Of Affects, Effects, Acts, and X
- Of Affects, Effects, Acts, and X
Over more than a year of global pandemic, stress, tragedy, worldwide activist upheaval, and bitter US political struggle, this one non-life-threatening, merely annoying, little thing kept happening: everyone on the internet kept using “performative” to mean theatrical. Compared to the loss of life, livelihood, and social and familial connections across the globe, performative’s newly prominent role in hashtags and colloquial discussion may not merit a headline, but for the performance and dramatic theory community, inculcated with Austinian and Butlerian notions of “performativity” and the “performative” utterance (or action) that actually accomplishes something, the social media performative’s negative valence of “merely for show” or empty narcissism still delivers a shock.
It wasn’t because I am angry about a pet word being abused by the masses that I formulated the call for the special section that became #PerformativeX and the issue of JDTC that you are reading now. It was rather because I suspected that such a groundswell indexed a surge of popular concern about fundamental issues of theatre and performance theory and I hoped our interdisciplines dedicated to such studies would have something (as it happened, many somethings) to add to these debates. The call for #PerformativeX brought in more than forty proposals. Of the many excellent ideas, we selected those that would speak directly to our current moment of heightened concern about the performative-as-mere-appearance-without-substance and its overlaps with—or challenges to—canonical works of performance theory.
The works collected here are working at this frontier, where the tasks of sorting appearances from actions, and the actions contained within appearances, and the various guises of action and change, are all open and provocative questions. At what point might the proliferating nothing of social media’s “performative wokeness” tip into the Butlerian sustainedness of being something? How can we move our canon of theories further toward a nuanced reckoning with the powers of both theatricality/theatre/drama/representation/appearances and performativity/performance/efficaciousness, at once? And how can we do better than the crude [End Page 9] binary I’ve just re-invoked here? The seventeen authors assembled in this special section help us to do that.
The special section is divided into two major subsections: full length articles and a selection of shorter pieces meant to deliver just one key argument or case study relevant to the theme. Aaron C. Thomas and Patrick McKelvey each point to places where fundamental performance studies discourses seem to have hardened into dogmas, reopening inquiries that restore complexity and nuance to our genealogies of theatre and performance theory. Meanwhile, Lilian Mengesha conveys the concerns of “performative allyship” into the theatre, with an examination of Sicangu Lakota playwright Larissa FastHorse’s most-produced script to date, The Thanksgiving Play. Kelsey Blair triangulates the “performative” in corporate, political, and individual activism, while co-authors Jessica Hautsch and Amy Cook analyze the ethical and political stakes of a novel mode of role-playing: the reaction GIF. The shorts section features twelve additional takes on various aspects of “performative” provocations, from internet and in-person activism in 2020 across the United States, Canada, and India to queer fashion to mainstream sports with historicizing trips back to Japan 1968 (Marotti) and James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (Goss).
My own grounding in performance and theatre theory has been re-enlivened by pressing ethical and political debates occurring across what has become The Long 2020, as we moved even more of our lives, work, and social and political activities online (and indeed throughout four years of a reality TV presidency). It began to feel as if the pervasive, ambivalent power of “theatricality” (which I take to mean something like appearances or representation unstably tethered to truth value) was really re-establishing dominion over performance studies’ attempt to define an efficacious or “real” ground to performance. The transformation of performative into an anti-theatrical slur indexes a very reasonable exhaustion and a very correct recognition that representations and statements are unstably attached to action; but to suggest that the verdict of performative is the end of an inquiry, instead of...
