Zeroing in on Performance 2.0: From Serialization to Performative Enactments
Zeroing in on Performance 2.0: From Serialization to Performative Enactments

Summary/Abstract: This article explores the notions of performativity and performance in digital environments from the combined perspective of linguistic anthropology and folkloristics. In order to bring these diverging conceptual, methodological, and disciplinary traditions into mutual contact, an intermediary heuristic term of “performative enactments” is introduced. Performative enactments are elaborated as events of communicative sign behavior that foreground and make use of the principle of performativity, although not performances proper in the sense of manifesting a specific “mode of communication” (Bauman 1984). Two different cases of digital communication are analyzed, the first manifesting an instance of everyday SMS messaging between two friends, the second concerning the so-called Per-Looks media event that took place in Finland in October 2012. Both cases are approached as materially durable performative enactments with methodological attention laid on poetic patterning understood as a textually diffuse form of performativity.

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