Performance as a Social Form:

Simmel, Performativity and “Performative Effects”

Abstract

Scholarship on performativity has provided broad evidence for performative agency,

performative citation and the linguistic and technical mediations that make them possible.
Nevertheless, the subfield is fragmented and lacks a clear specification of its own phenomenon
of concern, something that gives performativity a confused relation to social constructionism. In
this article, we attempt three interrelated tasks to help address this confusion: first, specifying
and distinguishing performative effects as emergent and sui generis to performativity claims;
second, identifying a generative mechanism for performative effects; and third, theorizing the
structural potential of that mechanism using Simmel’s conception of social form. Performative
effects refer to a distinct social mediation, we argue, in which a mediational third makes that
which cannot be immediately present have effects on others as if it were present.
1. INTRODUCTION

Performativity has traveled widely throughout the social sciences and humanities, making

appearances in the study of gender, sexuality, and race (Goffman 1976, West and Zimmerman

1989, Butler 1989, West and Fenstermaker 1995; Munoz 2006), networks (Healy 2015),

economies/economics (MacKenzie 2006; Callon 1998), technology (Law and Singleton 2000),

science (Latour 2005), medical symptoms (Greco 2012), new media (Schwarz 2012), refugee

status (Hakli et al 2017), surveys (Law 2009), elite athletic programs (Brown 2016), families

(Choi and Luo 2016), Dutch farmers’ movements (Daniel 2011), migration and borders (Kaiser

2012; Feldman 2005); even sociology has been called performative (Law and Urry 2004).

If this is any indication, increasingly no subfield or topic seems immune from performativity.

This makes performativity convey a certain resemblance with social constructionism and its

earlier appeal, which lead to an extended and prolific list of social constructions, matching every

letter of the alphabet (see Hacking 1999: 1). In the same manner, the proliferation of

performatives begs the question whether everything is performative? Does performativity carry

the same kind of potential for “universal constructionism”? Is performativity different from

social constructionism?

This article seeks to accomplish three goals as a way of answering no, no and yes to these

questions: first, to specify and distinguish performative effects as an emergent phenomenon that

is sui generis to performativity claims, which makes this research different from social

construction; second, to identify how performative effects depend on a generative mechanism;

third, to specify that generative mechanism in relation to what Simmel (1971) calls a social form.

2
We define performative effects as the contents of a performative process that brings into being

certain kinds of realities. Performative effects are easily conflated with good old-fashioned social

constructions when they seem to be just a restatement of constructing reality according to

“typifications” (cf Berger and Luckmann 1966). But this is not what performative effects

involve. They do not concern ontology but rather consist of the effect of something as having

such and such a set of characteristics. Instead of the economy being a social construction,

performativity concentrates on the process that produces the effect of the economy as, for

instance, unified, coherent and inevitable.

If this difference is often overlooked and mistaken, this is due in no small part to the

underspecified difference between social constructions and performative effects, which leaves

the latter vulnerable to similar kinds of criticism. Social constructionism is “ironic” because it

demonstrates how utterly serious aspects of social life are really just figments of a constructed

reality (Smith 2010: 120). It has been dismissed as simply an updated version of nominalism that

gives inordinate power to words and language (Wendel 2006). Relatedly, performativity is

critiqued for giving too much power to speech acts in their ability to change social patterns

(Disch 1999). Such critiques are valid only if performative effects are technically and

linguistically mediated, and not socially mediated in a distinguishable way.

Many performativity scholars balk at the premise that “the social” can be predefined in any way

without participating in what it finds, itself becoming a performative effect (see Latour 2003;

Law and Urry 2004; Butler 2010: 155). For Barnesian (1983; Bloor 1997) performativity,

described below as a version that relies on feedback loops, the social applies lightly as the

3
available standards and practices that can be “cited.” Citational practices have performative

effects by imparting a certain configuration on a pattern of action and “giving life” to a

verbalized entity (Bloor 1997: 33-34). However, different approaches add much thicker forms of

social mediation. The Bourdieusian route maintains that those categories with “idee-force” have

the capacity to be performative because they possess symbolic capital in a given field and are

associated with persons who are “authorized” to speak. Performative effects are understood here

as an extension of the “social energy that has been accumulated in a group or an institution by

the work … that is the condition of the acquisition and conservation of symbolic capital”

(Bourdieu 1999: 338). The theatrical analogy, meanwhile, finds social conditions for

performative effects by finding equivalents to roles, role-playing, scripts, and other aspects of the

theater in everyday social life (see Alexander 2004 for an extensive summary). 1 Performative

effects are always quasi-theatrical effects in this argument, with the same generative mechanisms

that work in the theater applying in social performance.

Simmel is not only relevant for this discussions, we argue, he also provides the tools for

identifying a generative mechanism that has priority over these in accounting for performative

effects. By theorizing performance as a social form, it is possible to identify a generative

mechanism for performative effects in a manner that captures what we argue is its main

condition of possibility: a mediational “third” that can make something that cannot be

immediately present seem as if it were immediately present in its effects.2 While this appears to

1
Diane Vaughn (2004) emphasizes analogy as a productive tool in social theorizing. Significantly, she basis her
argument on Simmel and his suggestion that, in Vaughn’s words, “forms of social organization have characteristics
in common … making them comparable in structure and process” (318). The theatrical analogy has been subject to
past criticism in sociology, generally revolving around the work of Goffman (Dewey 1969). None of this is launched
from a Simmelian point of view, however.
2
Simmel drew attention to “thirds” in his analysis of how group dynamics are shaped formally by the number of
members: “In the function of the third, namely, that of mediating between two extremes, several may share in
graded degrees. This function is, so to speak, only a sort of extension or refinement in the technical equipment of the

4
mirror a similar triadic formula as performative citation (influenced by Wittgenstein) or Peircean

semiotics (Heiksala 2014), Simmel offers a distinct means for theorizing social mediation in his

own transcendent-vitalist terms as “life standing beyond reality” (2017[1920-21]: 2; see also

Symons 2017: 54). The performance theorist Richard Schechner calls this mediation an “as if”

performance space that makes it possible to be absorbed in a performative state (1977: xix).

