620208

research-article2015

CSCXXX10.1177/1532708615620208Cultural Studies <span class="symbol" cstyle="symbol"></span> Critical MethodologiesYoung

Article

Intimacies of Rock: Ethnographic

Considerations of Posthuman
Performativity in Canadas
Rocky Mountains

Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies

2016, Vol. 16(1) 7582
2015 SAGE Publications
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1532708615620208
csc.sagepub.com

Bryanne Young1

Abstract
This essay engages feminist science studies and theories of performativity to inject with dynamism familiar figurations of
static being. Through the modalities of ethnographic writing, memory, and embodied experience, I enact a lively engagement
with Canadas Rocky Mountains. By shifting the way we understand this unique, constitutive feature of the Canadian West,
I suggest an approach to ethics that expands categories of agency, disaggregating it from realms of human exceptionalism.
Through the analytic of performativity, I attend to the dynamic and agentive capacity/ies of glacial bodies, mountains,
and lichennonhuman bodies considered passive and inert by prevailing epistemologiesto make/materialize meaning. I
animate the argument that what we call nature is not a passive, immutable surface on which culture is inscribed, but rather
is the production of active, agential practices, each containing divergent wills to power immanent with the capacity to make
cuts of their own. The aim of this writing is to think through how mountains, and other such complex living systems, might
pose a necessary series of questions to prevailing epistemologies and systems of epistemological capture.
Keywords
performativity, Western Canada, performance studies, feminist science studies

Intimacies of Rock: Writing Culture,

Writing Nature
This is an ethnography of rock and ice, inscription, interpretation, and altitude. It is a writing that traces the contours of
a region sculpted by glaciers, cycles of freezing and melting, and seasonslandscapes growing fecund and green,
dry and brittle, burning into forests of cinder, becoming into
the pale depth of snow. More than geomorphology, (geo)
politics,1 or a simple matter of landscapea background
you can walk through but never live inmy engagement,
ongoing, with the mountains of the Canadian West is comprised of many fractures and imaginaries, losses and uncertainties. It is marked by spatio-temporal longing and the
hope of return as well as the psychical/physical impressions
left on the body of actually having been there (the aftermath
of frostbite, broken bones badly healed, the memory of falling, scarred hands, an obsessive search for fossils remaindered in buckets in a North Carolina storage unit). Sparked
by a lively interest and a durational immersion in the mountain spaces of the Canadian West, I write from the suspicion
that an ethnography calibrated to the dynamic register of performativity can generatively attend to other kinds of intensities and tempos than the cadence of the human. Furthermore,

it can productively work to deconstruct what physicist and

philosopher Karen Barad (2003) calls the thingification of
the world: the deadening transfiguration of phenomena and
relationality into a static series of objects/things.2 By engaging what I call a posthuman performativity, whose point of
origin is latent in Judith Butlers earliest elaborations of the
concept, I interrogate and revitalize static concepts of
embodiment, agency, relationality, and materiality. My aim
in doing so is to contribute a useful theoretical framework
for developing more nuanced understandings of bodies and
embodiment, pointing to the necessity of taking seriously
the materializing epistemological cuts we enact when we
frame our understanding of the world. Staying with the
complexities, unfolding(s), and intimacies of lichencovered headwalls, ice, water, and planar fracturing, I animate the argument that what we call nature is not a passive,
immutable surface on which culture is inscribed, but rather
1

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

Corresponding Author:
Bryanne Young, Department of Communication, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, CB 3285, 115 Bingham Hall, Chapel Hill, NC
27599-3285, USA.
Email: youngbh@live.unc.edu

Downloaded from csc.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA IRVINE on July 10, 2016

Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 16(1)

76
is the production of active, agential practices, each containing divergent wills to power immanent with the capacity to
make cuts of their own.

Bodies of Enchantment: Performativity

and the Making-Manifest of Mountains
Canadas Rocky Mountain range comprises the eastern
point of the Canadian Cordillera. Landlocked, it is bordered
on the east by the boundlessness of Alberta prairies, their
slow gradation into a confusion of foothills, the doorstep of
the mountains. The Rocky Mountain Trench, otherwise
known as The Valley of a Thousand Peaks, borders it to the
west: 1,600 km north to south, a uniform 150/330 geographic vector, a by-product of faulting, planar fractures
resulting from earth movement. To the north, it is shored up
by the Liard River, which flows southeast from the Yukon
down through British Columbia. At its highest point, a peak
called Mount Robson stands 3,954 meters above sea level
with nothing but vaulted air above, precipitation and spindrift. It is a bounded space. Forced upward into two major
groupings of ranges by the fracturing of rock plates, the
movement of continents, imbricated layers of continental
margin, thrusts, and faults, the Canadian Rocky Mountain
range is the source of the Fraser, Columbia, North
Saskatchewan, Bow, and Athabasca Riversmuscular and
turgid waterways that support industry (hydroelectric, logging, adventure tourism) before breaking up into smaller
estuaries, formidable and cold. Considerably more jagged
in appearance than the Rocky Mountain ranges to the south,
the tree line is lower. There are cirques punctuated by artes
and horns. Written by glaciation in the language of petrified
coral, it contains on its surface a place at which I once rested
my hand on the static archive of bending rock, a ribbon that
seems to record the thrusting up of rock from the ocean,
inscribed by incredible force over time.
This mountain range has formed much of my selfhood:
different forms of inscription enacted with different kinds
of force. Living in Banff National Park, climbing rock and
ice in the Kananaskis Valley, scrambling up Mount
Yamnuska, charting courses through glassy waters in my
fathers canoe, hiking the Plain of Six Glaciers, clambering
through caves in Yoho National Park (50 meters of crawlspace leading to the mouth of Takakkaw Falls), standing
above the Highwood Meadows in a sudden viscosity of
electrified air, sleeping on the shores of the rock-bound
lakes. The Rocky Mountains, as they continue to unfold,
always in excess of epistemic capture, of my ability to
know them, are spaces of close proximity and imbrication, layers of remaindered seasons containing the memory
of terrestrial life beginning on the planet. These are places
where time bends rock and the boundaries between things,
phenomena, animate, and inanimate seem at once the sharpest and the most confounded/ing. Storms flash over the

