Showing papers on "Performativity published in 2007"

Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning

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.

Do Economists Make Markets?: On the Performativity of Economics

Abstract: Around the globe, economists affect markets by saying what markets are doing, what they should do, and what they will do. Increasingly, experimental economists are even designing real-world markets. But, despite these facts, economists are still largely thought of as scientists who merely observe markets from the outside, like astronomers look at the stars. Do Economists Make Markets? boldly challenges this view. It is the first book dedicated to the controversial question of whether economics is performative--of whether, in some cases, economics actually produces the phenomena it analyzes. The book's case studies--including financial derivatives markets, telecommunications-frequency auctions, and individual transferable quotas in fisheries--give substance to the notion of the performativity of economics in an accessible, nontechnical way. Some chapters defend the notion; others attack it vigorously. The book ends with an extended chapter in which Michel Callon, the idea's main formulator, reflects upon the debate and asks what it means to say economics is performative. The book's insights and strong claims about the ways economics is entangled with the markets it studies should interest--and provoke--economic sociologists, economists, and other social scientists. In addition to the editors and Callon, the contributors include Marie-France Garcia-Parpet, Francesco Guala, Emmanuel Didier, Philip Mirowski, Edward Nik-Khah, Petter Holm, Vincent-Antonin Lepinay, and Timothy Mitchell.

On the nature of markets and their practices

Abstract: This article presents a conceptual model of markets as constituted by practice. Drawing on recent sociological research on the performativity of market theories, the article stresses the need to take seriously the role of ideas in the making of markets. Since extant studies of performativity focus on the role of economics in shaping markets, it is argued that marketing as an academic discipline is a particularly apt partner in expanding this endeavour. The conceptual model presents markets as the ongoing results of three interlinked types of practices: normalizing practices serving to establish normative objectives; representational practices serving to depict markets and/or how they work; and exchange practices serving to realize individual economic exchanges. The links between these practices, which are conceived as translations, are elaborated upon using a number of empirical studies. Finally, the model is used to illustrate differences in how markets are being continuously realized. This highlights th...

Markets, market-making and marketing

Abstract: Recent debates in economic sociology have moved away from a critique to homo economicus to a focus on how market exchange is formalized and abstracted from social relations. Rather than dwell on the disparities between the formalism and the practice of market exchange, the work of Michel Callon and associates focuses on the calculating agencies that enable the creation and operation of markets. This article provides a critical examination of these ideas and argues that they have important implications for marketing theory, namely in terms of a shift from exchange as events to markets as institutions. Rather than regarding marketing practices as operating within pre-defined markets, we argue that marketing practices have a performative role in helping to create the phenomena they purportedly describe.

Theories of Markets and Theories of Society

Abstract: Starting from the objectively dominant position of the sociology of markets in economic sociology, this article suggests that markets have served as a privileged terrain for the development and application of general theoretical arguments about the shape of the social order. I offer a critical overview of the sociology of markets as it relates to our concepts of society, focusing on four main representations of what is sociologically important about markets: the social networks that sustain them, the systems of social positions that organize them, the institutionalization processes that stabilize them, and the performative techniques that bring them into existence. I then speculate about the possible future directions that such theorizing might take, calling in particular for a stronger contribution of the sociology of markets to the analysis of societies as moral orders.

The Northern Theory of Globalization

Abstract: Recent sociological theories of globalization represent a second encounter between sociology and global issues. Their underlying concept of “global society” was constructed from an idea of abstract linkage, given content by existing theories about metropolitan society emphasizing modernity, postmodernity, or system dynamics. Antinomies within the globalization theory, such as the global/local opposition and chaotic argument about power, arise from the metropole-centered logic itself, not from conflicts of evidence. The rhetoric and performativity of globalization theory construct a relation with metropolitan audiences, and sociological theories constitute themselves in multiple ways as Northern theory. If we want a genuinely global analysis of globalization we must reconstruct sociological theory as a markedly more inclusive dialogue.

