The Critical-Norm: The Performativity of Critique and the Potentials of Performance

Abstract

Grounded in a topics course designed to examine the limits of “racial talk,” the paper examines how critical pedagogy faces a complex web of obstacles in the interrogation of racial discourses and systems. Next, the paper moves to assert and apply the concept of the critical-norm, marking the performativity of critical dialogues and critical analysis that have come to inhibit critical work through the normalization of critical patterns of engagement. The paper turns to performance theory as a space to resist the limitations of the critical-norm, specifically in the context of racial dialogue, marking aesthetic performance dialogue as a space where the trappings of the critical-norm can be expanded, troubled, and potentially reworked.

Keywords:

• Performativity
• Critical pedagogy
• Critical race theory
• Performance
• Dialogue

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the work, bravery, and commitment of the students from the Race, Power, and Privilege course. In addition, I wish to thank Jason Zingsheim, Kimberlee Pérez, Fred Corey, and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and committed engagement in helping to shape the ideas in this essay.

Notes

1. Upon completion of this essay, many months after the course closed and grades were submitted, I received written permission from this student to use her words and her story in this article. The name “Sandy” is a pseudonym, as are any other student names mentioned in the article.

2. In this essay, there is less of an interest in claiming or refuting the value of dialogue, but rather an investment in locating how certain dialogic patterns inhibit critical work. Thus, the commitments of this specific project are focused upon marking and challenging specific patterns of dialogue and analysis that work to stall further critical investigation.

3. Critique and “critical talk” are also embodied performances that also carry the potential to be resistant and challenging to normalized patterns. In other words, not all critical talk is being cast under the critical-norm. There are a range of possibilities that might take place in response to a performance, such as Sandy's, wherein critical responses could be situated within specific contexts, relations, locations, bodies, histories, and experiences. A critical response to Sandy's performance has the potential to apply critical theory, while simultaneously marking and mining its limitations. Such a response breaks or pushes against the critical-norm. At the same time, while artistic performance affords the opportunity to move, illuminate, anticipate beyond the confines of present discourses and theoretical abstraction, I am not arguing all performance will do this. Artistic performance can also be written, shaped, and confined within the restored critical patterns of a critical-norm, crafted and staged in such a way as to dismiss and disguise history, body, context, relation, and all the messy, clumsy, dirty potentials of performance.

4. This work clearly builds upon, as well as departs from, much of the work that has been developed for critical performance pedagogy. John T. Warren's highly influential scholarship has utilized critical performance pedagogy to mark, examine, and theorize the mundane performances that produce racial identity as a performative accomplishment. His research has effectively worked to suture systemic theories of race to daily and embodied actions, assisting our ability to locate how race is performed in classrooms and whitewashed in academic spaces through a performance frame.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dustin Bradley Goltz

Dustin Bradley Goltz is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the College of Communication at DePaul University