ABSTRACT
The implications of performance theory for understanding power should be pretty clear. The institutional-structural approach seems to assume, in other words, that the performance of power is easily fused. Concentrating on language at the expense of speech, they ignore the very contingency of performance that cultural pragmatics aims to embrace. The durability and visibility of the madres constituted a counter-performance, quietly recalling the regime's murdered enemies and silenced opponents. Dictatorship is the ability for central power to refuse every element of its own performance, while preventing other potential powers from ever doing the same. In this manner, there is a primitivization of power: social performance is pulled back under the center's control. Skeptical audiences are the key to causing the performances of institutional power to fail. The reason is that the very elements from which performances must be put together have become increasingly defused.
