Performativity

The traditional meaning of this term in leisure studies lies with the act, process, or art of performing, particularly with reference to performance arts such as theatrical productions which incorporate acting, song or dance. Erving Goffman (1959) was one of the first major theorists to develop the term in a more critical way. According to him, it is not just actors, musicians, singers and dancers who perform. In the modern world we are all performers (even those of us who are not [Page 158]performers) and everyday life as a whole is guided by performativity. Drawing on a number of theatre analogies, he set out a categorization of dramaturgical contingencies by which he identified the key ‘stage props’ or strategies that individual actors might draw on in order to negotiate their way through the ups and downs, the challenges and embarrassments, that we are all confronted with in our everyday life.

At the same time that Goffman was developing these ideas about performativity in the 1960s, studies in ethnomethodology which set out to uncover the ‘methods’ by which actors construct their everyday lives, were also being developed. These sought to show that, during these performances, individuals are not only able to convince others about their social identities – through the structures of everyday activities which they ordinarily and routinely produce and maintain – but sociologists are also better able to understand human interaction by disrupting tacitly agreed and taken-for-granted assumptions about everyday life through ‘breaching experiments’ (see Garfinkel, 1967).

As with the ethnomethodologists, Goffman centred his own analysis on individual actors and the ways in which they presented themselves in everyday life, but in addition to them what he was also offering was a form of analysis that took more account of the institutional and structural aspects of the interaction order. In this respect Goffman was wise to the fact that, while individual actors can draw on a range of techniques in order to maintain the presentation of the self, performativity comprises not merely singular acts in order to perform a ‘personal front’ but also established or institutionalized roles. For Goffman, then, dramaturgical performances tend to be embedded in an existing reality and are selected rather than individually created (Ritzer, 2003). In other words, and notwithstanding our individual ability to act, this suggests that our leisure still tends to reflect everything about what it means to be born in a particular place and time as well as our class, gender and ethnicity.

However, given these latter points, the ‘centring’ of the self remained at the very heart of Goffman's analysis and from Judith Butler's (1990) poststructuralist perspective this reflects the major weakness of his sociology. Even though Goffman takes into account both institutional and structural aspects of the interaction order, he also understands the individual presentation of the self as a performance rather than the ‘front end’ of performativity. Goffman's understanding of the self is ‘fixed’ and ‘deep’ rather than ‘liquid’ and ‘aesthetic’; he constructs an understanding of the self at the ‘centre’ of things and this understanding is underpinned by a founda-tionalism which, in Butler's terminology, ‘presumes, fixes and constrains’ the individual subject.

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