Take your time, but be quick about it…

We seem to have reached a chiasm, knot or simply an entanglement with the terms performance, performative and performativity. Barabara Cassin and Philippe Buttgen (2010) have a role to play at this point, and not simply to dis-entangle or un-tie. 

In one of the knots they discuss in their essay "The performative without condition: a university sans appel", one of the threads splits in two: performance and performative. This is similar to, but not identical to, the previously recognised splits between (language) performative and (cybernetic) performativity in Lyotard (see Postmodern: Un-conditionally?); and within cybernetic performativity itself (between performativity and command-and-control; See Performance and production; Command and control).  

Each variant, i.e. language performative, cybernetic performativity, cybernetic command-and-control, is itself potentially a model for both understanding and enacting the social bond. 

The question Cassin and Buttgen (2010: 35) ask is:

The context of this question is the citation of Jacques Derrida, who spoke of a “University without Condition” using the notion of the performative and of promise and a pledge of responsibility in April 1998, by the French Minister for Higher Education and Research, Valerie Pecresse, who spoke of performance and of autonomy as the culture of results, in January 2009.

For Derrida, the 'university without condition' is performative, and,

For Pecresse, the university is autonomous and university autonomy is grasped in the ethics of performance through the culture of results, but at the same time the university is autonomous only when it suits the government, the only judge of real performances (Cassin and Buttgen, 2010: 31).

They suggest the question they pose can be answered in two ways. 

The first is through a short history of recent vintage. Derrida delivered his lecture on the university without condition at Stanford in 1998. Both the Bologna process of 1999 and the Lisbon strategy of 2000 make the university the prime motor in the transformation of Europe into a knowledge-based economy. Valerie Pecresse delivered her speech in 2009. 

By 2010, the time of Cassin and Buttger’s writing, a discourse built around the performative by Derrida had been set aside and displaced by a discourse built around performance by the French government, yet using a vocabulary that is confusingly similar to that of Derrida. 

The second answer takes a longer view, and suggests that the evolution of performative to performance sums up two centuries of the European university. As Cassin and Buttgen explain, in Derrida, for a time at least, the performative saves the university without condition from an autonomy reduced to Selbstbehauptung (self-assertion or self-direction) and the pathos of destining (a means to an end, working towards pre-established ends, including political and economic ends). 

For Derrida, the unconditioned and the absolute are said performatively. The university performs itself in affirming itself. This avoids a repetition of the demise of the Humboldtian university [1] and even more avoids being led astray by Heidegger, by following his attempt to politicise the university, in seeking to provide the National Socialist revolution an intellectual basis and to transform the National Socialist movement into an ontological revolution (Thomson, 2003: 538-539). [2]

In this Derridean performative view, “[i]n affirming itself without any condition, the university fabricates itself … - is constituted as university - in anticipation of any merely transmitted knowledge” (Cassin and Buttgen, 2010: 36). The performative is both a support for and a vector of a knowledge which must be held to be something the topicality of which is still and always established.

For Cassin and Buttger, this must be held for much longer than Derrida, who suggests that the performative is rapidly directed towards a place where it fails, a place which he designates ‘the event’, such that “the force of an event is always stronger than the force of a performative”, a passage that Cassin and Buttger (2010: 31 and 36) call “masculine hysteria” . 

Just as was Derrida’s response at the time when calling for a university without condition, Cassin and Buttger’s call for a university without appeal is strategically determined. As they make clear, it has nothing to do with a perennial, timeless, ‘essential’ definition of ‘the’ university. They understand responsibility as the strength to respond ‘no’ to

"the responsibility of the citizen-professor and citizen-student of a techno-scientific neoliberal state concerned with performance.” (Cassin and Buttgen, 2010: 36)

They conclude, just as the performative has been able to get the university out of an autonomy reduced to self-assertion, if thought all the way through the performative is capable of serving as a means to enable the university to be subtracted from an autonomy confused with the performance of a manager.

In other words, as Cassin and Buttger suggest, the performative is a good way to out-manoeuvre the performance imperative and the culture of results, so long as it is thought through to the very end, without stopping, as does Derrida, at the doubtful ethics of the event.

Notes 

[1] According to Kweik (2006: 5),

"There are three main principles of the modern university to be found in the founding fathers of the University of Berlin. The first principle is the unity of research and teaching (die Einheit von Forschung und Lehre); the second is the protection of academic freedom: the freedom to teach (Lehrfreiheit) and the freedom to learn (Lernfreiheit) 3; and the third is the central importance of the faculty of philosophy (the faculty of Arts and Sciences in modern terminology)."

Thomson (2003: 524-525) tells us that Humboldt's seminal idea was to link Wissenschaft, with its objective character, to Bildung, with its subjective character. In so doing, the university would be responsible for forming fully cultured individuals. Humboldt hoped this requirement would guide and unite the disciplines, even in the context of the new freedom of research. It was insufficient, however, to prevent the university's fragmentation into increasingly specialised disciplines. 

[2] Thomson argues that, "What is needed, Heidegger provocatively implies in 1933, is not a politicization of Wissenschaft, but rather, a scientization of the polis (so to speak), a becoming-knowledgeable of Germany. The university will lead this charge, and Heidegger will lead the university."

Cassin, B. & Büttgen, P., 2010. The performative without condition: a university sans appel. Radical Philosophy, (162), pp.31–37. Available at: http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/the-performative-without-condition.

Derrida, J., 2001. The Future of the profession or the university without condition (thanks to the “humanities”, what could take place tomorrow). In Jacques Derrida and the humanities: a critical reader. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 24–57. 

Kwiek, M., 2006. The Classical German idea of the university revisited, or on the nationalization of the modern institution. Center for Public Policy Studies Research Papers, Vol.1. Poznan: Poznan University, Center for Public Policy Studies.

Thomson, I., 2003. Heidegger and the politics of the university. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 41 (4), pp.515–542. Available at: http://muse.jhu.edu/content/crossref/journals/journal_of_the_history_of_philosophy/v041/41.4thomson.html [Accessed January 29, 2013].