**4. The performative turn in social sciences and humanities**

Human behavior can be understood and analyzed by assuming that all human practices are performed so that actions can be seen as a public presentation of self. This is the conceptual basis of the methodological breakthrough titled the performative turn. The term turn signifies the trend to reverse the ontological premises that reality corresponds to particular objects, entities, and configurations that exist in and of themselves exhibiting certain essential qualities towards a new central hypothesis that objects are textures of partially coherent and partially coordinated performances existing through multiple situated practices [13].

This trend entered in cultural studies, social sciences and humanities in late 20th century and has greatly influenced disciplines like ethnology, anthropology, and sociology, bringing an alternative way to look at how members of groups and society at large interact, work, and share knowledge within the context of groups and societies [13]. The major premise is that people create and recreate meaning and knowledge in social settings through performance. And even more: The social reality itself is created through the actions of its members. Thus, the focus is redirected to "the active social construction of reality rather than its representation" [14] (p. 4).

The roots of this approach can be attributed to the need to move beyond the prevailing focus on texts or symbolic representations to capture meaning. Performance is, above all, a meaning making bodily practice. Consequently, it is related to rituals and other forms of spectacles and social practices. Moreover, performance can be related to lifeless mediating objects, such as architectural objects or, in modern days, digital systems that constitute our hyper-connected societies [15].

The performative assumption is that reality becomes in the process of knowing and it implies that the object that is known and the subject that does the knowing are co-produced in and by the same performance. This has paramount significance for the epistemological problem (what is true) and the ontological question (what is): They are both resolved (or remain unresolved) in the same moment [13]. This is a quite important and thought-provoking claim that proved very fruitful in renovating many disciplines and creating a movement towards the performative understanding of various phenomena on the one hand and the adoption of research tools that explicitly focus on the performative aspects of human behavior in order to reveal the performative aspects of life and describe them with rigor on the other hand [16]. Therefore, the idea of a "performative turn" evokes a more historical attitude, which was exhibited by individuals that have deliberatively turned away from representationalism to adopt action-oriented and embodied perspectives.

Recently, scientists and scholars from various fields have adopted performance as their research subject or method [16]. It is indeed offering an interesting framework for understanding and describing meaningful action. Beyond the main premises and the theoretical justification of the validity of performativity, one could attribute the significance of this paradigm to an inherent dramatic quality of human experience. This is one of the major claims of this chapter. Furthermore, this scholarly and scientific focus on performance that begun at the dawn of the hyper-connected era, and steadily continues to evolve as the infrastructures of the hyper-connected societies evolve as well, seems to be closely related to the capacity of digital technologies to provide new ground for dramatic interaction (i.e. meaningful bodily and symbolic actions).

One of the seminal books in establishing the performative turn in social sciences is certainly Erwin Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life [17]. In that book, Goffman adopts theater as a model to frame face-to-face interactions based on the assumption that when an individual interacts with other people, both at

#### *Onlife Drama: Towards a Reference Framework for Hyper-Connected Activity DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100238*

informal and formal settings within the context of social institutions, the individual tries to control the impressions of the other people, thus building a self-identity. In parallel, the other people that interact with the individual are seeking to form and obtain the identity of the individual. This framework ultimately promotes a dramaturgical analysis as a basis for microsociology employing terms such as front region vs. back region (like stage and backstage in theater) to distinguish between the playing of the individual's role in front of the audience and the preparation of the individual respectively.

When it comes to the domain of politics Mackenzie and Porter remind us that:

*The idea that drama can serve as a medium for the expression of political ideas and debates is virtually co-extensive with the history of drama itself: from the early Greek plays to the recent theatrical reenactments of politically charged public inquiries. Equally, the idea that political theory often contains dramatic elements and references within it is hardly contentious. For example, it has been said that Plato's Republic owes a 'debt to Aristophanic comedy' […] In a general sense, moreover, we are familiar with the political theorist as a kind of director, staging a situation for the reader that presents a dramatic version of the problem being addressed. [8] (p. 483)*

In modern times, we find again this double relation between politics and theater: Not only does theater play an active role in society as an important means to influence the political understanding of citizens and their political actions, but also philosophy in general and political philosophy in particular have adopted dramatization as a method of presenting their concepts and claims. One contemporary political thinker who explicitly used dramatization as a method to bring political ideas into life and put them in action is Gilles Deleuze [9]. He adopts theater as a model for his theory of singular events claiming that theater, as any performance-based art, is based on activity that is happening in front of us in contrast with an approach that is based on symbolic representations or texts. His conception of theater is completely free of any representationalism. Drama is ultimately used as a model to frame purposeful action to interact with the world and bring real changes to the world.