Creativity and performativity policies in primary school cultures

Abstract: Cultures of performativity in English primary schools refer to systems and relationships of: target‐setting; Ofsted inspections; school league tables constructed from pupil test scores; performance management; performance related pay; threshold assessment; and advanced skills teachers. Systems which demand that teachers ‘perform’ and in which individuals are made accountable. These policy measures, introduced to improve levels of achievement and increased international economic competitiveness, have, potentially, profound implications for the meaning and experience of primary teachers’ work; their identities; their commitment to teaching; and how they view their careers. At the same time as policies of performativity are being implemented there is now increasing advocacy for the adoption and advancement of ‘creativity’ policies within primary education. These major developments are being introduced in the context of a wide range of social/educational policies also aimed at the introduction of creativity i...

"Unhomely" Academic Developer Identities: More Post-Colonial Explorations.

Abstract: Academic developers are very often disciplinary migrants, performing hybrid, liminal roles at the “fault lines” between teachers and learners, between academics and managers, and between teaching and research. As a result, their identities as scholars can be described as “unhomely.” While this in‐between space is uncomfortable and ambiguous, its deconstructive power lends itself to “thinking at or beyond the limit” of current teaching and learning discourses. This article seeks to apply the post‐colonial notion of “unhomeliness” to academic development so that we can more critically understand academic‐developer identities and how the relentless march of performativity impacts on them. The article also explores some deconstructive possibilities inherent in the liminal educational development zone that may bring back the playfulness of exploring transgressive ideas about teaching and learning. Les conseillers pedagogiques sont tres souvent des etrangers a la discipline, jouant des roles hybrides ou a la li...

Un/doing Gender and the Aesthetics of Organizational Performance

Abstract: In the age of the so-called 'expressive organization' and the 'aesthetic economy', for an organization to compete in the global marketplace it would appear that it must perform. This does not refer simply to economic performance, but rather to the idea of performance as a means of affecting both people's impressions and definitions of reality. In this article we argue that such performativity is achieved, in part, through the power of symbolism and aesthetics, as well as the capacity to bring oneself into being in an environment in which successful management of the aesthetic has increasingly become a prerequisite for the conferment of recognition. Central to this process are the ways in which the aesthetics of gender are mobilized and indeed simultaneously 'done' and 'undone' in order to affirm particular, but often unstable, regimes of managerially desired meaning. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, and informed by a critical or hermeneutic structuralism, we are concerned here to think through the relationship between performativity and the gendered organization of the desire for recognition as it is materialized in, and mediated by, the landscaping of corporate artefacts and organizationally compelled ways of un/doing gender. With this in mind, we consider a series of images taken from a sample of recruitment documents that, as cultural configurations that organize and compel particular versions of gender, we argue, are concerned with the production of organizationally legible and therefore viable gendered subjects.

Drag Kinging and the Transformation of Gender Identities

Abstract: This case study of the feminist drag troupe the Disposable Boy Toys (DBT) examines the relationship between drag and gender identity. Drawing on multiple methods, the author explores the range of gender identities that emerged through participation in DBT. Members saw DBT as the central catalyst for their own identity shifts. The author suggests that these identity transformations occurred through four collective mechanisms: imaginative possibility, information and resources, opportunities for enactment, and social support. The author finds that DBT served as an identity incubator in which participants were able and encouraged to interrogate, play with, and sometimes adopt new gender identities. The author concludes that context is critical in understanding the meaning and importance of drag. Performing gender in this politicized, feminist context shaped the gender identities of the troupe's members in fundamental and varied ways, suggesting that oppositional communities can be an important venue for iden...

Performative Bodies, Tactical Agents and Political Selves: Rethinking the Political Geographies of Childhood

Abstract: Theoretical elaboration and conceptualisation of children's political geographies is presently in a state of modification. Since the concepts of childhood and politics are not commonly brought together, there is plenty of work to be done. This article concentrates on revealing some political aspects of childhood and bringing up other focal questions concerning children's political geographies. Special attention is paid to children's agency and tactics to reach a better understanding of their ways of participating in politics. The theoretical foundations for this paper are in critical social theory. Following the thoughts of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau and Nigel Thrift on the potentials of non-representational theory, it explores performativity and body politics in general.

