CMCL-C 611: Topics in Rhetoric and Public Culture
(Topic: Politics of Performativity: Fetishes of Identity, Democracy
and Capitalism)
Class Number: 25729

M, 2:30 PM-5:00 PM, MJ 112

Open to Graduates Only!

Instructor: Michael Kaplan
E-Mail: mikaplan@indiana.edu
Office: Mottier Hall 209
Phone: 856-1365

Course Description
The concept of “performativity” pervades contemporary critical
discourses on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, democracy,
postcoloniality, globalization, new media, and cultural performance.
Its rise to prominence responds to concerns about the prospects for
political agency in a world rendered unjust by symbolic forms of
power that seem to organize the very structure of reality. Yet the
political premises, promises, resources, and efficacy of
performativity have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years.
The term itself has a double lineage, deriving one of its senses
from “ordinary language” philosophy and linguistics and the other
from theatrical and ritual performance. This course explores the
theoretical foundations and critical elaborations
of “performativity” understood as a constitutive feature of all
discourse. The aim is to acquire critical purchase upon the meaning,
entailments and scope of the concept of performativity in
contemporary theory, and to assess its usefulness for doing critical
work on, and within, the emerging historical situation. Beginning
with key texts on linguistic performativity, we will trace its
implications for prevailing theories of power and agency (e.g.
Marxism; psychoanalysis; various poststructuralisms). We will then
look critically at some major efforts to re-conceptualize social
structure, subjectivity and identity in terms of performativity.
Finally, we will endeavor to grapple with criticisms of the politics
of performativity by investigating the performative dimensions of
liberal democracy and transnational forms of late capitalism.
Seminar participants will critically assess deployments of
discursive performativity in ongoing research in gender, sexuality,
race, ethnicity, and/or citizenship and pursue its implications for
their own research.

Readings are likely to include:
J.L. Austin, Pierre Bourdieu, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Jacques
Derrida, Sigmund Freud, J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jean-Joseph Goux,
Ernesto Laclau, Benjamin Lee, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean-Francois
Lyotard, Karl Marx, Jeffrey Nealon, Orlando Patterson, Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, Slavoj Zizek, and/or others.