Arts & International Affairs: Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 2018 | Page 6

EDITORIAL: PERFORMATIVITY AND PARTICIPATION
idealistic, perhaps even a marketing-oriented, view that the Edinburgh festivals bring the
world together, the deliberations featured in these films attest to the follies and rewards
of such Enlightenment thinking�nevertheless as critical perspectives themselves.
The arts, as noted earlier, possess enormous representational capacities to make us reflect
on our actions and situations. The 2017 adaptation of Ionescu’s Rhinoceros at the Edinburgh
International Festival with playwright and director Zinnie Harris recalls ideas of
groupthink against which Ionescu’s autobiographical character Berenger rebels (Quinney
2018). As he shouts “I’m the last man left. I’m staying that way until the end. I’m not capitulating”
at the end of the play, we are reminded of the tremendous power of theatricality
in our political world to entrap us. Political theorist Mihaela Mihai (2019) notes that
the refusenik stands outside this groupthink. To avoid entrapment, reflective judgment is
necessary: “Reflective judgment refers to the individual’s capacity to judge particulars as
particulars, and not by subsumption to a principle, rule, formula, etc.” (Mihai 2016:24).
Thespis was the first person in Western culture to step outside a chorus to assume the
mask of another character whom he enacted. Performativity and participation in this
issue are only meaningful to the extent that our cultural politics makes us aware of the
masks our actors wear. Somewhat like Guy Debord (1967), invoked directly in the Taxidou
essay, the authors in this issue distinguish societies and actors from their spectacles.
The spectacle “is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity”, warned
Debord. The first step toward a critical understanding of performativity is active participation
and reflective judgment.
References
Butler, Judith. (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Routledge.
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