ABSTRACT

According to the late ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel (1967: 11), all modes of social expression and practical action are ‘contingent ongoing accomplishments of organized artful practices of everyday life’. The structures and actions of political life are no exception. As accomplishments, they are regular and predictable in many ways but never inevitable, never structurally determined beyond the actions, motives and understandings of participating and observing individuals. To use the key concept of this volume, grammars of politics – sets of ‘recognizable rules or codifications that facilitate communication’ (Rai and Reinelt (this volume): 2) – are critical to the ongoing accomplishments of political life, be they the maintenance of particular orders or structures, or the disruption, displacement or alteration of those orders or structures. Those grammars are performed, or are deeply implicated in performances which can sustain or produce distinctive social and political orders (or their effective disruption). Performances constitute politics, deploying grammars (rules, codifications) to sustain familiar political understandings and to generate new ones. I shall refer to the phenomenon within which such grammars are enacted as ‘performative politics’, a phrase intended to draw attention to both the theatrical and productive (or constitutive) elements of performance in and of politics. Performative politics combines the theatrical with the productive: it is rehearsed or repeated citational action designed to draw, or with the effect of drawing, special attention to the alleged existence and character of entities such as nation-states.