Expected Papers
Introductory considerations
Under the label of ‘performance and imaginaries’ we address a key set of questions for the workshop. Performance is a concept that has been developed to emphasise the particular aspects of the practices that constitute social and ecological forms and processes. Szerszynski et al (2003) summarise that performance points suggests practices, often iterative ones that constitute or bring about phenomena that would not exist without this (regular) activity. They continue that this practice always stands in a creative tension with a corresponding script or precedent, which informs that practice, but from which the practice inevitable departs to some extent.
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Performance is the manifestation of agency and the action through which agency and creativity emerge. Performance is thus ephemeral, unpredictable, improvisatory, always contingent on its context. (Szerszynski et al 2003: 3)
The concept links to various bodies of literature in the social sciences and the humanities, including theories of practice (Bourdieu 1977), ritual studies (Turner 1974), performing arts, architecture (Olwig 2011) and creative processes more generally (Hallam and Ingold 2007).
The concept of performance is very well suited to explore environmental management as situated practice, not only because it lays open the context-specific contingencies of environmental management, but also because it is open to understanding the role of non-human performers alongside the human ones. It can be employed to approach human-environment relations as ‘mutual improvisation [where] one loses a sense of nature as pre-figured and merely being “played out”; instead, the performance of nature appears a s a process open to improvisation, creativity and emergence, embracing the human and the non-human’ (Szerszynski et al 2003: 4).
Furthermore, if relations and interactions with the non-human world are approached as performances, knowing the world also must be understood differently. As an emphasis on performance renders stable objects and subjects mere abstractions from the actions and processes that constitute them, knowing itself becomes active and relational performance (Szerszynski et al 2003: 4).
Some authors writing about performance place a particular emphasis on affect (e.g. Latham 2003). Thereby they make clear that this approach does not just imply a shift in scale of a largely rationalist paradigm, where the feedback loop between plan, enactment and assessment is merely shortened. Instead, embodiment and emotions critically enter the analysis, including whims and habits. People do what they do not only inspired by as on-going assessment of the costs and benefits of various alternatives, but also because of desires, intuitions and gut feelings.
This does not imply, however, that performance implies a random, unlimited choice and pathways. Rather, performance always relates to a script, or a set of imaginaries. It does so in two ways, first by orienting itself along a script, which may be a plan or policy, a ritual order or simply a code of conduct, and at the same time improvising around and adapting that script in situation-specific ways. Second, these ideas about how to do things and how things are are also created and modified in performance. As the above comment about knowledge indicated, performance itself – acting in a particular way in a particular set of relations and with a particular set of ideas and intentions – forms knowledge and more ideas, among them plans how to do things.
In the context of performance, the term imaginaries can thus be used to rethink the dialectic of ideas and things. It is crucial to recognise the materially transformative potential of ideas, even though – as performance thinking teaches us – the never directly impact on the world, but only through their influence in actual practices. This is also true for the converse side of this dialectic, that things, landscapes and material processes play a role in shaping ideas and imaginaries. Maps am map-making are a case in point (Olwig 2004), but it also applies to much of environmental management more generally. Performance teaches us to appreciate the common origins of both sides of the dialectic.
For example, Waterton (2003) illustrates how classifying plants is a practice that performs both the replication of particular principles and the improvisation of deciding how to apply these principles to concrete specimen. This performative aspect of classification, however, is frequently downplayed, Waterton suggests. Another insightful account of the interplay of performance and imaginaries is provided by Watson (2003) who argues that the apparently specific experience of place is informed by a set of abstract concepts. He goes on to show, however, that even these abstract concepts are based on concrete performances.
A further benefit of the concept of imaginaries comes from its plural form, whereby it points to the fact that there is always an array of different imaginaries, plans and maps which correspond to a multiplicity of possible emergences from situated practice or performance (Latham 2003: 1902). Performance opens up such possibilities and pathways as much as it closes others down. This openness, however, also constitutes the political potential of the performance approach, by pushing to ‘expand the existing pool of alternatives and corresponding forms of dissent’ (Thrift 2003).
Concluding the introduction to their edited volume Nature Performed, Szerszynski et al (2003) posit a central implication of this approach for environmental management, knowledge and ethics. They state that ‘the areas of planning, environmental policy and regulation are dominated by static ideas about nature and nature-human relationships, ideas that might usefully be disrupted by the application of notions of performance, with their emphasis on activity, on ongoing “doing” and “making”’ (Szerszynski et al 2003: 10). They recognize that such acknowledgement of performance and improvisation may be threatening to institutions based on the assumption of static categories and fixed plans, but drawing on the chapters in their collection they also concede that arrangements that incorporate a performative approach do indeed exist in some places and institutions.
References
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hallam, Elizabeth and Tim Ingold (eds.) 2007. Creativity and cultural improvisation. Oxford: Berg.
Latham Alan and David Conradson 2003. ‘The possibilities of performance.’ Environment and Planning A 35(11): 1901–1906.
Olwig, Kenneth R. 2004. ‘"This is not a landscape": Circulating reference and land shaping’, in European rural landscapes: Persistence and change in a globalising environment. Edited by Hannes Palang, Helen Sooväli, Marc Antrop, and Gunhild Setten, pp. 41-65. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Olwig, Kenneth R. 2011. ‘Performance, ætherial space and the practice of landscape/architecture: the case of the missing mask.’ Social & Cultural Geography 12(3): 305-318.
Szerszynski, Bronislaw, Wallace Heim, and Claire Waterton (eds.) 2003. Nature performed: environment, culture and performance. Oxford: Blackwell.
Thrift, Nigel 2003. ‘Performance and ….’ Environment and Planning A 35: 2019-2024.
Turner, Victor 1974. Dramas, fields, and metaphors: symbolic action in human society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Waterton, Claire 2003. ‘Performing the classification of nature,’ in Nature performed: environment, culture and performance. Edited by Bronislaw Szerszynski, Wallace Heim, and Claire Waterton, pp. 111-129. Oxford: Blackwell.
Watson, Matt 2003. ‘Performing place in nature reserves,’ in Nature performed: environment, culture and performance. Edited by Bronislaw Szerszynski, Wallace Heim, and Claire Waterton, pp. 145-160. Oxford: Blackwell.
- 1. "State of Finland as an agent of sustainability – the consequences of introduction of hegemonic ecologies in Sami domicile." Workshop "How do you manage? Unravelling the situated practice of environmental management", 2012.
- 2. "Managing Catastrophe. Carbon Payments and the Aesthetics of Environmental Collapse in the Brazilian Amazon." Workshop "How do you manage? Unravelling the situated practice of environmental management", 2012.
- 3. "Berries, Bombs, and Bodies: Multiple Modes of Managed Militancy in the Anarcho-Primitivist Case of the Unabomber." Workshop "How do you manage? Unravelling the situated practice of environmental management", 2012.