Prompted to read a text I had downloaded earlier, “On the ‘doing’ of ‘something’” by Teemu Paavolainen, I was fascinated by the discussion on performativity, although the context, performative protests, is not that familiar to me. The text begins with the statement that the essay “grows from the simple observation that ‘performative’ or ‘performativity’, in protest as elsewhere, have a plurality of conflicting meanings.” (p 38) He summarises the duality “between explicitly positive and negative conceptions of performativity as a function of novelty or normativity: active subversion or passive submission, effective doing or theatrical dissimulation”. (p 38) He references Judith Butler’s Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), where she “insists that ‘performativity describes both the processes of being acted on and the conditions and possibilities for acting’, and cannot be understood without both dimensions (2015: 63)”. He summarises the situation: “people do something, and it begins to look like some thing. (Think of verbs and nouns: protesting becomes ‘a protest’, behaviour comes to suggest ‘character’.)” (p 39) Later he speaks of and for “the unsettled duality of performativity as both making and maintaining, and on the ways these intertwine.” (p 43) The article contains examples of various protests and the different tactics utilized, from violence to clowning and also notes: “While the estrangement of the present is relatively easy … imagining new futures is substantially harder, even if many of their ingredients are already present in the present. Perhaps the most that any protest can prefigure is an adjectival sense of a world more open and more openly performative.” (p 45) The text ends by suggesting a possible dynamic for the performativity of protests: “in all cases, there is a doing of things that have real effects both outside the done and back again on the doers. Effectively, the performativity lies in the cyclical relation between the doing and the done: whether consecutive or concurrent, there is an aspect of making and an aspect of maintaining (hence production, approximation/ compulsion, dissimulation). Perhaps, it is simply the balance between the efficacy of the doing and the artificiality of the done that also gives us the more positive and negative connotations of ‘performative protest’?” (p 46)
 
Probably it is this relation between the doing and the done that interests me because it is applicable and relevant in all kinds of creative contexts while trying to do things differently. As is the difficulty of imagining new futures. If I keep talking to trees it is on the one hand suggesting a manner of treating trees with respect as a prefiguration of another kind of coexisting with the vegetal world and on the other hand it is simply maintaining an old folk tradition of humans talking to trees when in distress. But we could ask what exactly is the ‘something’ that is thereby done.
 
Teemu Paavolainen (2022) On the ‘Doing’ of ‘Something’, Performance
Research, 27:3-4, 38-46, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2022.2155394