Eaket (2010?) The Performativity of Language in Real and Imagined Spaces

From Inventiopedia

Eaket, Chris (2010?) "The Performativity of Language in Real and Imagined Spaces: Locative Media and the Production of Meaning" (citation info missing)

In this paper, the two locative storytelling projects [murmur] and Urban Tapestries are analyzed from the perspective of performativity theory, as well as Harold Innis' categories of time- and space-biased media. The author perceives a danger in locative media, in that they may end up with "a reductivist understanding of space:

"These projects risk radically simplifying spatial dynamics and the subject into mere points on a grid, as well as reducing the complex interplay of mind, body and the social environment to sets of descriptive web pages delivered from a server. [...] When locative media projects become too reliant on data-driven representations and spatial coordinates, they fall back into a space-bias, providing content without context and information in lieu of meaning. The two projects I will be looking at here, [murmur] and Urban Tapestries, tend to avoid these pitfalls by incorporating performativity and social practices into their designs." (p. 4-5)

Eaket places these projects in the category of "spatial annotation", using the same terminology as Tuters and Varnelis (and before them, Russell). He includes a nice quote from Nick West of the proboscis group (behind UT):

“To the extent that the annotations in such a system become spatial, it makes the authors of those annotations the co-creators of a new virtual vernacular that will more and more shape the shared experience of the city … The challenge is to find ways to embed cultural intelligence within the built environment – or, more precisely, alongside and within the pathways that we traverse from day to day” (Nick West, "URBAN TAPESTRIES: the spatial and social on your mobile", p.4

Part of the analysis seems a little lofty, compared with the concrete properties of the [murmur] system, for instance (my criticism of that is presented in "textopia: designing a locative literary reader"). But I find the following explanation of the performativity approach compelling:

The performativity of space can be understood as the “acting-out” of a place through social practices, specifically actions and utterances, which contextually and through repetition determine its functional meaning within a meshwork of social habitus (Bourdieu 23). Performativity in/of the built environment means the interrogation, reworking, and iterative deployment of signs and practices; this viewpoint implies that the city is not so much a normative set of objects, but rather a system which is discursively produced and materializes over time via iterative processes and actions. [...] The reified materiality of the built environment tends to blind us the fact that it is a “pattern in time” resulting from multiple acts of human agency, discourse, decision making and action (Johnson 76). Likewise, the performative model of the construction of meaning stands counter to standard representation, which we use synchronically (within a period in time) but rarely think about diachronically (across periods in time). [...] In this sense, we might say that the performative, in its ritual, temporal and discursive aspects is a form of meaning production that is time-biased, relying as it does on localized speech acts over a relatively long duration. Conversely, the standard view of static representation which allows us to manipulate symbols readily, without having to consider localized variations or past usage, tends to exert a spatial bias since standardization allows for faster and wider communicability. When we try to define what a place “is”—that is, to determine its meaning—we automatically run into problem of choosing between static representations which risk reductionism and embodied performativity, which is much less easily codified. (11-12)

So Eaket is trying to emphasize the temporal dimension of place-based meaning - that meaning is something that is articulated not just in space but also in time, and the meanings attached to places are shifting and fleeting articulations in time. In other words, cities are "patterns in time" - and spatial annotation needs to take this into account, that what is recorded are temporal articulations which give temporal "snapshots" of the space.

Following this argument, Eaket proposes to view projects like [murmur] and UT as "'state spaces' whereby the data set defines not all the possible states of a complex system (as the term is commonly used), but rather everything that has been said about a particular place" (12).

What narrative spatial annotation projects do is map places linguistically in multiple dimensions at once, contributing to an overall understanding of the texture of a space. This texture, I would argue, constitutes a kind of state space that iteratively and aggregately serves to define its meaning in practice. (13)

In his conclusion, Eaket discusses the two projects as hypertexts, and here he makes some interesting remarks regarding links. He refers to the idea of spatial hypertext: "As locative media projects like [murmur] and Urban Tapestries have matured and expanded, they become less like spatial annotation and more like place-oriented spatial hypertexts (cf. Shipman & Marshall 1999)." (20) This use of words is very similar to the ones I have used to discuss textopia - at least in some drafts, I have been calling it "place-based hypertext" - but I have discarded these terms due to the absence of a link structure. In this light, Eaket's reasoning is interesting to me:

Conceiving of these projects as hypertexts risks falling into the same navigational metaphors that plague the Web and some databases more generally; such metaphors can lock us into the same space-biased framework that [murmur] and UT attempt to critique: static representations that ignore relational patterns, iterative changes and the social construction of meaning. While search engines, Web 2.0 applications and the Semantic Web attempt to overcome some of these difficulties, the problem is in many ways tied to our governing model of synchronic representation. Instead of links and lexia, edges and nodes, perhaps we should begin to think of links as a shared set between two state spaces (pages or lexia) that are performatively produced linguistically and temporally emergent in terms of aggregate meaning. (p. 20)

So, basically, if we are to think of these projects as hypertexts we shouldn't think of links between nodes - in the material sense of a digital traversal function that literally takes you (or rather, your browser) from one text node to another - but rather a kind of shared set of semantic meanings? That is a nice thought, but what does it mean in practice? Should we consider [murmur] (and textopia) as hypertext systems without links (they do not have them, in the traditional sense) - or should we consider them something else? I have opted for "locative literature" so far, am still not convinced that hypertext is the appropriate frame to view this phenomenon in.

Eaket states as a conclusion:

What might a database of meanings based on iterative performativity and socially emergent meaning (as opposed to static representations) look like? That question remains largely an open one, although I believe that metaphors like state spaces and spatial textures can help us think this question through. Locative projects like [murmur] and Urban Tapestries provide interesting case histories in the social production of meaning: meaning that spans both the real world and the imaginary spaces of digital media. Such projects are simultaneously time and space-based media, depending as they do on material sites and digital, narrative descriptions. As hybrid media, I feel they still have a great deal to tell us about how we ascribe meaning to places and objects over time, as well as providing parallel insights into the structural processes of meaning-production itself. (p. 21)

--Anders Sundnes Løvlie 14:36, 25 August 2010 (UTC)