Performing Economic Geography: Two Men, Two Books, and a Cast of Thousands

Environment and Planning A 2002, volume 34, pages 487 ^ 512 DOI:10.1068/a3440 Performing economic geography: two men, two books, and a cast of thousands Trevor J Barnes Department of Geography, 1984 West Mall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada; e-mail: [email protected] Received 12 February 2001; in revised form 6 August 2001 Abstract. In this paper I use the notion of performance, especially as it has been theorized within the science studies literature, to begin to make sense of the history and continuing practices of economic geography. I argue that not only humans perform, but also objects. In this paper, I focus on the performance of books, and in particular, textbooks, or as Bruno Latour calls them, ìmmutable mobiles'. I argue that textbooks bring four attributes to their performance: they travel easily over distance, thereby bringing their message to a geographically diffuse audience; they allow for àn optical and semiotic homogeneity', that is, they take quite different pieces of the world, and bring them together, manipulating them and controlling them, on the same page; they represent an obligatory passage point in the sense that once they are accepted as the standard summary of a field they are necessarily acknowledged by successors; and finally, their effectiveness is in part a conse- quence of their rhetoricödefined as the ability to draw together and integrate within the text a wide range of sources and authors. These arguments about the performance of textbooks are illustrated by two case studies. The first is George G Chisholm's Handbook of Commercial Geography, published in 1889, which helps launch economic geography as an academic discipline within Anglo-America. The second is Peter Haggett's Locational Analysis in Human Geography, published in 1965, which in many ways codifies the quantitative and theoretical revolution that first emerged in the United States in the late 1950s. `Àll the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players'' William Shakespeare, As You Like It ``My strong point is performance ... I always do more than I say.'' Richard M Nixon `` ... [a] textbook is a performance of reality ... '' John Law and Vicky Singleton (2000, page 1) `À cultural geography of economics and economists? Now that's a thought.'' Nigel Thrift (2000a, page 701) Introduction At a recent conference, I witnessed two events that I had never seen before. The first was the equivalent of performance art. It was during a session in which I also presented. The first three presenters, which included me, did the standard conference routine. In a slightly disheveled state, you bring a sheaf of notes, some murky overheads, and try to cram a forty-page paper into fifteen minutes, expressing complete shock when told that there is only one minute remaining. In contrast, the last presenter, dressed in a black t-shirt and denim jeans, with closely cut blonde hair, brought no notes and only two overheads that he then used as props in what was a brilliant, and exactly fifteen-minute performance. Arguing against the violence committed by quantitative forms of inquiry, and especially by the number oneöyou wondered what it ever did to him?öhe buzzed, stuttered, and acted out at the front of the room the cruelty and fiendishness of stopping the geographical world in its tracks by rendering it in numerical form. 488 T J Barnes The second event was notable for the lack of performance. The presenter simply stopped dead in the middle of his paper. Until then he was clear and engaging. But he reached a certain point, and forgot his lines. He shuffled at the podium, rustled his papers, and said, `Ì'm sorry'', hesitantly restarted, but within a couple of minutes he succumbed to silence again, and sheepishly returned to his seat. Everyone felt terrible for him and a bit embarrassed. He broke the golden rule about academic performance. It would have been acceptable to give a bad paper, but not to finish was beyond the pale. Both stories bear centrally on the theme of my paper. I will argue that the history of economic geography is a series of compelling and persuasive performances carried out by a variety of different actors, both human and nonhuman. When performances work, such as the first one, they can change a discipline's trajectory. But when they do not, as represented in extreme form by the second, they leave no residue. It is as if they had never happened. Over the last decade, an enormous amount of literature has been published on performance, some of it even in economic geography [see the special issues of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2000 18 (4), (5)]. Now a component of the discipline's `cultural turn', performance is used to understand how culture inflects all kinds of economic activities and their spaces, whether that be in the context of female merchant bankers in the City of London (McDowell, 1997), or restaurant Figure 