Abstract
This article explores what might happen to the concept of performativity within arguments that are understood as ‘topological’. It argues that we might ‘decline’ performativity, which is to say, elaborate the concerns that are expressed in the concept, but inclining it more boldly towards the complexities of a world whose elements are always in process of constitution, of reiterative enfolding. Taking a cue from Isabelle Stengers’ recent work in which she posits the notion of ecologies of practice, on the one hand, and Whitehead’s concept of concern, on the other, the paper argues that emergent entities have differential requirements – not least according to the disciplines to which they appeal – and subtend different modes of implied obligation. An adherence to these requirements needs to be accompanied by persuasive presentation that obliges a community to affirm any entity. On many levels of abstraction, ecologies need to show concern for an entity to facilitate its emergence and to sustain its mode of being. In an expanded vision, then, human and non-human entities at all levels enter into multifarious relational modes of becoming, but these become of sustained consequence only through persuasion of communities, sometimes organized into disciplines. The survival of entities requires forms of differentiation, division and of value. The paper relates these arguments to forms of sociological enquiry that give glimpses of how sociology might respond. It ends with a hesitation around the radical anti-anthropomorphism of the stance developed, and argues that this does not entirely eclipse the importance of political hope.
Keywords
If the inside is constituted by the folding of the outside, between them there is a topological relation: the relation to oneself is homologous to the relation with the outside and the two are in contact, through the intermediary of the strata which are relatively external environments (and therefore relatively internal). Deleuze, Foucault (1988a: 119)
IF THE ONE caught in Bentham’s panoptican develops ‘conscience’, finding within him or herself a set of jangled affects and energies that call for attention where previously there had been none, or else usurping the place of other attractions experienced differently, then one might say that a line of power (of light, of knowledge, of subjectification) has prompted a certain actualization within the body of the prisoner. It has created a sense of inner depth, so the argument goes, as if a new landscape had opened up within him, a place to which s/he feels obligated to return, to enter into, to explore and to mull over. Like the book’s landscape that opens up to the enraptured reader, who follows the protagonist around cities and lands seeing them as if s/he too were within them, the captured prisoner becomes with this newly created interiority.
Unlike the novelist, however, the panoptical diagram intends that the exploration constitute a moral force that will be sustained rather than closed and returned to the shelf. Temporally, one might say subjects so caught re-energize the past, bringing it into the present, actualizing its virtual force, all the while experiencing the past itself as active, enervating them through its imposition into their present, demanding to be recalled again and again until there is no gap between recall and its effect; it is incorporated. This scene of being captured by a force experienced as the force of the past and named guilt is thus a scene of energies, attractions and creativity. Guilty conscience arises, and so simultaneously the new landscape which it creates and in which it resides; conscience is a nonplace that our diagnosis declares as only seemingly ‘within’.
Just as the inside is ‘merely the fold of the outside, as if the ship were a folding of the sea’, as Deleuze wrote of Foucault’s analyses (1988a: 97), so in the panoptical scene the appearance of certain ‘elements’ – interior landscapes, guilty subjects, reformed habits – are resultants brought into being and sustained through the exteriority’s, which is to say power’s, attentions; they are in that sense the coerced actualizations of virtual potential in which an assemblage of material elements – architectural design, justice processes, steel, glass, sunlight, towers, keys, human judgements, wigs and half-remembered theological precepts – are entangled and somehow co-ordinated. And the proof of that diagnosis is – can only be – in its observable trace, viz. its enfolding into the habits and demeanour of the prisoner and henceforth of the ‘subjectivity’ s/he displays and perhaps articulates, and in the persuasiveness of the argument that posits this analysis as a convincing probability.
To describe this diagram or dispositif in this manner is already to elaborate upon Foucault’s scene, and to push the emphasis towards the creative tangle of relations that provide the conditions within which the subject emerges. This too is the scene that has centrally informed the work of Judith Butler insofar as while the relations of the familial scene in The Psychic Life of Power (1997) replace those of the panoptican, the logic remains the same. Butler’s attention is on what she terms the complicity that the emergent subject has in sustaining the power relations that produce her; in other words, she posits the necessary involvement of the subject’s desire in her emergent constitution.
