Performativity and Education

Abstract

First paragraph: “Performativity” is a term coined by the French Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in his most famous work The Postmodern Condition (1984). It is an unusual concept in philosophy of education for several reasons. Firstly, given that The Postmodern Condition looks at the role and status of knowledge in the university, “performativity”, its most famous concept, arises from a work in philosophy of education rather than a work of “straight” philosophy. Lyotard would never have thought of himself as a philosopher of education, but that is beside the point. Second, the term is as popular with sociologists of education as it is with philosophers (see Ball 1998 and 2003). Indeed it is arguably the work of the former that has led to the third unusual feature of a term deriving from philosophy of education, namely that it has become ubiquitous within the study of education per se - it is just as likely to feature in discussions of schooling as meditations on the state of the university . Given performativity’s status within the study of education, it is worth beginning with what, over the last several decades, it has commonly come to mean in that domain.