英语作业封面 (1)

New Perspective Graduate Series: Reading, Speaking and Writing 1 — HOMEWORK 1 Using Performance in Human Geography: Conditions and Possibilities           TEACHER：Xiaorong Liu COLLEGE：College of Tourism and Urban-Rural Planning NAME： Li Ming STUDENT NUMBER：2014020718 DATE：24 September 2014 CHENGDU UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY Using Performance in Human Geography: Conditions and Possibilities ELIZABETH RICHARDSON    Abstract Performance and performativity have regularly appeared as both a theoretical framework and an object of empirical investigation in the discipline of human geography over the past two decades.Although the interest in performance can be traced through work in the sub-discipline of cultural geography that was concerned with processes of identity formation, the broad function of the term as both theoretical tool and empirical object has seen its wider take-up across the discipline. For human geography, the concept of performance contributes to the wider disciplinary concern with the ways in which space is produced and enacted. This position challenges the notion that the spatial is significant primarily because it contains the spatial; it can “hold the world still” 翻译：性能和经常出现既是一个理论框架和讨论实证调查的对象在人文地理的学科在过去的二十年里。虽然兴趣的性能可以通过工作来跟踪它的分支学科的文化地理是关心身份形成的过程,这个词的广泛功能作为理论工具,实证对象的大范围普及整个纪律。为人文地理概念的性能造成更广泛的纪律问题空间的方式生产和实施。这个职位的观念挑战空间意义重大,主要因为它包含空间;它仍可以持有世界。 Space is not simply considered a measurable quantity to be represented and mapped, butrather it must be thought of together with time in order to actively configure the world. By understanding the spatial and the temporal as entwined, it becomes possible to avoid the “reduction of space to the a-political sphere of causal closure”. Within this context, the vocabulary and action of performance offers one means of exploring how space creates, conditions and is experienced at a variety of sites and scales. Whilst not attempting to do justice to the breadth and depth of work on performance, this article will try to elucidate some of the key areas where the term has been taken up, and examine the purposes of this use. Through this review discussion, the intention is to articulate the vocabulary of the future in two ways. Firstly, the article will offer a temporal trajectory of the term performance in human geography that will tentatively signpost some directions to come. Secondly, through surveying work on performance events, it will touch on how the experience of performance can be considered one of uncertain potential, which is always bound up with a sense of what lies ahead. The article will proceed by delineating two broadly separate uses of performance in human geography: the first metaphorical and the second more literal, focusing on the action of specific performance (arts) events. After an exploration of the possibilities and limitations of these two terms, the article will conclude by arguing for a more explicit thinking across the two; focusing on the aesthetics of performance. Initially though, it is necessary to offer some further context on the delineations of human geography by turning to some of the ‘disciplinary’ conditions that set the stage for the term to be put into practice. Although a crucial goal of Butler’s project was to expose the operations of ‘power’ in the construction of identities, she also highlighted the importance of resistance. She argued that theforce of the performative came not only through repetition, but also through deviation from this path14. Here, performance appears primarily as a scripting and constraining, a way of thinking about the conditions and conditioning of reality. Yet, consequently a sense of the art of performance is lost; particularly its creativity and possibility. Butler catches performance in a binary net of citation and resistance that relies on the repetition of that which already exists, avoiding the potential for experiment and improvisation. Equally, as a figurative invocation, her use of performativity and its particular genealogy in linguistics, means that (especially in scholarship that builds upon this theorisation) a gap has tended to open up between the discursivity of societal norms and the materiality of embodied acts of resistance and citation15. However, the ability of both performance and performativity to highlight such interactions between matter and form continues to be central to the utility of the term. In particular, a more nuanced understanding of the operations of performativity is emerging, one that attempts to move beyond the simplicity of a material/discursive binary. Performativity (and performance) is increasingly being employed to emphasise the complex registers through which the constitution and negotiation of human subjects takes place. Such explorations demonstrate how the conditions and conditioning of subjectivity cannot be limited to an isolated (and often textual) social construction, but involve everyday practices of embodiment and emotion16. Equally, there has also been a shift in focus onto the ethico-political implications of the performative process17, emphasising how this may operate beyond the constitution of an autonomous human subject. Thus, Bialasiewicz et al 18 argue for an engagement with performativity in political geography on the grounds that the notion can enhance understanding of foreign and security policies by demonstrating that such activities of the state are both enabled by and productive of specific geographical imaginations. For them, the central role of the discursive in performativity neither denies nor separates the reality of the world; rather the focus is on how certain ‘ontological effects’, including the material, are stabilised over time. Therefore, discourse is not understood as a solely linguistic realm; instead its ideational effects may function through a variety of forms, many of which emphasise people and practices operating beyond the normative conception of an ‘official’ state. This concern with how performance might be used to deal with and negotiate the (invisibility of the) everyday feeds into the second broad invocation of performance in the discipline. One element of non-representational politics seeks to outline and explore theories of nonrepresentation19, or the manner in which the bodily acts of performance illustrate ways of being that elude capture20. With a particular focus on non-linguistic forms of performance such as dance and music21, this work set itself against the prevailing location of knowledge in ‘textual’ forms in order to draw out how embodied practices might make up the explanation