Butler speaks of forms of ‘rapture and subjection’ that are the conditions of possibility for the ‘self’ who emerges; in other words, there are obligatory affective ties – however ambivalent – of the emergent self to its caregivers, ties that sustain and create ‘the family’ and which potentially make it so hauntingly complex throughout one’s adult life. Both Foucault’s diagram of power, which he of course ambitiously extended not only to other disciplinary institutions but also to society at large, and Butler’s similarly ambitious – and similarly influential – development of a theory of the subject and its encrypted foreclosures necessarily involve the tracing of obligated affective ties within their specific conditions of emergence. That is, they insist that whether and how a line of power/knowledge manages to form or reform a subject’s sense of self depends on how it is able to capture her, to subtly hold her, to oblige her to organize her embodiment and, perhaps more accurately, her sense of inwardness, in accordance with its attentions. Without any recourse to a notion of ideological persuasion, this line of power becomes incorporated, embodied or registered through arousal or sensation, be that conscious or unconscious, be it gratefully or ungratefully received.
That one can explore the panoptican scene through this emphasis on the attention, even attraction, of the emerging subject for that which forms her, enables one to connect these literatures to others that have approached such connections differently. Indeed, my intention here is to elaborate upon this initial scene in order to suggest a line of thought that may take us beyond the current state of play wherein performativity is seemingly trumped by a ‘turn to ontology’ or a new vital materialism. What I mean to suggest is that despite an apparent divergence, in which Butler’s work has been critiqued for its inattention to materiality, its privileging of language over and above other constitutive elements, and so on, it is possible to find a resonance between philosophies of performativity that have tended to remain focused on the human realm and philosophies that have historically decentred ‘the human’ to consider broader questions posed by the wider fluency of (all) existence across multiple assemblages.
I want to suggest that with the focus on their shared problematization of the actualization of entities, one might take the concept of performativity into new conversations. Conversations, for example, with the questions posed by those engaging anew with Whitehead’s philosophy, where the human must be understood as only one particular existent or subjectification, among many. Along the way, there are important revisions or additions that will join performativity as a result of this endeavour. In particular, in this intervention I will suggest that a notion of ecology emerges as an important and generative additional term, implying an elaboration and shift in our attentions, not least to considerations of the specific concerns and the specific requirements and constraints involved in the emergence of different entities (considerations that are advanced in the work of Stengers, 2010). Yet this exploration will also raise some hesitations about this proposal. I would like to think these hesitations through the perspective developed here, i.e. to regard the concept performativity as a subject or entity for which our disciplines are ecologies. So the question becomes what aspects of the concept we sustain in taking it into these new conversations and which aspects of its prior articulation we cut away from it. The debate then becomes whether or not we wish to affirm those cuts.
Concern
Let me start with the notion of concern. For whatever arises and is sustained in the world can be thought of as the loci of multifarious concerns, human and non-human, and their products, be those fleeting or sustained through time. If Bergson’s élan vital, so influential on Deleuze’s thought, glosses the process of actualization of virtualities, it must also perforce name the process by which elements of a situation are concerned (or not) with one another, attending to, ‘choosing’ – the anthropomorphic language is stylistic, a speculation – or repelling aspects of the environment in which they emerge, sustaining and changing themselves and, perhaps, the relevant aspects of that environment in the process.
To take up this point in more Whiteheadian language, one might argue that an actual entity concerns itself and is a matter of concern for other aspects of its environment or ecology, such that the emergence or sustenance of each actual entity depends upon it sustenance by other entities, and that emergence is both dependent and qualified in the process. In such a scenario or ‘occasion’ of what Whitehead called prehensions, elements ‘grasp’ one another, actively attempting to ensure their survival or some quality thereof. Be it my son’s arm as he reaches out from his cabin bed for the reassurance of a bedtime hug, or the roots of the offshoot from the vallisneria plant in his aquarium that dangle down seeking anchor, from the point of view of the emergent subject, the ‘desire to survive’ that Butler mentions in her different but possibly resonant way, shapes the immediate environment, acting upon, or with, its elements as they concern it and as they will allow themselves to be a concern for it.
