Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance

Jon McKenzie
Review by Jeremy Hockett, PD
In his lecture machine, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance, stratoanalyst
Jon McKenzie has launched a challenging forth of the liminautic deterritorialization of
stratified layers of ethnophallogocentrist sedimentation by catachristening a perfumative
gay sci-fi, which, through puncepts and scientifiction, lends itself to a digital saticficing
of both normative and mutational machinic processes of diverse performance systems. If
that makes perfect sense to you, you might not need to read this book or this review. If
find yourself totally dumbfounded, intrigued, or recoiling at the etravagant and playful
use of language, please read on.
If you have ever read a book that seemed to get longer and longer the closer you
got to the end, like film scenes where a hallway stretches and seems to retreat from the
camera, you have some understanding of my eperience as I progressed chapter by
chapter towards what felt like an ever-elusive conclusion. In fact the later chapters in
parts two and three are somewhat shorter than those in the first, but I kept finding myself
looking to see how much further I had read to reach the end of this or that chapter. !ow
granted, when I got to what were in many ways the most challenging aspects of the book
"chapters five and si#, I was in the grips of an acute case of the flu. $or several nights,
after forging ahead a few more pages, I would wake several times drenched in sweat,
literally with the words and ideas of McKenzie%s book swirling in my mind. My dreams
were conversations, discourses, and struggles, attempting to comprehend and distill the
overwhelming amount of disparate information presented, much of which was not
unknown to me, but had yet to be consolidated in such a way. &t one point I remember
waking up and writing down the idea of 'feed-forward loops,( only to come across the
phrase two nights later. )trange story, I know, but true.
*art of what made this book so difficult is McKenzie%s indulgence in the
embellishment and invention of language. Indeed, much of the time spent reading
Perform or Else is devoted to learning a new language, a language that at times appears
totally 'made up,( and eacerbating this, McKenzie%s language builds upon and
elaborates the already very convoluted language of postmodernism, post-structuralism,
and eistential philosophy. +his inherent compleity makes a ,-.. word review of
Perform or Else etremely challenging, but I hope to provide some initial access to its
most salient elements and conceptions.
McKenzie%s opus reads more like two books. +he first 'book( "*art I# is a
relatively straightforward genealogy of performance, encompassing three distinct fields
or paradigms of /ultural, 0rganizational, and +echnological performance. +hrough the
genealogical study of their growth since 1orld 1ar II, McKenzie begins to map their
intersected, interwoven, imbricated tra2ectories into a 'general theory( of performance.
In the second 'book( "*art II and III#, McKenzie%s general theory irrupts into a discursive
'theory eplosion( that no doubt would have made 3errida and $oucault gleam rosy with
pride, which is both eegesical and methodological. McKenzie%s general theory of
performance is simultaneously assembled and practiced. 4is writing brilliantly mirrors
the abstruse, orthogonal language and theory of recent $rench philosophy. 5yotard,
3elueze, and 6uattari, as well as Marcuse, 4eidegger and !ietzsche all make significant
cameos in this discursive performative.
+he book begins by looking at /ultural *erformance and the notion of its efficacy.
4e writes, '*erformance emerges here as the efficacy of certain activities, activities
capable of challenging of social norms and symbolic structures( "78#. *erformance
)tudies has conceived of cultural performance in terms of its liminality, in terms of its
capacity for resistance and transgression. '5iminality almost eclusively became a space
and time of transgression and subversion9 thus, a concept and practice primarily
associated with normative forces :in pre-industrial societies; had become the embodiment
of mutational forces :in post-industrial societies;( "-,#. *aradoically, this has resulted in
what he calls the 'liminal-norm,( a normative definition of irrepressibly subversive
practices "what I have elsewhere called a normative culture of countering cultural
norms#.
Moving to 0rganizational *erformance, which is associated with efficiency and
primarily the terrain of performance managers, McKenzie begins to disclose the dynamic
relationships between each performance paradigm. ')ystems theory( offers the most
powerful analytical tool to *erformance Management,
In classical systems theory, feedback is defined as a process by which part of a
system%s output is reentered or 'fed back( into the system as an input, thus
allowing inputs and outputs to be compared. +he reentering of outputs as inputs
gives feedback a circular or looped structure < In *erformance Management,
feedback is used to measure, analyze, and ad2ust an entire system%s performance
in relation to its component systems and to its environment "=.#.
$eedback and feedforward loops are integral to McKenzie%s general theory of
performance, for it is through them that navigation of the performance stratum is realized.