Critical Thinking Beyond Skill

Abstract: The aim of this article is to investigate possibilities for conceptions of critical thinking beyond the established educational framework that emphasizes skills. Distancing ourselves from the older rationalist framework, we explain that what we think wrong with the skills perspective is, amongst other things, its absolutization of performativity and outcomes. In reviewing the relevant discourse, we accept that it is possible for the skills paradigm to be change‐friendly and context‐sensitive but we argue that it is oblivious to other, non‐purposive kinds of rationality that are indispensable to critical thought. Our suggestion is that there is an aporetic element in critical thought that is missing from contemporary educational positions. We consider some other efforts to redeem the surplus of criticality that performativity fails to take into account and conclude that the aporetic element that we highlight accommodates better than other theories do the significance of thematizing the taken‐for‐granted in...

Managerialism and “Infinite Human Resourcefulness”: a Commentary on the “Therapeutic Habitus”, “Derecognition of Finitude” and the Modern Sense of Self

Abstract: This paper examines new managerial discourses and practices in which the dialectic of labour is reconstructed as a series of acts of self-understanding, self-examination and "self-work", and through which the "self qua self" is constituted as the central object of management technologies. We interrogate concepts such as "excellence", "total quality", "performance", "knowledge", "play at work" and "wellness" in order to decipher the ways in which managerialism deploys what we term therapeutic habitus, and projects a new horizon of "human resourcefulness" as a store of unlimited potentialities. We invoke management's wider historical-cultural context to situate managerialism within the framework of modernity as a cultural epoch whose main characteristic is what we term "derecognition of finitude". It is the modern synthesis "with the "self" at the centre of its system of values" that provides the ground for current elaborations of subjectivity by managerialism. The paper examines how current vocabularies and practices in organisations use "work" to rearticulate discursively the human subject as an endless source of performativity by configuring work as the site of complex and continuous self-expression. Management itself thus acquires a new discursive outline: instead of appearing as an authoritarian instance forcing upon workers a series of limitations, it now presents itself as a therapeutic formula mediating self-expression by empowering individuals to work upon themselves to release their fully realised identity.

The Performative "I":

Abstract: Although claims to revive the first person in scholarly writing remain compelling, efforts to fulfill them have been less so. Few have survived the problems of authenticity, authority, and advocacy identified by Joan Scott and Linda Kauffman, among others. Following the model of "stunting" offered by the feminist theorist, Mary Russo, this article proposes a view toward a "performative `I'" that invites error, disorder, and difference into the world of citationality or compulsive reiteration. The article builds its proposal on readings of two live performances and three short passages from selected texts. At their intersection, it imagines the displacement of a modernist "I" by a subjectivity defined by an ethics of sensuous coalition and a politics of errant possibility.

Toward a (Kin)Aesthetic of Video Gaming The Case of Dance Dance Revolution

Abstract: Against the hegemony of ocularcentrism currently pervading video game theory, the author situates the practice of video gaming for further inquiry by performance studies to account for it as a wholly embodied phenomenon. Personal narratives of players engaging in performances of the game Dance Dance Revolution indicate the necessity of accounting for both the intersubjective and interobjective elements of video game play. The performativity of video gaming insists on a consideration of its material and discursive dimensions that not only refuses to metonymically reduce the gamer's body to a pair of eyes but also complicates popular dualistic understandings of the player—game relationship.

Culture and Performance: The Challenge of Ethics, Politics and Feminist Theory

Abstract: Cultural theory has taken a 'performative turn', shifting its focus from the textual nature of the world to how the social world is narrated, its subjects are subjected and its relations are ritually enacted. The rise of performativity in cultural theory - spearheaded in many ways by feminist theory - has profound implications for the way we think about ethics and politics. Indeed, as it concerns all aspects of 'difference', it reshapes the ways we think about the continuities and interruptions of social life itself.Culture and Performance explores the development and direction of the notion of performativity. It interrogates the idea of subjectivity, the possibility of ethics and, beyond this, it explores new ways of thinking political imaginations and possibilities. It traces the implications of the concept, and assesses the critique that is emerging from a renewed interest in creativity.

