See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/233266530

THE ‘PERFORMATIVE TURN’ IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES

Article  in  Journal of Cultural Economy · July 2010

DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2010.494122

CITATIONS READS

36 2,483

1 author:

Christian Licoppe
Institut Mines-Télécom
312 PUBLICATIONS   4,656 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Mediated interaction View project

Quantified Self / QUANTISELF ANR Project View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Christian Licoppe on 01 February 2014.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 The “Performative Turn” in Science and Technology Studies: Towards a Linguistic
Anthropology of “Technology in Action”

C. Licoppe
Department of Social Science, Telecom Paristech
46 rue Barrault, 75013 Paris, France

Final version as
Licoppe, C. (2010). “The ‘Performative Turn’ in Science and Technology Studies”. Towards
alinguistic theory of technology in action”. Journal of Cultural Economy 3 (2), pp. 181-188.

This short article aims to consider some of the new paths which Judith Butler’s analysis of
performativity offers for current research in the Sociology of Science and Technology and in
Communication Studies, and more particularly for understanding what information and
communication technologies actually “do” in communication events. I will endeavor to show
that, by combining some issues related to the performativity of utterances, such as Judith
Butler’s current emphasis on failures (Butler, 2010, this issue) together with the socio-
technical networks of agency on which the Actor Network Theory rests, one reach new
resources for understanding the situated use of technical devices. It can serve as a basis for an
anthropology of “technology in action”, sensitive to the way in which, in any kind of
technology-mediated situation, the performative relevance of artefacts is related to the socio-
technical networks through which they become “present” in the first place.

1. The “performative turn” in social sciences

Judith Butler has played a leading part in promoting a particular way to emphasize process
over structure. In her seminal work, gender categories are not given but appear as the outcome
of the reiterated social performances in which they are involved (Butler, 1990). She uses
Austin’s concept of performativity as a resource to counter the positivist stance which
essentializes categories and naturalizes the qualities of the entities whose stable existence it

1
posits, and would also have gender be considered as a fixed attribute of persons. What is
central to her approach is the ceaseless production of subjects and categories in performative
social performances. Contrary to Pierre Bourdieu, who placed the origin of the force of
performative actions outside language into institutional social roles, she argues, following
Jacques Derrida, that the force of speech acts is founded on the iterative properties of
discourse itself. In a sense, the accomplishment of a speech act in a given situation is laden
with the weight it has acquired in all its previous performances. This is why verbal abuse
proffered by a person without authority or credit may still badly hurt.

However, such a process is open-ended. Every social performance is open to failings of all
sorts, and also to creative invention. The reproduction of categories and subjects is not
guaranteed. The risk that an expected action and the production of a relevant subject may fail
is not just a contingent characteristic of the situation but a constitutive feature of performative
operations. It is because the ensuing actions may fail that performative operations produce
reality and vice and versa as Butler shows in her contribution. The variety of excuses on
which Austin (1961) focuses () reveals the fundamental vulnerability of human action and the
way it is open to the world (Laugier, 2004). If it is because we are vulnerable to the
performativity of discourse that we can be hurt by verbal abuse (Butler, 1997), then the
possibility necessarily ensues that one can invent new responses and new stances for the
subject in every social performance in which “ excitable speech” is addressed to her/him.

Such a perspective has been extended to show how not only gender, but the materiality of
things (Barad, 2003) or even the man/machine distinction (Suchman, 2007) are not given a
priori, but are ceaselessly produced in social performances in which their reproduction is not
routine or matter of fact, and in which they always run the risk of being significantly
reshaped. With these latter authors, Judith Butler’s performativity-oriented critical theory gets
a foothold in the domain of Science and Technology Studies and can enter into a dialogue
with Actor Network Theory. Beyond the anti-positivist and anti-essentialist stance common to
both these approaches, this dialogue is also made particularly fecund by a “performative turn”
in Actor Network Theory, such as in Michel Callon’s recent work on financial markets
(Callon, 2003; 2007)

