On Performative: How “performative” was stripped of its analytical meaning and redeployed as a way of avoiding politics not understanding it

26/01/2026

I promised this post three months ago. October to be exact. One could not scroll through social media without encountering another account holding forth on the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern’s documentary. The commentary was predictable in its cadence: she was “all style, no substance,” her leadership “merely performative,” her legacy reducible to good communication in the absence of delivery. The same men (and yes, all the accounts presented as men) who had been saying this for years now had a film to hang it on. I am not, for what it’s worth, an uncritical defender of Ardern. I have my own views on what her government did and did not achieve, and they are more ambivalent than her admirers might like. But this is not a post about our former Prime Minister. This is a post about what happens when a term gets captured. When a useful concept, one that belongs to all of us who think carefully about politics and power, gets hollowed out and repurposed as a weapon. “Performative” meant something once. It did analytical work. And I have watched a certain kind of commentator diminish it into an insult, a sneer, a way of dismissing what they do not wish to engage with. So this post is for those of you who have strip-mined the term until the rest of us cannot use it. You’ve had your fun. You’ve gotten your clicks. Your paid subscribers have paid. Now give it back.

There is a particular kind of dismissal that has become fashionable in certain quarters. One hears it deployed against politicians, against protesters, against anyone who lacks conventional power but whose actions carry symbolic weight.

“It’s merely performative,” they say, as though this settles the matter entirely.

The word has become a bludgeon, wielded most enthusiastically by those who imagine themselves too sophisticated for symbolism.

This represents a rather spectacular collapse of meaning.

The term entered my vocabulary through J.L. Austin (1962), who observed that certain utterances do not merely describe the world but actively constitute it. “I promise.” “I declare this court in session.” “I apologise.” These are not reports on pre-existing states of affairs; they are themselves the action. The words perform the deed they name. There is nothing “mere” about it. Politics lives in the actions the state takes.

As Bourdieu (1991) reminds us, authorised language is a form of social magic: it brings into existence that which it names. When a government issues a formal apology, something happens in the saying. When Te Tiriti is read aloud at Waitangi, the recitation is not decorative. Speech acts do work in the world.

To dismiss such action as “merely performative” is to misunderstand how power operates. And I confess I have grown weary of watching a certain kind of man, invariably confident, usually pale, reliably senior, always online, deploy the term as though it were an argument rather than an evasion.

The performative has always been a resource for those without access to conventional power. Consider Antigone. She commanded no army. She held no office. All she possessed in her grief was her insistence on burying her brother against the king’s decree. To Creon, her actions were a madness: emotional display against the hard power of the state.

But as Honig (2013) argues, Antigone’s lamentation is not a retreat from politics; it is a politics of counter-sovereignty. Antigone’s performance of grief constituted a rival claim to authority. She used the only tools available, ritual, speech, her brother’s body, to interrupt the smooth operation of state power. This is what Honig (2017) elsewhere calls the work of “public things”: the way shared objects and practices constitute us as a demos, as a people capable of acting together.

In Aotearoa, we already know this. A haka performed in protest, a mōteatea sung in grief, a tikanga enacted where it has been deemed inappropriate: these are not symbolic add-ons to politics. They are assertions of authority by those denied access to the state’s recognised forms of power. Like Antigone’s lament, they do not retreat from politics; they interrupt it and reshape it.

So when we sneer at the performative, we sound uncomfortably like Creon. We imply that unless an action moves money, the economy or troops, it does not count as real.

Yet here is the first irony: the powerful have always understood that politics is spectacle. State openings of parliament. Military parades. The careful choreography of summits. The architecture of government itself. These are performances, and no one apologises for them.

The powerful perform constantly: they simply do not call it that. Pettit (2023) reminds us that to be a political agent at all is to “personate”; to hold out an image of who one is and invite others to rely upon it. The performance is not separate from the commitment; the performance is the commitment. There is no unperformed politics waiting underneath.

And here is the second irony, more troubling still. In Aotearoa, we have watched the Crown become expert at co-opting the performative practices of mana whenua precisely in order to neutralise their challenge. Curtis et al. (2025) and Ngata (2023) have documented this with care: the emergence of what we might call the performative state. Buildings receive Māori names. Agencies open with karakia. Rōpū kapa haka grace extravagant launches. Te reo appears on letterheads. And yet, as Ngata observes, these gestures take place “while not equitably sharing power or even securing pay parity for the agencies within those same buildings” (Ngata, 2023). The forms of Te Ao Māori are adopted because they can be performed without structural transformation. The performance becomes a substitute for the thing itself.

So the powerful are doing three things at once. They perform constantly themselves, though they call it governance. They co-opt the performative practices of the marginalised to contain them: do the karakia, never share power. And they dismiss their opponents’ symbolic action as empty theatre.

We have seen this move before. Zavattaro and Bearfield (2022) trace how “woke”, a term originating in Black American communities to describe alertness to racial injustice, was detached from its meaning and weaponised into a floating signifier for everything its critics dislike.

The same operation is underway with “performative.” By reducing the term to a proxy for former Prime Minister Ardern, or for a politics these critics find distasteful, they no longer have to engage with the substance of what is being claimed. They can simply attack their chosen proxy.

So the term is being squeezed from both directions until it loses all analytical purchase. Co-option demonstrates empirically that performance can be hollowed (do the karakia but never share power), while dismissal defines it as inherently so.

Between the two, we can no longer ask the questions that matter: what reality is this performance bringing into existence? Whose interests does it serve? What is being constituted, and what contained?

There is a final irony. Those who deploy “merely performative” as epithet are themselves performing. They perform worldliness. They perform hard-headed pragmatism. They perform the role of adults in rooms full of children who naively believe that words and symbols matter.

This performance, the performance of being above performance, may be the most political gesture of all.

When we allow “performative” to become synonymous with “empty,” we impoverish our political vocabulary. We lose the capacity to see that some of the most important things governments and citizens do together are achieved precisely through performance: through the shared enactment of values that would otherwise remain abstract. And we hand a weapon to those who would prefer we not notice their own stagecraft at all.

So, next time you hear the word being used remind yourself that politics is always performative. The real question is who gets to perform, under what conditions, and to what effect. Performative is never empty: especially so, when the performance is offered by those with almost no power.

References

Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power (J. B. Thompson, Ed.; G. Raymond & M. Adamson, Trans.). Polity Press.

Curtis, E., Loring, B., Jones, R., Tipene-Leach, D., Walker, C., Paine, S.-J., & Reid, P. (2025). Refining the definitions of cultural safety, cultural competency and Indigenous health: Lessons from Aotearoa New Zealand. International Journal for Equity in Health, 24, 130. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-025-02478-3

Honig, B. (2013). Antigone, interrupted. Cambridge University Press.

Honig, B. (2017). Public things: Democracy in disrepair. Fordham University Press.

Ngata, T. (2023, February 11). Performative gestures and permissiveness are derailing Tiriti justice. E-Tangata. https://e-tangata.co.nz/comment-and-analysis/tina-ngata-performative-gestures-and-permissiveness-are-derailing-tiriti-justice/

Pettit, P. (2023). The polity incorporated. In The state (pp. 68–117). Princeton University Press.

Zavattaro, S. M., & Bearfield, D. (2022). Weaponization of wokeness: The theater of management and implications for public administration. Public Administration Review, 82(3), 585–593. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13484