Spatial Performativity

Definition

Spatial performativity names the condition that built and imagined space is performative — that spaces act, and that action in space and space in action are reciprocal. Dorita Hannah's formulation: "How do the varying magnitudes of our socially prescripted and aesthetically devised performances in everyday life affect and influence spatial performativity, its fabrication, and its impact?" — spatial performativity encompassing "embodied modes of inhabitation within the complex dynamics… of specific sites." The concept stands on J.L. Austin's speech-act theory ("How to Do Things With Words," 1975): the illocutionary act, where "in speaking we can also be doing" — phrases such as "I do" (marry), "I bet," "I name" (a ship) "actually enact what they state." Austin's crucial extension, which makes the concept spatial: speech acts "require certain environments, actions, objects, and witnesses to accompany them… some sort of ritualized place, communal gathering, celebrant, and contract" — "these places and things, replete with cultural meaning, also perform rather than describe."

Applied to construction: "within the illocutionary act of architectural construction something is being done through spacing as both the act of designing/building and embodied time-based inhabitation." Elin Diamond supplies the concept's dialectic: performativity is "that risky and dangerous negotiation between a doing … and a thing done" (p. 5) — "As an aesthetic invention, 'design' is both a doing (creative act) and a thing done (cultural artifact)." Sanford Kwinter (via Austin) architecturalizes it: architecture must confront its character as "an illocutionary event, or at the very least as an element inseparable from and in constant interface with the world of force, will, action and history" (p. 14). And Jon McKenzie supplies the imperative frame: "we 'perform or else!'" — in a mediated world that has become "a designed environment in which an array of global performances unfold."

The concept must be read against its neighbours: building performance (the technical, diagnostic regime — Leatherbarrow's "uncritical affirmation of old style functionalist thinking"), which spatial performativity displaces by asking "not what a building (as singular object) is, but what the fabricated environment (as a dynamic multiplicity) does"; and theatrical performance (the staged aesthetic event), which is only one of the "broad spectrum" of performances Richard Schechner's approach admits ("everything can be studied as performance").

Key Thinkers

• Dorita Hannah — the concept's spatial-design theorist: the question of magnitudes; the co-creativity of inhabitants; spacing as the illocutionary act of construction (2018).
• J.L. Austin — the concept's philosophical ground: "How to Do Things With Words" (1975, p. 8); the constative/performative separation; illocutionary acts and their enabling environments (not yet paged — see log).
• Jon McKenzie — the imperative register: Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (2001); the global-performance environment (not yet paged — see log).
• Richard Schechner — the "broad spectrum approach": "while not everything is a conscious performance, everything can be studied as performance" (not yet paged — see log).
• Jacques Derrida — the architectural extension: "architectural performativity, whereby architecture, by 'taking place,' becomes 'the event of spacing'" (via the Parc de la Villette).
• Sanford Kwinter — the architectural-historical register: architecture as "an illocutionary event"; the evental (not yet paged — see log).
• Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman — the disciplinary/dramaturgical sources McKenzie develops: power and everyday life as performance systems.
• Henri Lefebvre — the production premise: "space is socially produced and practiced, in turn producing social relationships."

Related Concepts

• event-space — the concept's spatial form: "a theory of event-space as a performative model, which recognizes that constructed space is itself an event and an integral driver of experience."
• spacing — the operation: "something is being done through spacing as both the act of designing/building and embodied time-based inhabitation."
• scenography — the design medium: structuring experience "through open-ended spatial dramaturgies."
• architectural-performance — the sibling concept: Kipnis/Koolhaas/Odom's performance (scenes triggered, effects produced) — the production-oriented register of the same turn.
• discipline — the power-face: "space disciplines us to perform through architecture as a spatial discipline" (Foucault via McKenzie).
• practiced-place — de Certeau's cognate: space actuated by operations — the everyday-practice version of the performative.
• performativity vs. the constative (Austin's pair, treated here without its own page) — the descriptive/active split the concept refuses for space.
• weak-architecture — the resistant posture: performativity "both performative and resistant in defying attack through transience, permeability, and anti-monumentality."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Event-space: A performance model for spatial design (Hannah 2018) — the concept's full statement: Austin's speech acts (p. 8); Diamond's doing/thing-done (p. 5); Kwinter's illocutionary event (p. 14); McKenzie's "perform or else!"; Schechner's broad spectrum; the designer's conventional complicity ("kowtowing to politicians, institutions, lawmakers, and corporations – themselves designers of experience"); Rendell's reflexivity program.
• Productions: spatial practices, processes, and effects (Odom 2018) — the production register of the same turn: Kipnis's performance "closer to theater and music than to science or engineering"; Koolhaas's "performance is not function… what kinds of scenes does it trigger?" See architectural-performance, productions.
• Shape shifting (Taylor 2018) — the technological register: the responsive environment in which "the relationship between interior architecture and interiority is dynamic and mobile, and ultimately aided by the inhabitant's response to the interior environment – and vice versa" — performativity as real-time feedback. See interactive-architecture.
• Foucault for Architects (Fontana-Giusti 2013) — the disciplinary ground: architecture ensuring "a certain distribution of people in space, a canalization of their circulation, as well as the codification of their reciprocal relations" — space as the apparatus that scripts conduct. See discipline, panopticon.
• source-notes/dovey-2010-becoming-places

Open Questions

• Austin's performatives fail without felicity conditions (the ritualized place, the witnesses). What are spatial felicity conditions — and who adjudicates an interior's failed performativity (the room that does not convene)?
• "Perform or else!" is an imperative with a coercive edge: if space disciplines us to perform, is spatial performativity an account of freedom (co-creativity) or of compulsion (prescribed performances)? Hannah holds both; can they be held together?
• Diamond's "risky and dangerous negotiation between a doing … and a thing done" makes performativity a dialectic — but Hannah's spacing is "always in the making." Is the thing done ever finished, or does the design discipline's attachment to artifacts (drawings, buildings) systematically miss its own concept?
• If "everything can be studied as performance" (Schechner), does the concept explain everything and therefore nothing — what would a non-performative space be, and does Hillier & Hanson's configured boundary (power as ratio) describe one? See inhabitant-and-visitor, static-vs-dynamic-architecture.