The many sides to performativity

Abstract

Performance will dominate the 20th and 21^st century just as discipline did in the 18th and 19th centuries. Performance can be seen as a global formation of power and knowledge, challenging us to perform – or else. The technology of performativity exposes the jargon and practices of efficiency, effectiveness, quality assurance, control, inspection, and accountability in contemporary education. Any undertaking must be justified by an increase in productivity, measured by a gain in time. The technology of performativity, based on systems of rewards and sanctions, makes us both perpetrators and victims. It erodes the professional soul of teachers and academics, with metric adequacy becoming the primary focus. Performativity leads to fabrications, where individuals present themselves within specific registers of meaning, valuing only certain possibilities of being and becoming.

In this article, I argue that while the technology of performativity is dominant in universities and broader society, performativity does not have a single meaning. It is a polysemous term with multiple meanings. I shall discuss various meanings of performativity, including Edward Said’s ‘performance as an extreme occasion’, slow scholarship; Judith Butler’s ‘gender performativity’; the performativity of knowledge, the performativity of method, and posthuman performativity. These different meanings create alternative opportunities for being and becoming, suggesting that the dominance of the technology of performativity does not preclude other possibilities. I shall explore how these interpretations could counter the technology of performativity in the neoliberal university during a time of polycrisis.