Whitehead spoke of an actual entity – or what he also termed an ‘actual occasion’ – as the unity ascribed to an instance of concresence (1978 [1929]: 212). In the first phase of its emergence, the environment – that is, the already actual world – is merely received; it is data, felt as external centres but unabsorbed. It was to emphasize this kind of gentle ‘there-ness’ of the specific environment for the active entity that Whitehead borrowed his notion of ‘concern’ from the Quaker tradition. He wrote: ‘The Quaker word “concern”, divested of any suggestion of knowledge, is more fitted to express this fundamental structure [of occasions of experience]. The “concern” at once places the object as a component in the experience of the subject, with an affective tone drawn from this object and directed towards it’ (1933: 176).
In the second phase, that which was ‘felt as alien’ is transformed into a unity under the ‘government’ of a private ideal (1978 [1929]: 212). The active element might be said to be provoked into its activity by the environment, but that stimulation produces a response in interested fashion. Yet Whitehead is clear that in this second stage the dispersed origins of the entity’s emergence are not truly ‘lost’ since there is ‘no element in the universe capable of pure privacy’ (1978 [1929]: 212). The ‘nexus of actualities’ that were the past have enabled this creative process to occur insofar as they were the datum or environment in and by which the new entity, with and through its concerns, emerged.
Thus the two kinds of fluency for Whitehead: one that is the emergence of the entity, its concresence, and the other which is the fluency whereby ‘the perishing of the process, on the completion of the particular existent, constitutes that existent as an original element in the constitutions of other particular existents elicited by repetitions of process’ (1978 [1929]: 210). Thus is each actual entity complete only ‘so far as concerns its microscopic process’, being also ‘incomplete by reason of its objective inclusion of the macroscopic process’ (1978 [1929]: 215). When abstracted, all entities appear passive, but in conjunction they carry ‘the creativity which drives the world’ (1933: 179).
From Whitehead, then, one might adopt the notion that it is only through and because of what they owe their datum, or environment, that entities achieve their self-attainment. Through the relations or concerns between the emergent entity and its environment, the entity achieves its decisive moment of absolute self-attainment and ‘stands out as for itself alone’ (1933: 177). However briefly, entities ‘stand out’ as occasions of experience – as subjects, as ‘emotional unity’ (1933: 177). But since all is process, because each concresence in turn becomes mere data, as it were, for other occasions – in short, because of the fluency of the world – there is no guarantee that that survival will be sustained. The entity’s emergence has to be repeatedly achieved.
For the observer, there is nothing to celebrate, necessarily, about these achievements that continue around us, on all scales, whether or not we notice them – since many things arise and survive that we would rather did not (and any such celebration would involve a further event and its attendant value judgement). By the same token, nor is there anything especially depressing about the fact that there is a ‘perpetual perishing’ accompanying the creativity of the world (as Shaviro notes, ‘Locke’s phrase that time is “perpetual perishing”, runs like a leitmotif through the pages of Process and Reality’ (2009: 8). 1 Rather, this insistence on the disparate conditions of emergence invites attention to the specificities of conditions of emergence, the ‘ecologies of concern’ that provoke, sustain and thereby constitute the emergence of any specified entity, understanding that process as continuous and contingent.
Ecology
To use the term ecology, then, is an attempt to name this creative movement of concerns between elements in relation with one another. It is not to be understood as passive, and is certainly not to be defined as Nature compared to a human Us, as in some versions of environmentalism that argue the need for greater ‘care’ for the environment (Bennett, 2010: 111), for this implies a distinction that is to be challenged insofar as attention to ecologies decentres the human actor, placing it within the dizzying array of actual and potential configurations of elements, and those within it, as it were. (‘My “own” body is material, and yet this vital materiality is not fully or exclusively human’, writes Bennett (2010: 112), pointing to the example of the bacteria hosted in the special eco-system that is the crook of the human elbow.) The constitution of the subject in the panoptican begins to appear as only one analysis of the many different concerns and relations that must exist in that scene.
