When everything is performative, all you can do is improvise

From Shakespeare to ChatGPT, it's all a performance.

If there is one thing that I wish I had done more in my childhood, it would be to act in more plays.

I was in fourth standard, probably eight years old, when I acted in my first school play. I was a tree. Three years later, I tried my hand at acting again in another school play. I was not a tree anymore. I got the role of a student who sits in the back of a class, silently taking notes. The sheer banality of acting as a student who doesn’t speak in class while being one in real life was evident to me even back then.

If there is one skill that everyone needs to survive in this world that we are currently living in, I think it is performance.

Performative [insert any word]

Performative male/men is an internet trend that started in early 2025. According to the internet, a performative male is someone who acts the part of being a progressive liberal male, an ally, with the core objective of attracting women. It is a label for a particular type of aesthetic, specifically; loose and baggy clothes, a tote bag by the side, nail polish on at least one hand, holding feminist literature, and listening to female artists using wired white earphones. Hey wait, I check some of those boxes. Tote bags are extremely functional, I am less likely to lose one half of a wired earphone, also they are cheaper, and I think nail polish looks nice on me too.

Although the term started as a warning, like any internet culture, it has become a meme now. A stark opposition to the performative masculinity of big muscles and the alpha male misogyny of the manosphere. Although some argue that both come from a similar place.

Performative male is just one small and recent corner of the performative world. We had performative activism, performative socialism, performative environmentalism, and even performative reading and performative intellectualism.

So performative anything is essentially an overtly obvious act or performance to show or signal some values and virtues. Whether it is genuine or not is a question whose answer remains as mysterious as the elusive performative male.

What caught my attention, more recently, was the phenomenon of performative productivity. Performative productivity is when people act as if they are being productive. Always busy, always planning, always typing, always talking loudly, running to meeting rooms, Microsoft Teams status set to “Do Not Disturb”, and so on. Essentially. The aesthetics of ‘working’ with the core purpose of looking like they are being productive. Who are they performing for, you might ask? It’s for the manager, the supervisor, the co-worker, the person they are managing, and, subconsciously to some extent, themselves. This sounds so obvious when we realise that every employee is essentially rated on their performance at the end of the year.

Wait, when did the curtains rise?!

Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage,” and the sociologist Erving Goffman called it the dramaturgical model of social life. According to him, social interaction can be like a theatre, with people in everyday life to actors on a stage all playing a variety of roles. I agree to this, in fact, I think it is not just a simple play, it is an improv show.

Everything is an improv show. Quick wits, remembering the right things, the right facial expression, the correct body posture, the right looks, the right clothes, the right movements, even the right accent, all the while trying to entertain people. Was I talking about a job interview, an improv show, or a wrestling match? All three have become indistinguishable.

For anything to be performative, there needs to be an audience for whom we perform and an incentive (perceived or real) for acting that way. Just like the claps, the laughs, the tears, the sing-alongs, the head-banging, maybe even an occasional standing ovation.

Interestingly, figuring out the incentive becomes quite straightforward once we nail who the audience is. For the performative male, the incentive becomes clear when we realise the audience is women. For the performative employee, the incentive in all senses becomes clear when we understand that the audience is their manager.

Who watches the watchman watching the camera that’s watching us?

So if there is no audience, is there no more performativity?

In his famous book Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault talks about panopticism, a mode of social control in which people begin to police themselves under constant surveillance. This self policing makes people into disciplined and obedient little boys and girls.

It essentially says that we behave or discipline ourselves based on the fact that we are aware that people might be watching us.

It does not come across as shocking news to know that in 2025, we are always being watched and listened to. Of course, it is the usual suspects: the government, social media, smartphones, and the internet in general. But I’m also talking about the general behaviour of ourselves in the society. Everyone of us is watching each other. Take open offices, for instance, open offices are one of the most anti-employee things we can have. It just makes us feel like we are always being watched. Even if we are not surveilling on our employees or our manager does not do that to us, still the open office still makes it possible to maintain that watch, and that realization alone is enough. I don’t know, I have a visceral disgust for open offices.

It is no less daunting in the wilds of the urban city, either. There are all kinds of surveillance cameras on every corner, but what’s scarier to me is that we can’t walk in the street without bumping into someone asking a weird question for their Instagram channel or even being part of someone’s viral clip on the Internet.

