The Performance Complex

Musicians, dancers, and actors perform. Politicians, doctors, and teachers do also. Millions perform their everyday selves on social media. And while some perform, others keep score. We live in a performance society, saturated with performances of many and various kinds, with a wide range of attendant capacities, techniques, and creativities—but also anxieties. This chapter introduces the book’s central focus; the assemblage of metrics, networks, and their attendant emotional pathologies referred to as the performance complex. It takes the reader through the general structure and elaborates on the broad themes of the book, outlining the important distinctions between competition and competitions, ratings and rankings, and performances and performance.