However, to understand this mediational third requires that we not take recourse to the theater

and draw an analogy. The observed regularities in the theater are only one location for observing

the same a recurrent form of social interaction that systematically generates performative effects.

Performance, we argue, is a generative mechanism when we translate it into Simmelian terms as

a “social form.”

As Guy Oakes (1980: 8) writes, “the concept of form is Simmel’s fundamental methodological

instrument.” It remains “opaque and elusive, but also essential and axiomatic in his work” (9).

As a neo-Kantian, Simmel (1971: 12) subscribed to the idea that there was no such thing as

noumenal (pure, uncognizable) contents. Performativity, too, constitutes a similar effort to avoid

empiricism while not committing to a naïve realism (Law and Singleton 2000). Performativity

draws attention to molecular factors and a multiplicity of ways of organizing activity that seeks

to do without the presumption of macro-structures (e.g. economies qua calculative devices

[Callon 1998]; gender differences qua clothing design [Butler 1990]). Simmel makes a related

proposition by describing macro phenomenon as the concatenation or aggregation of the effects

principle. This mediation itself, however, the decisive modification of the configuration from within, occurs only
through the addition of the third party” (Simmel 1902: 165). Simmel also deploys a similar thirding principle
elsewhere, in his analysis of conflict (1971: 86-88) and his analysis of domination (1971: 106-180, 113-115) both of
which he conceived of as social forms (see also Pyyhtinen 2009).

5
of social forms. He consistently returns to social forms (“simple structures”) as recurrent forms

of interaction with formal characteristics (Simmel 1971: 24; see also Martin 2010: chap 1).3

Performance as a social form magnifies the interactional or relational “constant” in performative

effects (Simmel 1971: 112). Performativity scholarship traces its legacy to the ordinary language

philosopher John L. Austin (1962[1955]), illocutionary and perlocutionary (or “performative”)

utterances and Austin’s famous “how to do things with words” argument.4 This genealogy

therefore concentrate on linguistic mediation, in which language and verbalized entities provide

the content for performative effects, and lends a certain ambivalence to claims in which

performativity is less conditional on linguistically-based “felicity conditions” (Austin 1962: 14-

15). The main antithesis to such a claim concentrates more on technical mediations in which

technical devices bridge the gap between “things and signs” or “is and ought” and provide a

content that is performatively maintained (Latour 1999: 185ff).

The problem, we argue, is that neither linguistic nor technical mediation recognizes social

mediation in its own right as a generative mechanism.5 We argue that social mediation has a

clear structural potential for performative effects but has been overlooked to such an extent that

3
Simmel’s approach to social forms has strong parallels with the search for generative mechanisms. He pursues a
wide range of specific topics in seemingly random and scattered ways. He then clearly senses an urgency to show a
form of meaning operative in all of his specific points. He makes this form explicit as the latent potential realized in
all of these different ways. The point is to show how “the contents of experience are taken up into a form of
experience” (Silver, Lee and Moore 2007).
4
For Austin, an illocutionary statement (“commanding”) can directly bring about certain affects, like the Federal
Reserve Chair pronouncing an increase in interest rates. A perlocutionary statement (“promising”) requires that
other people take up the utterance and make it happen, like the statement “Make America Great Again” leading
people to endeavor to make America great again.
5
Marx also proposes a type of social mediation, and he agrees with the point shared by performativity claims that
adding mediations makes an account more concrete. Though he also agrees with Simmel that social mediations
matter differently (and matter more) than others. The difference between a Simmelian social mediation and Marxian
one can be loosely summarized as the tendency of Marx to work backwards (reality standing before life) in the
manner of retracing a cob of corn through the integral circuits of capital back to the 16th century, where Simmel
works forward from social mediation (life standing beyond reality) (see Sayes 2017).

6
social mediation is rarely considered alongside linguistic and technical. Theorizing mechanisms

(e.g. performance as a social form) carries its own validity independent of empirical

investigation because the mechanism may be present only as a structural potential even if it is not

empirically manifested (Hedstrom and Ylikoskli 2011; Machamen, Darden and Carver 2000;

Bhaskar 1975: 184). If Simmel is right, forms bring content out of life, and social forms need to

be specified in their distinct and observable effects.6 While Simmel is generally acknowledged as

a neo-Kantian, he draws Kantian philosophical motifs together in a radically original synthesis

with life-philosophy that lends his understanding of social forms a generative capacity (Silver

and Brocic 2019; Symons 2017; Pyyhtinen 2012).7

As described below, performance is a recurrent pattern of interaction that creates a mediational

third that allows for the communication of meaning between others separated along the lines of

actors and audience. While such an arrangement has a clear semiotic resonance, Simmel in fact

provides the more advantageous argument in his emphasis on social form and the connection

between forms and life: “Life is compelled to exist solely in the form of its own opposite,

produced immediately by it, in the form of forms,” Simmel writes, “life can only enact itself in

forms, is expressed in each case as the struggle of the form just brought forth by life against the

forms that life has previously produced as its character, its language, its specifiable quality”

6
In drawing these parallels between Simmel and performativity, we also draw analogies between performance and
the forms of social interaction that Simmel himself identified, including conflict, domination, sociability and
exchange.
7
As Simmel writes: “[Life] begets something that is more-than-life: the objective, the construct, that which is
significant and valid in itself” (quoted in Symons 2017: 7; see also Pyyhtinen 2012: 83-84). Elsewhere Simmel
acknowledges the logical confusion of life and more-than-life (or content and form) as co-occurring: “The logical
difficulty raised by the statement that life is at once itself and more than itself is only a problem of expression. If we
wish to express the unified character of life in abstract terms, our intellect has no alternative but to divide it into two
such parts, which appear as though they were mutually exclusive and only subsequently merge to form that unity”
(2010[1918]: 14)

7
(2010[1918]: 104). This, we submit, provides an alternative starting point with which to

understand performative effects, in this case by drawing attention to a social form that adds a

“specifiable quality” to life contents that cannot be immediately present in abstraction but which

can be responded to concretely as if they were immediately present.