In Actor Network Theory the scientific character of certain factual propositions or the
efficiency of technical systems and artefacts are not essential properties of some facts,

2
utterances or technical devices. They are produced through a continuous process of
translation t, and their apparent solidity or obviousness only holds inasmuch as this ceaseless
work of translation stabilizes a heterogeneous actor network which ‘performs’ them and gives
them their coherence. Michel Callon recognizes from the start that the Sociology of Science
and Technology involves a particular form of performativity in the sense that the production
of scientific facts and efficient technology through translation simultaneously produces the
world in which they are relevant and meaningful. This is the very basis of Michel Callon’s
own theory of the ‘performation’ of the economy by economics (Callon, 2007). However, in
Actor Network Theory, performativity is not to be explained on the basis of the properties of
discourse or of institutions.

2. Rooting performativity into heterogeneous socio-technical assemblages

Science and technology Studies (STS) offer an original account of performativity. If scientific
propositions can produce the context on which they depend for their relevance and validity,
such a power derives from the agencies involved in the socio-technical networks which are
constitutive of their very facticity (Callon, 2007). These networks assemble human and non
human entities, and their nature is neither solely material nor discursive. A technical device
cannot be dissociated from the many texts and descriptions which refer and point to it, such as
“action programs” (Callon, 1991). This allows Actor Network Theory to criticize other
theories which treat performativity on the basis of ‘classical’ sociology and invoke macro-
social explanations, such as Pierre Bourdieu’s, which considers the force of utterances to be
anchored in the power of institutions which empower the individual speaker, as in the case of
a judge performing judicial speech acts in the courtroom (Bourdieu 1982). However, ANT’s
emphasis on socio-technical networks of agency also provides a basis to criticize Judith
Butler’s own approach to performativity for puttingtoo much emphasis on discourse.
Annemarie Mol has for instance remarked that her account of the construction of female
identities in discursive performances denied the materiality of female organs and medical
instruments (Mol, 2002).

3
The philosophical approach to performativity which stands closest to Actor Network Theory,
and which has inspired in part the recent work on the ‘performation’ of markets (Callon,
2007; Callon, Millo, & Muniesa, 2007), seems to be that of Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari. These authors want to account for the articulation of an utterance with the social
action it accomplishes without folding one onto the other, in a way which preserves its
‘thickness’. Between language on the one hand and action on the other, there is room for a
multiplicity of active voices which all speak ‘within’ the performative utterance. This
heteroglossia is characteristic of a ‘collective assemblage’ (“agencement collectif”), which is
neither purely linguistic nor completely outside of discourse. It is through the heterogeneous
agency that the performative articulation of discourse and action is achieved (Deleuze et
Guattari, 1981). One just has to include in this ‘collective assemblage’ the agency of non
human constituencies, understood as hybrid material-discursive entities, to recover behind it
the heterogeneous socio-technical assemblage of Actor Network Theory.

When Michel Callon reads the sociology of science and technology through the prism of
performativity, he seems to point towards two very different scales for his analysis (Callon,
2007): a) the scale which characterizes “performation”, in which a wide array of propositions,
instruments and practices (such as those of economics as a discipline) produce the world they
describe (the economy); and b) a more ‘micro’ scale in which the descriptive “singular
existential propositions”, which are continuously produced through scientific activity,
reflexively construct the context to which they refer through the use of linguistic devices such
as “shifters”. Actor Network Theory then seems to come very close to a situated and
pragmatic analysis of performativity and to the interactionist approaches it had until then tried
to distance itself from (Latour, 1994; 2005).

What I will try to do next is use the performativity approach while combining Judith Butler’s
stress on the importance of the way performatives produce subjects and can fail or elicit
unexpected responses, with Actor Network Theory’s specific emphasis on socio-technical
networks of agency and the way it sheds some light on what words, but also things, can do in
the social performance of speech acts.

