Abstract
When Judith Butler’s ground-breaking book Gender Trouble came out in 1990, it inspired a vibrant engagement with performativity throughout the social sciences and humanities. Within geography, Butler’s understanding of sexed subjectivities as effects of reiterative performative practices was first taken up by feminist scholars. They challenged previous conceptualizations of (gendered/sexed) identities and suggested that spaces too must be thought of as being produced by reiterated performances (Gregson and Rose, 2000).
With their edited book, Michael Glass and Reuben Rose-Redwood mark the 20th anniversary of Judith Butler’s subsequent book, Bodies that Matter (1993), which further inspired the debate. Their collection of essays brings together geographical scholarship on political performativity. They situate the book within the context of concurrent uprisings and civil struggles in the Arab world and in the Occupy movement to explore what it means to say that political spaces come into being through reiterated performative practices.
In their opening chapter, Glass and Rose-Redwood provide a comprehensible genealogy of performative thinking. They trace the concept of performativity through the works of Henry Lefebvre, John Austin, Judith Butler and others. Their introduction emphasizes how Austin’s sovereigntist understanding of performativity, in which the performative power relies on an actor that holds sovereign authority, gave way to a political understanding of the concept. Theories of political performativity conceptualize sovereignty not as the prerequisite but as the effect of performative practices. Understanding the exercise of power as a citational process acknowledges its contingency and instability. It foregrounds the potential to challenge authority through reiterative counter-performances.
Following the introduction, the book includes a reprint of Nicky Gregson and Gillian Rose’s (2000) widely cited essay ‘Taking Butler Elsewhere’, in which the two authors first argued for a performative understanding of space. Using the examples of car boot sales and community art projects, they conceptualize spaces as brought into being through reiterative citational practices saturated with power.
The following chapters build on this notion to explore the performativity of political spaces and configurations of power. How does ‘the state’ materialize as an effect of everyday discursive practices? How did land become an object of calculation? What are the performative effects of street naming, drawing watershed boundaries or creating a region through visioning exercises? I found it especially valuable that the essays do not only concern themselves with how hegemonic discourses are reinforced through reiterative practices, but focus to a large extent on the slippages and misfires. In doing so, they show that a performative perspective on sovereignty and political spaces understands them as inherently provisional and unstable.
Although all the chapters have their merits, I was especially captivated by Lise Nelson’s examination of how Butler and researchers working with her concepts theorize agency. If subjects are effects of discourses, Nelson asks, how can they consciously reflect and purposefully subvert hegemonic discourses? In a close reading of Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter she traces Butler’s notion of agency as rather abstract and not well suited for studying living subjects’ actions. Thus, she criticizes the tendency of scholars to draw on these two books and employ the language of performativity but simultaneously frame individuals as intentional actors. She suggests resolving this challenge by turning to Butler’s later work, in which she develops a subject that is aware of its limits of self-knowledge and understands itself as constitutively related to others. Nelson sees Butler’s later work as much better suited to analyse how subjects challenge and resist dominant discourses.
A further valuable contribution of the edited collection is that several chapters explore how performativity speaks to other theoretical approaches. They bring performative thinking into dialogue with Chantal Mouffe’s thoughts on contesting hegemony, with Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of affect, with actor-network theory, with science and technology studies and with non-representational theorists. That being said, I would have appreciated a more extensive debate with new materialist approaches that call for attention to the ‘agency of matter’ and criticize performativity theories for losing sight of ‘the material’ (e.g. Alaimo and Hekman, 2008). To what extent are they based on similar or different ontological and epistemological assumptions? How can more-than-human-agency be conceptualized within a theory of performativity?
Secondly, after reading in the preface about the civic uprisings in the Arab world and the Occupy movement, I felt somewhat disappointed that these topics were not discussed in the book. I would have loved to have learned more about what a performativity perspective might contribute to understanding these political spaces and transformations.
Overall, however, I read this cohesive collection with great pleasure. Its theoretical depth and the range of empirical cases examined offer a significant contribution to ongoing debates on the production of political spaces and subjectivities. Being true to its aim, the book succeeds in demonstrating the analytical and also subversive potential of a political performativity perspective that will hopefully continue to inspire students and scholars alike.