The Troubadours of Knowledge: Passion and Invention in Management Education

Abstract: This article argues that current management education works primarily with an instrumental, reified and fragmented conception of knowledge that ignores the connection between knowing and passion. To propose a learning process that is less dispassionate and disembodied and that conceives of knowledge as invention, we first exemplify the current crises of (management) education and reflect on its implied concepts of knowledge and learning along Lyotard's principle of ‘performativity'. We further probe the relationship between passion and knowledge through Derrida's idea of the ‘unconditional university' and illustrate its merit for both critical reflection and affirmative invention. Instead of a nostalgic re-evocation of ancient pedagogies, we reflect critically upon the possibilities of a deconstruction-based pedagogy in contemporary management education and propose Serres' figure of the ‘troubadour of knowledge' as a conceptual persona that can guide us in developing learning practices that incorporate and combine the value of critique and invention.

Blatte betyder kompis : Om maskulinitet och språk i en högstadieskola

Abstract: This thesis deals with masculinity and language among a group of teenage boys. Based on a year’s fieldwork at a middle school in a Stockholm suburb, the study focuses on how language is used to “perform” masculinity and how the stereotype of the “immigrant youth” emerges in daily communication in school. Inspired by contemporary theoretical work on gender and performativity, the thesis argues that “immigrant youth” is a subject position that emerges through the intersection of two related kinds of phenomena: (a) what particular individuals do with language, and (b) the attitudes and practices about “immigrant young men” present in society and communicated in the school environment. There is an ongoing debate about how youths in multiethnic suburbs speak poor Swedish and use inappropriate language. This thesis takes a critical stance toward the essentializing and moralizing dimensions of that debate. It explores how discussions about “suburban youth slang” and “sexist language” contribute to stereotypes about “immigrant youth” that demonize young men from immigrant backgrounds, even as they subtly work to establish the superiority and desirability of middle-class ethnic Swedish culture and people. In addition, the study examines the way in which communicative practices in the school constantly refer to a particular masculine position that function as an “absent presence” in the construction of “immigrant male youth”, namely the “fag”. The omnipresent threat of the “fag” works in particular ways to construct both a normative Swedishness and a normative heterosexual masculinity. These stereotypes emerge as important boundaries for what should not be said or done in everyday school life. The role of different categorizations in school is examined, and a main finding is that there are no fixed meanings of words as “immigrant” or “blatte” (darkie/immigrant). The labels may be used in processes of exclusion, but they are also in order to establish social relations and friendships among boys.

Education and the Commodity Problem: Ethnographic Investigations of Creativity and Performativity in Swedish Schools

Abstract: Education and the Commodity Problem : Ethnographic Investigations of Creativity and Performativity in Swedish Schools

Utopia, Performativity, and the Unhomely:

Abstract: In this paper I discuss how a differently conceived performative and architectural understanding of Utopia can help us to rework and extend notions of utopianism that have received renewed attention in recent times. In developing this point, I argue that, although notions of dwelling and comfort are key to Utopia and architecture, the ‘unhomely’ and ‘unsettling’, which also appear in aspects of thought on performativity, are a crucial and as-yet greatly underscrutinised part of thinking about Utopia. I attempt to question what we consider ‘good’ or desirable, and hence to enlarge the frame of what we consider ‘utopian’. Through this, I consider the potential beginnings of an extended uncanny Utopian ethics.

