In Show Time: The Logic and Power of Violent Display, political scientist Lee Ann Fujii investigates the theatricality of violence and the complex interplay between spectacle and social change. Through the examination of three extreme cases of violence – the murder of a Tutsi family during the genocide in Rwanda, the execution of Muslim men in a Serbian-controlled village in Bosnia during the Yugoslav Wars, and the lynching of a black farmworker in Maryland in 1933 – Fujii explores how public acts of violence influence spectators, participants, and broader populations, profoundly affecting their political identities, social hierarchies, and power structures. As multiple reviews have shown, Fujii’s book is empirically rich and theoretically exciting, showing how perpetrators exploit social bonds for their purposes and how public violence fundamentally alters societal structures.
I was drawn to the book by the concept of performativity, not in its broader, colloquial meaning (as in performative allyship) but in the tradition of the more specific terminology pioneered in the 1960s by what Roland Barthes called ‘Oxford philosophy’: in particular, the speech act theories of John Austin in How to Do Things with Words and John Searle in Speech Acts. While an important author to cite in this context, it should be noted that Searle had his emeritus status revoked for sexual harassment and assault. In the Oxford Johns’ theoretical framework, speech acts – the act of saying something – can fulfil different functions. Most importantly, the mere statement of a fact is distinguished from a performative speech act. The latter designates an utterance that both describes and performs an action in the same instance. Austin’s prime example of such a performative utterance is the ‘I do’ during a marriage ceremony. Performativity has often been re-, and I would argue sometimes mis-, interpreted. Take, for example, the German rendering of the title of Fujii’s book: Formen und Folgen demonstrativer Gewalt. I see the temptation to use ‘demonstrativer’ or ‘demonstrative’ as a proxy for ‘display’, but performativity is more than a mere demonstration of reality. It is an act that brings into being what it names, differentiating it from both representation – where something stands in for something else, potentially leading to a reproduction of, in this case, violence – and demonstration, where something is simply shown to someone. The transformative power of performativity, distinct from simply showing or reproducing, underscores the creation of new structures and identities through the very act of violence itself.
This leads to my only major criticism of Fujii’s book, namely a lack of distinction between different conceptions of performativity and related gaps regarding the implications of her own theory. I argue that, perhaps due to her professional background in theatre, Fujii’s interpretation of performativity is overly grounded in a theatrical framework, obscuring the nuances and foregoing the subversive potential of performative acts as explored by earlier theorists. To explain this point, let me put two masterminds of performance into contrast: Erving Goffman and Judith Butler. In a highly simplified understanding, Goffman views life as theatre, with each individual playing different roles or presenting themselves in a certain way, depending on the situation. For Butler, on the other hand, performance is an iterative process that generates a social reality in the first place and is interesting precisely because it blurs the line between life and theatre, nature and culture, and other binarities. This is how drag can destabilise the heterosexual matrix; it ‘troubles’ established boundaries. Although citing Butler and not Goffman, Fujii tends to subscribe to a Goffman-like roleplaying game. This is evident in Fujii’s vocabulary, such as rehearsing, casting, and audience, but also in the considerable agency she ascribes to individuals, even the background actors (p. 7), within the ‘theatre’ of violence. I would have appreciated a more thorough engagement with existing theories of performativity to fully situate Fujii’s own theoretical position and gain clarity about the practical implications thereof.
This latter lack of clarity leads, at times, to an optimistic view of agency within contexts of violence that appears insufficiently substantiated. Fujii writes, for example: ‘Understanding the power of collective violence to transform not only political hierarchies but also shared notions of belonging can help to lessen the allure of putting violence on display.’ For this statement to be meaningful, the individuals involved in performative displays of violence – and for Fujii, this emphatically includes more than the primary perpetrators – need to have a real choice about their participation. Without this choice, after all, why would a mere better understanding of violence have any bearing on future displays of violence? Yet, supposing this choice exists, Fujii’s theory seems to imply a ‘voluntarism’ similar to the one Butler had to clarify away from many of their early theoretical formulations. That is, they elaborated that social roles cannot be put on and changed like clothes, but the self is inherently constituted in the social surroundings. A similar clarification as Butler’s might have helped make Fujii’s book even more convincing. She could have made it clear that people cannot freely decide whether the allure of violent display affects them. Importantly, this acknowledgement would not preclude ways of resisting. Indeed, chapter 7 illustrates instances of resistance. Yet, they are explained by the strength of identities or social relations, such as friendship, preceding the violence, not the conscious enactment of a part defying the new hierarchy. This leaves little reason for optimism about informed subversion of the violence and the new order it establishes.
A related theoretical gap remains as to how knowledge about the power of collective violence can ‘lessen the allure’ of violent display. Intuitively, a simple increase in theoretical awareness cannot diminish the practical appeal of violent displays. Unfortunately, Fujii does not suggest concrete steps to substantiate her general optimism about the positive impact of work like hers. This optimism might detract from the involuntary engagement with violence by many individuals. But it also neglects the concrete potential to remake reality ‘less violently’, which is inherent in other theories of performativity. Eventually, Fujii thereby leaves unanswered the perhaps most consequential question implied by her theory: How can subversive acts be performed in the theatre of violence? To answer questions like these, Show Time would have benefited from a thorough discussion that engaged different thinkers of performance.
The quality of Fujii’s work is evident in the fact that the existing reviews of the book include not much criticism but more curious questions. Jessica Soedirgo wonders, for example, if display could maintain existing orders just like it can establish new ones, and if non-violent display could be as effective as the violent variant. In a similar vein, I would further be interested to know how narrowly violence needs to be conceptualised for Fujii’s theory to be applicable. All her cases feature extreme physical violence and, eventually, murder. Can less extreme cases yield a similar reordering of social structures? After Lee Ann Fujii’s untimely passing in 2018, we must find answers to such questions ourselves. But Fujii’s work is undoubtedly a superb point of departure to guide future thinking about the performative power of violence and the performative potential to prevent it.