Performativity

The concept of performativity has had an important theoretical impact in recent decades. It is in fact almost impossible to provide a definition of performance or performativity on which everyone can agree. Within the context of our research, performativity is defined as the normative aspect of an action. Every action can be observed either by focusing on its determined aspect (its context, the constraints involved, etc.) or by focusing on its undecided aspect (how it is new, how it produces something that was not previously decided upon). The quality of performativity refers to the fact that a particular action produces something that was not predicted (or that was not predictable) before the action itself. In this sense, the notion of performativity denotes an approach to reality that does not focus on the essence of things and that rejects the representational paradigm.