Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

Reflecting upon what the work Elias and Foucault offers, I realize that our rationality
is rather limited. Behind our strategic behaviour there is no little man – the famous
homunculus – who decides whether to act strategically. Acting strategically is an
embedded self-evident part of people’s social psychological repertory to act. Apparently,
only in situations where we experience more or less extreme difficulties – discomfort,
dissatisfaction, disappointment, anger – in reaching our goals our strategic
behaviour becomes perceptible. In a situation in which the borders of our comfort
zone are crossed and depending on our power potential, we try to enforce things by
manipulating other people or by practising verbal or physical violence. In my view
within our comfort zone we act on a kind of strategic autopilot, mostly cloaked in
different ‘outfits’ in our different conversations. As long as these outfits keep on being
civilized they are mutually accepted. I suppose that we even are not aware that we act
strategically because it is has become a very common and deeply ingrained organized
attitude. “The organization of the self is simply the organization, by the individual
organism, of the set of attitudes towards its social environment - and toward itself
from the standpoint of that environment, or as a functioning element in the process of
social experience and behavior constituting that environment - which it is able to
take.” (Mead, 1934: 90). From a strong rationalistic point of view our comfort zone
potentially has some unfortunate implications. The tendency of human beings to stay
in the comfort zone seduces us to take the easy way instead of arguing and avoiding
our usually errors and biases (Kahneman, 2011).
Autopilot
Given the rather smooth way of working together within the coordination team my
conclusion is that a lot of our work was done on a kind of strategic autopilot. In a short
period we worked towards a set of conclusions and recommendations, which are
meant to have impact within the UAS. No member of the coordination team shouted,
nobody got angry and – apparently - nobody of this team felt manipulated. Together
we stayed in our comfort zone. Our ‘use’ of the autopilot illustrates the ‘just talking’
through which we organized our reality, “... identifying the most repetitive and so
apparently stabilized aspects of our relating treating this as a puzzle or ‘game’ we can
solve or manage.” (Shaw, 2002: 95). The smoothness of the cooperation within the
coordination team makes me assume that no member of the team defined the situation
as that much strategic that he felt a need to break away from conversational
behaviour.
Therefore I suppose that the dimension of interdependency in which a lack of awareness
plays its part, is of far more interest to help me to explain what happened in the
deliberations in the coordination team. Interdependency in a non-awareness fashion
implicates that the way we think, we act and dream is depending on our interactions
and not on our more or less conscious decisions. Then I would say that what we
usually experience as a self-caused action can be explained differently. The work of
Foucault and Mead provokes to look differently at self-caused action. Thirty years
before the stir Foucault caused by denouncing the human self as an a-historical and
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