BEING IN AN ENVIRONMENT : A PERFORMATIVE PERSPECTIVE

This essay lays out my general perspective on human relations with the environment. The central thread is a conviction that our thinking on this topic should start from a concern with performance and agency—the actions of people and things—rather than from scientific knowledge as a given point of departure. My approach is ontological rather than epistemological. It grows out of my earlier work in science studies, and I begin by reviewing some concepts developed there, and why they clash with mainstream academic discourses, before moving on to environmental topics and examples. Key threads there include a distinction between two paradigms in scientific and engineering approaches to the environment, and an attempt to put science in its place—to see from the outside just how science figures in our relations with the environment. I am especially keen to establish the possibility of engaging nature in a directly performative fashion—one that does not centre itself on knowledge, science and the laboratory.

knowledge as a given point of departure. My approach is ontological rather than epistemological. It grows out of my earlier work in science studies, and I begin by reviewing some concepts developed there, and why they clash with mainstream academic discourses, before moving on to environmental topics and examples. Key threads there include a distinction between two paradigms in scientific and engineering approaches to the environment, and an attempt to put science in its place-to see from the outside just how science figures in our relations with the environment. I am especially keen to establish the possibility of engaging nature in a directly performative fashion-one that does not centre itself on knowledge, science and the laboratory. So one thing I need to do here is to clarify my position as well as I can, before addressing environmental questions.
The key move in The Mangle was to focus on performance rather than cognition. We have all been taught to think of science as primarily a cognitive activity-the production of knowledge about the world-but my argument was that if you want to understand scientific OX-rev-120412 forward-looking evolutionary processes, dances of agency that explore a world of endless emergence and becoming. My story of the mangle was a way of trying to conceptualise that.
• After writing The Mangle I began to think about ways of generalising the story beyond the lab (at the end of book, I claimed it was theory of everything). And I quickly realised that our relations with animals, nature and the environment are an obvious place to look. It might be hard to think about science along these lines-we are so deeply conditioned to identify science with knowledge-but it is totally obvious that we engage with the environment performatively. In The Mangle I mentioned the weather, but think about earthquakes and tidal waves. How else could we regard these than as manifestations of the agency of nature, to which we react performatively, trying to ward them off, usually through engineering, but never quite succeeding?
And to bring this picture down to earth, I fixed on a couple of examples, which I can briefly discuss here. One was a story about invasive species, Asian eels in the midwest (Pickering 2005). This was an amusing story I found in the New York Times, about the importation of these eels to the US as pets. They turned out to grow quickly and rather horrifyingly. The owners disposed of them in local ponds, where they multiplied and competed successfully for food with the fish. This upset the fishermen who liked catching large-mouthed bass, so various tricks were tried to get rid of the eels, for example draining the ponds. This didn't work because the eels survived by burrowing into the mud (unlike the fish, which died). Then OX-rev-120412.doc p. 4 20/8/12 people tried building concrete barriers to stop the eels spreading to other ponds and waterways-but this failed too because the eels just climbed over them.
For me this a beautiful example of a dance of agency, not now in the lab, but in the wild-a performative back and forth of the human and nonhuman in which the eels show up as always emergent, surprising, unpredictable. I want to ontologise it-to take it as a little model of how things go in the world in general. The world is full of agents which can interfere with one another consequentially but without any sense of control. We acted on the eels and made a difference for them, but the outcomes were not as hoped-they were emergent-and vice versa. All this seems to me visibly true, but one cannot say it in the language of mainstream ecology or sociology: they cut up and edit the world in ways that make it vanish.
After the eels, I fixed on the Mississippi, and John McPhee's wonderful history of the struggles between the river and the US Army Corps of Engineers-the ACE (Pickering 2008b, McPhee 1989. As McPhee tells it, this has been again a story of an emergent performative back-and-forth. The river does something-floods-the ACE does something in response-raising the levees, building control structures-the river responds to that-running higher, washing away the structures-etc etc. Again, we have a dance of agency, now writ very large, in which the river, the engineering structures that surround it, and, indeed, the social groups and structures that depend on the river, have all been emergently and unpredictably transformed-mangled-over the past 150 years or so.
What I take from this is, then, that there are interesting and possibly important things to say about our being in the environment in the performative idiom, as I call it, which are inexpressible in the language of the mainstream disciplines (civil engineering, hydrology, Hills-fields, populated by cows and sheep. When the river floods, as it quite often does, the cows, sheep and farmers stroll off to higher land. There are a few more or less ancient raised tracks crossing the floodplain-walkways, railways, roadways-which look pretty odd and intriguing most of the time but whose purpose becomes totally obvious when the waters rise. We could say that over the centuries people in the Exe valley have found a way of living in dynamic equilibrium with the river; that this has involved very little by way of a detour through science; and that it works. The present configuration of the Exe valley is the upshot of the stance of revealing-a performative openness to what the river will do, and a performative response to that. The beautiful village I live in, a quasi-nomadic approach to farming, and the strange river architecture around it, have grown out of a long dance of agency.