If bodies, or entities, of all kinds are produced through the attentions and attractions that circulate in any given domain, human subjectivity is joined by many other subjectivities, as Whitehead would not flinch from calling then, and vitality is no longer the preserve of the human or the animal. Jane Bennett’s notion of ‘vital materiality’ invites attention to this active participation of non-human forces as they participate in an entangled process of producing or ‘congealing’ into bodies of all kinds, ‘that seek to persevere or prolong their run’ (2010: 118). Her work insists on the necessity of attending to the variety of elements and agencies composing an assemblage, be it that within which Darwin’s industrious worms produce topsoil and thereby, inter alia, preserve – sustain – the findings of archaeologists researching human artefacts and culture (2010: 95–6). Or, alternatively, the assemblage in which Latour studied the activities of some other worms, this time in the Amazonian rainforest, where the worms partake in a gathering of ‘savannah vegetation, forest trees, soil, soil microorganisms, and humans native and exotic to the rainforest all responding … to each other’ (2010: 97).
By doing so, Bennett argues, there is the possibility that we might appreciate the importance of the activities of something other than humans – such as the worm, or its diet, or its aluminium excrement which seems to transform sandy soil into the clay soil more amenable to forest trees (2010: 98). These are, she insists, heterogeneous scenes of distributed agency, composed of ‘not-fully-predictable encounters between multiple kinds of actants’ (2010: 97).
What difference might a concept of ecology make? In her Cosmopolitics, Isabelle Stengers (2010) has written insightfully about how the ‘ecological perspective’ implies certain warnings for thought and for politics. Among these, I will note the three most pertinent for this discussion. First, the ecological perspective reminds us that any entity exists multiply in ways that may not be initially apparent, for entities’ entangled and dependent existences mean that none is fully defined by its entanglement in any one particular assemblage. Ecology has to be open to the multiplicity and disparate causalities, even if, as I shall discuss further below, one must limit the parameters of one’s investigation of an entity or phenomenon. Secondly, ecology as it has emerged as a shared concern in the contemporary world has made us aware that consequences of the ‘facts’ we create are not knowable in advance and have to be understood as potentially subject to unintended and possibly disastrous consequences.
Thirdly, Stengers argues that the ‘ecological perspective’ invites us ‘not to mistake a consensus situation, where the population of our practices finds itself subjected to criteria that transcend their diversity in the name of a shared intent, a superior good, for an ideal peace. Ecology doesn’t provide any examples of such submission’ (2010: 35). The closest one might be to consensus is symbiosis, but in symbiosis the ecological perspective suggests that ‘every protagonist is interested in the success of the other for its own reasons… [and] the “symbiotic agreement” is an event, the production of new immanent modes of existence’ (2010: 35). In other words, in symbiosis each element is sustained because it is required by, and only therefore concerned with, the other.
There are many scenarios, moreover, in which the appearance of peace involves one term’s attention to another element that seems to display no direct reference to the existence of the other. Thus the ‘strategies of mimetic defence employed by the caterpillar refer to the “cognitive” abilities of the bird that threatens it, but it seems that for the bird the caterpillar is just one kind of prey among others’ (2010: 36); the bird does not affirm the existence of the caterpillar even though it is clearly part of the latter’s concerns.
Inviting performativity, then, to travel in the direction of Whitehead’s ‘concern’ and what Stengers refers to as ‘ecological practices’ is to leave the somewhat tiresome debate that has for too long arranged its terms across a presumed divide between ‘materiality’ and ‘culture’. Instead, it enquires, as did Deleuze in his discussion of Spinoza, of ethologies: ‘ethology is … the study of speed and slowness, of the capacities for affecting and being affected that characterise each thing’ (1988b: 125), such that we ask ‘What does it [each thing] react to positively or negatively? What are its nutrients and its poisons? What does it “take” in its world?’ (1988b: 125). In our approach to phenomena or entities and their ‘modes of existence’, we must seek to understand their etho-ecologies, i.e. the concerns that provoke, the reactions and connections of relevance. It suggests that the problematization of modes of actualization, or of becoming, and the new situations they constitute thereby, should take the form of attention to practices by which an entity is sustained and survives within, and for, its particular milieu.