3. Getting empirical access to the relevant networks of agency

4
Let us now consider communication technologies, a particular type of technology whose
agency is not always obvious and which could be much better understood if we exploited and
combined some of performativity-oriented tools provided by Judith Butler and Michel Callon
in their respective research traditions. Indeed, in an information-oriented or semantics-based
approach to communication, the message as content and meaning and the message as a
medium can be analyzed separately. If one adheres to such a version of the functions of
language and communication, communication technologies are supposed to deal exclusively
with the transmission of independent ‘content’ and to work properly when they can be treated
‘transparently’ for communicative purposes. It is only when one relies on different,
pragmatically-oriented theories of communication, attuned to what utterances do and to what
they might do differently in a mediated setting, that we may grasp their peculiar form of
agency. The performativity of utterances therefore provides a privileged entry point to
deconstruct such an alleged ‘transparency’ of communication technologies and grasp their
agency in communicative events.

The research in the “workplace studies” perspective (Luff et al., 2000) has partly unveiled the
pragmatic ‘opacity’ of these communication devices by analyzing the practical problems and
interactional trouble which can occur when mundane utterances and gestures are performed
within “fractured ecologies”, such as video-conference settings (Luff et al., 2003). These
include glances, pointing gestures, referential work, and more particularly verbal and non
verbal deixis. Indeed, a prolonged glance may be far less efficient at projecting an expected
response or eliciting a proper one in a media space than in a co-present setting (Heath et al.,
1992). According to Actor Network Theory, glances, pointing gestures or speech acts perform
differently in a mediated setting because they are reflexively embedded in a different and
specific socio-technical network of relevant agencies. However, to make this work, one must
find a way to empirically get to the precise socio-technical network which is relevant in the
situation and at the time in which the performative is done, in the sense that the participants
orient towards this socio-technical network as a relevant resource adjusted to the particulars of
the unfolding situation.

One can find ways to elicit more complex chains of agency from the ethnographic analysis of
the situation. Keeping within the sole domain of discourse, it is for instance possible, in
keeping with Actor Network Theory (Latour, 2005), to replace the action verbs within any
given utterance by expansions, which emphasize the “make do” rather than the “do” side of

5
things. By repeating the operation, analysts can make longer and longer chains of textual
agency which are potentially at play in any given utterance, appear (Cooren, 2008). For
example, “A has given object X to B” becomes “C has made A give object X to B”. Language
is structurally open to such an expansion of agency through a kind of meta-pragmatic
development which plays a role similar to that of paraphrasal reformulation and expansion in
the semantic domain. Nevertheless, how useful such linguistic methods for expanding chains
of agency are as a heuristic tool to get a sense of the complexity of the networks of agencies
potentially at play in a given speech event has yet to be determined. Furthermore, the difficult
question of mapping degrees of relevance to these various expansions remains. For example,
how can we determine which kind of agency chain, among the infinite number of possible
expansions, is relevant at a given moment in the situation at hand.

One possible solution is to come back to Judith Butler’s work in two respects. First, we can
consider a particular performative speech event as one in a long chain of similar social
performances, with a distinctive pattern of success and failure. Second, we should take into
account her forceful point about the constitutive fallibility of performative speech acts.
Following Austin’s interest in excuses (Austin, 1961), we must also bear in mind the
importance of accounts, which the failure of performatives may elicit (Butler, 2010, this
issue), under the usual guise of justifications and excuses (Scott et Lyman, 1961).

Accounts are occasions for imputing responsibility and intention, and attributing blame to
various human and non human actants, in a way that is adjusted to the particulars of the
unfolding situation. This attribution work constitutes a certain pattern of socio-technical
agencies as relevant to what just occurred. The fact that it is this particular pattern which is
made relevant among the many which might plausibly be evoked is publicly meaningful; so is
the way the pattern is formulated. Thus here we have an additional powerful interpretive
resource for the analyst. Consequently, there seems to be room for bringing Cultural Studies
and Actor Network Theory closer to interactionist analyses, more oriented towards the actual
experience of the social situation. I will now bring these ideas into play in an example.

