Description
This paper explores how the concepts of performance and performativity travel across disciplines and how far their meanings are transformed by distinct epistemic and institutional contexts. While both terms have become central to contemporary theory—from linguistic philosophy and cultural studies to law, political economy, and International Relations—the paper asks whether they constitute a shared analytical vocabulary or remain structured by disciplinary boundaries.
Conceptually, performativity refers to the intentional dimension of practice—the way concepts, utterances, or models are made true through reiteration and institutional embedding—whereas performance emphasizes the situated and embodied enactment of such practices through gesture, movement, and material engagement. Through a comparative reading of performativity in legal scholarship (including the Legal Sightseeing collective’s work on the sensory, affective, and spatial dimensions of law) and in political economy (where performativity captures the constitutive power of economic models and financial practices), the paper investigates how each field imagines the relationship between discourse, practice, and materiality. It argues that the interplay between performance and performativity reveals not only disciplinary differences in how knowledge, normativity, and agency are conceptualized, but also shared concerns with how law and economy enact the realities they claim to describe.
