Politics is a determinate series of practices, just as performance is in its rehearsals and reiterations.
The ‘conditions’ of the political and the ‘roles’ shaped through reiterative performances are both ‘social relations’.
Rancière’s ‘distribution of the sensible’—that is, the system of division and boundaries that define, among other things, what is visible and audible within a particular aesthetic-political regime—is much like the colloquial use of the term ‘performance’.
In the political narrative, the real must be fictionalized in order to be thought: the logic of stories and the ability to act as historical agents goes together. Politics and performance construct ‘fictions’—that is, material rearrangements of signs and images, relationships between what is seen and said, between what is done and what can be done.
A theoretical discourse (political narrative) is always simultaneously an aesthetic form, a sensible reconfiguration of the facts it is arguing about, an identificatory performance.
Art (performance) has been subsumed by the aesthetics of biopolitical capitalism and autonomous production is no longer possible, the production of symbols has become the central goal of capitalism. With the development of immaterial labor in advanced capitalism, the labor process has become performative, and it mobilizes the most universal requisites of the species: perception, language, memory, feelings. Contemporary production is now ‘virtuosic’, and productive labor in its totality appropriates the special characteristics of the performing artist.
The rhapsodist narrates the story of his character by vivid portrayal, always knowing more than it does and treating its ‘now’ and ‘here’ not as pretense made it possible by the rules of the game but as something to be distinguished from yesterday and some other place, so as to make visible the knotting together of the events. This is a way of treating society as if all its actions were performed as experiments—rehearsals.
People absorb behaviors by doing, rehearsing, and performing them. The prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions or to relegate them to the private sphere in order to establish a rational consensus in the public sphere. Rather, it is to sublimate those passions by mobilizing them towards democratic designs, by creating collective forms of identification around democratic objectives—invoking catharsis, like the theater. Performances operate as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through iterated actions.
Performativity must be understood not as singular or deliberate act, but, rather, as the reiterative or citational practice by which discourse produces the effect it names. Much like the political mobilization of affects to align political actors (spect-actors?) through identifications aligned with democratic objectives.