St Andrews' Performativity Competition

Which of these is the most performative?

(a)   Reading a book in public, especially while walking down the street. Bonus point if it’s a title that people will recognise for its literariness, like Giovanni’s Room.

(b)  Wearing paint-stained overalls with a beer bottle sticking out of your pocket.

(c)   Citing some great academic in class who wasn’t even included in the secondary reading —you skimmed an abstract three minutes before the tutorial—to show off to everyone how you are both clever and industrious.

(d)  Hosting –and posting– an elaborate dinner party.

All of these examples perform the most up-to-the-minute taste, in reading, dressing, thinking, or socialising. I would give my vote to the book-reading, however, simply because, while these acts are all designed for someone else to witness (that’s what makes them performative), the walking book-reader is additionally performing a double act: appearing to be so engrossed in their book that they can’t put it down, and at the same time unbearably aware of how other people are looking at and reacting to them.

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St Andrews is always described as a bubble, but it’s also, for the same reasons, a panopticon. If you start to get the feeling that you know everyone by never more than two or three degrees of separation, then it also starts to seem like everyone knows you, and any anonymity that you might have maintained at a larger university is lost. Not that we are prisoners per se, as the original panopticon model would suggest—we can technically behave however we want. But to do so, you have to accept the risk that everyone might see it. If you can’t accept that, then rather than hoping people won’t look at you, you have no choice but to make sure that they are looking at you as you would prefer to be seen. Ironically, we often end up showing people reflections of themselves when we do this—the same styles, preferences, vocabulary, cadences of speech, and all the other personal customisations that amount to what is called “taste.”

In her famous essay “Notes on ‘Camp’,” the critic Susan Sontag writes that “to patronise the faculty of taste is to patronise oneself. For taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response.” When we perform taste, however, we open up a paradox in that definition, a sort of catch-22, because if your tastes are tailored to what might impress others, are they really freely patronised? Moreover, although it may be a very short essay, do you think I’ve read the entirety of “Notes on ‘Camp’ ”? Of course not. I’m doing the very same thing that I just criticised, pulling a few relevant quotes from an influential text in order to signal my tasteful choice of critical reading. It’s an uncontrollable impulse, even when I have no audience but my Word document. 

One of the pleasures of university is being granted the chance, perhaps for the first time, to figure out who you are and what you like, away from the influences of the people and places that raised you. But there’s also the possibility that, instead of discovering your own taste, you simply discover, internalise, and learn to display the tastes of others. In this way, the pleasure of self-discovery is reduced, twisted into something that, however sophisticated, is also equally neurotic.

Yet it’s also true that a social life always demands some kind of performance, and that the people who seem to observe you everywhere are also engaged in crafting their own tasteful personas, testing how certain words come out their mouths. In St Andrews, I have to suspect that everyone is susceptible to this feeling of being constantly under watch and needing to put on a show. As Shakespeare (surely it’s not performative to cite the big guy?) reminds us, we’re all merely players, anyway. What we can hope for is that, as with any theatrical performance, the basic desire to connect is perceptible beneath—and the critics love it.