+he last of McKenzie%s paradigms, +echno-*erformance, is concerned with
effectiveness. 1hereas 0rganizational *erformance%s feedback loops are more loosely
involved in a systems-maintenance enterprise "a social system#, +echno-*erformance is
more akin to a guidance system "a technological system#, which, if all has been properly
engineered, will 'perform( as designed, that is, 'the test of an engineering hypothesis is a
comparison of its predictions with performance, :where; eperience becomes the
>uintessential learning device( ",.=#. In the spirit of +homas Kuhn, despite scientists%
insistence on the rigor of their method, McKenzie goes to lengths to show that 'the
evaluation of technological performance often involves nonrigorous, intuitive
techni>ues( ",,,#.
/ultural, 0rganizational, and +echnological correspond respectively with 'three
metamodels of performance? rites of passage, feedback loops, and missiles( ",7@#, which
each eemplify their particular paradigms. Aites of passage are the seminal trope of
cultural performance. +hey are the basis from which *erformance )tudies springs.
$eedback loops describe the fundamental analytic of 0rganizational *erformance. +hey
are how *erformance Managers assess systems. Missiles embody the >uintessential
processes of +echno-*erformance. +hey are machines designed to complete a specific set
of programmed maneuvers and to accomplish a specific outcome.
0n the surface, it may not appear that Perform or Else offers much to think about
for /yberculture )tudies, but, McKenzie insists? '0n the performance stratum, the field
of human-computer interaction is ground zero for the emergence of a new and powerful
machine, the feedback and feedforward of world culture( ",B=#. Indeed, the computer is
conceived as a metatechnology, which is the essential component in the shift to global
performance, and the ascendance of the computer corresponds with a Mc5uhanes>ue
decline in the 'book.(
&cross the performance stratum, audiovisual archiving increasingly occurs
through multimedia networks. Its citational network is programmed less and less
by the book and increasingly by the metatechnology of the computer<. +he
networked computer culminates a process that has been underway since the
invention of photography and phonography? the radical transformation of the
citational network of discourses and practices ",8C#.
+he purpose of McKenzie%s analysis is to articulate the ways in which 'we( have
been moving, especially since 1orld 1ar II, from a ,B
th
century $oucauldian paradigm of
discipline "and punishment# into a D,
st
century paradigm driven by the imperative to
perform< or else. /entral to this is 'that performance must be understood as an
emergent stratum of power and knowledge( ",8#. $urthermore,
+his formation is ontological in that it entails a displacement of being that
challenges our notion of history< 5ike discipline, performance produces a new
sub2ect of knowledge, though one >uite different from that produced under the
regime of panoptic surveillance ",8#.
In short, he argues, we are passing into the 'age of global performance( "DC7#.
+hus, '/ultural performance, organizational performance, technological performance,
embodied performance, discursive performative, performance stratumEthese are the
main concepts composing our theory( "D7,#. Fach of these performance 'paradigms( has
slowly been epanding and feeding into one another such that we can now say,
'performativity is the postmodern condition( "Italics mine, ,@#.
1hat does this all meanG In McKenzie%s general theory of performance, it means
'that all performance is electronic, that the global eplosion of performance coincides
precisely with the digitization of discourses and practices, and that this coincidence is
anything but coincidental( "DC=#. Aather than being coincidental, they are the self-same
process. *erformance, as a conceptual construct, emerges at precisely the same moment
as the post-11II technological revolution is set spiraling towards its inevitable paradigm
shift, because it is at precisely that moment when /ultural, 0rganizational, and
+echnological embodied performances and discursive performatives begin their parallel
tra2ectories and eventually become bound together as the dominant onto-historical
structure of a global eistence.
Hecause the forces of global performance are, paradoically, both normative and
transgressive, McKenzie poses this 'challenge? not only to recognize that one eperiences
history from the perspective of the present, but to plug into emergent forces in order to
generate untimely perspectives on this very perspective, perspectives that multiply and
divide the present, rattling it to and fro( "D--#. Aising to the challenge, McKenzie wields
what he calls a perfumative gay sci-fi, perfumative because we have moved from 'oral-
ear :ritual; to alpha-eye :theatrical; to electro-nose :performative;( "DC=#. *erfumance is
a 'mode of eperimental resistance( which 'rehearse:s; the future,( "D-.# in order to
channel 'mutational forces across the entire performance stratum, releasing desires and
intensities from contets that constrain them, creating perfumances that test the
modulations of performative power( "D7-#. Perform or Else is, in the final analysis, a
book of strategies to both 'sniff-out( the citesIsites of normative performative power and
grasp the potential for mutational performances, which will 'build new worlds, break
with the history of an all-too-human being and, through rigorous cross- and
countercultural training, prepare the way for man%s overcoming and surpassing( "D-B#.