Disciplines
Much of this work contains a plea or an injunction for humans to ‘discipline’ themselves to attend better – that is, more broadly – to the distributed agencies that are potentially of relevance in the emergence of an entity or situation. Attending to the emergence of entities is, however, a complicated business since the emergence potentially involves elements across many scales – forces, particles, molecules, human and non-human affect, sensations, things that affect these, and more – all in dynamic relations that by definition involve questions of temporality and duration: a formidable and, for the natural or social scientist, practically impossible list. Furthermore, there is also, potentially, a question of complexity at stake. Prigogine and Stengers’ (1985) insistence that since matter can ‘self-organize’, and that there is a sense in which matter-energy can be said to ‘choose’ its path of becoming, means that the continuous attainments and perishings may take unpredictable paths in accordance, as Bennett puts it in relation to her discussion of worms, ‘with a certain “freedom of choice” exercised by the [multiple] actants within an assemblage or ecology’ (2010: 97) who rework its order. Bennett is also drawn to the work of Michel Serres for the similar reason that he emphasizes the aleatory swerves which bodies and matter-energy may take, with parts meeting abruptly, and situations of turbulent confusion before any stabilization or crystallization occurs.
Clearly, how we understand what elements and what processes ‘demand’ to be included – and so how we narrow the focus of any enquiry into the emergence or survival of this or that entity – is going to depend upon our (i.e. human) concerns, as well as our adopted methods and apparatus (including our theoretical apparatus). If, in Whitehead’s terms, our considerations are with understanding the processes of prehension – of provocation, or what Stengers terms reciprocal capture – that allow an entity to emerge and to survive, we have also to consider how our human interest both motivates and participates in that process. Our concerns, our interest, in the subject of our attentions make our disciplines – insofar as they allow this concern to survive – part of its ecology.
Stengers invites us to consider the processes by which a discipline allows an entity to emerge in terms of the constraints it puts on processes of emergence as well as the way its candidacy is passed by an attendant ‘jury’, as Latour (2004a) has argued. Latour has described processes of emergence in which entities, or what he terms ‘factishes’, require not only forms of practice and co-ordination, certain specific technologies that place them in time and space, but also a community of affirmation to sustain them through their interest and attendance. As Stengers notes, it is crucial to stress that not all facts or entities arise via the same constraints, since facts have specific milieus within which they appeal.
Her example is the ‘experimental fact’ that has a history of acceptance by a collective that has been obliged to interpret the experiment in a particular way. Although it is dependent upon the historical conditions of its production and human endeavour, therefore – and is unarguably a Latourian ‘factish’ in that sense – a fact that succeeds in satisfying the requirements for its emergence can also assert its transcendence, which is to say that it was there all along. It can do so because this fact emerges through certain specific devices and constraints that do not pertain to a ‘raw’ fact such as an earthquake or a tree falling down. Experimental success can be celebrated, Stengers argues, because it entails the creation of new beings that transcend the practices that cause them to exist (2010: 67). That is, an experimental fact has to achieve the sense of obligation by convincing its attendant community that it is both a reliable witness – that it has satisfactorily passed through tasks required to emerge as a fact, i.e. the requirements – and that it is of consequence. Through rigorous scientific procedures the former is sought, procedures that allow it to come into presence, to ‘stand-out’; but, Stengers notes, the phenomenon itself cannot perform the latter task of asserting its own consequence. This makes its survival vulnerable to issues of power and influence within the community that observes it (in other words, that is concerned with it, or not).
With this attention to the constraints of requirement and the importance of obligation, Stengers draws attention to the event of a newly emergent fact as an event of value. That is, if a new fact emerges it implies a value given to that entity’s survival, such that ‘wherever there is reciprocal capture, value is created’ (Stengers, 2010: 36). This is not the same as saying that the emergent entity is intrinsically valuable but simply to recognize that anything that emerges does so because it appeals, that is to say, it has, or is, value for someone or something. This last point was also made by Hans Jonas (1984, and quoted by Latour, 2004a). 2
The work of Karen Barad is also very interesting in this regard, insofar as she takes the principle of interconnectedness of assemblages into her study of the emergence of proofs in quantum physics. She does so, moreover, with an explicit attention to how such a study might constitute a critique of the concept of performativity, the scholarship on which has, she argues, been too focused on the social and the production of human bodies, lacking any account of materiality as ‘agentive and productive in its own right’ (2007: 225).
