Performative governance
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“I define performative governance as the state’s theatrical deployment of visual, verbal, and gestural symbols to foster an impression of good governance before an audience of citizens”
- —Iza Ding[1]
“What a useful thing a pocket-map is!” I remarked.
“That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?”
“About six inches to the mile.”
“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“Have you used it much?” I enquired.
“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”
- —Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, (1895)
Just as well this kind of thing could never happen in a corporate environment.
“Performative” is a voguish word, and if the learned author thinks she’s discovered something new — that administrators manage second-order derivatives and proxies of their political problems rather than engaging in the political problems themselves — she would do herself a favour by reading James C. Scott, Jane Jacobs and others who have been articulating these ideas for seventy or more years — but since its fashionable, and since it is bang-on the money, let’s go with it.
With — perhaps — a spin. You perform governance, generally, by approximating it: creating crude, two-dimensional stick-figure illustrations of a four-dimensional[2]reality which is genuinely ineffable: with social systems there is never the necessary information, nor boundaries, for any simplistic representation to work.
See also
References
- ↑ World Politics, Vol 72, Issue 4, October 2020, pp. 525 - 556. “Performative governance should be distinguished from other types of state behavior, such as inertia, paternalism, and the substantive satisfaction of citizens’ demands.”
- ↑ Yes: four, and I don’t even need to exceed Euclidean geometry to get there: governance propositions mutate over time.