Dec 5, 2025 09:57 PM
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-le...ve-reading
EXCERPTS: A performative reader treats books like accessories, lugging around canonical texts as a ploy to attract a romantic partner or as a way to revel in the pleasure of feeling superior to others. While everyone else is scrolling social media and silencing life with noise-cancelling headphones, the performative reader insists upon his intelligence with attention-seeking insincerity, begging to be noticed with the aid of a big, look-at-me, capital-“B” book.
This way of perceiving social reality—and particularly a person’s reading life—may seem inane, even deranged. But performative reading has firmly implanted itself into the popular imagination, becoming a meme for a generation of people who, by all accounts, aren’t reading a whole lot of books...
[..] When did life become a land mine of possible performative gestures? There’s activism and performative activism, masculinity and performative masculinity, positivity and performative positivity—et cetera, ad nauseam. Are these neologisms diagnosing modern phenomena or illuminating preëxisting cultural realities? If all human activity can be measured on a spectrum of authenticity and performativity, what metrics can we use to weed out the genuine from the fabricated?
[...] To be seen as a poseur or a phony—a person who affects rather than is—violates some nebulous code of acceptable self-cultivation. ... If our authenticity is questioned—if we are caught pretending and playacting—what ground do we have left to stand on? If we are deemed inauthentic, how can we stand for anything at all? Conversely, if everything is potentially performative, how will we ever work up the courage to step outside of our sphere of normal, to risk being earnest and cringe, and experience something transformative?
[...] Conceptions of authenticity and sincerity have dominated Western thought since the Enlightenment, a period in which Immanuel Kant argued that individuals should be free to pursue knowledge as a means to better understand the human condition, and thus their authentic selves...
[...] Such an absolutist vision of individualism, however, undermines the systemic conditions that inform our relationship with the world, and ourselves. If we are to believe that the purpose of our lives is to unearth and express an authentic version of our true natures, we risk ignoring the myriad associations and forces that determine how we conceive of these premises in the first place...
[...] In this view, the performative-reading phenomenon appears less like a newfangled way of calling people pretentious and more like an odious reflection of society’s increasing deprioritization of the written word... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: A performative reader treats books like accessories, lugging around canonical texts as a ploy to attract a romantic partner or as a way to revel in the pleasure of feeling superior to others. While everyone else is scrolling social media and silencing life with noise-cancelling headphones, the performative reader insists upon his intelligence with attention-seeking insincerity, begging to be noticed with the aid of a big, look-at-me, capital-“B” book.
This way of perceiving social reality—and particularly a person’s reading life—may seem inane, even deranged. But performative reading has firmly implanted itself into the popular imagination, becoming a meme for a generation of people who, by all accounts, aren’t reading a whole lot of books...
[..] When did life become a land mine of possible performative gestures? There’s activism and performative activism, masculinity and performative masculinity, positivity and performative positivity—et cetera, ad nauseam. Are these neologisms diagnosing modern phenomena or illuminating preëxisting cultural realities? If all human activity can be measured on a spectrum of authenticity and performativity, what metrics can we use to weed out the genuine from the fabricated?
[...] To be seen as a poseur or a phony—a person who affects rather than is—violates some nebulous code of acceptable self-cultivation. ... If our authenticity is questioned—if we are caught pretending and playacting—what ground do we have left to stand on? If we are deemed inauthentic, how can we stand for anything at all? Conversely, if everything is potentially performative, how will we ever work up the courage to step outside of our sphere of normal, to risk being earnest and cringe, and experience something transformative?
[...] Conceptions of authenticity and sincerity have dominated Western thought since the Enlightenment, a period in which Immanuel Kant argued that individuals should be free to pursue knowledge as a means to better understand the human condition, and thus their authentic selves...
[...] Such an absolutist vision of individualism, however, undermines the systemic conditions that inform our relationship with the world, and ourselves. If we are to believe that the purpose of our lives is to unearth and express an authentic version of our true natures, we risk ignoring the myriad associations and forces that determine how we conceive of these premises in the first place...
[...] In this view, the performative-reading phenomenon appears less like a newfangled way of calling people pretentious and more like an odious reflection of society’s increasing deprioritization of the written word... (MORE - missing details)
