In Defense of Being Performative

If anything, the performative dimension of democratic politics is even more front and center when it comes to the work of some of the other figures that Rogers considers. Frederick Douglass had himself photographed more frequently than any other 19th-century American man, precisely because he understood the influence that depictions of his dignified countenance could have if widely distributed. These portraits were, like Walker’s tract, a performance of citizenship that, by their very existence, helped to call the reality of that citizenship into being.

Later in The Darkened Light of Faith, Rogers highlights the power of Billie Holiday’s live renditions of the anti-lynching anthem “Strange Fruit”—both a literal series of musical performances in the colloquial sense and a performative act in the Austinian sense that, according to Rogers, “is not exclusively concerned with helping us understand lynching…but to help us feel what should be felt and to display the appropriate emotions to it through a mimetic display of the horrific.” By dramatizing the horror of lynching, Holiday compelled otherwise dispassionate white listeners to feel a species of horror not conveyed by traditional news reports.

American freedom fighters are not the only ones who understood the link between democracy and the performance of democracy. Václav Havel—the Czech dissident writer and, later, first president of post-Communist Czechoslovakia and the successor Czech Republic—felt it in his bones. His most celebrated essay is essentially a call for Czechs living under Communist rule to engage in performative politics. In “The Power of the Powerless,” he invites readers to consider the Czechoslovakian greengrocer who hangs a poster with the slogan “Workers of the world, unite!” in his shop window.

“I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions,” Havel writes. Instead, the greengrocer puts up this sign because he received it from the Communist authorities, and he knows that he could get in trouble if he doesn’t display it.

Havel asks us to think about what would happen if the greengrocer took down the poster and began to speak his mind—if, in other words, he acted like a free individual. “In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie,” Havel writes. “He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.” These small gestures of resistance, according to Havel, corrode the very foundation of autocracy, which is based in lies: “If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth. This is why it must be suppressed more severely than anything else.”

Thus far we’ve mainly considered the role of performance in a democratic society. But Havel’s parable of the greengrocer draws our attention to the reverse phenomenon: Much of authoritarianism’s power also rests on elaborate performances of power. By forcing its subjects to perform their subjugation, an authoritarian regime helps to turn that subjugation into a reality. And who in American public life is more nakedly and monomaniacally preoccupied with the need to deliver a good performance than Donald Trump? (Here’s what Trump said to ABC’s chief Washington correspondent regarding his illegal war on Iran: “How do you like the performance?”)

It may seem odd that “virtue signaling” and, later, “performative” took off as terms of derision around the time that Trump, America’s showman in chief, entered national politics—particularly because the most frequent targets of these terms tend to be on the left. If you are part of a movement led by a man whose entire life is one elaborate performance of wealth and dominance, who are you to accuse anyone else of being performative? But the partisan valence of these accusations isn’t so strange if you think about it. After all, as should be clear by now, virtually everyone in a society is constantly performing in one way or another. So  “performative” as a slur must refer to the specific content of a performance rather than to the fact that performance is involved.

Which raises the question of what separates a performance of fealty to Trump from a performance of opposition. Or, for that matter, the question of why a skinny Gen Z guy with a tote bag gets called a “performative male,” but someone like Andrew Tate—who has built a large online following by cultivating a grim and menacing masculine aura—does not.

We can begin to answer that question by considering the conceptual slippage between the technical definition of a performative utterance, “performative” as an insult, and accusations of virtue signaling. The blurriness between these different meanings implies that a performance should be considered less authentic and worthy of greater suspicion if the thing being performed is a type of virtue or selflessness. Tate’s performance is “authentic” because his vision of masculinity is all about terrorizing and exploiting others. In contrast, a “performative male” who reads Sally Rooney and behaves in a generally nonthreatening manner has to be concealing his real agenda, which is no less sociopathic than Tate’s. No one really has the capacity for virtue or altruism, so the only honest (non-“performative”) performances are those that make a spectacle out of selfishness and cruelty.

Similarly, only the rituals of democratic political engagement—the displays of respect for your fellow countrymen, the invocation of values like liberty and equality, and the public demonstrations on behalf of one cause or another—can be considered performative under this rubric. The rituals of autocratic rule—cabinet meetings that consist of televised self-abasement sessions, demonstrations of the state’s immense capacity for violence, and flagrant lying—aren’t performative in the derogatory sense, because the thing being performed is an insatiable desire for power. That’s authentic. Only attempts to communicate that you hold certain principles higher than your own base hungers and your own self-exaltation must be somehow misleading.

As Stephen Miller, Trump’s superego, put it in a CNN interview: “We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” Such an attitude makes democracy impossible, because there is no path to constructive negotiation and problem-solving between parties of equals. A society that cannot be held together through the performance of mutual recognition is one that must necessarily end in the dictatorship of those with the greatest capacity for violence.

Thankfully, Miller and his ilk are wrong. The “real world” has always been populated by people with a capacity for fellow-feeling; people who will give up half of their meager allotment of bread so that their neighbor doesn’t starve, people who derive self-worth from their ability to treat others with consideration and respect, and even people who have given up their lives so that others may enjoy the gift of freedom. Some of the people you see reading challenging literature in coffee shops are doing it because they want to enrich themselves or because they take pleasure in grappling with difficult-to-express ideas. If they have more than one motive—maybe some guys both love Elena Ferrante and want potential romantic partners to see them as the type of guy who loves Elena Ferrante—so what? There is no universe in which we should prefer the type of guy who proudly declares his disdain for female writers.

We are currently ruled by people who revel in their own depravity. These overt displays of moral turpitude—some people call it “vice signalling”—aren’t some kind of brave stand against hypocrisy. They are a conscious attack on the customs and habits that help to preserve a democratic society. Any sustained effort to rescue the democratic project from these people will require material resources, but it will also require the sort of group cohesion and moral reinforcement that can only be realized through performative acts. It’s time to start taking virtue, and in particular public displays of virtue, seriously again.