Topic
Performativity
About: Performativity is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3051 publications have been published within this topic receiving 72393 citations.
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01 Jul 2007
TL;DR: Barad, a theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism as mentioned in this paper, which is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics.
Abstract: Meeting the Universe Halfway is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous fields in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In this volume, Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism. Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, agential realism is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics. The starting point for Barad’s analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr’s philosophical views in light of current scholarship in physics, science studies, and the philosophy of science as well as feminist, poststructuralist, and other critical social theories. In the process, she significantly reworks understandings of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity, and objectivity.
In an agential realist account, the world is made of entanglements of “social” and “natural” agencies, where the distinction between the two emerges out of specific intra-actions. Intra-activity is an inexhaustible dynamism that configures and reconfigures relations of space-time-matter. In explaining intra-activity, Barad reveals questions about how nature and culture interact and change over time to be fundamentally misguided. And she reframes understanding of the nature of scientific and political practices and their “interrelationship.” Thus she pays particular attention to the responsible practice of science, and she emphasizes changes in the understanding of political practices, critically reworking Judith Butler’s influential theory of performativity. Finally, Barad uses agential realism to produce a new interpretation of quantum physics, demonstrating that agential realism is more than a means of reflecting on science; it can be used to actually do science.
4,731 citations
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TL;DR: The ubiquitous puns on "matter" do not, alas, mark a rethinking of the key concepts (materiality and signification) and the relationship between them, rather, it seems to be symptomatic of the extent to which matters of "fact" have been replaced with matters of signification (no scare quotes here).
Abstract: L anguage has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every “thing”—even materiality—is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation. The ubiquitous puns on “matter” do not, alas, mark a rethinking of the key concepts (materiality and signification) and the relationship between them. Rather, it seems to be symptomatic of the extent to which matters of “fact” (so to speak) have been replaced with matters of signification (no scare quotes here). Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter. What compels the belief that we have a direct access to cultural representations and their content that we lack toward the things represented? How did language come to be more trustworthy than matter? Why are language and culture granted their own agency and historicity while matter is figured as passive and immutable, or at best inherits a potential for change derivatively from language and culture? How does one even go about inquiring after the material conditions that have led us to such a brute reversal of naturalist beliefs when materiality itself is always already figured within a linguistic domain as its condition of possibility?
4,728 citations
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TL;DR: Performativity is a new mode of state regulation which makes it possible to govern in an "advanced liberal" way as mentioned in this paper, and it requires individual practitioners to organize themselves as a response to targets, indicators and evaluations.
Abstract: This paper is the latest in a short series on the origins, processes and effects of performativity in the public sector. Performativity, it is argued, is a new mode of state regulation which makes it possible to govern in an ‘advanced liberal’ way. It requires individual practitioners to organize themselves as a response to targets, indicators and evaluations. To set aside personal beliefs and commitments and live an existence of calculation. The new performative worker is a promiscuous self, an enterprising self, with a passion for excellence. For some, this is an opportunity to make a success of themselves, for others it portends inner conflicts, inauthenticity and resistance. It is also suggested that performativity produces opacity rather than transparency as individuals and organizations take ever greater care in the construction and maintenance of fabrications.
3,850 citations
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01 Jan 2003
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel and the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins (written with Adam Frank) 93 4. Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You 123 5. Pedagogy of Buddhism 153 Works Cited 183 Index 189
Abstract: Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Interlude, Pedagogic 27 1. Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel 35 2. Around the Performative: Periperformative Vicinities in Nineteenth-Century Narrative 67 3. Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins (Written with Adam Frank) 93 4. Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You 123 5. Pedagogy of Buddhism 153 Works Cited 183 Index 189
1,932 citations
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe the work of a nascent research community of economic geographers and other scholars who are making the choice to bring marginalized, hidden and alternative economic activities to light in order to make them more real and more credible as objects of policy and activism.
Abstract: How might academic practices contribute to the exciting proliferation of economic experiments occurring worldwide in the current moment? In this paper we describe the work of a nascent research community of economic geographers and other scholars who are making the choice to bring marginalized, hidden and alternative economic activities to light in order to make them more real and more credible as objects of policy and activism. The diverse economies research program is, we argue, a performative ontological project that builds upon and draws forth a different kind of academic practice and subjectivity. Using contemporary examples, we illustrate the thinking practices of ontological reframing, re-reading for difference and cultivating creativity and we sketch out some of the productive lines of inquiry that emerge from an experimental, performative and ethical orientation to the world. The paper is accompanied by an electronic bibliography of diverse economies research with over 200 entries.
1,204 citations