Abstract
‘Performativity’ is a term coined by the French Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in his most famous work The Postmodern Condition (1984). This chapter begins by looking at performativity’s status within the study of education and what it has commonly come to mean in that domain. I argue that this common understanding presents an overly simplistic (or vulgar?) understanding of performativity when read against Lyotard’s original account. It is this rendering of performativity that tends to be the focus for philosophers of education. Consequently, it is important to show the ways in which performativity covers concerns that extend beyond a focus on improving exam results and ensuring accountability. This will involve looking more closely at what Lyotard had to say about performativity and putting his work in a philosophical context. The discussion will then move on to some of the ways in which philosophers of education have taken up the concept to try and analyse and understand educational practices and discourses. Given the vast array of work on performativity, providing a literature review of everything that has been published since The Postmodern Condition would lead to incredibly thin fare. I have therefore selected five relatively distinct positions into play so as to illustrate what is at stake in regard to thinking about, and in some cases beyond, performativity.
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Notes
- 1.
It should be noted that the discussion of performativity in sociological work by Ball and others is much more nuanced and sophisticated than the common understanding that has followed from it.
- 2.
Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics concerned with language in use.
- 3.
This is not fully developed until the publication of A Theory of Communicative Action in 1981and postdates the initial publication in French of The Postmodern Condition.
- 4.
‘Language game’ is a term drawn from Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and it is used to refer to forms of language that are smaller and simpler than the whole of language. The word ‘games’ refers to the active, lived dimension of language in use and to play a language game is to partake in ‘a form of life’. Lyotard’s treatment of this issue is rather controversial as his language games are ‘islands’ partitioned off from the colonising force of performativity Wittgenstein’s vision of language is less pure when he talks of “a complicated network of similarities, overlapping and criss-crossing” (Wittgenstein, para. 66).
- 5.
See Munday (2009) for a detailed reading of this.
- 6.
It should be noted that Derrida has been heavily criticised for his reading of Austin. Searle’s damning rejoinder ‘Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida’ (1977) is perhaps the most well-known critique. These disagreements are deserving of their own chapter and there is no space to rehearse them here.
- 7.
This is a literal translation of Derrida’s famous formulation “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”. As Attridge notes, “this phrase does not mean ‘the things we normally consider to be outside the text do not exist’ but ‘there is nothing that completely escapes the general properties of textuality, différance etc.’—that is, as Derrida goes on to explain, no ‘natural presence’ that can be known ‘in itself’. But it is also true that here is no inside the text, since this would again imply an inside/outside boundary” (Attridge in Derrida 1992, p. 102). The more famous (though less exact) translation is “there is nothing beyond the text”.
- 8.
This account of professing is radically at odds with what tends to count as ‘professionalism’ today.
- 9.
The REF stands for Research Excellence Framework. It was first carried out in the UK in 2014 and is undertaken by the four UK higher education funding bodies The REF is a review process carried out by selected senior academics who review institutions in accordance with judgements regarding the quality of “outputs”, “impact” (the ways in which research influences the world beyond academia) and the research “environment” present in each centre.
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Munday, I. (2018). Performativity and Education. In: Smeyers, P. (eds) International Handbook of Philosophy of Education. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72761-5_62
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