Performativity, Politics, and the Production of Social Space

Michael R. Glass, Reuben Rose-Redwood, Michael R. Glass, Reuben Rose-Redwood

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138954007
• eBook ISBN: 9781136208096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Theories of performativity have garnered considerable attention within the social sciences and humanities over the past two decades. At the same time, there has also been a growing recognition that the social production of space is fundamental to assertions of political authority and the practices of everyday life. However, comparatively little scholarship has explored the full implications that arise from the confluence of these two streams of social and political thought. This is the first book-length, edited collection devoted explicitly to showcasing geographical scholarship on the spatial politics of performativity. It offers a timely intervention within the field of critical human geography by exploring the performativity of political spaces and the spatiality of performative politics. Through a series of geographical case studies, the contributors to this volume consider the ways in which a performative conception of the "political" might reshape our understanding of sovereignty, political subjectification, and the production of social space. Marking the 20th anniversary of the publication of Judith Butler's classic, Bodies That Matter (1993), this edited volume brings together a range of contemporary geographical works that draw exciting new connections between performativity, space, and politics.

1 Introduction

Geographies of Performativity

Reuben Rose-Redwood and Michael R. Glass

DOI: 10.4324/9780203094587-1

We see … that stating something is performing an act just as much as is giving an order or giving a warning. … What we need besides the old doctrine about meanings is a new doctrine about all the possible forces of utterances. (Austin 1979: 251)

In the first instance, performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate “act,” but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practices by which discourse produces the effects that it names. (Butler 1993: 2)

Space too needs to be thought of as brought into being through performances and as a performative articulation of power. (Gregson and Rose 2000: 434)

The state, through its policies, actions, and customs, thus performs itself as sovereign—and this is particularly visible at borders when the self-evidence of the state's control over populations, territory, political economy, belonging, and culture is so clearly in question. (Salter 2011: 66)

Introduction: Performativity, Space, Politics

From revolutionary declarations of independence and the delimitation of territory to the embodied politics of everyday life, the performative articulations of power that constitute the “political” as a space of social action only “take effect” as a result of considerable material-discursive effort. The force of such performative acts is therefore always provisional yet may nevertheless acquire the aura of permanence and stability by means of what Judith Butler calls the “ritualized repetition of norms” (1993: x). If socio-political norms must be continuously reiterated in order to be sustained, these regulatory practices can be seen as performative to the extent that they succeed at bringing into being the very effect that they proclaim. This applies just as much to assertions of territorial sovereignty, the surveying of private property, or the naming of a city's streets as it does to the embodiment of gendered subjectivities or the calculative practices that enact “the economy.” It is little wonder, then, that theories of performativity have influenced scholars in such a wide range of fields, from literary theory, gender studies, and linguistics to international relations, economic sociology, and human geography. Performativity theory has taken on a life of its own in each of these disciplinary contexts, dancing to several different tunes even within a single field of study, and it is through this reiterative and citational process that the “performative” itself has come into being as a contested theoretical terrain.

This edited collection showcases contemporary scholarship on the geographies of political performativity, exploring the various ways in which political spaces are both materially and discursively performed. Through a series of geographical case studies, the contributors to this volume consider how a performative conception of the “political” might reshape our understanding of the social production of space. This is by no means a straightforward issue, since performativity theory is not a monolithic approach that can simply be imported into geography wholesale. Rather, the notion of the performative has been put to very different uses over the past half century, and there are many conceptual hazards and political risks at stake when theorizing the interrelations of performativity, space, and politics.

As we shall discuss later, theories of performativity can be employed to naturalize or subvert the sovereignty of political authority; to depoliticize or repoliticize the body as a locus of corporeal subjectivities; and to reinforce or call into question the taken-for-grantedness of social conventions and the spaces of everyday life. Much depends on how we come to think about the manner in which spatial practices acquire their performative force, or the power to produce the ontological effect of bringing something into being through the repetition of performative acts. Can such a performative force be attained by following the conventional procedures of law, sovereign decree, and social customs alone? Or, is not the very existence of law, sovereignty, and customary tradition the political effect of a whole series of performative practices that must be repetitiously invoked to assert their own ontological status? If the latter is the case—as we think it surely is—then this has important implications for a critical theory of performativity that views political space as a site of radical contingency.

This line of thought, no doubt, owes much of its inspiration to Butler's path-breaking work on the politics of the performative, which has had a considerable influence on geographical accounts of performativity over the past two decades. However, the contributors to this book take performativity “elsewhere” by explicitly highlighting the political spatialities of performative practices, drawing not only upon Butlerian philosophy but various other currents in contemporary political and geographical thought as well. In order to more fully appreciate the different appropriations of performativity theory in this collection, and in the geographical literature more generally, it is important to situate current discussions within a broader political genealogy of the performative. This is particularly necessary at the present moment, because the relation between the performative and the political remains a hotly contested issue among geographers, and relatively little comparative work has explored the divergent ways in which theories of performativity have been taken up within different subfields of human geography.

