Rob Sullivan, Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography, Ashgate, Farnham, 2011, 198 pages, $99.95 hardback, ISBN: 9781409420095.

In Geography Speaks: Performative Aspects of Geography, Rob Sullivan argues that speech act theory and the performative can be applied to geography. Speech act theory and performance are familiar subjects within critical theory and the humanities, with a modern lineage spanning back to the mid-twentieth century. Geographers began engaging with these approaches more recently, led by feminist and poststructural scholarship of the early 1990s. Despite the established tradition of speech act theory and the consequent use of performative approaches by geographers, there remains a dearth of writing addressing the main theme of Sullivan’s book: namely, how geographic knowledge produced by geographers and others is in itself performative: a term he defines as “the capacity and ability to make things happen” (page 117). Whereas Sullivan’s claim is timely, his enthusiasm to identify the performative aspects of geography without providing a stronger theoretical grounding for the term leads to problematic generalizations about the applicability of this significant concept.

The first part of Sullivan’s book engages with two interrelated topics: speech act theory and the construction of scientific fact. After a brief introduction to the book, his chapter on speech act theory begins with Sullivan’s own definition of performativity which explains that “if [a performance] makes something happen, it’s performative” (page 7).  Sullivan then introduces the linguist J. L. Austin, whose lectures in the late 1950s were published as How to Do Things with Words – a playful and highly significant volume addressing how particular conventions (such as marriage) or invocations (such as naming ships) bring things into being. Austin’s work was expanded by his student John Searle and was critiqued by theorists including Jacques Derrida, and Sullivan spends a significant portion of the chapter by recounting the nature of these exchanges, providing information that may be useful to readers already familiar with debates on the citationality and context of speech. Judith Butler’s early work on gender subjectification and Ervin Goffman’s research on performance are described more briefly, but in a way which infers that performance and performativity are inextricably linked, despite significant conceptual differences between the two approaches. The essay which follows – based upon the arguments of Bruno Latour and Pierre Bourdieu – is less successful, as it rehearses familiar anti-positivist arguments regarding the subjectivity and mutability of scientific “fact” without connecting these arguments to the book’s central claim regarding the performativity of (geographic) knowledge. The central problem here is that Sullivan’s definition of performativity is loosely defined and overly broad, enabling him to define anything – in this case, the creation of scientific knowledge – as performative. What is unclear from Sullivan’s first two chapters is a sense for what is not performative, or how the term provides a more direct explanatory framework compared to other terminology, such as “enactment” or “creation”.

The conceptual fuzziness of the first section impairs the remainder of the book, which consists of five essays – each addressing what Sullivan refers to as geographic applications of the performative. The essays appear to follow the syllabus from a graduate class in geographic theory, as they treat consecutively with place, cartography, private and public space, environmental determinism, and professional geography. Indeed, the chapters seem written for such a class, with performativity inserted intermittently. Dare I say the overall impression is very much one of old wine poured into new wineskins? The conceptual problems of the book are compounded by weak editing, and the text would have benefitted from attention to prose, less reliance on block quotes, an expanded conclusion, a more detailed index, and removal of the frequent authorial asides – some of which are highly offensive, such as his footnote comparing Adolph Hitler and George W. Bush as war criminals (page 2), or his judgments on scholars including Jared Diamond (page 144) and Henri Lefebvre (page 160).

Sullivan’s chapter on “The Performance of Cartography” illustrates the problems which mar his attempts to showcase the performative dimensions of geography. Sullivan argues that maps are “the cartographer’s performance, it is her performative vehicle. Maps, in turn, once created, once performed, have their own performative domain: they can make things happen” (page 83). Part of this statement is doubtlessly true – cartographers create maps, and a particular performance is occurring with each mapping, since the cartographer selects what to include or exclude from their representations of space. Sullivan’s problem is that the secondary sources he uses to claim the performative basis of cartography are standard works of critical cartography by scholars including Monmonier, Wood, Edney, and others who explain the process of cartographic representation without recourse to the language of performativity that Sullivan favors. If, in other words, the social constructedness of cartographic production is already established, what new insights does a veneer of performance and performativity grant the reader? More problematically is the lack of agency in the quote by Sullivan: by itself, a map cannot make anything happen. An actor is required to perceive the map, and consequently uses it to create, reject, or reinforce what is depicted. Unfortunately, in this chapter it is maps, rather than people, which variously “perform the continents upon us”, are “primary performative operators” of nationhood, “perform collective identity”, have “performative capacities tightly sequestered”, and “offer a performative hassle-free instantaneous gratuitous visitation to any place on the globe”. Too often in this chapter, and indeed throughout the book, performance and performativity appear as extraneous prefixes; without them, the chapters are read as more or less standard treatments of familiar geographic themes, but with them, the chapters muddy the real power of performativity to understand subject formation, embodiment, political economy, and the creation of political spaces in ways which are significantly different from alternative approaches to geographic analysis.

The problem the author creates for himself in this book arises from his apparently limited reading of performativity, which seems unaware of the key issues relating to the (sovereign) subject in Austin’s work, or the breadth of performative turns in geography and elsewhere over the past twenty years. [1] For instance, Sullivan addresses Judith Butler in a cursory fashion during the first part of the book, mentioning briefly her significant work of the early 1990s, yet he seemingly misses the crux of her critique regarding Austin: namely, that there is no preexisting sovereign subject that speaks, and rather that identity is the processual consequence of reiterated practices, constrained by social norms. Her conceptual advance, while not immune from critique, has nevertheless opened up new lines of inquiry for critical geographers.

It is beyond the purview of this review to provide a full-throated categorization of the strands of geographic analysis which are informed by a deeper engagement with performativity, although I will note four general domains which are absent from Geography Speaks. First, feminist geographers produced powerful scholarship derived from Butler’s denouncement of Austin’s sovereign subject which argued that spaces – and not just identities – are performatively enacted through bodily and discursive enactments of subjectivity. Second, a subset of economic geographers following Michel Callon’s argument that ‘economists make markets’ are using the language of performativity to understand the spatialities undergirding economic performances. Third, nonrepresentational theory argues that performative approaches based in the ‘symbolic register’ of discourse – namely, the Butler-influenced perspective – are insufficient for understanding the materiality of everyday practice, and nonrepresentational researchers consequently are examining a broadening field of sensory and affect-laden events. Fourth, political geographers are engaging with poststructural political economy to understand how iterative practices and events create the space for new political identities and spaces. In short, there is a burgeoning and dynamic field of academic practice which regards performativity as a valuable conceptual framework, and which frequently emphasizes the promise of subjectification for emancipatory change to subaltern populations.

If Sullivan is to be commended for anything, it is for his brief allusion in the all too brief concluding chapter that geography as a discipline is a “performative venue”. This is true – through the practices of geographers governed by our own social norms, networks, and codes of the ‘discipline,’ we all contribute in some way to the in-becomings of our field. This is a story that deserves to be told. Unfortunately, it is not told here. 

Notes

[1] At one point, Sullivan is surprisingly candid about his selective reading when he states “let us breezily skip over a hundred years of geographic thought as if it never existed: this testifies…to our rough and ready methodology” (page 152).