In what follows, we first recount the origins of performativity and trace its historical trajectory in

relation to social constructionism. The purpose is to demonstrate their close and confused

relation. We examine performance as a generative mechanism by showing how performative

effects are generated by different configurations of a social form. We conclude the paper by

using performance as a social form to re-read Donald MacKenzie’s (2006) argument about the

Barnesian performativity of financial reality and Judith Butler’s (1990) argument about gender

performativity.

2. THEORIZING PERFORMATIVITY

2.1 From Austin to Butler

Although Judith Butler is perhaps its most famous advocate, performativity is rooted in earlier

philosophical observations about how language works, within the analytic tradition. In the mid-

1950s, the English philosopher John Austin argued that language is often a way of

accomplishing things in the world, or reshaping the world, not only a means of describing it. To

make a promise, for example, is to do the promising not just to say something about it. In How to

Do Things with Words ([1955]1962), Austin described these types of statements (commanding,

declaring, labelling), which entailed performing actions, as “performative utterances.”

8
Austin’s view proved to be revolutionary in that it emphasized the functionality of performative

utterances and how they did not have “truth conditions” but instead have felicity conditions,

which made them more or less effective at “doing something” in the world (Austin 1962: 5).

Rather than describing their topics, performative utterances are “constative” of them. The

statement “I declare [this person] to be my lawfully wedded [partner]” makes that person one’s

lawfully wedded partner. It does not simply describe what is already the case. The marriage

would not be the case without the utterance of the statement. For Austin, felicity conditions that

allowed this to happen were quite simple: (1) a recognized convention must in place that applies

to the uttering of certain words; (2) particular persons must be appropriate to the following of

that convention; (3) the utterance must be executed properly according to the convention; (4) the

persons involved must “have certain thoughts and feelings” and intend to conduct themselves

according to the convention; and (5) they “must actually so conduct themselves appropriately”

(Austin 1962: 14-15). The interdisciplinary enterprise of speech act theory was born in the wake

of Austin’s influential spate of claims.

Roughly 30 years later (1988), Butler would link performativity to gender, making explicit

reference to the American philosopher John Searle’s (1969) work on speech act theory as a

further elaboration of Austin’s original insight. For Butler, what was particularly interesting

about Austin’s analysis was not simply how words do things, but how they commit people to

future actions. For example, when a judge declares a “case closed,” she does not simply end the

trial; she, instead, sets off a chain of events: acquittals or indictments, not to mention the court

being adjourned. Significantly, Searle (1969: 128) argued that in order for a performative (e.g.

the judge’s declaring “case closed”) utterance to have any impact on the future, it has to adhere

9
to pre-established conventions, presumably ones that dictate the someone’s response to the

declaration, not to mention recognizing the legitimacy of the judge’s authority and what her

declaration entails. Likewise, for Butler, gender is performative in that norms of gender and sex

are always already enacted whether or not the performative act adheres to or challenges them.

This gives us some context for understanding Butler’s famous definition in Gender Trouble

(1990: 24-25) and its incredible subsequent influence on performativity: “gender proves to be

performative [by] constituting the identity it is purported to be.” Gender does not pre-exist the

statements or action that seem to be describing it after the fact. This is all, effectively, compatible

with Searle cum Austin. But then Butler takes an important turn, one that we claim should drive

theorists interested performative at least (partially) away from Austin and his felicity conditions

and toward Simmel.

In an earlier essay, Butler (1988: 526) makes the performative connection to performance very

clear using a direct analogy to theater. Gender is an “act [in a play] which has been rehearsed,

much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual

actors in order to be actualised and reproduced as reality once again.” Gender is not a thing but a

performed process; it is one that maintains its presence through active repetition. In her earlier

works, Butler is especially concerned with the construction of the gendered body through

performative acts over time and the consequences this has for interiority and identity. This

remains in Gender Trouble but it has a more muted presence (see Butler 1990: 45, 67, 87, 134).

Butler does, however, return to the theatrical analogy in more recent work (2010; 2015). What

10
Butler argues is that performativity represents an explicit attempt to “[think] about acting in the

theatrical sense” and transpose those insights into the human-scientific domain (1988: 519).

2.2 Edinburgh and ANT Performativity

Butler, of course, is only one major theoretical entry into the burgeoning discussion of

performativity. What makes her unique, among other things, is that she is more aware than most

of the possible limits of Austin’s notion of “performative utterances.” She situates performativity

in a theatrical framework in order to overcome the social limits of felicity conditions. Among

other reasons, this means that her version of performativity departs from those attracted to

performativity from the Edinburgh Science Studies Unit like David Bloor (1997) and Barry

Barnes (1983), who also draw from Austin but do not make a theatrical analogy. This also makes

Butler distinct from Bruno Latour (1986) and actor-network performativity, though in some

version Latour (1992; 2005) does recognize the theatrical analogy, though he remains largely

ambivalent about it.8

In “bootstrapped induction,” Barnes argues that social life consists of constant feedback loops

whose ordered and patterned “products” emerge from a “system of [intervening] inductive

inferences” that are always “tagged with patterns[that are] recognized earlier” (1983: 534,

emphasis added). This same feedback application of Austin is developed further by Bloor (1997:

33) through his claim that “self-referential and performative processes [occur] within rules and

rule-following.” In both models, the performative effects of action are contingent on rules or

institutions that need to be “cited” by actors in order to bestow a specific configuration on reality

8
Butler (2015) has also turned to the question of assembly and assemblage, if on her own terms and to different
purposes than Latour, to further the analysis that began with the performativity of gender to understand the
embodied, performative effects of violence, citizenship, and precarity.