In this introductory chapter, we provide an overview of the performative “turn” in the social sciences and humanities and then trace several threads of geographical thought that have taken performativity theory in different directions. While not exhaustive in its scope, the general aim of this genealogical account of performativity theory is to contextualize the chapters that follow while developing a critical theory of political performativity to rethink the social production of space. It should hopefully go without saying that any discussion of the production of space in contemporary geographical scholarship—including the present collection—owes a significant debt to Henri Lefebvre's rich body of work.¹ That being said, we are wary of the common practice of reducing Lefebvre's theorization of the production of space to a formulaic account of conceived, perceived, and lived space, which is repetitiously and ritualistically invoked as part of what has now become the conventional wisdom of socio-spatial theory.

As Elden (2004: ix) rightly points out, such accounts often lose sight of the “temporal dimension” in Lefebvre's thought, which is particularly evident in his later writings on rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre 2004). It is here that Lefebvre comes closest to a performative reading of space, the body, and the everyday by emphasizing how the “field of rhythm” is based upon the repetitious enactment of spatio-temporal practices. He argues that there is “[n]o rhythm without repetition in time and in space” and goes on to suggest that “[w]hen it concerns the everyday, rites, ceremonies, fêtes, rules and laws, there is always something new and unforeseen that introduces itself into the repetitive: difference” (2004: 6). Following Nietzsche, Lefebvre maintains that the absolute repetition of the self-identical is impossible (i.e., the second “A” in “A = A” is not the same as the first precisely because it comes second).² In short, the seemingly stable identities of bodies and spaces are a fiction produced by the rhythms of repetition that necessarily fail to fully reduce difference to sameness, which is why “the new and unforeseen” can arise from the apparent reiteration of the same.

The issues of repetition and difference are also central to performative conceptions of the production of space, and they are thus a primary concern in the current volume. Our aim in examining the performativity of social and political space is not to simply replace a Lefebvrean approach with a new performative orthodoxy but rather to consider how theories of performativity can further enrich the theoretical ground that has been opened up by Lefebvre's critique of the production of space. Although one of the overarching goals of assembling this edited collection is to demonstrate the usefulness of performativity theory for political-geographic inquiry, we would also urge caution against jumping headstrong into the performative whirlwind without attending to the theoretical and political pitfalls that have beset prior iterations of performativity theory.

The Multiple Lives of Performativity: Rearticulations of the Performative Turn

The concept of performativity entered the geographical lexicon in the 1990s as feminist geographers and queer theorists drew inspiration from Butler's (1990, 1993) provocative work on the performativity of gender norms. Yet, scholars in other fields had begun exploring the performativity of language and social life much earlier (e.g., Green 1970; Ginet 1979; Gardner 1983). These early references to the notion of performativity were direct responses to the philosopher J.L. Austin's theory of speech acts, which he developed in the 1950s as a critique of the “descriptive fallacy” of logical positivism—that is, the belief that the only legitimate role of language is to describe or represent the world by means of verifiable, factual statements. Any statement that could not be verified as an accurate representation of reality, the positivists maintained, was simply nonsense that should be passed over in silence.³ One of Austin's (1962, 1979) greatest achievements was to question the representationalism that underpinned positivist philosophy by demonstrating that language is performative—it has the potential to actually do something in the world rather than merely depict an already existing state of affairs (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Performativity, take 1: from language-as-representation to the performativity of speech acts.

The influence of Austin's work on the performative qualities of ordinary language runs deep in both analytical and continental philosophy (Rorty 1967; Searle 1969; Derrida 1988; Loxley 2007). Over the past half century, Austinian speech act theory has provided “an almost irresistible springboard for thinkers and theorists keen to launch their own interventions into ongoing debates” (Loxley 2007: 2). In this sense, the concept of performativity has lived “multiple lives,” many of which have departed significantly from Austin's initial conception of the performative utterance. The branch of linguistics known as pragmatics has integrated much of Austinian speech act theory into studying the practical uses of language in different contexts (Yule 1996; Allan and Jaszczolt 2012). Literary theorists have also explored the performativity of literature despite the fact that Austin himself did not take the arts seriously as a medium through which speech acts could be felicitously performed (Pratt 1977; Fish 1980; Petrey 1990; Miller 200...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Geographies of Performativity
• PART I Taking Performativity Elsewhere
• PART II Performativity, Space, and Politics
• PART III Political Performativity and the Production of Social Space
• Contributors
• Author Name Index
• Subject Index