The Politics of Discourse: Performativity meets Theatricality

When discourses are in flux (of course from one point of view they always are in flux), in periods of unsettled meanings, political struggles exist at various sites of contestation. This productive dissonance is currently the state of play within discourses of performativity and theatricality. Their relationship to each other, and their meanings and uses within their own terms are equally in question. In this essay, I will argue that volatility within these discourses affords an opportunity for forging a new understanding of both their practices and of the consequences of their usages. Further, the identification of certain of these applications with specific nations or regions, what we might call “local struggles,” enables a challenge to the limits of these discourses in light of an increasingly urgent imperative to rethink and resituate performance theory in relation to our contemporary transnational situation.