Performative Reading Could Be Good and Might Save Us
A less pessimistic take on performative reading. It might be a positive sign and could help us rescue civilization. Paraliturgy and using performance to restore proper function in society.
Is all of life actually liturgy, following a schema that Divine Liturgy and Mass of the Christians exemplify, or even the worship of non-Christian religions? Yes. It absolutely is. I’ve found this to be a popular idea in select Orthodox and Traditional Catholic circles, as well as in some Eastern Catholic micro-communities. To an extent in certain societies, this truth is still lived out.
But before I found the theory in those marginal communities, I found it in, of all places, a theater class during undergrad. Although I was rarely timely with registering for classes, and resented the modern state of theater, this one I could not but anticipate joining, thinking it’d be a breeze: Theater, Intro to Performance, taught by a resident Jesuit (Eternal Memory). Sure enough, in what seemed like a semi-guilty e-mail to the registrants two weeks before class, Father said,
“Just so you know… this course is a course about what performance is. It’s a theory-type course, not an acting one.”
I had no idea what I was getting into. Apparently, neither did my classmates who were anticipating exactly what Father said the class wasn’t going to be. I’m still processing the incredible theories of performance that seem to prompt every day of every person. And with that, I will justify performative reading.
performative reading, n: recently popularized act of reading or referencing texts as a social signal—a performance of belonging, intellect, virtue, or political stance—rather than purely for comprehension, critical engagement, or learning. Commonly displayed on social medias such as TikTok, Instagram, Substack; has led to social frustration; performers accused of vanity, superficiality, virtue-signaling, etc.
paraliturgy, n: act of devotion or worship that resembles/imitates the formal liturgy (i.e. Divine Liturgy or Mass) but are not officially part of the formal liturgy or body of prescribed services.
Life is liturgy and the paraliturgical nature of everyday life used to justify itself. Theater and religion were common enough in society that the parallels were innately understood by the masses. Some things you just did, other things you just didn’t do, because “that is (or isn’t) how we’ve always done it” – to scorn by some modernists; but “that’s not how we’ve always done it” is just the same as “because that’s not how we’ve rehearsed it,” and what is a play before an audience without coherent roles and lines? Who would pay for tickets to an unreputable playhouse, and how long before the actors quit? In life as liturgy, people are both the actors and the audience. This synergy is central to civilization.
But in living memory, at the advent of religious indifferentism and the (plenty related) downfall of the arts and humanities (particularly in the gayification of playcraft), life as paraliturgy has been unconsciously lumped with “dead tradition.” Hence why Christmas gatherings seem stranger, house parties have disappeared, children no longer play outside, and intimacy has shifted into the digital realm. Hence also why we have begun this tired discussion of “main character syndrome,” (click here for definition) a syndrome that reveals how many people are regressing to a world where only they are actors, and seldom, if ever, the audience.
For this reason among others, I can’t judge or overlook people for “performative reading” or “rebellious fashion,” as has been so hotly discussed on Substack of late. In the past, to do anything publicly was both functional and performative, to the end of justifying correct and imitable actions to others. So we must ask: is performative reading a symptom of “main character syndrome,” or is it an instinctual desire to restore the function and good effects of reading in public via performance?
As it happens, and has not been exhausted even by this publication’s obsession with what is meta: this present generation of young adults has both broken a 4th wall, and has broken the orthodox understanding of the the 4th wall via performance sans function, thereby breaking a 5th wall, thereby thrusting 19-28 year old society into an en-masse metanarration of the narratives that uphold social narration. We have a tribe of 19-28 year olds not keen on what older generations have called “deconstruction.” A decade or two ago, we might have been accused of deconstructing reading (accusation: by performatively oversignifying reading, you are hurting the act of reading for its own sake); but, on the contrary, the labeling of performative reading as such is a socially reconstructive act concerned with restoring social theater, for the “act of reading for its own sake” has already be deconstructed. If it weren’t already so, then we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Seeing as function is integral to social paraliturgy, and paraliturgy is “to the end of justifying correct and imitable actions to others” as mentioned above, we would only ever intentionally do something as performance to either restore or uphold function, and few people are reading solely for function these days, so the function of reading for its own sake must have been long deconstructed.
The pendulum swings, hence the accusation of deconstruction. Just before social point zero (that is to say: when social stability is on the downward trajectory), the last thing to disappear is performance. Coming upward from point zero, therefore, the first to reappear must be the same: performance. This is precisely why some thinkers have identified what can best be called “aesthetidoxy” — or the semi-artistic performance of “reactionary” ideology — as both the predecessor to the reduction of society to a deconstructed singularity, as well as the successor of the singularity as a predictor and potentiator of new progress.
