Making Meaningless: Performance Studies as Style and Method in the Context of Self-Negating Expertise

At a substantive level, this paper engages with the practice of expertise in global governance. The paper takes as its starting point an idea that expertise is a hermeneutic operation, geared to producing or imposing meaning on the world, through epistemic authority, as a means of guiding and justifying action. It asks: what to make of moments when experts contest their own authority? And when they do so in a commonplace enough fashion to belie the idea that this is a strategy to reinforce their authority, or a mere slip-up? In my case, rule of law experts question the very existence of the concept, even as they do rule of law work. “What does the rule of law mean, anyway?”, asks the rule of law expert as she develops indicators for its measurement, policies for its promotion, and projects for its implementation. This question poses a methodological problem. Common social scientific methods for the study of epistemic authority—such as ethnography, discourse analysis, and archival work—are geared toward understanding meaning-making. How can an enquiry into expertise capture the forms of power generated when experts produce meaninglessness? One response is to turn to reflexive social science, in which a scientific standpoint or methods also become, or are used by, the objects of study. But in this case, meaninglessness dissolves a scientific standpoint. For example, some sociologists study meaninglessness in terms of the cognition of the experts who produce it. However, this entails interpolating the structure of expert cognition into meaninglessness, thereby giving meaninglessness a structure, or form, of meaning—which then again becomes vulnerable to that dissolution. Instead, in this paper, I argue that the production of meaninglessness should be understood not as a series of hermeneutic operations—as social scientists of expertise might do—but as an aesthetic activity. On the basis of this shift, I draw on methods from theatre and performance studies to describe the production of meaninglessness, given their concern with aesthetics in action. I write short dramatic vignettes of two rule of law projects – a global expert indicator workshop, and a monitoring trip inspecting local Chiefly court reform in West Africa. Through these vignettes, I argue that performance studies can help us analyse action both as a way of producing social meaning (as in ethnomethodological approaches), as well as a way of producing meaninglessness. This allows me to analyse the actions of rule of law experts on their own terms, without seeking to reveal their mindset or hidden intentions. This paper thus moves beyond the view that disrupting meaning is a mode of resistance to expert rule. Instead, it aims to show how meaninglessness itself is produced and circulates as a resource for ongoing projects of transnational legal governance.