So we are always on the lookout. There is an audience, whether we like it or not. Most of the time, it is not clear who the audience is, so we have to assume and act. So people have to be performative for this plausible set of audience all the time.

Performative technology

If we look at how AI bots like ChatGPT respond, it is nothing but a performance. The tone of this performance can be controlled by selecting the right personality. In ChatGPT, under the personalisation section, we can find an option to switch the default personality into either of the four: robot, listener, nerd, or cynic. Yes, there is a personality called ‘cynic’ that can be selected. Based on the personality, the way the bot “performs” also changes. The default personality quickly becomes a sycophantic yes-man, whereas the personality called ‘cynic’ borders between a sarcastic try-hard and an insufferable git. Wait, that sounds like someone I know. Hey, why is there a mirror in front of me?

Performative design

Design as a verb and a noun, i.e, the process and the output are inherently performative as well. The performative nature of design comes from the performative nature of the designer or the team of designers behind it. This is one of the often-forgotten pieces of evidence of human DNA in a piece of design.

Everything from buildings to business, design is performative. Take Stalinist architecture, Apple’s Liquid Glass interface, Spotify’s organisational design, BYD’s service innovation, or even YC-backed startups. There is performativity ingrained deep within all of them. The moment we use an adjective to describe a design, we are essentially describing the performative nature of that design.

The righteous hero or the misunderstood villain?

My take is that being performative is fine. In fact, it is good. If anything, I think there needs to be more performance or more people should be performative. Because performance is the way to live in this world, and being performative is the way we internalise that identity. If nothing, we get our annual increment based on our performance, in its true sense. Conversely, not performing is also an attempt to let go of an identity. An act of rebellion against an expectation of performance from the assumed audience.

This is contradictory to the popular advice of being authentic. I think the problem is, we can’t be our authentic selves because it doesn’t exist. There is no authentic authenticity. We are all being performative in some way or the other.

Maybe even looking at things as ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ itself is the problem. Everything is an authentic performance; it’s just that some are conscious while some are more subconscious. Some with an objective, some others with a consequence. Some bring us joy and fulfilment, while some drain us for every last drop of energy. Some hurt others, and even some hurt us. Some performances liberate us, make us feel alive, while others are being forced upon us and tying us down with shackles. Everything is performance, and we are all being performative, even that friend who professes stoicism. In fact, it is one of the most obvious of all performances.

We have been performative for so long, we forgot, or rather, we never realised we are performing. There is no backstage or front stage. We don’t even realise the stage that’s around us. But unlike the theatre, the curtain never drops, because there is no curtain to start with. If we think death will free us from Performativity, I don’t think it does. Death itself is performative, and we keep performing even after death. We prepare ourselves for our post-death performances. We write our will, we decide how to bury or cremate us, and we desperately wish people would remember us even after death. We humans are reptiles that belong to the genus “weird”.

All this might sound cynical, but there is also a freedom that comes with this cynicism. I mean, if everything is performative, then anything can be performative. Leadership, entrepreneurship, that tough job, a scary meeting, another daunting party, and so on. Of course, not all performances are natural and easy. Some fall flat, while others are more convincing. Also, some come quite naturally to us, whereas some need conscious effort.

I’m also aware of the performative nature of writing these pseudo-philosophical opinions and thought pieces on the internet.

Cracks

Sometimes, very rarely, the acts and performances crack in front of a mirror. Not every time we look in a mirror, but occasionally when we pass by one and we catch a glimpse, or when the YouTube video is not loading and the black screen flashes our reflection. A glimpse of who we really are; an unrecognisable pile of meat and bones. A dreadful sense of alienation from our own image of who we are. The reason why we stop bawling our eyes out when we look at the mirror and see ourselves crying.

More reason to perform and keep living, I guess. Meanwhile, let me go try the new nail polish I bought.

P.S.: In my process of writing this, the algorithm showed me a podcast on performativity, and apparently, the famous American philosopher and author Judith Butler has explained the same thing, only much better, more articulate, and with more authority. Maybe you should have just skipped this whole piece and read Judith Butler. Maybe I’ll go read Judith Butler now and have a follow-up for this sometime later in my life.

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Thanks for reading and engaging with my performance here.

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