I have been encountering this word a lot.
‘ an expression or utterance that does not just describe or represent an action in language but actually performs or activates something’
‘performance as a mode of being in the world radically differs from representational forms of knowledge. In general, representation assumes a split between the representation, whether an image on the canvas or in the brain, a description in a text or a line of code, and a thing or world to be represented – a referent. Variously translated as ‘imitation’ or ‘mimicry’, Aristotle’s use of the term mimesis in the Poetics already suggests that the thing or act on the theatrical stage stands in for or represents someone that is not present but that we nevertheless should identify with through an act of empathy. (Salter, xxvi)
*Antonin Artaud railed against the concept that the stage was a place for stand-ins and imitators. By harnessing the means of spectacle, of light, space, sound, gesture and forsaking the dominance of text, the theatre would no longer copy life but instead, through the vibratory effect of its media, emerge as life itself, in all of its unstable, shifting materiality.
”questioning of an age-old assumption in philosophy – the assumption that to say something…is always and simply to state something,’ suggests that language does not just represent statements but is an inherently material practice in the way it can change the course of an event in the world or create a new one.’ (xxv, Salter)
Source:
Chris Salter, Entangled – Technology and the Transformation of Performance ,MIT Press, 2010