In an attempt to summarize the recent discourse about performativity, three intertwined aspects could be highlighted: (a) reality is understood as incessant creation or practice; (b) matter itself is understood as entangled intrarelation; and (c) individuals do not preexist their interactions in any essentialist, objectivistic sense. As Cabitza and Simone argue:

*The concept of performativity therefore invites us to abandon the Kantian notion of "thing per se" (at least in system design) to recognize the relational and manifold nature of any perceived phenomenon, irrespective of its seeming solidity, as well as the co-constitutive entanglement of the social and the technological (i.e., material) and "the performance of the emergent sociomaterial assemblage". [13] (p. 222)*

#### Consequently:

*[…] researchers adopting a performative turn put first in their research agenda the study of the contingencies of time, space, technology, materiality, or discourse, […] all things that the more classical "representational" model of thinking […] i.e., the one assuming a detached observer that studies real objects and their essential properties in an objective world (or that designs and puts new objects into the world), escapes either consciously or unaware with profound consequences also on the conception of the role of technology in society and of its "designers". [13] (p. 224)*

By attributing to our daily lives a performative quality, the close relationship between drama as an art and drama as a social process is evident. The next section explores this relationship.

## **5. Social drama and stage drama**

William Beeman offers a very interesting comparison and in-depth analysis of the relation between theater and other performative genres:

*Revolutions, public demonstrations, campaigns, strikes, and other forms of participatory public action all have performative dimensions. Moreover, they share certain features with the fundamental ritual processes […] Such "social dramas" involve a break with "normal" structures of ongoing life, the entrance of groups of individuals into liminal transitory states, and the reincorporation of the liminalized individuals into a re-constituted social order. The efficacy/entertainment distinction is a way of separating ritual from theatre, but other performance genres also fall under the general functional rubric of entertainment. [18] (p. 379)*

Furthermore, Beeman [18] identifies three descriptive dimensions that can illuminate the relation between theater and other performance genres such as public speaking (e.g. lectures, sermons), exhibitions, demonstrations etc.: (a) efficacy vs. entertainment in intent, (b) participation vs. observation in the audience's role, and (c) symbolic representation vs. literal self-presentation in the performer's role.

Based on the above distinction, Beeman goes on to analyze the interrelationship of stage drama, as a generalization of theater, and social drama, as an inclusive term to describe all performative genres that aim at changing actual reality, employing a scheme initially proposed by cultural anthropologist Victor Τurner [19]. This scheme is depicted below (**Figure 1**).

The two rectangles above the horizontal line represent what is actual, visible and public while the two rectangles below the horizontal line what is hidden and virtual, i.e. implicit and internal. The left rectangles represents social drama, i.e. all performative genres related to social life. The right rectangles represents any genre of cultural performance, any kind of aesthetic or stage drama. The interesting point is how these parts communicate (following the arrows between rectangles) thus creating a process with four distinct feedback directions:


*Onlife Drama: Towards a Reference Framework for Hyper-Connected Activity DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100238*

#### **Figure 1.**

*The interrelationship between social drama and esthetic (or stage) drama. The concepts depicted are based on Schechner [20] following the ideas of Turner [19].*

The above feedback loop continues not as cycle but rather as a helix: At each exchange new elements are added and other elements are left behind (forgotten or discarded). Turner underlines that:

Human beings learn through experience, though all too often they repress painful experience, and perhaps the deepest experience is through drama; not through social drama, or stage drama (or its equivalent) alone, but in the circulatory or oscillatory process of their mutual and incessant modification.

*[…] the interrelation of social drama to stage drama is not in an endless, cyclical, repetitive pattern; it is a spiraling one. The spiraling process is responsive to inventions and the changes in the mode of production in the given society. Individuals can make an enormous impact on the sensibility and understanding of members of society. Philosophers feed their work into the spiraling process; poets feed poems into it; politicians feed their acts into it; and so on. Thus the result is not an endless cyclical repetitive pattern or a stable cosmology. The cosmology has always been destabilized, and society has always had to make efforts, through both social dramas and esthetic dramas, to restabilize and actually produce cosmos. [19] (p. 17–18)*

Following the social-stage drama interrelationship, some interesting conclusions can be drawn on how hyper-connected activity can be framed as a unified space where stage and social drama, the real and the virtual, promote the emergence of a new synthesis between the chaos of raw reality (Dionysian) with human Logos (Apollonian) in a way similar to the vision presented by Nietzsche [7] drawing inspiration from a certain conception of Ancient Tragedy.