11
through feedback loops (Bloor 1997: 33). Bloor describes this as a “circle of talk about talk,

where the reference of the talk is the practice of reference itself” (32). This process is understood

to be performative because it is self-creating. Citational practices (e.g. this is a lecture) produce

effects by subsuming conduct under rules. The rule is a verbalized entity that is understood to be

“brought into existence” as soon as it is cited.

Unlike Butler’s approach, Bloor and Barnes do not feature a highly relational context (like a

theatre) for “citational practices” but instead define performative effects as the recursive

unfolding of institutions and rules. Aside from an authority relation (Barnes 1983: 529), the

feedback loop does not acknowledge social relations as an integral part of this felicity condition.

Latour (1986), meanwhile, is concerned (at least initially) with performativity as a way of

reframing sociology as the (neo-Tardean) study of associations rather than the study of the

social. Sociologists rely on an all too ostensive understanding of the social, which means that the

discipline effectively pre-establishes all the “typical properties” that constitute social

phenomenon (structures, cultures, classes, values). Latour pushes in the other direction and

expands the range of properties that can constitute “what society is and what it is made of”

(1986: 273). He calls his alternative “performative” and omits giving any specific distinction to

social relations independently of the attention given to “human” and “non-human” mediators

(see Law and Singleton 2000).

Latour (1992), however, does come to recognize a more social-relational felicity condition --

partially at least -- in his later argument about prevailing “nonmodernism.” Based on his reading

12
of Shapin and Schaffer’s (1985) magisterial analysis of 17th century scientific experimentation,

Latour (1992: 27ff) recognizes the quasi-theatricality of the scientific “demonstration” as a key

moment in the deployment of actants to resolve controversies and assemble the social through

their wider imbrication (see also Latour 2005: 136-37) The relation between actors (e.g. Boyle

and his air-pump) and an audience (e.g. gathered members of the Royal Society of London)

allows scientific experimentation to “ground social order objectively” (Haraway 1997: 23; see

also Law and Urry 2004). This is a performative effect that Latour asserts, for these reasons,

should not be conflated with a social construction.

Our suggestion in this brief tour of performativity theories is that these theories flirt with a

felicity condition for performative effects that is a distinct social mediation, but performativity

theorists ultimately remain reluctant to credit performative effects to this kind of generative

mechanism. Why the reluctance? An important reason could be the confusion between

performative effects and social constructions, combined with the position-taking among

performativity scholars that maintains they are not social constructionists (see Law and Singleton

2000; Butler 2010). This begs the questions of why this sort of resistance/confusion would in fact

be present in the field at all?

2.3 Social Construction, Performance or Performativity?

One answer comes from the history of social constructionism and performance native to the field

of American sociology, and two arguments that came to fruition during its postwar heyday.

Social constructionism (Berger and Luckmann 1966) and performance of self (Goffman 1959)

foreshadow and provide something of a template for the incorporation of performativity in

13
sociology.9 Because social constructionism largely prevailed over Goffmanian performance in

every area except for microsociology, later performativity has been situated more strongly in

relation to it than to Goffmanian performance, despite the evident relation between the two.

Despite Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) acknowledgment in The Social Construction of Reality

of an “inherent instability in the human organism” (52) that makes “universe-maintenance” an

ongoing problem for a socially constructed reality, it is only during socialization that socially

constructed reality confronts the possibility of a failed or deviant construct, when a constructed

reality must be “internalized” by new cohorts (129ff). Berger and Luckmann never account for

failed social construction or even deviant social construction. Social interaction is neither a

necessary nor a sufficient condition for the social construction of reality. What is a necessary

(but not sufficient) condition are what Berger and Luckmann call “typifications” (47-48).

Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), meanwhile, incorporates the

possibility of failed performance as “mispresentation” and “the suspicion of contrivance” (58ff),

to the need for coordinated teamwork to support a given “definition of the situation” (83).

Performances are always haunted by failure in Goffman’s view, because they must involve social

relations. There can never be complete congruence between the “crucial roles” in a performance,

or between “those who perform; those performed to; and outsiders who neither perform in the

show nor observe it” (144).

9
Performativity’s appeal has tended to be concentrated in subfields with either a strong interdisciplinary dialogue or
where central questions were left only partially answered by social constructionist principles (for example, in
gender). A comparison of subfields that are more or less available to performativity is suggestive for revealing more
implicit theoretical commitments (as suggested initially by ethnomethodologists).

14
Social constructionism and (Goffmanian) performance theory rose to prominence at roughly the

same time in American sociology. Both rode the wave of sociology’s surge in popularity on

American university campuses during the 1960s and 1970s (see Turner and Turner 1992). Social

constructionism came to define the field at large, shaping nearly every subfield in the discipline.

Performance, meanwhile, prevailed mostly among fledgling micro-sociologists in friendly (and

not so friendly) distinction from symbolic interactionists. For those influenced by Goffman, the

theatrical analogy largely prevailed. While Goffmanian performance and social constructionism

resonated for similar reasons and overlapped in terms of content, the differences between them

and the different trajectories they followed in the field is mirrored in present-day concerns about

performativity.

Social constructions have distinct effects that arise from the kind of phenomenon they are, which

means they have an ontological status apart from the acts that constitute their reality.