Gender, subjectivity and feminist art: the work of Tracey Emin, Sam Taylor-Wood and Gillian Wearing

Abstract: This thesis provides a missing link between the British feminist art movement from the 1970s onwards and three contemporary female artists, namely Tracey Emin, Gillian Wearing and Sam Taylor-Wood. The dissertation demonstrates the influence that feminist art has had on contemporary women's art. It shows how various elements, typically associated with feminist art from a previous generation of female artists. have been either consciously or unconsciously incorporated into the way the three artists in question approach their work. The ideas. concerns and ways of working of a previous generation of feminist artists are discussed in relation to gender politics, the idea of the traditional male "genius", the question of feminist art practice, the role of the female body, performance versus performativity and the representation of women in visual culture. The contemporary work is discussed in relation to the above issues, drawing out comparisons to feminist art practice where appropriate. The thesis also contextualises Tracey Emin, Gillian Wearing and Sam Taylor-Wood within the generation of the Young British Artists (YBAs) of the 1990s. Here it focuses on ideas such as self-promotion versus patronage, the particular sensationalist art practice of the YBAs, the problematic attitude towards cultural theory and finally, it demonstrates how women artists of that particular period tended to work. The dissertation does not aim to present a comprehensive survey of all feminist visual arts activity in Britain and North America, the geographical locations of interest for this thesis, nor is it an all encompassing art historical overview of the activities in London, during the 1990s. The thesis should be understood as a celebration of the significance of the feminist art movement and as a demonstration of the validity of many of its concerns, even today, as exemplified in the work of the three artists in question.

Akogare, Ideology, and ‘Charisma Man’ Mythology: Reflections on ethnographic research in English language schools in Japan

Abstract: In light of recent reflexive ethnography based on frameworks of performativity, this work develops a phenomenological interpretation of my white, male, gaijin (foreign), English-speaking positionality inside Japan's private English conversation schools (eikaiwa). These eikaiwa are ubiquitous in modern urban areas. They are patronized predominantly by women who seek career enhancement, study and/or work abroad, and international romance. To understand the gendered participation patterns inside the eikaiwa I develop a phenomenological understanding of my positionality through a framework based on Occidentalism. This framework is grounded in the ideo-geographically specific notions of seken (surveillance) and akogare (desire). Akogare is instantiated and intensified inside eikaiwa by the performative aspects of staff, students and instructor practices in addition to eikaiwa texts and advertising and popular media discourses while seken, especially gender-normative seken, directed at women is minimized. This ...

Teorías performativas de la identidad y performatividad de las teorías

Abstract: This article aims to review some knowledge derived from performative theories of identity to reflect on the performativity of the theories. Even though it is vital to critically examine the capacity of agency and materiality that carries scientific discourse - a discourse authorized by excellence, especially when it takes place more in the center than at the margins of the hegemonic activity - one of the questions that I want to offer and share is if the notion of performativity is the best way of doing so. Taking constructivism as a quasi posture of common sense in contemporary social investigators, I am interested in revising some of their regulatory fictions - like the one of contrastivity - to point out certain theoretical, political and ethnographic effects that result from basing analysis on a "cliche of performativity".

Embracing the catastrophe : Gay body seeks acceptance

Abstract: This article examines the constitution of gay male identity through embodied performances in Steamworks, a gay male bathhouse in Chicago. Motivated by Kabat-Zinn's (1990) Buddhist conceptualizations of catastrophe and mindfulness, I reflectively track the ways in which desirability influences disconnection and identity negotiation as it occurs within a pervasive, generalized, and highly influential conceptualization of the idealized gay male body. Personal narratives scan experiences at Steamworks in which my body—less than the “ideal”—matters to me and to others culturally. I use Butler's (1990) notion of performativity to propose stylized and normative ways in which subjectivity comes to be through uses of the body.

Performativity by stealth: a critique of recent initiatives on creativity

Abstract: This article offers an analysis of recent development in primary education, in particular the prevailing climate of performativity and new initiatives on creativity. Since 1989 education has been dominated by the performativity discourse accompanied by the obsession with evidence: of children's learning; of teachers' performance; and of student teachers' ‘covering’ the standards. Recent initiatives would seem to signify a shift in official Government thinking on education and a move to embrace the creativity discourse. The commissioning of a national report on creativity and culture was an important first step. There was also the QCA's literature review of creativity, and the development of the QCA web site on creativity. More recently, we have seen the introduction of the new Primary National Strategy (PNS) via the DfES document Excellence and Enjoyment and Government support for creative partnerships: a programme aimed at developing creativity in learning and participation in cultural activities. This a...