For Barad, trained in quantum physics, the apparatuses in which phenomena appear and are attributed causality are crucial, so long as one realizes that the boundaries of the apparatus are also enacted, as is the attribution of causality and the bodies at stake (her central example is an elaboration and re-reading of Niels Bohr’s quantum model of the atom). Barad thus extends the concept of performativity to include the activity of all elements, human and non-human, including the apparatus by which they are observed and the comprehensions of those engaged in the study. In her re-formulation, performativity reappears thus:
matter is a dynamic expression/articulation of the world in its intra-active becoming. All bodies, including but not limited to human bodies, come to matter through the world’s intra-activity – its performativity. Boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted through the intra-activity of mattering. (2007: 392)
The ‘intra-activity’, Barad argues, is crucial to understanding how elements of a situation perform and thereby emerge. It would include the perception of the environment that enters into the resolution of instability in the non-equilibrium situation (that is, Stengers and Prigogine’s complexity thesis). One of Barad’s own examples, about which I have written elsewhere (Bell, 2007, 2008), is the intra-activity between the scientist’s smoking of a low-grade cigar and the visibility of the experiment’s ‘results’ (only later articulated as evidence for the existence of the spin, or angular momentum, of the electron).
While he was studying the traces of the silver atom beam on the detector plate, on which no traces seemed to have appeared, the sulphur from the scientist’s breath turned the silver into silver sulfide, which is jet black, so easily visible (Barad, 2007: 164, quoting Friedrich and Herschbach, 1998, on the experimentation of Stern and Gerlach carried out in 1922). Through this unexpected, unplanned ‘prehension’, in which elements ‘outside’ the parameters of the experiment intra-act with those ‘within’ it, the experiment performs its truth-seeking task.
Of course, intra-activity isn’t always surprising, nor is the trace of a line of affect always visible. But while it is the case that it would be unwise to make general predictive statements about intra-activity, it certainly acts as a caution and a reminder of the difficulties of complete transparency in the description of relevant elements in any study. Whether the issues of social class that Barad highlights are relevant to the truth he produces, or to our study of the experiment, is clearly dependent upon what concerns us in our attentions to it.
For Barad, the experiment is an example of how ‘materiality’ acts without regard to human intention, how aspects of the world’s physical processes can declare themselves as they come into presence. Her example might also support the argument that issues of social class and gender ‘intrude’ without human intent, interacting within the most controlled situations. Thus Barad explains how social class (he couldn’t afford better quality, lower sulphide options that wouldn’t have had the same effect) and gender (cigar-smoking was an activity of men, a prop materializing them as masculine) might be employed in the explanation of how this result was obtained (if not why the result appeared). Which reading one makes of the experiment depends on one’s concerns; which elements, as well as how they are labelled and how they are perhaps understood as indices of something else (cigars of social class or of masculinity), likewise depend upon the relevant and permitted lines of abstraction within which the reading will be presented.
Barad suggests that one way of thinking about the question of relevance and what I’m terming here concern is to understand it as an ethical question, attending to where the lines of relevance are cut (away). These cuts cannot be understood as determined by the objects themselves, for the reasons we have been discussing, and nor is the decision of relevance simply within human hands, not least because we, too, are enacted as distinct (that is, the human/nonhuman distinction is itself an enactment). Yet within the differential mattering of the world we take part, and we do so ‘agentially’ (2007: 178); insofar as this is the case, there is a responsibility. Indeed, Barad calls this attention to cuts ‘ethics’, and opposes it to versions of ethics that understand the other as radically outside the subject, as does Levinas, famously. Barad argues:
cuts are agentially enacted not by wilful individuals but by the larger material arrangements of which ‘we’ are a ‘part’. The cuts that we participate in enacting matter. … Ethics is not a geometrical calculation; ‘others’ are never very far from ‘us’; ‘they’ and ‘we’ are co-constituted and entangled through the very cuts ‘we’ help to enact. Cuts cut things together and apart. (2007: 178–9)
The boundaries we articulate and the exclusions that we thereby perform are simultaneously ones about relevance and about ethics; since many different possibilities for (intra-)acting exist at every moment, Barad argues, ‘these changing possibilities entail an ethical obligation to intra-act responsibly in the world’s becoming’ (2007: 178).
