Great Jones Street, Don DeLillo's 1973 novel about fictional rock star Bucky Wunderlick, features one of his most lyrical, elegiac descriptions:

It is a telephone that both is and is not a telephone, retaining form but not function, a phone-shaped sculpture and, for Bucky, beautiful because, in keeping with Oscar Wilde's dictum about art, it is useless. Bucky describes and admires the phone that will not speak; DeLillo describes, and seems to admire, the performer who, like the detached and mute telephone in his apartment, will not perform. What, then, becomes of such a phone? What, then, should become of Bucky? What does DeLillo mean by speak, and, by extension, by perform?

Similarly, after learning that he cannot have immediate access to his savings because the money is ‘working’, Bucky replies, ‘I don't want it working … I’m the one who works … While I work and sweat, I want to think of my money resting in a cool steel-paneled room’, repeating himself immediately: ‘I don't like to think of money working. I’m the one who works.’ He is met, however, with this hostile rejoinder: ‘Except you don't seem to be’ (44–5). The word that might best describe how they – both the phone and Bucky – now work, or do not work, is no longer performance, which might have described their previous incarnations, but, rather, performative, a word that gender theorists such as Judith Butler have used since 1990, drawing upon the framework of sociologist Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life in 1959 and philosopher J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words in 1962.