Wordwatch: Performative

Tate Britain’s exhibition of the works of Sickert closes this weekend. I’m not here to review it but ask you to look, not at a picture but at this sentence: “[Sickert’s] works [featuring music hall audiences] show how people unconsciously engage with the social performative act of being part of an audience”. And look in particular at that word “performative”. What does it mean?

Here it is in another recent context: “[During the Conservative leadership debate] there was insufficient time for the country to find out about the likes of Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat before they were unceremoniously evicted, and far too long given over to the performative gibberish spewed out on a daily basis subsequently by Sunak and Truss” –Spectator 3 September 2022. 

We gather that “Performative” is an “in” word at the moment. It was hardly ever used in the past, but now crops up all over the place. However, as far as I can see it appears in sentences only to impress the reader with the deep intelligence of the writer. In most cases it adds nothing to the meaning and is often quite unnecessary. 

The word has actually been borrowed, as so often happens, from a technical vocabulary, in this case, that of grammar. It used to refer to “a statement or verb, that itself constitutes the action described” (Chambers). Clearly it can be omitted from my first citation where it’s particularly confusing since it refers to the behaviour of an audience (who are watching a performance rather than performing themselves). As to the second quotation, surely it means something there? In what way is the “gibberish” “performative”? I search with the benevolent intention of finding a meaning, but it still eludes me. 

But “performative” has recently taken on the connotations of a technical term from a completely different discipline: sociology. In the last half-century, various philosophers have redefined “the performative” in numerous ways, usually tending to the political or relating to theories of gender, often concluding that gender is a social construction (rather than a set of biological facts). “Gender” itself is a word that has developed new meanings in the light of modern philosophical (and political) ideas, but leaving these aside, we can perhaps confine ourselves here to the notion that “gender” is determined by our “performative” choices – how we choose to behave rather than what we are innately and biologically.  To explore and explain these complications would make for a very long article, and lead any sensible person to avoid using “performative”, in any context, at all costs. 

But the writer of my second quotation, driven by the current fashion for employing the word at every possible opportunity, uses it again in the same piece, and this time apparently gives a definition, too: “The traditional – performative – means of addressing this [the housing shortage] is to say we’re going to build lots and lots of new house and there’s an end to it”.

Does this mean that “performative” means “traditional”? I think not: the sentence seems to imply that the performative solution to the housing shortage is to build houses. Er, yes. 

In other words, to perform the act of building houses is a performative solution. We seem to have got somewhere, but simply by creating a tautology. In the old days we got these ideas across without being tautological, and without a hint of an explanatory verb borrowed from grammarians’ jargon.

But the word has clearly become indispensable. It occurs three times in this one article. Here’s the third instance: “…what the government has done so far to address the issue is actually counterproductive and has already made the housing crisis worse … Once again, that’s because it has been acting in a performative manner.” 

I would expect by now to have grasped from these various contexts what “performative” means. But I fear I still can’t see why it’s needed. And here it is again – used by another writer in the same issue of the same magazine, oddly enough, which proves, doesn’t it, how indispensable (or fashionable) it is: “… Germany’s representatives at the UN… smirking, shaking their heads and laughing performatively while President Trump spoke.” Here I think the writer intends to suggest that the smirking representatives are mimicking in their gestures and expressions the actions of the former President. Funny how the meaning is quite different here from what we deduced the word meant before. Is it wonderfully flexible in the ways it can be used? Or is it, as I suspect, redundant in every case?