performancescape

People do not inhabit landscapes. That was an invention of modern Europe, of our scopic drive. People perform themselves within a enormous variety of territories, of environments. People and environments are not separate realities. Environments are made up of "affordances", of available features people deal with, and features that are manipulated by people. This interaction is constant. Nothing exists in a vacuum. No part of this world is just a "vista", a place to be seen from afar, a landscape, except for modern tourism. The expression "landscape architecture" is meaningless. We built things in a piece of land to tie us together and to feel the materials, to play with them. We built a wall in order to have two sides in what was just a continuum. We introduce new features within the features of the environment. In that sense, all the environment is in a process of performance itself. It performs as a series of features: places to stay, paths to follow, open areas to camp and meet, to sleep and eat. People do not just accomplish tasks. Tasks and "taskscapes" seem to me a very interesting idea, developed by my friend and distinguished colleague Tim Ingold in his book "The Perception of the Environment" (London, Routledge, 2000), one of the most important books published in the domain of the so-called "social anthropology". Of course, as any important book, it has significant philosophical implications, going well beyond the established frontiers of any discipline.
But I would risk a step further, proposing a more general and embracing concept, the concept of performancescape. It avoids, I think, a certain functionalist connotation - if I am not mistaken - of the word "task". Actually, people do not only accomplish tasks; they are complex subjects which do not dominate entirely what they are doing. They are made continuously by their common action. As reflexive beings, they feel the look of others, which is the projection of their own consciousness. So people perform together, in an environment full of performative situations. We may consider as performative even natural phenomena, like wind or rain. It is in this mesh (yo use again a Tim Ingold's happily appropriate word) that we really live.
So, performancescape seems to be our environment. It accounts of the complex reality of being human.
These ideas are not motivated by the intention of separating persons and other beings. I am a materialist. But as a materialist I can not reduce a man or a woman to an organism similar to a bacteria or, say, a horse, a cat, or even an ape. I would not make love to an ape, be it a very nice female, believe me. We are all living matter, but in our case (I do not care for establishing any barrier or border between humans and non humans) we have something that is not supernatural, but that makes us "something special". Whatever it is, "performance" is a word of universal applicability, both to inanimate and animate matter. So I propose the adoption of this concept/word.
I apologize for my bad English, and I wish to confront these basic and caricatural ideas with other colleagues's ones... so please send me your opinions, even if you think that my proposal is complete nonsense. Thanks!


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Photo: Ernesto Timor
Source:
http://www.ernestotimor.com/pages
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