John-David C Dewsbury

Dead Geographies—And How to Make Them Live

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.

Performativity and the Event: Enacting a Philosophy of Difference

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 Deleuzes 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.

Witnessing space: 'knowledge without contemplation'

This paper is about the importance of witnessing and how such an act, or call, makes place or our place in the world. Pushing forward the agenda of nonrepresentational theory, this is about attending to differences—those imperceptible, sometimes minor, and yet gathering, differences that script the world in academically less familiar but in no less real ways. I am thinking here about the folded mix of our emotions, desires, and intuitions within the aura of places, the communication of things and spaces, and the spirit of events. Such folds leave traces of presence that map out a world that we come to know without thinking. Throughout, I argue the political importance of our current debates concerning a performative appreciation of societys unfolding. In the first part of the paper I sketch out the academic territory that makes witnessing space potentially unfamiliar by problematizing the representational setup and the interpretation of empiricism that facilities knowledge production. In the second part I present an overview of the operation of Gilles Deleuzes thinking as a possible apprecenticeship in becoming able to perceive, and hence better able to express, the folded mix of the witnessed and witnessing world. In the third part of the paper I investigate the philosophical and ethical mechanics of the act of witnessing itself, translating the arguments found here to question the laws regulating the act of representation. Throughout, as an exemplary witness to that which I am trying to present, the paper is haunted by Olga Tokarczuks novella The Hotel Capital.

Practising geographical knowledge: fields, bodies and dissemination

In this article we make a case for a renewed emphasis upon some of the generic, albeit often tacit, spaces of practice that we share across our sub–disciplinary boundaries. In this we seek to emphasize the ways in which everyday actions make up the grander facades of institutional agendas, empirical projects and disciplinary schools of thought. To achieve this we trace the performance of disciplinary contours and identities across three important sites: the field, the body and the act of dissemination. There are, we will argue, significant commonalities that bind us as disciplinary practitioners in terms of how we perform within and across these sites, and indeed, how we join them up through our practices.

Affective Habit Ecologies: Material dispositions and immanent inhabitations

The paper engages with the question of ecology and performance through two compound concepts, that of material dispositions and immanent inhabitations, which juxtapose environmental memory with immediate performance. Drawing out the temporal and spatial material affordances and affective impositions to be understood as habit ecologies, the argument will focus on the relationship between intimacy and engagement in everyday action as the site for ecological ethics in the C21st. Conceptually, the paper positions itself in relation to ‘New Materialist’ debates through a reading of four recent publications: Malfeasance: appropriation through pollution by Michel Serres; Neither Sun nor Death by Peter Sloterdijk; The Machinic Unconscious by Felix Guattari; and Of Habit by Felix Ravaisson. Three philosophical agendas are proposed in suggesting forward looking conclusions: for attention to be paid to vital experiential intensities that solicit the body to action through materially afforded practical activity; for dwelling longer within in situ present tense ecologies towards rewiring the capacity of our bodies to become differently in new habits; and for an ethical vitalism as an intensification of configurations of life and of theory that make us more hopeful about the capacity for human change but less nostalgic about the human condition we think we should preserve. All of which heighten our capacities to feel ecologically.

Non-representational landscapes and the performative affective forces of habit: from ‘Live’ to ‘Blank’

This article examines the relationship between landscapes and the performative materialities of habit in relation to non-representational theory. Materially, landscapes already pre-occupy us insofar as the material world is seen to afford action that is already thought practical intelligence: from how you tacitly know how much clearance to give your step as you walk onto the pavement, to learning to drive a car without needing to concentrate too hard on precisely what it is that you are doing. Where the human is already established in phenomenological thought, habit gives us an ontology whereby this is not the assumed starting point. Material affordances only address half the matter, given that the occupation of being in a landscape is now seen to be much more explicitly constitutive of what it means to be human in the first place. This article, then, addresses the new directions for cultural geography present in recent work on habit within the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Ravaisson. It does this by considering this interface between, on the one hand, the biological rewiring of bodies re-engineered in the lived and habit spaces of immediate occupation of landscaped activity and, on the other hand, that of cultural preoccupations disposing subjective formations in situ within landscapes. In this, it makes use of a workshop event from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded network Living in a Material World and the context of training at the British Army Ministry of Defence (MoD) site at Mynydd Epynt, Wales.

Habit geographies: the perilous zones in the life of the individual

Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence. Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals; the world being a projection of the individual’s consciousness (an objectivation of the individual’s will, Schopenhauer would say), the pact must be continually renewed, the letter of safe-conduct brought up to date. The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day. Habit then is the generic term for the countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects. The periods of transition that separate consecutive adaptations (because by no expedient of macabre transubstantiation can the grave-sheets serve as swaddling-clothes) represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being.1

The Minute Interventions of Stewart Lee: The affirmative conditions of possibility in comedy, repetition and affect

The popular performer speaks in an already recognizable tongue, producing pleasure by an affirmation of what the audience already knows and feels. Yet affirmation is, at its best, much more than this, involving an openness into the coming into being of something that is genuinely new. In this article we explore the way that humour – and specifically the stand-up comedy of Stewart Lee – can cultivate an audiences bodily receptivity to novel modes of thinking and being which are never recognisable in any immediate sense. Affirmation, if it is to be more than a mere confirmation of what is already given, necessarily eschews reactivity. Certainly, Lees comedy operates through a form of critique that goes beyond the negativity that we would associate with conventional modes of critical thinking and practice. Most obvious in Lees lampooning of the popularity of the representationally-laden form of observational comedy, ‘critique’ here works affectively at least as much as it does cognitively. Through his attention to the form rather than the content of humour, and through his use of repetition and the creation and maintenance of tension, Lee provides a slow motion capture of those habitual modes of anticipation that foreclose other possibilities for thought and action. In examining the comedic and performative affects of Lees comedy, we give a sense of the conditions in and through which new modes of attention, new dispositions and forms of bodily attunement might be produced. Drawing on more recent affect theory focused on the minute perceptions of the body, we argue that wit has a special relation to the new, less because it effects an irruptive change in the existing state of affairs, than because it exposes us to the affective conditions of possibility for the production of novelty.

Guattari’s resingularization of existence: Pooling uncertainties

This commentary responds to Joe Gerlach and Thomas Jellis’ focus upon Felix Guattari’s own work and its ethos of what they call an ‘impractical philosophy’. Pivoting off the intellectual courage present in Gerlach and Jellis’ affirmation of the potentialization of ideas that places experiment before judgment, and uncertainty before certainty, I draw attention to three aspects housed within their overall argument: (1) the shift from a scientific to an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, that (2) rethinks the status and production of subjectivity, and that ultimately (3) pushes the importance for geography as a discipline to be one that takes care of the world’s mental ecologies as much as it does its physical ones.

ICT 4 Climate Change Adaptation Systemic and Generative Perspectives & Tools

The predicted manifestations of global climate change are diverse and extensive. Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) offer great potential to enable and enhance climate change adaptation projects, programmes and activities. As yet these roles have received relatively little systematic consideration. In this paper we outline the nature of climate change adaptation contexts and present a set of prototype tools that aim to enable the identification and exploration of opportunities for ICTs to play positive roles across the full spectrum of climate change adaptation contexts. The tools are both generative and systemic—generative in enabling the creative identification of potential adaptation roles for ICTs, of all kinds, and systemic in providing a means of taking into account the complex interactions between the key elements of any climate change adaptation context. Further because of their systemic nature they can be iteratively applied enabling adaptive responses to the inevitable change within any climate change adaptation project. The paper provides an illustration of the generative use of the tools and finally explores key limitations in the initial work leading to suggestion for further development.