We have long reached peak performativity in society. Of course, there has always been an element of performance, and if I could control my reading to just Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, then I would likely give you a nice little overview of the work on this subject. I’m going to have to come back to that as I have a feeling this is going to become a series of posts.
I think, if I were a different kind of person, I would be talking about “wokery” right now. I hate that word. I hated it when the self-righteously inclusive self-proclaimed themselves as “woke”, and I still hate it now those without broadly inclusive politics justifiably use it as an insult against those who proclaim broadly inclusive politics.
Even as I type this, there is so much to unpack.
What do I mean by “peak performativity”? What do I mean by “broadly inclusive politics”? Why did I emphasise “proclaim”? Let’s come back to that.
I am trying to root the moment in time when I first started noticing this acceleration towards people performing values, as opposed to encountering people who emotionally and intellectually held and owned values. I think my suspicions were first raised in around about 2016, during Jeremy Corbyn’s Momentum moment, as the ripening performativity of many of the Momentum members was suspicious to me. I observed people I knew suddenly start “caring” about things they previously had never cared about, simply because their new tribe “cared”. This was especially so as I was researching and writing my PhD at the time, and knew how utterly absurd and false their revisionist history was in terms of the Labour Party and its historic approach to ‘race’ and racism. (This is not a slight against Jeremy Corbyn who I think was unfairly maligned by many.)
During my PhD, I had been a literacy volunteer at a local charity serving young people in my neighbourhood. In 2017, I got a job working at the charity around the same time that Rashan Charles was murdered by the police. I went to most of the marches and rallies protesting the injustice of his murder and was disgusted to observe that the police were suddenly registering to become volunteers at the charity. It was clearly a cynical act of political damage control by the police. I objected to it on those grounds and because, demonstrably, the police were not safe to be around the young working class, often black, kids we worked with. One of my colleagues objected to my position (daddy was a police) and filed a complaint against me. I was then told by the CEO that I could either retract my comments or be fired. Owing to the fact that my comments are my ethics are my truth, I was fired.