Performative effects are, instead, indistinguishable from the practices and assemblages that

create them (Law and Singleton 2000: 770; Latour 1986). Our argument is that without a kind of

social mediation, then the implication is that practices, theories and assemblages always make

and build what they prefigure and explain, which obscures the differences between social

constructions and performative effects. What Simmel adds is an understanding of how

performative effects are mediated upon others and therefore presuppose the structural potential

of a social form.

15
Performative effects convey a similar non-necessity that aligns with a progressive sensibility

interested in social change, sharing this with social construction (Hacking 1999).10 In the same

manner, however, performative effects can also convey an “irony” when the recognition of

performative effects does not seem to alter them or change their puzzling inertia; they simply

continue unabated (Smith 2010). They also convey a similar nominalism that can appear to give

inordinate power to “mere names” or the citation of mere words (Wendel 2006). We claim that

nominalism and irony apply to performative effects when they are less concrete than the

otherwise should be. This applies when accounts of performative effects lack a specification of

the “social conditions … social coordinates and relations” that make them possible (see Butler

2010: 155).

The social mechanisms identified by performative citation (Bloor 1997), symbolic capital

(Bourdieu 1999) and the theatrical analogy (Alexander 2004) are not dismissed in our argument;

rather it is that a generative mechanism for performative effects should take priority. This is one

that accounts for the appearance of “life standing beyond reality” or the “as if” space in which

performative effects become possible. Performative agency of this sort, we argue, can only be

activated in a social form of interaction that moves performative effects from a potential

tendency to an actualized and observable phenomenon.

Thus far, this article has attempted to better identify the nature of the problems for which we

want to sketch a possible solution. The remainder of this paper now theorizes performance as a

social form. To do this, we follow Simmel’s lead and concentrate on the difference between

10
This is evidenced by the discussion below in which MacKenzie (2006) uses his performativity argument to show
concern with the “counterperformativity” of the economy, and Butler (1990) uses her performativity argument to
recommend various forms of gender parody, an equivalent form of counterperformativity.

16
potentially observing the empirical manifestation of an underlying process generated by a

mechanism and actually observing the empirical manifestation of its operation. If this formula

applies in order to theorize generative mechanisms, it also applies to theorize social forms.

3. PERFORMANCE AS A SOCIAL FORM

As Simmel argues there are two key criteria that must be verified to prove the existence of a

social form:

On the one hand, we must demonstrate that the same form of sociation can be observed in
quite dissimilar contents and in connection with quite dissimilar purposes. On the other
hand, we must show that the content is realized in using quite dissimilar forms of
sociation as its medium or vehicle. A parallel is found in the fact that the same geometric
forms may be observed in the most heterogenous materials and that the same material
occurs in the most heterogenous geometric forms (Simmel 1971: 26).

This, we claim, provides a strategy of identifying how performance is a social form, by finding

performance as a persistent form of interaction across different contexts but also finding a

variation in content that corresponds to the different formal configurations that performance can

take. “The point is to ascertain from all the facts what … [is] a form of human behavior … We

are suggesting, in brief … that similar elements be singled out of the complex phenomenon so as

to secure a cross-section …” (Simmel 1971: 29)

3.1 A Cross-Section of Performance

The effort is to align performance with conflict, domination and exchange as equivalent social

forms of interaction. This means, in Simmel’s terms and simplified, that there must be a formal

dimension of performance and also a content dimension. Presumably there must also be a

17
historical dimension to performance, though Simmel draws this out far less frequently with most

of his social forms (sociability [Simmel 1971: 127ff] being a notable exception).

In a formal point of view, performance corresponds with a very basic experiential pattern of

interaction, familiar in everyday life, that involves “preexisting forms” that, in Simmel’s words,

persons “fill with … individual content.” Together, this “intertwinement” makes possible a “life

standing beyond reality,” which Simmel says is the source of the parallel between functional

roles and theatrical roles.

Very seldom does a man define his way of behaving purely from his very own existence,
most often we see a preexisting form in front of us that we fill up with our individual
content. Now this: the person lives or presents a prescribed part other than his own core
development, left to itself, but all the same he does not thereby simply abandon his own
being, but rather he pours this being into the other, and he guides the flow of the role into
many divided streams, each of which, although running in an existing riverbed, receives
the whole inner being to give it a particular shape—that is the early form of the actor’s
art. It becomes art in that it abstracts from the reality of life and is transformed as a
means from a simple form, intertwined with life, into its own life standing beyond reality
(2017[1920-21]: 7; emphasis added)

Life “standing beyond reality” as more than either its individual contents or its preexisting form

is only possible, Simmel claims, in relation to an audience and the “reality [given] in the sensual

image” (2). The actor tries to afford a “sensual picture” that is otherwise “given literally” through

some kind of explicit message. All of this unfolds in time, through a “sequence of happenings”

whose pace, or the “general flow of time,” moves at varying speeds (2). Simmel provides here a

general framework for understanding the purely formal dimensions of performance and how

these formal aspects together systematically generate performative effects, which we can

understand here as the experiential dimension of “life standing beyond reality” with the

capability of engendering effects upon others as if it were reality.

18
Figure 1 depicts the formal dimensions of performance as actor, audience, message and timing.

<<<<Figure 1 about here>>>>

The actor/audience relation can be more or less distinct, where there is a clear differentiation

between the two and they are not interchangeable, mutual, where there is a differentiation

between the two but they are interchangeable, or simultaneous, where there is little

differentiation between actor and audience and they co-occur.11

Timing can be conveyed as more or less fast, where there is close alignment between the

different elements assembled in the performance, deliberate, where the pacing is more noticeable

and labored, or slow, where significant mismatches in the performance significantly interfere

with the sequence of happenings and stop the flow of time.

