Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

In this introductory paper—which follows the course of the papers included in this special issue—we argue that there are currently four main apprehensions of performance. The first of those apprehensions is provided by the work of Judith Butler on performativity. We then move to a second apprehension—the rather more general notion of performance found in nonrepresentational theory, using as an example the work of Gilles Deleuze. The third apprehension of performance is that taken from work found in the discipline of performance itself. Then, the fourth apprehension concerns the reworking of academic practices as performative.

This paper is concerned with exploring the potential of performance and performativity as conceptual tools for a critical human geography. We begin by emphasising the importance of recognising the different ways in which performance can be theorised, and their very different critical effects. We then argue that, although the geographical literature is apparently characterised by two contrasting discussions of performance (those of Goffman and of Butler), these accounts form a consensus around Goffman. By contrast, and along with Butler, we maintain that performance is subsumed within and must always be connected to performativity—that is, to the citational practices which produce and subvert discourse and knowledge, and which at the same time enable and discipline subjects and their performances. But we also take Butler elsewhere, arguing that spaces too need to be thought of as performative, and that more needs to be made of the complexity and instability of performances and performed spaces. To illustrate our general arguments, but also to show how they work out rather differently in the specificities of particular social practices, we draw on two very different pieces of research which we have separately been involved in: a study of community arts workers and projects in Edinburgh and another on car-boot sales as alternative spaces of consumption. We conclude the paper by arguing for the necessity of extending our arguments to encompass academic performances and performativity, reflecting on our own production, both through particular academic performances of our respective research projects and this paper.

Drawing on Judith Butler's notion of performativity I examine some of the ambivalences and contradictions surrounding the exposure of pregnant bodies in public places. I focus on a bikini contest that was held on 7 October 1998 for pregnant women in Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand. I also focus on the narratives of thirty-one women who were pregnant for the first time and living in Hamilton, Aotearoa/New Zealand. There are normative expectations that women will do pregnancy in specific ways. For example, when occupying public places they are expected to act in a manner that is demure and modest. Such behaviours are repeated over time, eventually taking on the appearance of being ‘natural’. The pregnant women who entered the bikini contest momentarily destabilised these expected behaviours causing ‘pregnancy trouble’. The contestants were described by organisers of the contest as “pregnant women with attitude”. Parodying more normative beauty pageants the contestants (im)pregnated the streets. Yet at the same time the contestants reiterated hegemonic discourses of pregnancy by celebrating motherhood as a glorious and beautiful thing. This indicates the multiple ways in which pregnant women and others negotiate pregnancy resulting in a variety of complex subject positionings.

What is performativity? In this paper I set out to encounter this question by intimating the directions we are forced to consider when thinking through the performative. In centring my arguments within the corpus of Deleuze's philosophy of difference I advocate academic production as creative of thought. This is to suggest a performative thinking and doing that unfolds our way of looking at our social, corporeal, human dramas and the technologies by which we feel able to analyse something, and in so doing, enact its constitution. Coursing underneath this issue of performativity is the problematisation of the term of the subject—what if the event was more important? What do we understand of the event if not through a sense of subjectivity? Insinuated within the confrontation with performativity are fundamental implications associated with the timing of something as it happens, the centrality of the material and visceral body to this, and the settings through which events take place. Arguing through this triality I extract three symptomatic themes of performativity: that it speaks of irretrievability, indeterminacy, and excess. Ethically, and in conclusion, emphasis is placed on the empiricism of life in its doing—the present moment of immediate uncertain happening as we are continually enacted out of ‘knowing’ how to go on within concrete, material circumstances.

Recently social analysis has turned its attention to ‘the body’. In this paper the author considers the implications of such a turn for social analysis itself. The main discussion of the paper concerns the indeterminate or ‘elusory’ nature of embodiment and its productive relation to ‘sense making’ in everyday life and contemplative thought. The author examines how these aspects of embodiment have been marginalised within social analysis and the effects of this marginalisation in understandings of subjectification. Describing the processes of subjectification in terms of ‘habit’ and ‘style’, the author suggests that the disclosive and performative in the everyday have been ignored in favour of a search for the foundations of the everyday and the subject. An argument is put forward for the groundlessness of being in terms of its potential to be otherwise. The above discussions are described in terms of the ability of collectives to make sense from the fleeting and ephemeral feelings and experiences of everyday on-going comportment. Finally it is suggested that through a consideration of the performative, collective, and material nature of embodiment contemplations of everyday life should be understood in terms of enaction and immanence.

The author explores the relationship between rationality, ethics, and space. He argues that the contemporary ethical project involves a derationalisation of ethics through a recorporealisation of space. There is a move away from the abstract space of liberal-individualist notions of justice to more enclosed and local spaces of communitarian loyalties and intersubjective communication. Postmodern interventions into the ethical realm lead us to a corporealised, intimate space that recognises difference and is heavy with phenomenological presence. The author argues that the conception of agency which explains adherence to community norms and the acknowledgement of difference is strategically rational self-interest. Situated practices and understandings of the other rely on rational assumptions. The time-space conditions of late modernity bring unlike others into more regular contact and open up the possibilities for more universalist forms of strong (ethical) social coordination based on expanded strategic rationality.