Performance as Metaphor

Abstract

Performance is clearly one of those terms that Raymond Williams calls keywords, or words (e.g., realism, naturalism, mimesis, structure) whose meanings are inextricably bound up with the problems [they are] being used to discuss.' Find a word that is suddenly emerging from normal semantic practice (a word you are hearing, say, a dozen times a week), and you can bet that it is a proto-keyword spreading on the winds of metaphor. And in this process the word's standard dictionary meanings seem to fall into a dormancy while the new key meaning, not yet clear, gets tested and extended far and wide, revised, qualified, and finally settles into the vocabulary as if it had always meant what it now means.2