The Performance Complex

Chapter 1 from this book is published open access and free to read or download from Oxford Academic

What's valuable?

Market competition provides one kind of answer. Competitions offer another. On one side, competition is an ongoing and seemingly endless process of pricings; on the other, competitions are discrete and bounded in time and location, with entry rules, judges, scores, and prizes. This book examines what happens when ever more activities in domains of everyday life are evaluated and experienced in terms of performance metrics.

Unlike organized competitions, such systems are ceaseless and without formal entry. Instead of producing resolutions, their scorings create addictions. To understand these developments, this book explores discrete contests (architectural competitions, international music competitions, and world press photo competitions); shows how the continuous updating of rankings is both a device for navigating the social world and an engine of anxiety; and examines the production of such anxiety in settings ranging from the pedagogy of performance in business schools to struggling musicians coping with new performance metrics in online platforms. In the performance society, networks of observation - in which all are performing and keeping score - are entangled with a system of emotionally charged preoccupations with one's positioning within the rankings. From the bedroom to the boardroom, pharmaceutical companies and management consultants promise enhanced performance. This assemblage of metrics, networks, and their attendant emotional pathologies is herein regarded as the performance complex.