Performativity—Judith Butler IToP

Judith Butler, the author of Gender Trouble (1990) and many other
books, is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative
Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of
California, Berkeley.

Since the early ’90s, I have found myself embroiled in discussions about
the possibilities and perils of this keyword—“performativity.” Why
was I there? And why am I still returning to the topic now? I suppose
it is because at that earlier point in time I made the suggestion that
gender might be understood as performative, and that led to a rather
long discussion with many people in different parts of the world on
questions such as, “What is the difference between performance and
performativity?” and “Is performativity a way of talking about social
construction?” and “Are all bodies or, rather, is everything about the
body constructed, and does that mean that bodies lack materiality?”
If gender is performative, and performativity is one way of specifying
social construction, does that mean that “we choose our genders” or
that “we are determined by social and cultural norms”?
It is not that such questions came to me in dreams or woke me
from my sleep, but they did continue to arrive at my door, knocking.

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Performativity—Judith Butler IToP

That knock often took the form of invitations to speak, which, once
accepted, compelled the body to get on a plane, watch out for issues of
adequate hydration, sleep in strange hotels, and arrive in person, as a
body, in order to vocalize a response of one kind or another. What was
the relation between those repeated lectures on performativity and the
concept—or practice—that I was trying to elaborate?
It seemed at first that I was speaking within literary theory,
then with an emerging queer theory, but of course I was also in
conversation with many other scholars and artists working on essays,
books, and compelling art projects thinking about performance in
time and space. One position within that increasingly productive field
argues that performance emerges from shared social worlds, that no
matter how individual and fleeting any given performance might be, it
still relies upon, and reproduces, a set of social relations, practices, and
institutions that turn out to be part of the very performance itself. In
a way, “social work,” the name of Shannon Jackson’s book, names as
well at least two dimensions of performance condition and exceeds its
status as a punctual act. Different ways of working together constitute
the social condition, even the very stuff, of performance itself; in
turn, performance brings with it the chance to re-create community
through various preparatory collaborations among objects, others, and
technologies. Even the solo, the monologue, or the highly individuated
verbal performance (which is what most academic lectures tend to be)
requires a support team, a space, a time, a schedule, a set of working
and enabling technologies, a slew of objects, networks, and temporally
organized processes that do not explicitly appear in the distinct set
of moments when the body of the performer becomes seen, heard,
or communicated. We rightly think of all the hidden labor, largely
unpaid or underpaid, that makes the punctual act of utterance or
action possible. But the “action” is better described as a choreography
of objects, networks, and processes that cross the human and the
nonhuman.
From such a perspective, we are compelled to think anew about
some rather fundamental theoretical questions. First, are the human
and object worlds that together make a performance possible also what
make up the performance, such that there is a nonhuman dimension to
all performance? That is, is performance always engaging the nonhuman
conditions and components of our own action? Are such worlds carried
and conveyed, made or unmade, in the performances that we do and are,

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Performativity—Judith Butler IToP

the ones we see and hear or register in some other way, those that lay
claim to our responsiveness and, by acting on us, tacitly restructure how
we sense the world at all? Even at this moment when I write (or speak),
I rely on the work of various scholars and artists to help me think
about how this happens, and this dependency, if you will, structures
this performance; their work is in my work, and their thought is in my
thought, sometimes in ways that preclude the possibility of an explicit
citation.
The body who appears in a lecture space relies on the support
that the space provides, and so relies on the support that the space
receives. These modes of interdependency are both presupposed and
deflected as the individual speaker speaks. We become aware of it, of
course, when microphones suddenly break down or lights dim when
they are not supposed to. Even though we groan at such moments, they
show us how very lucky we are, we humans who transpose and amplify
ourselves by nonhuman means. We are trying to move and speak and
perform in a world that is supported (the sense of the world depends
on supports, and the world, in turn, becomes our support). There
are bodies behind and to the side of this body, and they are working
together, even when that plurality sometimes collapses into the figure of
the one, even when no one else shows up on stage when I do.
I wanted to say something like that when I spoke about gender
as performative or, at least, I came to see things that way in the course
of responding to all those questions and keeping new company. No one
really performs a gender alone, no matter how beautifully idiosyncratic
the performance might be. That does not mean that everyone is
performing it in the same way—not at all. But even under conditions of
extreme and punitive isolation, the kind that follows from performing
gender in ways that are considered non-normative in highly hostile
spaces, one suffers alone, but there is always the shadow of company, of
others who would be treated the same way were they present. One finds
oneself inside a category not of one’s own making. Of course, it is this
particular body who suffers and enjoys, and no other, but that suffering
and enjoyment is already a relational matter—gender is performed for
a someone, even if that someone does not yet exist; and sexuality is
lived in relation to a world of others, whether it is reclusive, auto-erotic,
externalized, or exposed. When someone suffers as a consequence of
having broken with a cultural norm, or for having shown how the norm
can or must be broken or bent, that person has entered into a cultural

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Performativity—Judith Butler IToP

and political struggle whether or not one meant to, whether or not there
are proximate signs of others in solidarity. An isolated act can, in fact,
be a radical petition for solidarity, as if to say, “Where are those of you
who will support me now?” Gender is not gender if it does not imply
the social dimension of a bodily being, the way that the body refers to
a broader world and exceeds the one who bears or does it, even as that
one remains in some sense singular.
But the same goes for performanceZand perhaps this is part of
the link between them. Performance is always an action or event that
involves a number of people, objects, networks, and institutions, even
when performance takes place without a stage and in the briefest of
moments, gathered up and dispersed in evanescence. For it is for and
with someone or some set of nonhuman things and movements, always
relying on a ground or background, or social world—a fleeting act for a
passing crowd—that performance comes forth as “performance” at all.
Even when infrastructure fails, something or someone takes up some
space, pointing to that loss. So performance is not the self-constituting
act of a subject who is grounded nowhere, acting alone. If performance
brings a subject into being, it does so only in terms of the social and
material coordinates and relations that make it possible or that form
its scene of intervention. The boundaries of the body that establish
singularity are precisely the means by which sociality comes into being.
For every question of support and tactility depends on a body that is,
from the start, given over to the material and social conditions of its
own persistence, bound up with that human and nonhuman support
without which . . . nothing.

© 2016 intermsofperformance.site