FIGURE 3: ROADWAY IN THE FLOODPLAIN OF THE EXE RIVER
Of course, the Exe is a little river, not so important in the grand scheme of things. The Rhine, on the other hand, is big and important, and it strikes me that the current Room for Rivers project in Holland is a revival of the traditional stance (Rohde et al 2006, de Groot and Lenders 2006, Palca 2008. Room for Rivers aims, as I understand it, to let the river flood, in the spirit that it is better for us to adapt to regular finite floods than to try to pin down and enframe the river, with the disasters and catastrophes that inevitably follow. I am tempted to call Room for Rivers a hylozoist project. Hylozoism, for me, is the idea that everything we need is there in nature already, and that we can latch onto it directly and performatively instead of going through long detours of cognition for the sake of bending nature to our will. I started thinking about this when I was trying to understand cybernetic biological computing projects in the 1950s and 1960s. There the truly amazing idea was to entrain pond ecosystems, for example, to manage factories (Pickering 2009b(Pickering , 2010. Now it strikes me that water engineering in general might be moving in this hyolozoist direction-a realisation that maybe nature is better at controlling itself than we are. Sarah Whatmore showed a picture of novel dams being built upstream of a Yorkshire town called Pickering (of all places). The novelty of these dams is that they look as though they have been built by beavers rather than engineers-they are simply tangled meshes of branches thrown across a stream. What fascinates me about them is that rather than dominating streams via a detour through science, they stage an exploratory dance of agency with them, finding out how nature will respond. Obviously, the state of the dams and how they act depends on their history-how much detritus has been washed down and caught by the dams or detached from them. I don't know how well they work, but this is an example of engineering in the mode of revealing and finding out, rather enframing and domination through knowledge.

FIGURE 5: DAM ABOVE PICKERING
And moving from the micro to the macro, I'm fascinated by the Dujiangyan dam in China (Li and Xu 2006). 2,000 years old, this dam is famous for the elegance of its performance. It acts differently according to the season and the waterflow in the river, variously diverting water into irrigation channels and dampening out floods. I have not been able to find out much about the history of the dam's construction, but it is safe to say it was not designed scientifically, and certainly its maintenance, at least, crucially entails a dance of human and nonhuman agency. The dam structure is not fixed; every year it is eroded by waterflows and every year it is rebuilt in line with the experience of the previous year. Not coincidentally, I think, it is one of the places where heaven and earth are joined-there always seems to be a spiritual angle on hylozoist relations to nature. In his book, Seeing Like a State (1998), Jim Scott refers to a body of thought and action that he calls metis, which he sees as a less poisonous alternative to modernist rationalisation. And he gives an example that I find striking, of a traditional Japanese approach to the environment: p. 9 20/8/12 Erosion control in Japan is like a game of chess. The forest engineer, after studying his eroding valley, makes his first move, locating and building one or more check dams. He waits to see what nature's response is. This determines the forest engineer's next move, which may be another dam or two, an increase in the former dam, or the construction of side retaining walls. Another pause for observation, the next move is made, and so on, until erosion is checkmated. The operation of natural forces, such as sedimentation and re-vegetation, are guided and used to the best advantage to keep down costs and to obtain practical results.
Clearly here, the engineer is finding out what the propensity of the valley and the water is, and he does that by deliberately staging a performative dance of agency with it: trying this, seeing what happens, trying something else, just like Glaser en route to the bubble chamber.
So here we have a very nice example of a sort of purposeful finding out how to control nature without any detour though science and representation-a way of trading on the dance of agency rather than trying to short-cut it through knowledge. One point to emphasise, then, is that a performative perspective does not require us simply to let nature go its own way, as in the Exe valley; rather, it opens up the possibility of foregrounding and actively conjuring up emergent dances of agency in practice rather than casting a scientific veil over them. It might also be worth noting that one can speak of experiment in this connection: the Japanese forest engineer certainly experiments on water flows in the valley. But this is not the same sense of 'experiment' as that usually associated with science. Scientific experiment depends on the detour I have been talking about: a displacement of phenomena away from the world and into the lab for the sake of producing knowledge which can then be re-exported to the worldwhich is, for example, how the Army Corps of Engineers proceeds in its dealings with the Misissippi. Scott's example points to another sort of experiment which entails performative interaction with the thing itself, with no displacement, and focused on a performative outcome rather than exportable knowledge-experimentation in the wild, we could call it (following Hutchins 1995).
