Performance, Performative: Thinking About Failure

• In Event: 3151 - Theory Section Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 4. Building Theory: Innovations and Applications – B

Abstract

Performance is broadly understood as a spectrum of action that includes ritualized behavior, habitual practices, play, and theatrical events. Performance theory is an ensemble of frameworks and intellectual traditions, drawn together across anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies, by their shared focus on the embodied construction of social reality, knowledge, and solidarity. Curiously, performance theory has historically concerned itself with performance success, perhaps due its focus on the productive and creative potential found in performative action. Theories of performance help us to understand social action in terms that account for and draw from the contributions of feminist and relational theories of action, meaning-making, and consensus-building. Theorizing failure considers the potential of performances of undoing, vulnerability, privation, world-unmaking, silence, and absence. In this paper, I propose a tri-part model of performance failure: critical reflexive failure, routinized nonreflexive failure, and multi-perspectival failure. This model leverages performance and performative theories to conceptualize failure for frameworks of culture and action.

Author

• Samantha Leonard, Brandeis University