Performative
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Office anthropology™
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“It’s a crucial moment in history,” said Abraaj founder, Arif Naqvi. “It’s an opportunity to immutably and absolutely change the course of innumerable lives.”
Performative
/pəˈfɔːmətɪv/ (adj.)
1. (Critical theory) Characterised by the performance of a social or cultural role: the contextual and performative aspects of gender.
This is the intellectual origin of Judith Butler’s insistence that gender is a mutable social construct, characterised by repeated actions, language and dispositions that shape (and are shaped by) the physical environment. These performance repetitions are not always conscious, nor voluntary nor a product of free choice. If gender is “performative” in this way — and this encapsulation seems a distance from what was traditionally meant by “biological sex” — then it stands to reason that where one can choose one’s performance, then one’s gender can be whatever one chooses it to be. All the world’s a stage. Fair enough, as far as that goes: but the JC will deftly duck out of further extrapolations of what this might mean in practice, since they run fairly quickly into fear & loathing and a highly petulant version of grand guignol. But it is an interesting starting point, deserving serious attention.
2. (Media relations) Describing an action that resembling a dramatic or artistic performance, being one in whose acquiescence one must suspend disbelief willingly — if on a stage of some kind — or gullibly, if in a political or commercial context. A magician’s misdirection.
The key to this kind of performativity — quite different from the first kind but, ironically, performative of it — is the tacit understanding that one is not expected to personally believe what one is saying. Just as we do not expect Anthony Hopkins personally to like eating human liver with fava beans and chianti just because Hannibal Lecter does, nor do we expect the ultra-high net worth wealth management executives to really mean it when they pledge to reduce global income inequality. It isn’t like they are about to give out their clients’ money to poor people, or even stop cooking up elaborate tax shelters to further increase global inequality in favour of their clients, are they?
3. (Technical, and not really in use these days) Relating to an utterance by which the speaker performs a particular act merely by making the utterance (e.g. “I guarantee”, I “represent” or I “promise”).