Again, we can scale this example up, and also bring it more up to date. Lisa Asplen has written about performative and mangle-ish ways of getting along with the environment. The easiest one to think about is called adaptive management (Gunderson and Light 2006). Just like the Japanese example, adaptive management, as I understand it, is all about experimentation in the wild and staging dances of agency as a way of exploring the shi of any given situation. Asplen (2008) discusses experimental floods on the Colorado River staged downstream from the Glen Canyon dam. The idea there was to find out how the river and the downstream ecosystem would react to different flows of water, as a basis for further dealings with them. One important point that Asplen emphasises is that while the scientists involved did have conventional scientific representations of river dynamics, they were prepared to find p. 10 20/8/12 out that they were wrong-as indeed some of them were; valuable monitoring equipment simply got washed away; the river and ecosystem reconfigured themselves in ways that surprised the scientists. This sort of experimentation in the wild, then, is alive to emergence in the dance of agency, interested in it, not trying to short-circuit it through knowledge. Asplen this other way of going on-the hylozoist stance of revealing-is, at least, much less prone to a catastrophic darkside than the stance of enframing and domination, which is something very much in its favour. From another angle, this essay is an attempt to argue that there are interesting and perhaps important things to be said in the performative idiom. As I mentioned before, I often feel like I have arrived in outer space, but I do not think it has to be outer space, even for academics. It should be our home, the place we set out from and return to in our explorations. interest in schizophrenia in the 1950s to environmental concerns in the 60s and 70s, and he gave much the same analysis of both (Bateson 1968(Bateson , 2000. Both circle around attempts to stamp a modern blueprint onto an emergently lively system-enframing selves and rivers respectively-and the disastrous consequences that follow when these project fail. Hurricane Katrina as the madness of the Mississippi; madness as the Hurricane Katrina of the soul.
We can go back to science. I increasingly think it makes sense to distinguish between two different paradigms, in Kuhn's sense, for thinking about and acting in the world (Pickering 2009b(Pickering , 2010. One is the modern paradigm, exemplified here by Ruzik's calculations. As Heidegger said, this draws on the sort of science that makes the world calculable and sets it up for enframing. But there is a different kind of science, that Heidegger did not think about, which represents the world differently. Cybernetics would be one example of this other p. 12 20/8/12 paradigm, but complexity theory is probably a more relevant version today. I am not an expert in this version of environmental studies, but I can sketch out some tentative thoughts.
First, I like the complexity approach a lot. Instead of linear models of cause and effect, it offers us a vision of basins of attraction in highly complex socio-ecological formationsattractors that pull these entities back to specific sorts of states, until one crosses a boundary when they flip over to another attractor, for better or for worse (Folke 2006, Miller et al 2010. This sounds to me like a much better representation of how the world is than calculations of the carrying capacity of the earth. And this sort of representation certainly serves as a warning against trying too quickly to edit out emergence and surprise. But two questions arise from a performative perspective. One goes back to the question of realism: should we just believe these sorts of representations: do they literally describe how the world is? In the world of Deleuzian philosophy, Manuel DeLanda (2002) would say yes to that question and then go on about attractors as the structure of 'the virtual.' I am inclined to say no. What complexity is good for is the construction of an alternative and nonmodern imaginary, for people who need that sort of thing. If you are a fan of science and would like to think your way out of enframing, read a few papers on complexity-they will show you how even a simple determinist world can nevertheless continually surprise us.
But from another angle, I am inclined to wonder what else complexity can do for us. I don't think there is much hope of ever pinning down the actual complexities of any important real ecosystem, of mapping the attractors and their boundaries; and I certainly don't think there is any hope of doing that for socio-ecological systems. Speaking ex cathedra as a sociologist, multi-agent models of social systems, for example, do not remind me of anything I have come across in my research. The social world is not built from N interchangeable and otherwise identical agents. At best, these models can function, again, as aids to the imagination.
In the end, what fascinates me is how necessary people find it to embark on incredibly long, complex, expensive and tiring detours through science to get hold of what sort of a place the world is. Why bother, when you simply have to look? Why is it so hard for us to see that we live in a world that just is lively and surprising? It probably starts with what we teach our children at school-but that is another story.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This paper is a revised version of a talk given at Oxford University, 2 February 2012 as part of a series of Linacre Lectures on 'Environmental Governance and Resilience'. I am grateful OX-rev-120412.doc p. 13 20/8/12 for discussions at Oxford and to Laura Rival for the invitation to speak and her encouragement to revise the paper for publication.