PERFORMANS, PERFORMATIVNOST I POLITIČKA MOĆ
Performance, Performativity and Political Power

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines political power as one of the central concepts for any attempt to understand politics. Its primary aim is to point out the limitations of classical conceptions of power that equate power with domination and view it as a possession used to impose one’s will, either publicly and openly or indirectly and covertly. To this end, the paper draws on the conceptualizations of power developed by Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault to highlight the advantages of more comprehensive approaches that understand power as a constitutive force of social reality. Through an analysis of their conceptions, I suggest that power should be understood as a productive and creative relation of forces, a continuous and omnipresent interplay that lies at the heart of all social practices. Power, in this sense, exists only insofar as it is exercised; it cannot be possessed, accumulated, or stored for future use. Rather than being a static property, power is an ongoing process that emerges through action, interaction, and practice. While the paper emphasizes the analytical advantages of Foucault’s more comprehensive understanding of power in comparison to Hannah Arendt’s communicative model, I also argue that Foucault’s framework remains incomplete. Specifically, I suggest that a fuller understanding of the techniques and tactics of power and, crucially, of the conditions under which resistance to and rejection of power emerge, requires the incorporation of theories of performance. Such an expansion helps address what remains the weakest point of Foucault’s analytics of power: a systematic account of how resistance arises, is enacted, and disrupts or reconfigures existing power relations.

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