Given the potentially infinite number of relevant elements in an intra-acting materially-enacted world, the inexhaustible plethora of ‘entangled genealogies’ (Barad, 2007), the event of a new conception, fact or correlation has to be one that, by definition, makes a demonstrable difference. The limit is precisely indifference. In other words, the advice to one who wishes to tell an entangled genealogy is not so much to represent accurately as it is to ‘cut well’, which is to say provocatively or perhaps ‘generatively’, inviting the concern of others. This is the appeal that scientists and social scientists alike have to make to their fellow participants in the discipline, asking them to accept the importance of an argument, analysis or result. We ask that they care about the conclusions of our endeavours and agree to value and collectively sustain them (which is not to say that they agree with them – they can be sustained as highly contested). Disciplines act as filters of concern, and are themselves ecologies. 3
This being so, we can ask differently about the concept of performativity as an entity that has arisen within certain disciplinary ecologies; we can ask about its critique as a form of concern, one that is engaged with the concept but which is also changing the concept, adding to it, and cutting it in new ways. It is less in decline than it is undergoing a process of declination in the sense of Whitehead’s analysis of the ‘perpetual perishing’ of all things. Similarly, Bennett quotes Serres:
My world, objects, bodies, my very soul, are at the moment of their birth, in decline. … Nature declines and this is its act of birth and its stability. Atoms join together, conjunction is the strength of things, through declination. (2000: 34)
If it is possible to understand our attentions as sustaining the concept, then we need also to ask how its new form incorporates our new concerns and what work it might still do for our endeavours.
Topology and Sociology
These elaborations of performativity resonate with a topological approach, in the sense of the quotation from Deleuze that heads this article, emphasizing what he termed the fold, the constitutive process of becoming of exterior and interior. What form of analysis or critique would such an approach be within sociology?
In another chapter of her book, Barad suggests that sociological accounts need to understand their concerns through the terms of intra-activity and reiteration, as she rereads an analysis of labour relations (she is drawing upon an analysis by Fernandes, 1997) through the lens of ‘topological manifolds’ (2007: 243), arguing that the ways that gender, caste and social class are materialized and folded into one another makes it inappropriate to view workers in a factory as positioned according to static spaces ‘on the chessboard of an overarching static structure called capitalism; rather, the spatiality of capitalism is itself a contested and ever-changing topology that is iteratively (re)produced through the dynamics of intra-activity and enfolding’ (2007: 243).
A further and possibly closer resonance might be found in those arguments that pursue the idea of ‘informed matter’ (Barry, 2005) which posit the entity as ontologically different according to the occasions in which it is produced. For Barry, the molecule in the specific environment – or what has been termed here ecology – of pharmaceutical research and design becomes differently than it might elsewhere because the sorts of information there (data concerning the potency or dangers of drugs, the workings of metabolic processes, as well as legal information about patents, economic data about sales and so on) ‘enter into the constitution of an entity such as a molecule’ (Barry, 2005: 59).
Drawing upon this argument, Rosengarten has persuasively presented its implications for analysing how processes of treating HIV enter into the subjective practices of the HIV+ bodies that HIV prevention strategies seek to engage. For example, she suggests that viral load measures, already a form of knowledge which results from a process of intra-activity between body matter, the virus and the technological apparatuses that capture its effects, are communicated back to the human subject or enter into the ecology that ‘informs’ his or her negotiations of viral presence in, for example, sexual encounters with a partner. A mode of existence comes into being through the activities of many HIV educators, activists and scientists, and acts in turn in ways that inform it (including through social scientific research and analysis) (Rosengarten, 2009: 74). The idea that HIV prevention strategies are about getting bodies to respond responsibly to information, then, is exposed as a simplification of the processes at stake in which bodies and information are already engaged in multiple and productive intra-active responses.