4. The failure of a speech act in a distributed video setting

This example is taken from an ongoing research project on the development of the uses of
video communication technologies in French courtrooms. The event occurred during a

6
politically sensitive trial in a criminal courtroom (“cour d’assises”) of Saint-Denis de la
Reunion, in the Indian Ocean, in which several policemen (“gendarmes”) had to testify one
after the other from a special room in the Palais de Justice in Paris through a video
communication link. At the end of one of the testimonies, the judge requested a technician,
who was supposed to be present in the room, to fetch the next witness, who had been kept
waiting in a separate room. However, as the previous witness had been framed in a close shot,
the rest of the room was not visible on the screen. Therefore it was not possible for the judge
to make sure that the technician, the intended recipient of his request, was present and in a
situation to hear and acknowledge it, thereby fulfilling the felicity conditions for its success.
Indeed, the technician was out of the room at the time, having left it in order to smoke a
cigarette outside. A highly public silence of about a minute and a half in a packed courtroom
followed, only interrupted by the prosecuter’s questions to determine if there was someone in
the distant room, which remained unanswered. After a few more seconds, the technician
returned to the room; the judge reiterated his request and the technician went out to fetch the
next witness, leaving once more an empty frame on the screen. During this lapse of time, the
prosecutor, addressing the judge in a way which showed he was addressing all co-present
participants in the courtroom, whether he spoke to them directly or not, initiated a short
justification sequence:

1. Prosecutor: on les a mis à contribution là quand même

we have asked a lot of them though
2. President : oui oui
yes yes
3. Prosecutor: parce qu’ils ont beaucoup à faire (.) et c’était pas prévu que ça soit aussi long
because they have a lot to do (.) and it was not expected that it would take so
long

Such a justification is retrospectively oriented towards the consequences which might ensue
from the failure of the president’s initial speech act (i.e. his request, which was neither
granted, refused, nor even acknowledged). It is also finely adjusted to the particulars of the
situation. By placing the technicians’ behavior in a tolerance margin, such a justification
exonerates them from any sanctionable blame. By placing the responsibility of burdening the
technicians with heavy demands (i.e. staying all afternoon to manage the remote room on top
of their ‘usual’ duties) in the president’s hands and his own, he gives the president and
himself back an apparent degree of control over the situation which the failure of the

7
president’s request might have called into question. It therefore counters the possible
interpretation that the judge, who is the person held legally responsible for the proper running
and management of the hearing (i.e. the “police de l’audience”) in the Code de procédure
pénale, could have lost, even for a moment, his control of and mastery over the judicial
proceedings.

So this particular account works by relying on and making publicly salient a certain
formulation of the type of flexible socio-technical arrangement which characterizes such a
situation (a video-distributed judicial hearing). The Paris technicians ‘help’ the distant
criminal court of Saint-Denis de la Reunion beyond their usual, hierarchically prescribed
workload. Such a form of ‘organizing’, which rests on informal services rendered between
two different courts on the basis of interpersonal social networks, is typical of the socio-
technical networks which allowed remote witnesses to be heard in criminal trials, before the
technology was generalized to the whole French judicial system in 2008 (Dumoulin et
Licoppe, 2009).

The account we have discussed thus simultaneously makes overt both the kind of
performative efficiency which may be expected from one of the president’s requests in such a
situation and the relevant socio-technical network of agency which is constitutive of such a
patterning of the expectations regarding the performative force of such speech acts. It is one
formulation among many other possible ones. It reveals some particular details in the
organization of the setting and is adjusted to its particulars. It would have been just as
possible, plausible and correct (although, of course, correctness is not an issue) for the
president and the prosecutor, when confronted with a long silence after the president’s
request, to keep the audience waiting patiently for the technician’s return by explaining how
the features of videoconferencing technology lead to difficulties in accounting for what lies or
happens outside the camera frame. However, this would not have been adjusted to the
requirements of the unfolding situation, for the audience might have inferred from this that the
president was not at that moment in full control of what was occurring in the remote room
(and therefore in his hearing). It might also have given cause, particularly to the lawyers, to
suspect and argue that there was some impropriety there.