It’s true that there are multiple social stages, from multiple sociological perspectives, that last a varying amount of time. Fundamentally, the return to performance as a means of restoring function (more closely approximating the “formal liturgy” of a sound society) must be a late-stage development because its momentum is both backward and forward on account of the dual nature of performance and function.
Allow me to provide an example of social stages, and then retrofitting known history to it.
Auguste Comte, in his work The Course in Positive Philosophy, describes the progression of society through three stages
Theological Stage
1. Primitive religion such as the sun as a god, moving into
2. Personal polytheism, à la Green pantheon, moving into
3. Supra-personal monotheism à la Holy Trinity
Metaphysical Stage
The abstractification of God into a principle, the elevation of “principles”
Roughly occurring between the Enlightenment era and Modernism/early post-modernism
Positive Stage, a.k.a the Scientific Stage
The elevation of empirical sciences as a post-type of God
The rejection of the supernatural and metaphysical.
The duration of one paraliturgical social cycle, however, is not definitive; similarly, Comte admits that these stages overlap according to several variables. The beginning of one stage and the end of another, as it relates to paraliturgical social cycles, is contingent upon infrageistic characteristics such as how close the horseshoe’s ends are to one another, what the ends are essentially defined by, and what kinds of people are becoming religious versus what kinds of people are abandoning religion — indiscriminate of which religious institution. Essentially, people’s expression of self occurs along an x-axis in the early stages of society; and as society progresses, the line is bent gradually into a horseshoe, which might be why the forces of development have deigned to produce the “horseshoe theory” of political affiliation.
Besides potentially demonstrating main character syndrome, the public has accused performative readers of virtue signaling, of not truly engaging with the texts, of being excessively concerned with displaying an identity that the performer might feel insecure about. Unfortunately, just because these accusations can make sense, doesn’t mean they do for the reasons that the pessimists believe. I suspect that, for many, this virtue signal is (unlike how it usually is) not to show moral, political, or intellectual prestige. On the contrary, it may well be a signal coterminous with the edge of the horseshoe, or the geist. So to say: the more indistinguishable people become, the more they desire to signal or others that they’re somewhere different. It’s a cry for identity, a cry for culture, and a cry for the formal liturgy of society. Sadly, because it often looks so pitiful, it can be tempting to reduce the performance to vanity. But, as it were, people are possessed by the spirit of the time. Much of our free will is siphoned by this era. We can often only act within the framework we inherit (in other entries, known as our “system of significance”), and we’ve inherited the “margins” of society, and as symbolists know well: everything becomes upside down, backward, confusing, and disorienting at the margins. At the edges of the world, the terrain becomes oddly proportioned — tall, sharp, icy, hot, with extreme climates, strange languages, and different-looking peoples from you. It’s likewise in the margins of social groups: odd hair, odd clothes, unfamiliar jargon and hobbies. And lastly, likewise in society at large: strange ideas, strange conventions, novel politics, and mass identity crises.
If we are to follow Comte’s stages of society, and the return to performance is a late-stage phenomenon, then we should place ourselves at the tail end of the Positive Stage. Let’s assume that the stages repeat in some way. As it stands today, it would appear that we are quickly moving backward into the metaphysical stage, as embodied by our renewed concern for the abstract, the metaphysical, and the ironic; except, perhaps for the first time in human history, we are retaining humanity’s body of scientific knowledge as we go backward, which is leading to an unusual synthesis of ideas – are we mythicizing the scientific and objectifying the metaphysical?
Well, is reading a principle – a metaphysique? Why are people excessively concerned with performative reading in particular? Truthfully, there are many other things that are far more important to begin performing in public again, which the Orthodox and Traditional Catholics have been nailing for the last decade. After all, they are the prototype for social paraliturgy themselves, and they report to a much more concrete idea of liturgy from which this social theory derives. The Sign of the Cross, public prayer, processions with icons and statues – these are all (literally) paraliturgical actions that traditional Christian groups have been revamping to the nth degree, and under an ancient maxim: “Lex orandi, lex credendi,” paraphrased from Prosper of Aquitaine in the 5th century, which is to say, “The law of what is prayed is the law of what is believed.” How and what you pray is how and what you will believe. In the effort to restore belief in God, these groups have begun performing to restore function – with great success.
How you perform is how you will function.
But not everybody is conscious of lex orandi, conscious of social paraliturgy; and not everybody has returned to religion. Nonetheless, people have the human sense to perform to restore a healthy function of society, and if they’re doing it by reading, then I wager it’s a metaphysique for now. And I am inclined to let them continue.
PBWY,
G. Wesley