Declining Performativity: Hesitation
If these considerations have brought the term performativity into new conversations and granted it a chance to survive within a new ecology in which its first principle – that truths, entities and subjects are understood as arising from practices and events – is shared, one might also enquire as to what has fallen away from the concept. Are there aspects of ‘performativity’ that these new interlocutors and debates cease to sustain, and how should ‘we’ who remain concerned with it, in the senses that we have been discussing here, respond to the trajectory of its declination? (For in keeping with the thesis that the ecology sustains or encourages an entity to evolve, our concern is part of this complex, not a secondary or separate issue.)
This elaboration of performativity has encouraged it in the directions taken by those such as Jane Bennett whose ‘vital materialism’ argues convincingly for the need to attend to the ecologies within which processes of enfolding and emergence take place in a more thorough and inclusive manner. Although the argument is not that all entities have the same inwardness that we accord to human life 4 – despite Whitehead’s unflinching description of any entity as a subject with feelings and ‘experience’, such as that of the rock for gravity – it is to propose an interpretation of events such that ‘the human’ is placed and dispersed among a multitude of entities that we can posit as emerging through processes of concern (attraction, prehension, capture) at the site of their emergence. The category ‘human’ is placed in question, as the consistency and specificity of human experience becomes questionable in view of the inter- and intra-actions in any given scene. The non- or anti-anthropocentrism in these arguments is to be welcomed in that it invites the sorts of reflections that better explain processes at stake through the provocative opening up of boundaries between entities, posing the possibility of dispersed agencies where previously none could be contemplated. It enables social scientists to see the gatherings of multiple elements within and around subjects and to consider how the many ongoing intermingled processes are ‘cut’, in Barad’s sense, to produce semblances of unity.
But has something of the concept of performativity as it was articulated in Butler’s earlier work been cut away in such a rendition, something of its political ethos? Certainly there are those who would applaud the ‘decline’ of Butlerian performativity, and for this reason, into a form more empirically tethered, closer to an actor-network approach, where performativity remains useful as a tool ‘for thinking about empirical matters (in an empirical manner)’ (Du Gay, 2010: 178) in which what is cut away is the ‘anti-foundational theory of hope’ or ‘political romanticism’
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that threatens only to embarrass, with its talk of unrealized justice and politics located on a ‘higher’ philosophical domain of (a certain kind of) theory (Du Gay, 2010). In many ways this is close to what I too have argued here; yet I feel hesitant about this complete folding of performativity into equivalence with ANT’s ‘enactment’, that seems to have the demonstration of dispersed agency as its goal, and wish to emphasize in closing that, by contrast, my reading of the notion of concern allows and even demands that one – and not in addition to but within the theoretical argument advanced here – has also to consider the feeling and articulation of hope as a concern that is potentially, that is to say, sometimes but not always, of relevance to understanding processes that we may be studying as social scientists. Through Whitehead’s approach, one has to admit for consideration ‘everything perceived’, or in the terms I have been writing, everything that concerns. Latour, in his own discussions of critique, has quoted Whitehead’s famous passage in this regard:
For natural philosophy everything perceived is in nature. We may not pick and choose. The red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon. (quoted in Latour, 2004b: 244)
A concern with ‘unrealized justice’, its intra-action with critical endeavours instigated amongst academics, cannot be legislated away; for if it is a concern that gathers and is gathered by elements in its ecology, if it is sustained there, it is both an empirical matter and an element in how subjects are produced and, indeed, performed. Of course, it may not always be relevant to the problem we are investigating, or that we are creating. So if the objection to the political romanticism of ‘performativity’ is an objection (as it seems to be at least within Du Gay’s recent argument) to the insistence that performativity always fails whatever the scene in question and always therefore leaves an excess that is the privileged source of political hope, these arguments may be reconciled; for it is indeed an empirical question to consider whether and where gestures of hope, and the potentiality of movements that we might name ‘hopeful’, are matters of concern to the matter at stake and where they are of little relevance. Further, for the same reasons, it would be a mistake to accept that this declination of performativity disallows consideration of how theoretical reconceptualizations might provoke rearrangements we may wish to term political.