Entre el discurso y el performance: sobre el concepto de performatividad y sus transformaciones

Abstract

Since the publication of John L. Austin’s How To Do Things With Words, forces have been attributed to language that go far beyond representation, and that could be summarized under the concept of performativity: a feature of language to describe its capacity to do things or produce realities. The implications of this understanding have surpassed the field in which the concept emerged—philosophy of language—and in recent decades there have been studies from various theoretical approaches, from rhetoric and literary studies to cultural, postcolonial, racial, and gender studies. This widening of the performativity scope has not only led to the concept’s redefinition according to the specific problems of each field, but it has also triggered epistemological debates. The consideration of the multiple ways in which something is said to be “performative” has stressed the borders and tensions between theorizing methods that can be classified into two main groups: on one hand, those that deal with the pragmatic dimensions of language, and, on the other hand, those that focus on the study of social and cultural embodied norms, that have closely linked the concept of performativity to that of performance. The purpose of this article is to explore the constitutive tensions of this concept, to put forward an understanding that, instead of creating walls between fields, it has the opens up the possibility of a more complex, transdisciplinary theory of performativity.