#### **6. Conclusion: the rebirth of tragedy?**

Tracing back the appeal of theater in Western thought as a framework to understand reality in its deepest interaction with human psyche, we reach one of Friedrich Nietzsche's first works: The Birth of Tragedy [7]. In this book Nietzsche aims to pave a new way for meaningful life by proposing a synthesis to the dichotomy between the Dionysian and the Apollonian spirit inspired by the Ancient Greek tragedy. In Nietzsche's view, the way to achieve a new synthesis in his times was through music.

In his effort to trace the origins of tragedy, Nietzsche makes important arguments that are, in some sense, prophetic in the way that digital technologies give rise again to the dramatic notion of life especially with respect to the relation of the spectator to the spectacle not as an esthetic relation but as an experiential one. In a comment about the origins of tragedy in general and the chorus in particular, Nietzsche [7] brings in front the argument of Schickel, who considers the chorus as the "ideal spectator". Nietzsche contrasts this view with the usual belief that a real spectator is

expected to "remain conscious of having before him a work of art, and not an empiric reality" (p. 57). And he continues with the following important remarks:

*[…] whereas the tragic chorus of the Greeks is compelled to recognise real beings in the figures of the stage. […] We had believed in an aesthetic public, and considered the individual spectator the better qualified the more he was capable of viewing a work of art as art, that is, aesthetically; but now the Schlegelian expression has intimated to us, that the perfect ideal spectator does not at all suffer the world of the scenes to act aesthetically on him, but corporeo-empirically. Oh, these Greeks! we have sighed; they will upset our aesthetics! [7] (p. 57)*

This insight of Nietzsche to consider the chorus as the impersonation of the spectator that confronts the characters on stage as real is indeed very close to the experiences promoted with virtual reality and augmented reality systems. The immersion induced in these experiences and the phenomenon of flow [21] signifies the entering of the interactor into the stage. The ideal spectator approaches the action on stage not aesthetically but empirically.

Nietzsche's approach recalls Schiller in the celebrated Preface to his Bride of Messina:

*[…] where he regarded the chorus as a living wall which tragedy draws round herself to guard her from contact with the world of reality, and to preserve her ideal domain and poetical freedom. […] It is on this foundation that tragedy grew up, and so it could of course dispense from the very first with a painful portrayal of reality. Yet it is not an arbitrary world placed by fancy betwixt heaven and earth; rather is it a world possessing the same reality and trustworthiness that Olympus with its dwellers possessed for the believing Hellene. [7] (pp. 58–59)*

#### A few pages later, Nietzsche concludes:

*[…] the public of the Attic tragedy rediscovered itself in the chorus of the orchestra, that there was in reality no antithesis of public and chorus: for all was but one great sublime chorus of dancing and singing satyrs, or of such as allowed themselves to be represented by the satyrs. The Schlegelian observation must here reveal itself to us in a deeper sense. The chorus is the "ideal spectator" insofar as it is the only beholder of the visionary world of the scene. A public of spectators, as known to us, was unknown to the Greeks. In their theatres the terraced structure of the spectators' space rising in concentric arcs enabled everyone, in the strictest sense, to overlook the entire world of culture around him, and in surfeited contemplation to imagine himself a chorist. [7] (p. 65)*

This is indeed an important note: The physical organization of the ancient theater brings the spectator into the stage as part of the chorus, inside the representational worlds created by the theatrical plays. However, in order to achieve this harmonious resonance between the chorus on stage and the spectators, the people of the democratic Polis, a mediator is necessary: The author of the dramatic play that is living the reality that subsequently is made visible through the theatrical play. Nietzsche notes on the qualities of this mediator:

*[…] at bottom the aesthetic phenomenon is simple: let a man but have the faculty of perpetually seeing a lively play and of constantly living surrounded by hosts of spirits, then he is a poet: let him but feel the impulse to transform himself and to talk from out the bodies and souls of others, then he is a dramatist.*

*Onlife Drama: Towards a Reference Framework for Hyper-Connected Activity DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100238*

*The Dionysian excitement is able to impart to a whole mass of men this artistic faculty of seeing themselves surrounded by such a host of spirits, with whom they know themselves to be inwardly one. This function of the tragic chorus is the protophenomenon: to see one's self transformed before one's self, and then to act as if one had really entered into another body, into another character. This function stands at the beginning of the development of the drama. [7] (p. 67)*

This is indeed the ideal of virtual reality within hyper-connected activities: To provide the means to surpass the "raw reality". The dramatist can do this without the use of additional facilities. Theater, then, is in its essence a means for creating virtual realities. And there are two options here: Either the virtual reality corresponds to actual experiences that are difficult or impossible to be reproduced in another way (e.g. historical experience that cannot be reproduced due to different technology, conceptual frameworks etc.) or it is an imagined experience. In this last case, the theater does not mimic a reference reality but creates a new reality for the first time, a reality that corresponds to the imaginative creativity of the creator. Nietzsche compares drama with the art of rhapsodist:

