Editing Performativity (section)

===Origins===
The origins of the performative turn can be traced back to two strands of theorizing about performance as a social category that surfaced in the 1940s and 1950s. 

The first strand is anthropological in origin and may be labelled the dramaturgical model. [[Kenneth Burke]] (1945) expounded a 'dramatistic approach' to analyse the motives underlying such phenomena as communicative actions and the history of philosophy. Anthropologist [[Victor Turner]] focussed on cultural expression in staged theatre and ritual. In his highly influential ''[[The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life]]'' (1959), [[Erving Goffman]] emphasized the link between social life and performance by stating that 'the theatre of performances is in public acts'. Within the performative turn, the dramaturgical model evolved from the classical concept of 'society as theatre' into a broader category that considers all culture as performance. 
 
The second strand of theory concerns a development in the philosophy of language launched by [[J. L. Austin|John Austin]] in the 1950s. In ''How to do things with words''<ref>Austin (1962)</ref> he introduced the concept of the '[[performative utterance]]', opposing the prevalent principle that declarative sentences are always statements that can be either true or false. Instead he argued that 'to say something is to do something'.<ref>Austin (1962), p. 12</ref> In the 1960s [[John Searle]] extended this concept to the broader field of speech act theory, where due attention is paid to the use and function of language. In the 1970s Searle engaged in polemics with postmodern philosopher [[Jacques Derrida]], about the determinability of context and the nature of authorial intentions in a performative text.

The performative turn is anchored in the broader cultural development of [[postmodernism]]. An influential current in modern thought, postmodernism is a radical reappraisal of the assumed certainty and objectivity of scientific efforts to represent and explain reality. Postmodern scholars argue that society itself both defines and constructs reality through experience, representation and performance. From the 1970s onwards, the concept of performance was integrated into a variety of theories in the humanities and social sciences, such as [[Phenomenology (psychology)|phenomenology]], [[critical theory]] (the [[Frankfurt school]]), [[semiotic]]s, [[Lacanian psychoanalysis]], [[deconstructionism]] and [[feminism]].<ref name="McKenzie 2005" /> The conceptual shift became manifest in a methodology oriented towards culture as a dynamic phenomenon as well as in the focus on subjects of study that were neglected before, such as everyday life. For scholars, the concept of performance is a means to come to grips with [[human agency]] and to better understand the way social life is constructed.