Performatief! Een Sinterklaas-visie op de sociale werkelijkheid

Samenvatting

Performativity! A Saint Nicholas View of Social Reality. Argues for a radically constructivist and performative conception of social (dis)order that emphasizes the inevitably partial, precarious, and "imaginary" existence of all social collectives and institutions. Continually hovering between fact and fiction, social things are incessantly built up and broken down by means of real-time, on-the-spot definitions of the situation that coproduce what they seemingly only describe. Pace Emile Durkheim, social facts are not things but reifications stabilized because ordinary actors routinely define, accomplish, and enforce them as transcendentally constraining realities. Working through a string of examples of such "everyday essentialism," the idea of performative social order(ing) is further clarified through a critical consideration of Pierre Bourdieu's sociological revision of Austinian speech act theory, through the idea of a "natural proximity" between factual and value statements, and through a reflexive radicalization of the W. I. Thomas/R. K. Merton (eg, 1928 and 1973, respectively) theorem of the self-fulfilling prophecy. 68 References. Adapted from the source document.