CMC lecture by Theo van Leeuwen, Performance and politics, 6 June

The Centre for Multimodal Communication is happy to invite everybody to this open lecture. After the lecture, there will be time to chat with Theo and the other members of CMC.


When: 6 June, 13.00 to 14.00.

Where: Meeting room Rasmus Rask (you find the room here).


Theo van Leeuwen, Performance and politics

Performance, in the way in which it was defined by Hymes (1972: 62), as the “manner or spirit in which an act is done”, is an integral part of all social practices. But, perhaps since the presidency of the movie actor Ronald Reagan, who “wanted to be, and became, an accomplished presidential performer” (Cannon, 1991: 50), it is playing an increasingly important role in politics, as signalled by Fairclough (2000: 14), when he wrote about political style as multimodal, and as expressive of political identities and values.
In this talk, I will present a framework for analysing the discursive recontextualization of performance, along the lines of earlier work on the representation of social actors and social actions (van Leeuwen, 2008), and apply it to the performance of politicians during election campaigns.
Examples are drawn from visual and linguistic representations of the 2019 Australian election campaigns of Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten.
I will end with a critique of theories such as those of Goffman (e.g. 1959), which interpret social life entirely in terms of performance, which, inter alia, risks legitimizing the application of what Habermas (1984) called ‘dramaturgical’ validity criteria to politics.



Theo van Leeuwen is Professor of Multimodal Communication at ISKHK, Emeritus Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, and Honorary Professor at the University of New South Wales, the Australian Catholic University and the University of Lancaster.



The lecture is open to everyone, please email Nina Nørgaard if you wish to attend so that we know how much tea and coffee we need for the event :-).