and content of experience. The motivation for this work has been to examine how the experiential aspects of these occasions might fit into a wider politics of the event22. Empirical vignettes become a means of elucidating the ‘going on’ of such performances, in which forms of liberation and control unfold politically in moments of potential and uncertainty. However, such a reworking of the notion of power through performance was accused of being celebratory and neglecting to engage with the conditions that might constrain the potential of acts of habituation23. In this vein, both Revill’s and Cresswell’s24 explorations of dance demonstrate the necessity to take into account wider normative structures that must be negotiated in order to open up the liberating possibilities of practice (in performance). Despite these criticisms, the novelty of this exploration of performance events lies in the central emphasis on momentary experience as a means of understanding subjectivity. Here, there is a very separate understanding of difference from that offered in Butler’s conception of performativity. As Bell25 outlines, Butler’s subject retains a certain stability through its constituting definition against that which lies outside of it. So, ‘difference’ is understood as outside or beyond the subject, even if it is constitutively bound up with it. In contrast to this, much of the work on performance events alluded to above has drawn on a more ‘radical’ location of difference, one that situates it within any process of subjectification. For this, difference is no longer a mode of relation through which being is given, but rather it is being itself. Consequently, as an ongoing “expression of this heterogeneity”26, subjectivity becomes bound up with creativity. A number of geographers have sort to engage with this through the experience of performance. Whilst some such as Morton27 have used performance to focus on how this understanding subjectivity can (or cannot) be accessed or captured empirically, others have emphasised the micro-dynamics of the unfolding of experience in performance. Of particular Practically, such an aesthetic approach would attempt to identify how performance can be productive in the midst of the two different notions of subjectivity as outlined above. This might involve considering how the sensibilities produced in the numerous registers of a performance continue after the event in certain ways. Here, the notion of subjectivity as irreducible difference given through creative process would meet with the constraints beyond the ‘romantic’ possibilities of the performance space. Equally, when exploring actions that are both constitutive of and constituted by the subject, it might be fruitful to consider how and through which mediums these acts occur and may be perceived. Such an investigation might highlight the instability and mutability of acts as definers of constraint and resistance. Thus, through this aesthetic approach, the numerous stabilisations and destabilisations of the individual that are evoked by performance – the simultaneous being what you are but also not what you are, the being more or less than what you are, the potential to be something else – must be considered to be expressed across any apparent boundaries between the conceptual and the material. Instead of trying to locate the limits of performance in order to define its articulation, the project becomes one of working with and through these inseparable bounding/boundary activities so as to give shape to their expressive movements. With performance as event, the interest has resided in the ethico-political implications of the action of performance, either in terms of the unfolding of subjectivity or in the ways it might engender ‘community’ change, but generally with little discussion of the limits of these actions themselves. Although these two uses certainly overlap, the point that I wish to make in this conclusion is that an explicit thinking can enhance productivity of any theoretical or empirical engagement with performance across these metaphorical and literal dimensions. As the more recent scholarship cited above begins to show, the potential of the action of performance is always bound up with its figurative possibilities. One potentially fruitful direction for this interest in specific political interventions of performance may be what Pratt and Kirby37 call the ‘interspatiality’ of performance. Although the forms of community theatre outlined above retain a strong element of stability through their performance in a specific location (e.g. community centres, pubs etc.), Pratt and Kirby argue that the multiple spaces that inform performance are integral to its potential as an object of study. Rather than placing all the emphasis on experience of/in the event, this is considered the practices and processes that enable and are enabled by performance. Central to this is the composition of performance, or an exploration of the Brechtian interest in exposing the production of the production. For example, in forms of ‘community theatre’ the practices and conversations that precede the performance entirely shape experience and understanding of the event, particularly in terms of framing how questions of ownership and representation are played out38. Equally, this interspatiality is also about the potential ways for performance to linger or impact after the ‘event’ has taken place. As Pratt and Johnston’s foray into legislative theatre demonstrates, the potential of performance to bring about political and, specifically in their case, policy change must not be overestimated, particularly given the apparent incongruities between creative practice and bureaucratic operation. However, the notion of performance as social forum or laboratory for conducting practical experiments of everyday life39 is an attractive one that begs certain questions, notably in terms of the forms and registers through which the ‘results’ of these experiments may be played out. In this way the simultaneously figurative and literal nature of performance becomes a means of exploring how and for what purpose subjects become visible both individually and collectively, thereby moving beyond some of the early attempts to destabilise normative coherence and location of identities. Consequently, whilst the purpose and position of performance in human geography continues as a theoretical and empirical contribution to post-structural debates aimed at undermining the subject, the utility of terms is being expanded in order to think through the various’material returns’ to the discipline.