action; for which one if one follows the liberal model has not yet developed
skills. Fortunately almost no one acts according to the liberal model.
(Spinosa et al. 199 7 : 29)The virtue of this kind of approach to the practice (and definition) of the political
is threefold. First, it recognizes that all kinds of disclosing are going on in the
skilled responses to the situations in everyday life: we do not live in an alienated
void. Second, it recognizes that all manner of activity can be political; small projects
and modest enterprises can produce political outcomes. Third, much of this activity
will be the result of skilful coping, of intentions concerning how to respond to the
solicitations of a situation; ‘that receptivity is what makes skilful behaviour as
nuanced and feasible as it is. Skilled politicians respond appropriately to small
perturbations that rule-followers miss’ (Spinosa et al. 199 7 : 1 7 9). Further, political
activity nearly always involves changing backgrounds and showing how they can
make a change. These changes to backgrounds are, broadly speaking, of two
related kinds. There is, to begin with, the skill of forming an association. Then,
there is the skill of working on ‘one’ self through all manner of practices – including
writing (see Shusterman 199 7 ; Steedman 1998).^13
In the social sciences and humanities, many of these thoughts concerning the
push have now crystallized around one metaphor, the metaphor of performance.
What is interesting about performance as a metaphor is its evolution from
the notion of ‘life is like theatre’ to a notion that ‘life is like performance’ and the
corresponding move from an interest restricted to certain areas of the humanities
to a full-blown discipline, complete with its own sources and journals. This
evolution might well be seen as a filling-out of the meanings of this metaphor.
Yet the metaphor of performance is, more than most of its kind, a vessel still
waiting to be filled. In general, the metaphor refers to, and operates through, the
enactment of events with what resources are available in creative, imaginative ways
which lay hold of and produce the moment; events are, performed more or less
effectively as an infralinguistic transduction (Gil 1998). In other words, life is a
constant rehearsal, which allows a faint grip on what is to hand (Dening 1996).
But the metaphor is often used in a very loose way which provides a specious
dynamism to many accounts, a description masquerading as an exploration, a way
of making good a processual deficit. In the next section of the chapter I therefore
want to examine the metaphor of performance, and the ways in which it is currently
being filled out.
Working mystic: the push of performance
In order to understand some of these issues more concretely, I now want to turn
to a set of literatures/practices which have been created by their allegiance to a
single metaphor, the metaphor of performance. Performance is, at this moment,
one of the most pervasive metaphors in the human sciences – Dolan (1993: 4 30)
has called its wholesale appropriation ‘promiscuous’ – precisely because it provides
a way of understanding meaning as not residing in something but as generated
124 Part II