It does not mean what you think it means
I tend to magpie up words and ideas and flotsam half-memes and use them how I like without necessarily checking whether I’m doing it right: this is not always a good habit. So when I said earlier today that I used “performative” to describe a certain thing I forgot to add this - of course, I’ve never actually bothered to check what “performative” means.
Turns out, now I do check it, it does mean something completely different from how I’ve been using it - “performative speech” means, as far as I can understand it, speech which also performs an action, like “I name this ship…”
It doesn’t mean “speech intended as a performance”, a far vaguer idea anyway (what speech ISN’T?)
But that was how I’d been using it in a work context - and in that context, full of people who aren’t generally hep to linguistics, the meaning had got across fine. My point at work is to stress the fact that when people put stuff online they are doing it with an audience in mind (even if its an imaginary or invisible audience, or they’re absurdly wrong about who that audience is). That fact needs to be stressed because parts of the industry I work in - market research - are incredibly excited about the fact that social media is full of people sharing their opinions, opinions which are “unprompted”, “natural”, “spontaneous”. And so I’ve been using “performative” - when I meant “performance-y” - to stress that social media speech is none of these things. Except maybe at the “Tweeting that you’re on the loo” level which is mostly a media myth anyway. A lot of my colleagues look at self-publishing and see only the “self” bit and not the “publishing”.
So immense apologies for my pretension - I will try and find a better word for it. “Curated” almost works but implies a little too much of a process lurking in the background.
