Performativity and the Event: Enacting a Philosophy of Difference

• Published in: Environment and planning. D, Society & space Vol. 18; no. 4; pp. 473 - 496
• Main Author: Dewsbury, John-David
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.08.2000; Pion Ltd
• Subjects: Gilles Deleuze; Social theory; Subjectivity
• ISSN: 0263-7758; 1472-3433
• DOI: 10.1068/d200t

What is performativity? In this paper I set out to encounter this question by intimating the directions we are forced to consider when thinking through the performative. In centring my arguments within the corpus of Deleuze's philosophy of difference I advocate academic production as creative of thought. This is to suggest a performative thinking and doing that unfolds our way of looking at our social, corporeal, human dramas and the technologies by which we feel able to analyse something, and in so doing, enact its constitution. Coursing underneath this issue of performativity is the problematisation of the term of the subject—what if the event was more important? What do we understand of the event if not through a sense of subjectivity? Insinuated within the confrontation with performativity are fundamental implications associated with the timing of something as it happens, the centrality of the material and visceral body to this, and the settings through which events take place. Arguing through this triality I extract three symptomatic themes of performativity: that it speaks of irretrievability, indeterminacy, and excess. Ethically, and in conclusion, emphasis is placed on the empiricism of life in its doing—the present moment of immediate uncertain happening as we are continually enacted out of ‘knowing’ how to go on within concrete, material circumstances.