Term
Performativity
used in 17 texts across the archive
“The reliance of any utterance on the possibility of a verifying ostensive somewhere down the road is what makes language irreducibly performative (and therefore demands that performativity be made explicit and central) but the imperative amplifies and activates that performativity and makes it technological.”
In use
“The seemingly radical implication of performativity is that social roles rely upon ongoing participation and therefore revision and adaptation and can therefore always be taken up differently.”
“This doesn’t mean rule by “nerds,” because linguistic performativity means leading men, and men dedicated to the most rigorous testing of the more daring hypotheses.”
“It’s easy to overlook these modes of performativity, or to examine them only in some kind of protest mode which pretends to imagine a return to an earlier form of liberty, and thereby remain focused on the predations of social media.”
Key texts