In this situation, the videoconference technology “does” something: it contributes to the way a
performative fails, as it can on certain occasions. However, the participants do not orient

8
towards the technology and its “essential” qualities to account for the failure. Their account
evokes rather a larger socio-technical network, which emphasizes the kind of informally given
assistance characterizing the relationship of the court with the technicians responsible for the
remote room, though this means making background organizational arrangements public. This
orientation towards the relevance of a particular socio-technical network of agency is
inseparable from what we could call the performative texture of the situation, i.e. the way
certain utterances or gestures accomplish or can accomplish the next relevant social action
and the way they may succeed or fail to do so. The performative texture of the situation is
revealed in the series of social performances where some types of activity and performatives
are at play. The relevant socio-technical agency and the performative texture of the situation
for a given speech act are mutually elaborative.

5. Conclusion

The “performative turn” brings together different threads of research from Gender Studies,
Cultural Studies and Science and Technology Studies into a common front against positivism
and essentialism. I have attempted to show the fecundity of such a shift by exploring how it is
possible, starting from Judith Butler’s analysis of performativity, and particularly her
insistence on the constitutiveness of the possibility that performatives may fail, to combine it
with recent work in the Science and Technology Studies (STS) tradition, and more
specifically Michel Callon’s work on performation, which emphasizes the necessity to link
performative force to socio-technological networks of agency, to develop an anthropology of
“communication technologies in action”. Communication technologies can be considered
elements in the socio-technical networks of agency involved in the way some utterances and
gestures may succeed or fail as performatives in given communication events. This
articulation is made empirically observable when participants find themselves having to
account for the failure of a performative in the flurry of the situation.

Bibliography

Austin, J.L. (1961). Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Austin, J. L. (1970). Quand dire c'est faire. Paris, Edition du seuil.
Barad, K. (2003). "Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter
Comes to Matter." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3): pp. 801-831.

9
 Bourdieu, P. (1982). Ce que parler veut dire. L'économie des échanges linguistiques. Paris,
Fayard.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble. London, Routledge.
Butler, J. (1997). Excitable Speech. London, Routledge.
Butler, J. (2010). "Performative Agency", Journal of Cultural Economy, this issue.
Callon, M. (1991). “Techno-economic networks and irreversibility.” A Sociology of Monsters.
J. Law. London, Routledge: pp. 133-161.
Callon, M. (2007). What does it mean to say that economics is performative ? Do Economics
Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics. D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa, F., & L. Siu
(Eds) Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 311-357.
Callon, M., Millo, Y., & Muniesa, F. (2007). Market devices. Oxford, Blackwell.
Cooren, F. (2008). "Between semiotics and pragmatics: Opening language studies to textual
agency." Journal of Pragmatics 40: pp. 1-16.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2. Mille plateaux. Paris, Les
éditions de minuit.
Heath, C., & Luff, P. (1992). "Media Space and Communicative Asymmetries. Preliminary
Observations of Video Mediated Interactions." Human Computer Interaction 7: pp. 315-346.
Latour, B. (1994). "Une sociologie sans objet ? Remarques sur l'interobjectivité." Sociologie
du travail 4/94: pp. 587-607.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: an Introduction to Actor-Network Theory.
Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Laugier, S. (2004). Le langage comme pratique et comme performance. L'action en
philosophie contemporaine. In S. Haber (Ed.) Paris: Ellipses, pp. 191-207.
Luff, P., & Hindmarsh, J., & Heath, C. (2000). Workplace Studies. Recovering Work Practice
and Informing System Design. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Luff, P., Heath, C., Kuzuoka, H., Hindmarsh, J., Yamazaki, K., Oyama, S. (2003). "Fractured
Ecologies: Creating Environments for Collaboration." Human Computer Interaction 18: pp.
51-84.
Mol, A. (2002) The Body Multiple. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Scott, M., & Lyman, M. (1968). "Accounts." American Sociological Review 33(1): pp. 46-62.
Suchman, L. (2007). Human-Machine Reconfigurations. Plans and Situated Action 2nd
Edition. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

3672

10

View publication stats