*Here we have something different from the rhapsodist, who does not blend with his pictures, but only sees them, like the painter, with contemplative eye outside of him; here we actually have a surrender of the individual by his entering into another nature. Moreover this phenomenon appears in the form of an epidemic: a whole throng feels itself metamorphosed in this wise. [7] (p. 67)*

In this final comment Nietzsche distinguishes drama from other art forms that assume a kind of external description of the reference reality. In drama, the reference reality is experienced from the inside in a way that spreads over all participants. This magical transformation resembles what happens inside the magic circle [22] in games where objects, behaviors and actions take unique meaning within fantasy worlds when someone goes beyond this conceptual membrane: a shield of sorts, protecting the fantasy world from the outside world.

In the ancient (and modern) theater, the spectator is invited to transform himself during the play in order to transform the world. Within the realm of hyperconnectivity the interactor is invited to take part actively in the transformation of her/his own existence and the world in parallel! The magic transformation is the basis of the dramatic art and ICT can be considered as a global form of dramatic art that breaks the barriers of the theatrical stage and brings the theatrical interaction anywhere anytime.

Laurel [4] (pp. 44–46) provides a short summary of the function of theater in ancient Athens and reminds us of the fact that the stories enacted in Ancient Tragedies were already known to the audience. The interesting thing about those performances, always given in pubic feasts with massive participation of the Athenian people, was that they provided the means for public discourse taking into account the current situation within the Polis. Within this context, the chorus played a very important role:

*The Chorus in the Greek Theatre was like a mass character representing what might be cast as the citizens' responses through dance and song.*

*[…] Greek drama was the way that Greek culture publicly thought and felt about the most important issues of humanity, including ethics, morality, government, and religion. To call drama merely "entertainment" in this context is to miss most of the picture. [4] (p. 46)*

It is indeed important to note once more as concluding remark that tragedy (and comedy) was born in Ancient Athens within the context of a historical development that employed drama as a means for collective reflection and discourse in the Polis. Theater provided the means (stories, characters, social gatherings) to experience, not just discuss, the public issues and, this way, educate the democratic citizens, the members of the General Assembly (Ecclesia of Demos) that was the ultimate decision making body, in order to act as responsible decision makers.

It is interesting to note that Turkle attributes a rather similar function to computers, which she describes as "an evocative object, an object that fascinates disturbs equanimity, and precipitates thought." [23] (p. 19).

Turkle and Papert directly link computers with philosophy from a performative point of view i.e. from a perspective that addresses philosophical issues not as mere texts presenting abstract ideas but as concrete things in action, as agents interacting with other agents:

*The computer stands betwixt and between the world of formal systems and physical things; it has the ability to make the abstract concrete. In the simplest case, an object moving on a computer screen might be defined by the most formal of rules and so be like a construct in pure mathematics; but at the same time it is visible, almost tangible, and allows a sense of direct manipulation that only the encultured mathematician can feel in traditional formal systems […] The computer has a theoretical vocation: to bring the philosophical down to earth. [24] (p. 162)*

Within this broader perspective, one could argue that digital technologies update theater (and representational arts in general) in their "ancient" form giving new birth to the dramatic view of social life, transforming social spaces into stages and social life to social drama in a unified hyper-connected space where stage drama and social drama are fused together as onlife drama. In such a setting we humans, as logical/social beings, are living inside two realities: The virtual reality of our concepts, our language, or ideas etc. and the actual realities of our bodies, the material requirements of our existence. Culture is the embodiment of virtual realities into actual realities (e.g. architecture, food culture, clothing, science, language etc.) specifying the way, the mode of living in order to bring our virtual realities into existence. The problem of identity and the continuous "creation" of reality within the performative approaches of social sciences and humanities reflect exactly these facts. With hyper-connectivity a new culture is emerging, or better a meta-culture in the same way that a computer is not a medium but a meta-medium that emulates all other media [11]. This new culture can be better understood and engineered if we go beyond conceptions focusing on representations and the dichotomy between the virtual and the real. The challenge is to raise our awareness of the dramatic character of the hyper-connected era that promotes performative interpretations within contexts that enrich reality with universal entities that follow causal rules thus promoting mindful actions and interactions.

### **Acknowledgements**

This research is partly supported by the Bulgarian Ministry of Education and Science under the National Scientific Program "Information and Communication Technologies for a Single Digital Market in Science, Education and Security" approved by DCM №577/17.08.2018.

*Onlife Drama: Towards a Reference Framework for Hyper-Connected Activity DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100238*