Message refers to the explicit content that actors seek to transmit to an audience in a

performance. Message draws attention to the role of interpretation in a performance, though

performative effects are still different. A message can be more or less uncritical in which case it

does not signify anything that wants to draw attention to itself, pointed in which case it does seek

to make a point and be noticeable, or false which means that the message carries conflictive or

inappropriate content relative to the circumstances. Messages only work in combination with the

other elements of a performance.

11
The different configurations of the actor/audience can be elaborated further using Simmel’s ‘intersection of social
circles” framework as referring to more or less overlap or co-membership in the same circles. See Silver and Lee
(2013) for a related application and Simmel’s analysis of “The Stranger.”

19
Contrary to most versions of performativity, performative effects are not simply the result of

bringing an assortment of ingredients together (from the technical to the sartorial) in order to

make real that which an abstract content of some type prefigures or explains (category,

classification, calculation, theory, etc). There is a missing social link in this process, and this is

where Simmel makes a difference. Here we have filled out the formal details of different

configurations that activate performative effects and take the other ingredients that

performativity scholars draw attention to (technology, objects, clothing) from a potential

tendency to an actualized phenomenon.

Any assemblage brought together within a social form can activate the effect of “life standing

beyond reality” or the “as if” as a specific experiential content. Any assemblage brought together

without a social form cannot activate the effect of “life standing beyond reality” or the “as if” as

a specific experiential content. As Simmel further suggests, content—or, “everything that is

present in individuals … in such a way as to engender or mediate effects upon others or to

receive such effects” (1971: 24)—must vary along with different configurations of the form

itself.

Performative effects “engender effects” upon others about something that cannot be immediately

present (the economy, gender, a self), though others can act as if it were present depending on

the effects. Can we now get any more specific in referring to performative effects than “life

beyond reality” and an “as if” performance space?

3.2 Examining Performative Effects

20
Table 1 maps out different configurations of the performance form along the above parameters

and their correspondence with different specific contents in dramaturgical settings,

organizational settings and the theater. The different contents that fall under each specific

heading we label as performative effects.

<<<<Table 1 about here>>>>

Why these three? Goffman (1959) and Meyer and Rowan (1977) present what seem to be clear

(and influential) portrayals of performance as a social process, but their observations unfold in

quite different settings. Performance studies (Schechner [1977] 2010) provides a very different

setting (theatrical) that makes an illustrative comparison. The goal is to show how similar

configurations of the performance social form has the potential to generate similar performative

effects despite the different specific content found in each of these distinct settings.

Ease

As Goffman (1959: 19-20; 234-36) writes, the ease with which a performance of self unfolds

seems to correspond to same type of mutuality between parties in the interaction that allows

them to easily see the other person’s point of view. This implies a dramaturgical type of

performance (e.g. “tact”) in which actor and audience differences are recognizable, but one

recognizes herself as now one and now the other. As the actor assembles different contents as

part of a “performance of self,” the performative effect of this will be characterized by ease and

go largely unnoticed.

21
Legitimacy

In this configuration, the main difference is the actor and audience overlap to such an extent that

they co-occur within the same institutionalized myth. For Meyer and Rowan (1977), institutional

performance comes across as uncritical and its pacing is fast when the message is configured

according to a highly institutionalized presence of myths and standards. A performative effect

appears that is similar to ease in dramaturgy: the content of the performance is so closely aligned

that the there is little room for tension or “misfires.” The organization produces the effect of

legitimacy.

Naturalism

A naturalistic performance according to performance studies is one that gets across to an

audience in such a way that it draws little attention to itself and seems to just “flow.” While actor

and audience in this setting are distinct and clearly defined—e.g. actors do not become audience

or vice versa—the naturalistic performance corresponds to the same configuration that applies to

ease and efficiency. It does not seem like a performance (see Schechner 1977: 321). The

audience finds the actor easily recognizable though they cannot take her role.

Serious

As Goffman (1959: 229-234) observes, a performance of self comes across as serious (or

“protective”) when it conveys a lot of intentionality, care and deliberation. It seems that choices

and decisions are being made, and there is clear pacing to the “flow of time,” as the sequence of

happenings is choppy and recognizable. The messages conveyed are more evident and

conspicuous and can come across as critical. In the dramaturgical setting, this conveys distinct

22
actor/audience positions, but those involved rotate between them and they are far more cognizant

of this switching back and forth than they are in configurations of ease.

Efficiency

In an organizational setting, where the relation between actors and audience is characterized

more by simultaneity and co-occurrence, the equivalent to a performative effect like “serious” is

efficiency. Here the pacing of time is more deliberate and message more noticeable as

organizational survival is a stake. There is more uncertainty as the audience for organizational

performance is inside of it and not coordinated by institutionalized rules outside of it (Meyer and

Rowan 1977: 356). This means that the assembly of different content appears always in relation

to the current organizational task, creating a very pointed message, but with no sense whether

this will continue into the future.

Mannerism

Performance studies also has a reference for this configuration of the performance form. The

reference here is the mannered performance. Mannered also corresponds to deliberation and

choice and draws attention to itself such that the pacing of the performance is slower (Schechner

1977: 106ff). There is more to notice (by the audience) and more to be aware of (by the actor).

Embarrassment

For Goffman (1956), embarrassment arises both from an actor’s recognition of standard, from

her commitment to follow them and from her understanding that she is not now following them.

This involves mismatches in the content drawn together for a performance of self. In situations

23
of embarrassment, the sequence of happenings is so noticeable that the pacing comes almost to a

standstill (“time stands still”) and everything is noticeable. Nothing is brought together as it

should be.

Decoupling

The organizational equivalent to this is the rather rare organizational phenomenon of uncoupling.

Here the performance of organizational reality also comes to a standstill because of significant

mismatches and mis-alignments between the various contents that had otherwise been brought

together efficiently. This leads to the development of more distinct actor/audience positions,

breaking their simultaneity, as the organization ultimately fractures and separates, requiring the

recognition of a boundary (and its ceremonial management) that used to pertain only with those

outside the organization (e.g. “structural inconsistencies,” see Meyer and Rowan 1977: 356-57).