1. Outrageous femininity (reprinted from McDowell, 1997, page 196; original photograph from The Guardian, photograph by Lionel Cironneau). Performing economic geography 489 workers in southeast England (Crang, 1994), or buyers and sellers at car-boot sales in England's northeast (Gregson and Rose, 2000). Whereas the notion of performance that underlies such works is often theoretically complex, my use of the term is comparatively simple. It is the idea that reality is brought into being by the very act of performance itself. As Nigel Thrift (2000b, page 577) writes, performance `ìs the art of producing the now''. For example, when two young French women are photo- graphed by The Guardian newspaper in 1993 (reprinted in McDowell, 1997, page 196) on one of London's trading floors shouting down the phone and gesticulating, they are not just representing how financial trading is done, but are engaged in the act, the performance itself (figure 1). They are making reality, producing the now. When deployed in economic geography, then, performance, as illustrated by this photograph, has been applied to specific kinds of `real' economic activities in the òutside world'. What I would like to do in this paper, going back to my opening two stories, is to apply the notion of performance to the discipline of economic geography itself; that is, to examine the discipline as a performance. At the same time, I want to contend that economic geography is no less `real', and no less part of the òutside world' than, say, those animated and determined young French financial traders. Doing economic geography and doing financial trading both involve performance, and are therefore analyzable in similar ways. At least, this is an argument recently made for the discipline of economics (Callon, 1998; McKenzie, 2000). Performances by economists produce effects not just internally within their own discipline, but ones which spiral out into the world, transforming inside into outside. The outside world comes to mirror the economist's inside world of models and theories. For example, Donald McKenzie (2000) writes about the mathematical theorems of the Nobel-prize-winning economists, Robert Merton, Myron Scholes, and the late Fischer Black, on option pricing, which in part led to the development of derivative financial markets. McKenzie's argument is that such theorems were not an external description of the reality of financial markets, but they actively created them, they performed them. As he puts it, ``Finance theory describes a world of human institu- tions, human beliefs and human actions. To the extent to which that theory is believed and acted upon, it becomes part of the world it describes'' (McKenzie, 2000, page 4). That is, in their theoretical performances as economistsöwriting equations on black- boards, publishing papers in journals, speaking to the financial pressöMerton, Scholes, and Black created a new type of financial world, one that would make the fortunes of some, and send others to prison. For this reason there is no dividing line between the performances of academics such as Merton, Scholes, and Black in their campus lecture theatres, and the performances of nonacademics such as Nick Leeson on the Singapore stock exchange. They all just do it, albeit with different consequences. Making use of recent writings on actor-network theory (ANT), I intend in this paper to present two historical vignettes of Anglo-American economic geographers just doing it, that is, performing economic geography. Partly for reasons of brevity, but also partly to make a theoretical point, I make the bases of each of the two vignettes a key textbook. The first is George G Chisholm's Handbook of Commercial Geography, published in 1889, which as I will argue initiates the discipline within Anglo-America; and the second is Peter Haggett's Locational Analysis in Human Geography, published in 1965, which is associated with both an explicitly theoretical and a quantitative approach to the discipline. The theoretical point, which is emphasized by ANT, is that performances are put on not only by humans, but also by objects, including books. John Law and Vicky Singleton (2000, page 1) write, a ``textbook is a performance of reality, that it makes 490 T J Barnes present a representation of reality, and at the same time makes that reality.'' The same argument is made for the two books considered here: that is, albeit by different means, they make present a presentation of an economic geographical reality, and at the same time make that reality. Clearly, however, other books could have been chosen to make the same argument. That these two were selected is partly because of their importance in altering the trajectory of the discipline [a point substantively argued later in the paper, and also recognized in the admittedly few histories written of Anglo-American economic geography; Barnes (2000), Berry et al (1987, chapter 2), Scott (2000)].

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