A Term Hard To Pin Down

Performative： a noun and a adjective Performativity： -whole panoply of possibilities

-similar to “as performance”

-construction of social reality

-theories Performance writing

Performance and speech acts

Austin -“to say something is to do something” -parasite / Derrida -Searle Notions of performativity permeate culture. “real life” to gain market share and revenues -films, shows, Livingstone, cameras, websites

Postmodernism

Lyotard, Hutcheon, Jameson Is a practice in visual arts, archetecture, performanc

e art 1960s –master narratives -media, internet What was an “original”? -painting, photo, digital image, cloning “nature” and “art”

Simulation

is not pretense, imitation, or fiction, is a replication -“Kaycee’s death and life on the internet”

-Disney world

-Plimoth Plantation

-child pornography

-emotional simulations for military In science

Poststructuralism/Destructrualism

Anti-authoritarian, revolt against structuralism, a discourse began in 1960s with student insurrections

Every act, every idea, is a performative Derrida -writing is a power struggle -histories -Differance&Brecht Differance means “difference” + ”deferral”

The diffusion of poststructralism

1980s –spread far beyond France A wide range of theories and studies

-The Frankfurt School, Marx, Freud

-gender, cultural, postcolonial, queer,performance

“decentering” How to continue those concepts?

Problems with poststrucralism

-Not direct impact on majority of people

-campus radicals Anti-canonical Community-based performance Magic bullet or scapegoats?