Failure

A similar configuration is defined by performance studies with the reference of performative

failure (Bailes 2011; Munoz 2009). Here the pacing is also slow, the relation between

performative contents is also fractured and mismatching, and everything is also more noticeable

by both actors and audience. More recent performance studies examines failure as a designed

performative effect. Performative failure wants to create misfires for the audience in order to

increase their awareness and attentiveness (in the tradition of modernist theater), and perhaps in

this way provoke change.

3.3 Performative Effects as Generative Content

24
Our basic claim can be summarized as follows: performance as a social form has similar content,

given different configurations, that take similar forms, in different specific settings. This, we

argue, essentially passes the two tests that Simmel mentions for demonstration of a form: that the

“same form of sociation … be observed in quite dissimilar contents and in connection with quite

dissimilar purposes. On the other hand … that the content is realized in using quite dissimilar

forms of sociation as its medium or vehicle” (1971: 26). We have attempted to demonstrate those

contents in relation to performances of self, organizational performance, and theatrical

performance, all with quite dissimilar contests and purposes. Different configurations of actor,

audience, timing and message achieve a kind of “synthetic unity” (1971: 8). The performative

effect depends on the setting; but across different settings, each performative effect carries a

family resemblance with others, a formal similarity that suggests the structural potential of the

same generative mechanism. In these three settings, we have labelled these performative effects

as ease, legitimacy, naturalism, serious, efficiency, mannerism, embarrassment, decoupling, and

failure.

How are these contents? Our argument uses Simmel to uncover a missing social link in

performativity models in which the contents otherwise mostly consist of material objects,

technologies, equipment, or rules, citational practices, standards or theories. We do not dismiss

these as contents in generating performative effects, but we do argue that focusing only on them

overlooks a generative mechanism responsible for creating the mediational third necessary for

performative effects. If we recall, they do not refer to the social construction of something like

the economy. Performative effects make no ontological claims. Rather, they involve the

performative effect of a legitimate and efficient economy. This is independent of any specific

25
message given about the economy or any technical calculation that might provide that message.

Those messages can only be performative given the manifestation of performance as a

mechanism and the activation of its potential. This means that it mediates effects upon others,

although the economy cannot be immediately present. They can act as if it were present.

This ingredient appears in the way that the contents of all social forms appear, according to

Simmel, as what in each of these cases is “present in individuals … in such a way as to engender

or mediate effects upon others or to receive such effects” (1971: 24). Here, contents refers to the

mediational third in which performative effects (whether of a self, of an organization, or of a

fantastical world) are possible and present here in this type of mediation. This, we argue,

identifies a different form of mediation than mediation by actants (in ANT performativity) or by

bootstrapped citations (in Barnesian performativity).

How do they compare with the contents of other social forms? We can briefly mention a few

parallels using the social forms that Simmel himself identified. The social form of conflict

includes “unity and discord” and “differentiation” that involves, among other things, the

appearance of a third that those in conflict attempt to ally with or get on their side and

unwittingly benefit (Simmel 1971: 73-74, 86-87). There is innumerable content to which this can

apply. Like all content, performative effects involve the vital components of the form, entangled

with interests, wants and experiences. For example, the form of domination can appeal to interest

in moral force and a neutral or “higher tribunal” made possible by subordination under a

principle (1971: 107, 113). All contents of a social form must be linked as an entailment of its

form. For example, the form of exchange produces a sense of fairness or unfairness regardless of

26
what is being exchanged (1971: 53) Finally, social forms have some kind of historical dimension

and variability. Simmel explains this most fully with sociability. The development of “free-

moving forms” of association, promoting the joy of association, can be situated if anywhere in

“the court society of the ancien regime” (1971: 138).

This last point of emphasis, on the historical dimension of performance, is still missing from the

argument, though Simmel himself rarely gave social forms historical conditions of possibility

(though he did do this with cultural forms [Simmel 1971(1918)]). Alexander (2004; 2011),

provides a glimpse at such a genealogy in arguing that performances are composed of distinct

elements that had once been organized as Durkheiminan ritual but become “de-fused” due to

growing social complexity and differentiation (Alexander 2004: 544). Social differentiation

means that actor, audience, message and timing become more differentiated and the performance

form emerges out of an undifferentiated ritual overlap (see also Alexander 2014: 11ff). This

helps understand the interest in performance as a social form: to communicate meaning to

unfamiliar others who are socially distant and different.12

Does this make performance a distinct form of interaction? Are we really finding evidence of

conflict or exchange? Simmel gives very little sense for what it means for one social form to

switch over into another, or the boundaries between different social forms. They are made

distinct according the “enactments of life” they enable (Simmel 2010[1918]: 104), which we

hypothesize reveals something unique about performance as a social form. Using this historical

discussion we can also infer that what makes performance distinct as an interaction is that it

12
Robert Cooper (2010) provides a useful clarification of distance as a key category in Simmel’s thought which he
used to refer to an “immanent absence … a continuous reaching out by human agency.”

27
takes place between an actor and audience, as socially different and distinct positions, and that it

involves interpretation across a divide. The actor seeks to communicate meaning across a divide;

but the only way that message can have reality, or have a life of its own as “mediating effects

upon others,” is through an audience. The contents that correspond to performance may resemble

or align with the content of other social forms. Like conflict, it gives rise to an “objective

interest” between conflicting parties (Simmel 1971: 86-87). Like conflict, performance generates

a mediational third element. Unlike conflict, that third is, as Simmel (2017[1920-21]: 2) writes,

“life standing beyond reality” or the performative effect of a self, a formal organization or a

fantastic world in a theater production. The performative effect applies to that which cannot be

immediately present but which can mediate effects upon others as if it were present.

