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Performativity Performativité

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Definition

Defining characteristic of that which is performative. This concept first appeared in 20th century linguistics with the John Austin’s theory of speech acts, famously elaborated in How to Do Things with Words (1962), and it has since been further developed within the human and social sciences. A linguistic sign (sentence, statement, verb, etc.) is considered performative when the sign itself carries out the action that it states, such as ’I swear’ or ’I promise.’

Cite: “Performativity”, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177863

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Created : 2021-06-14.

Last modified : 2022-06-29.

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« Under the influence of anthropologist such as Milton Singer and Victor Turner, the object of “theatre”, once it had stared to be observed in other cultures than European culture, went through a sea-charge from the 1970s onwards. Interest was no longer directed solely at performances, or text-based theatre with its representation, but all kinds of performing actions, mises en scène, happenings and types of performance art. To this we should add ceremonies, festivals, rituals, all that a culture can produce as a manifestation, an externalisation, in short as “performativity”. This “performativity” is always a production (also in the English sense of mise en scène) a productivity: the production of an experience, a situation of enunciation here and now, a meaning. »

Patrice Pavis, Performance and Contemporary Theatre, Londres : Routledge, 2016, p.164


« Performativity is not a singular act,but a repetition and a ritual,which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body,understood,in part,as a culturally sustained temporal duration. »

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Londres : Routledge, 1999, p.xv

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