harmful social categories in hate speech.
The performative should be distinguished from the merely (albeit important)
descriptive speech act: "You are a long-winded American." Unless, Butler
points out, that speech act (and here's where she also gets into
embodiment) is presenced by a person uttering such words with the
empassioned, sputtering anger of proximity (important because American law
makes no such distinction between calm speech and angry speech unless
bodily harm is threatened... in which case the law recognizes threatening
*behavior*, but not threatening *speech*. That whole 1st Amendment free
speech thing which Butler suggests lets in real harm.) Butler, via
recognition of the performative, points out that speech acts can have very
real effects (socially, personally, and materially) and currently protected
hate speech is not without harm: The harm of forming and disseminating
categories of social exclusion and prejudice. Such speech--in this
way--participates in drawing a circuit of identity: a social production of
categories, an action in itself. Finally, performativity suggests that this
circulation of social categories cannot be distilled to original or
essential qualities: each action is a re-representation of categories, or
following Butler, "as copy is to copy." 

A primary distinction between the two is that performance is usually a
structured and formalistic speech that is understood as such, while
performativity occurs with everyday speech. Put another way, the
performance ends at the edge of the stage but performativity goes home at
night. You can see why performativity has been important for some queer
theorists because it recognizes gay and straight behavior as both
constantly socially mobilized categories of identity (and also historically
changing, multiplying, and collapsing) rather than gay being an aberation
or queer interpretation of a settled, normal, original straight.

To blur the distinction, there is "passing"--such as black for white, man
for woman--in which we can examine the intentional performance of an
identity category which has performative elements as well. Likewise, humor
is a performance that also trasmits important social categories to where it
takes performative qualities.

Well, that's way more than I probably should have written... sorry if it
reads pedantic.



Carl Thor Dahlman

1457 Patterson Office Tower
Department of Geography
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY 40506-0027
USA
http://www.uky.edu/ArtsSciences/Geography/
voice: (606) 257-8237
fax: (606) 323-1969


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