3.4 Re-Reading MacKenzie and Butler with Simmel

If we take well-known performativity arguments, what does performance as a social form mean

for them? Consider, first, MacKenzie’s (2006) well-regarded argument about how “the

development of our culture’s most authoritative form of knowledge of financial markets has

affected those markets” (275).

In series of highly detailed examples, primarily of the uses and adaptations of the Capital Asset

Pricing model and the Black-Scholes-Merton model, both have the potential for Barnesian

performativity, though Black-Scholes-Merton much more so. This suggests, for MacKenzie, that

while “empirical patterns of option prices was originally only approximate [the fit] improved

rapidly after the model was published and adopted by market practitioners” (256). In other

words, the market became more like the model, not least because the model cognitively

28
surpassed the “limited power of memory, information-processing and calculation” of those who

could actually check the models to see if the recommend course of action was in fact rational

(265ff).

We are not denying that technical mediation is central to MacKenzie’s performative story, but

our attention is cast more at the design and application of the models. As Mackenzie carefully

shows, “the key to achieving peer recognition was the development of good models. ‘Good’

meant economically plausible, innovative, and analytically tractable” (2006: 243). This would

imply an efficiency contents, the development of a “good model” being a performative effect

shaped by a particular, collegial academic setting. The message need not bridge a significant

differentiation between actor and audience. If there was more differentiation, then this would

mean a greater chance to disrupt non-critical performative effects, presumably by allowing for

more deliberate performative effects.

While MacKenzie mentions counterperformativity (e.g. “use of a theory or model may be to alter

economic processes so that they conform less well to the theory or mode” [19]) this implies

changing the technical contents though not the social contents of performativity. The deployment

of the models to price assets (“in the [trading] pits”) can be understood as a performance in a

similar manner, with simultaneity between actor and audience, that assembles financial reality on

the basis of efficiency, which seems unquestionable (see MacKenzie 2006: 164ff). In all

instances, a social mediation occurs alongside a technical mediation. That mediation consists of

the assemblage of technologies in a social form with a mediational third. In this case, the

29
performative effects of combined technology and performance produce the effect of financial

reality as so unquestionable as to be mechanically trusted.

For Butler’s (1990) famous analysis of gender performativity, the emphasis placed on

performative effects rests largely on the effect of a coherent and essential gender identity (185).

This is maintained through repetition, in Butler’s view, and the signifying practices that unfold

this kind of “inert substantive” in a discursive field shaped by compulsory hetereosexuality

(189). Butler delves deep into the signifying practices and the discursive entanglements to make

this argument, but we argue that, similar to MacKenzie, signifying practices of all sorts cannot

have performative effects sans their assembly in a social form.

Butler articulates clearly the performative effect in this case as the effect of coherent and

essential gender. More elaborated, it is the effect of a binary gender molded by heterosexuality.

This requires a mediational third, however, if we are not to read this argument as simply saying

that the signifying practices that correspond with gender binaries socially construct the gender

difference. Butler is insistent upon this point: “gender identity … is the effect of a regulatory

practice [that includes] sex, gender, sexual practice and desire” (1990: 24); “culturally

intelligible subjects [are] the resulting effects of rule-bound discourse that inserts itself in …

pervasive and mundane signifying acts” (198). Our argument is that for performative effects to

work so seamlessly in this case (e.g. convey “natural necessity”) requires not only a social form

but a specific configuration of performance as a social form that allows for performative effects

along the lines of uncritical ease.

30
Butler gives specific dispensation to gender parody and subversive gender strategies and

recommends how to undermine these performative effects. Here she emphasizes how “practices

of repetitive signifying” (198), “practices of parody” (199), and “strategies of subversive

repetition” (201) allow for the possibility of alternative configurations of gender. This could

imply an attempt at deconstructing or reconstructing a social construction that runs contrary to

Butler’s emphasis on performative effects. Our suggestion, then, is that Butler’s parodic strategy

actually depends on performance as a social form. Gender is shaped by performative effects that

apply to a mediational third. Parodic strategies are effective to the extent that they generate

different performative effects; in this case, the effect of “failed” gender (Butler 1990: 23).13

CONCLUSION

This article has sought to establish three points: first, that performativity research has a

distinctive (sui generis) phenomenon to explain, namely performative effects; second, that

current theories of performativity miss an important generative mechanism for performative

effects because they are reluctant to distinguish social mediations from other linguistic and

technical mediations; third, that this generative mechanism can be captured by theorizing

performance as a social form. The larger context for these points is our agreement with

performativity theorists that performativity is distinguishable from social constructionism, our

departure from them in attempt to specify that difference by distinguishing a distinct mechanism

for performative effects. This complicates the assumption in much performativity scholarship

that theories and assemblages always make and build what they prefigure and explain.

13
Butler makes this point in language that resonates with performative effects: “… the very notion of ‘the person’ is
called into question by the cultural emergence of those ‘incoherent’ or ‘discontinuous’ gendered beings who appear
to be persons but who fail to confirm to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by which persons are defined”
(1990: 23)

31
As a generative mechanism, performance as a social form accounts for the appearance of a

mediational third that helps solve the largest riddle of performative effects: namely, how they

can apply to that which cannot be immediately present in abstraction (gender, the economy) but

can still have concrete effects as if it were present. Performative effects are not uniform, and we

have attempted to “complexify” performativity with social mediation and an expanded range of

performative effects. We have sought to theorize performance as a generative mechanism and

largely kept our discussion separate from empirical investigation. This is in order to capture the

structural potential of this mechanism even if it is not empirically manifested. Future research

should examine the relational configurations that activate performance and the social mediations

that generate performative effects from a co-extensive empirical perspective.

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