One of the neatest and best-known descriptions of the ideology promoted by a universalised performance is that of Jon McKenzie in Perform or Else. He traces the emergence of the so-called paradigm of performance alongside the institutional expansion and consolidation of Performance Studies. From this perspective the arguments as to whether Performance Studies is a discipline or not, the debates about terminology and the promotion of the idea of the ‘contested’ concept, all of this he suggests results from ‘a tension between two desires: the desire to create cultural performance as a field of study, one with institutional and professional legitimacy, and the desire to avoid recreating the norms of the academy, norms that are themselves tied to extra-institutional forces’. Thus what gets defined is a coherent discipline that has as its distinctive feature the fact that it questions and upsets coherence. This ideological duality is nowhere better illustrated than in the consistent, discipline-wide, use of the concept of liminality as a theoretical model. It is employed for two purposes: ‘to define the efficacy of performance and of our own research’. Thus it has ‘helped us to construct objects of inquiry by guiding the selection of activities to be studied, their formal analysis, and their political evaluation.’ To make his polemical point McKenzie conjures up an apparent paradox: ‘the persistent use of this concept within the field has made liminality into something of a norm’ (2001: 48, 50).

As a formulation the ‘liminal norm’ neatly describes what McKenzie sees as the dominant characteristics of Performance Studies thinking. The foregrounding of liminality in this thinking has in turn helped keep in place the disciplinary distinctiveness and stability of Performance Studies. But it can only be ideologically effective in this function if, first, the meaning of liminality is restricted to a generalised sense of in-betweenness, of being outside norms, and, second, if performance is assumed to have some sort of essence or nature which means that it not only exists in, but establishes a state of, liminal in-betweenness, irrespective of its actual institutional positioning. Both these features turn up in Marvin Carlson's definition of ‘performance’, which McKenzie quotes: it ‘is a specific event with its liminoid nature foregrounded, almost invariably clearly separated from the rest of life’ (in McKenzie 2001: 49). Defined this way, performance drags into its own orbit the scholars of performance, …