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However, regardless of the historical context or field there is no agreement on a fixed definition of performance. More crucially, wherever it appears, “performance challenges, it provokes contests, stakes a claim”…Performance, McKenzie asserts, is ultimately a transformative force that causes institutional, social, and intellectual shifts. (Sabatini, 2002, p. 505)
Obviously, McKenzie cannot be accused of lacking ambition, and although reviews of this work are somewhat split (Sayre ultimately weighing against, Sabatini for), the voice of leading performance studies scholar Richard Schechner (2000a), adds serious weight to the perceived value of McKenzie’s paradigmatic study:
If alternatives to what we have had and what we are at present being offered [in terms of sociopolitical?/cultural global imbalances of power] are to be developed, it seems to me that the boldest kinds of experimenting in the arts are called for. Experiments that challenge all kinds of separations. This is what is implied in Jon McKenzie’s important new book, Perform Or Else. McKenzie asserts that “Performance will be to the 20th and 21st centuries what discipline was to the 18th and 19th, namely, a formation of power and knowledge [italics original]” …This knowledge and power come from the integration of three different kinds of performance: the economic, the cybernetic, and the aesthetic. McKenzie considers this one bundle of relations. If McKenzie is right, and I think he is, then this is what all the fuss is about. Arguing about performance, about who takes what from whom under what circumstance, and so on, is really about “power and knowledge,” about how the world is going to be run. (p. 7)
McKenzie (2001) traces the use of the word “performance” in three distinct fields of contemporary society: culture, economics, and technology. In culture, he tracks the development of performance studies—an interdisciplinary offshoot of theatre/drama studies, oral/speech communications, anthropology, sociology, and linguistics—over the past 50 years. He suggests that cultural performance is centrally concerned with issues of social efficacy, or social justice, that is to say, how performance positively assists us in understanding ourselves, seeing ourselves, re-forming ourselves in relation to the culture that surrounds us, and/or transforming the culture itself through performative actions (pp. 29–54).
