Food for Thougt – Performativism

Paul-Henri Moinet
A graduate of École Normale Supérieure, columnist for Le Nouvel Économiste, editorial director at Sinocle, an independent media outlet on China, Paul-Henri Moinet has also taught at Sciences Po Paris and held strategic planning leadership roles in major advertising agencies such as Publicis Groupe and Havas Media Group.
An idea, a book, a concept—a “matter for reflection” that we share with you to stimulate thinking, explore new subjects, and encourage a fresh perspective.

There is a pathology of action, which can degenerate in two ways: as activism or as hyperactivity, its two borderline forms. The symptoms of hyperactivity—first identified by the Scottish physician Alexander Crichton in 1798 as a morbid condition characterised by an inability to maintain attention on a given object with sufficient consistency—appear in children and, more rarely, in adults, whether or not associated with attention disorders: impulsivity, chronic impatience, lack of concentration, tendency to daydream and distraction, agitation, mood swings, and excessive mobility.
We often reduce the causes of hyperactivity to genetic or environmental factors. When it is not neurons or hormones at fault, it is social networks, cognitive or ecological pollution, our hyper-connected digital century, or even the pedagogical and emotional shortcomings of parents.
Activism, meanwhile, is defined as the manifestation of militant engagement that disregards the norms of peaceful and legal action. Activism can be right- or left-wing. In French history, it has taken revolutionary, royalist, nationalist, unionist, fascist, regionalist, student, and terrorist forms. It was practiced through political coups and insurrectional pressure, from the Camelots du Roi of Charles Maurras’ Action Française to the far-left militants of Action Directe. From the 1990s, activism became anti-globalisation, social, and ecological, defending the rights of sexual, ethnic, and social minorities, practising civil disobedience as seen in Occupy Wall Street, Act Up, Les Enfants de Don Quichotte, the Soulèvements de la Terre (whose dissolution by the Ministry of the Interior was overturned in November 2023 by the Council of State), and Extinction Rebellion (founded in 2018 by Roger Hallam and Gail Bradbrook). Today, activism is the realm of hackers and eco-terrorists, with Julian Assange and Andreas Malm as its new prophets.

Yet these two pathologies of action—one ideological, the other cognitive—tend to make us forget what lies at the very heart of action and can distort its meaning. There comes a point when action ceases to be the test and proof of human freedom: when it forgets both its principle and its purpose—its arche and telos, as the classical Greek philosophers would say. When the cult of action becomes the religion of performance, action, instead of fulfilling its transformative and emancipatory vocation, becomes lost in the mere pursuit of efficiency. No longer knowing its origin or purpose, it loses its way; if it continues, it is like a headless chicken running blindly. Action becomes nothing more than a managerial injunction, blind and counterproductive through relentless productivity and instantaneous assessment of its effectiveness. Excessive pressure erases stimulation, competition cancels motivation, and everything must be done before it can even be accomplished. The latency time, conducive to self-fulfilment and the proper transformation of things, is banished, despised, and almost forbidden.
“Money, machinery, algebra—the monstrous kings of contemporary civilisation. A complete analogy,” noted Simone Weil in 1942. This trilogy—is it not the world we are entering? Are we not already living it, with the freedoms it creates and the havoc it brings? The more life succumbs to the religion of performance, the less active it becomes, whether in personal, professional, or social life.

“What is divine is rest, inactivity. Without it, we lose the divine,” notes Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, who teaches in Berlin, in Vita contemplativa or On Inactivity. The divine is the free, disinterested, idle part that persists within each of us. Recall that the Greek polis was structured around three spaces: oikos, agora, and temenos. Oikos, the root of the word economy, was the domestic space for the production and exchange of goods; agora, the public space for debate on social and political matters; temenos, the sacred space for the celebration of the gods. That the Acropolis was situated above the city (polis) was no accident. Producing, debating, celebrating—these are the three modes of human action, the three ways of inscribing our humanity in the world. Depriving one of the others, or diminishing one to elevate another, is to fall short of our humanity. Every active person knows when not to act; they also know how to debate and celebrate, to produce and contemplate. Their balance and success depend on the secret interweaving of these three activities, as does social harmony and the fragile regulation of the world.

“A wise peasant does not till the land,” observed Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi, knowing that the land works on its own for its own good, through the natural labour of roots, insects, worms, and all the tiny creatures inhabiting it.
Every manager and entrepreneur should reflect on this. They must learn to become ruminants, to ruminate in order to become more active, more intensely active, more intelligently active.

Ruminants are, as Nietzsche noted in The Gay Science, “the good men of all times who have deepened old ideas to make them bear fruit.” The future belongs to the ruminants.

References
Gabriel Wahl, Les adultes hyperactifs
Andreas Malm, How to Sabotage a Pipeline
Sophie Wahnich, Le Radeau démocratique: Chronicles of Uncertain Times
Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Byung-Chul Han, Vita contemplativa or On Inactivity
A summary note by Paul-Henri Moinet