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.
This paper is concerned with exploring the potential of performance and performativity as conceptual tools for a critical human geography. 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.
In this paper I provide a description and preliminary analysis of the current 'technological unconscious'. Because of the potential vastness of the topic, I concentrate on just one form of positioning and juxtapositioning, namely the construction of repetition. The paper is in three parts. The first part provides a capsule history of how a very few templates of position and juxtaposition have become powered up into a capacious and effective background. In the second part of the paper I argue that in recent years the practice of these templates has been changing as a full-blown standardisation of space has taken hold. This standardisation is gradually leading to the crystallisation of a new kind of technological unconscious. In the third part of the paper I argue that the traces of this new kind of unconscious are taking hold in social theory as well, leading to the assumption of a quite different event horizon which can be thought of as a different kind of materiality.
B. Pereira Nunes, R. Kawase, S. Dietze, D. Taibi, M. Casanova, and W. Nejdl. Proceedings of the Web of Linked Entities Workshop in conjuction with the 11th International Semantic Web Conference, volume 906 of CEUR-WS.org, page 45--57. (November 2012)
H. Jiang, and J. Carroll. C&\#38;T '09: Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Communities and technologies, page 51--60. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2009)