Performativity confounded: agency, resistance, and the history of politeness

Abstract

This essay compares Judith Butler's and Erving Goffman's theoretical contributions to performance and performativity with the goal of bridging their approaches, usually seen as mutually incompatible. Using eighteenth-century women's politeness as a case study, it argues that politeness is a practice that is essentially both performed and performative and that analysing it as such offers us valuable new information on eighteenth-century subjectivities. Building on this, the essay suggests that combining performance and performativity can be used to reconceptualize agency and thereby find a way out of the Butlerian impasse of the impossibility of resistance. In this way, performance has the potential to confound the paralyzing non-agency of performativity.

The Performativity of the Yogyakarta Logo as a City Branding

“…The case of City Branding of the City of Yogyakarta, which is read as an agency of the complexity of the City of Jogja, is a true form of democracy in which the rulers are the people who submit the results of their ideas or concepts to the authorities (local government) and to public servants to be used together (Kogl, 2013;Ylivuori, 2022). So when the parts of the city branding through the Jogja City logo are presented again, parts of the design must be considered important, so that is what is presented in the city branding through the Jogja City logo.…”