peaks bringing onslaughts of snow, rain, wind, changeall

becomes flux as, in an instant, the stable referent of a horizon is undone, the sharp edges of the world made wild and
white by confluences of air and frozen particles of water.
These places are, above all else, places of intimacy/ies, of
crossings, attachments, inter-connectivity, dynamism, and
intense planar closeness. Any writing of/on this/these
bounded space(s) is thus a tracing of this/these intimacies,
where the doing of this tracing is to perform writing as a
holding close the connectivities and interstitial acts of interpretation that, performatively, inter-generatively, structure
the mountain-making(itself)-manifest. It is an echoing of
the breaking of a tree branch that is (also) the making of the
world, cycles of breaking and remaking, burgeoning forth,
never complete, never again, and never for the first time.
The notion of breaking and remaking is axiomatic to
performance studies, whose mandated object is the study of
the effects, and series of effects, produced by bodiesin
other words, in the creative capacities of performativity.
Yet, by and large, the vast and vital explanatory and descriptive potential of performativity continues to bolster a kind
of human exceptionalism that focuses on human embodiment as if it is the only embodiment. This is certainly no
fault of the theory or concept itself, containing as it does the
scaffolding for many different arguments and applications
beyond its own initial purview. For instance, Judith Butler
(2004) argues that discrete genders are what humanize individuals, that we gain entry into the symbolic economy of
meaning as signs among other signs, through cycles of repetition and difference. This holds true for nonhuman bodies
also, who enter into intelligibility through their own selfiterability. Their legibility (as discrete) is one result of the
self-production of meaning that, overabundant to necessity,
produces an excess that, itself, produces its own series of
effects. This does not mean that bodies as signs actually are
discrete objects, only that they must seem as such to other
bodies to be intelligiblerecall that for Butler, the stylized
doing of bodies creates those bodies as objects of belief and
not objects of ontology.
Indeed, the feature of embodiment that emerges so
clearly through the epistemic lens afforded by performativity is the quicksilver capacity/ies of bodies to always indicate a spatial, temporal, and semiotic world beyond
themselvesto always move beyond their own boundaries.
What remains most exciting in Judith Butlers account of
performativity is the inherent dynamism central to its
unfolding, in the shift between embodiment as a state of
being, to embodiment as an active doing. In conceptualizing performativity in this way, Butler resists ontological
claims about what bodies are, and instead elaborates the
productive doing through which bodies are produced and
re-produced. Speaking through the lexicon of performativity, then, the mode of being-in-the-world of a body (be it
human or nonhuman,) is dynamism: rather than static being,

Downloaded from csc.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA IRVINE on July 10, 2016

77

Young
becoming. This becoming is historical and contingent, yes,
but in the material effects it produces and re-produces, a
bodys own performative capacity is precisely the source of
its own critical agency. In this way, performativity indicates
a vibrancy that is immediately suggestive of the way in
which Grosz (2004) describes biological organization,
whose morphological structures, she contends,
engender the variety of life in all its forms, instead of ensuring
that life conforms to existing social categories, boundaries, and
limits, instead of containing existence to what has been, opens
up and enables cultural, political, economic, and artistic
variation. (p. 1)

The continuity of life over time, in other words, is repetition, but it is repetition with a difference, repetition with/in
infinite difference(s), in which difference is productive and
responsive, creative, adaptive, and made manifest/intelligible as transcription/inscription: as Barad (2003) describes
it, part of the universe making itself intelligible to another
part (p. 17), the simultaneous marking of a present that is
never self-same, and a conditioning of a future that remains
open to possibility and radical alterity.
If we approach, from this perspective, the cuts that are
enacted to make a mountain, what emerges are divergent
temporalities and agential materializations conditioned by
history and unfolding within and against a series of possibilities and constraints. The material/izing repetition of
acts/boundary-making doings/writings on/of stone are
agential and intra-related,3 unfolding from many divergent
wills to power. Looking at the geomorphology of the
Canadian Rocky Mountains thus, the ranges themselves are
sedimentation made manifest; they are proof of a living/
moving world, of dynamism and great force, of intensity
and the intra/interaction of matter with, and as, time. The
rocks that form the mountains of Banff and Yoho National
Parks, for instance, were formed from sediments that accumulated 710 million years ago, but the forces that deformed
and pressurized these rocks into mountains formed 120 to
60 million years ago. This asynchronous stratification was
further contoured by the tempo of glaciation, the memory of
which is held in the cerulean water of rock-bound lakes, its
remaindered force remembered by/in language (cirque,
moraine, till, diamictite) and debris, the contours of the
range itself. Here, in these mountains that seem to be austerity made manifest, there are ocean floors, held suspended in
stone and thrust up against the sky. As we clamber among
boulders, we find a museum of ancient marine life. Our
cliffs are made from the bodies of many millions of seaborn creatures, emerging with the tempo of erosion into the
sunlight. We walk the ocean floor as if this trick of time is
nothing, but the mountain remembers the sea, bearing the
trace left by water on the skin of the world. This kind of
inscription reminds us that the world/word is never written

once, reminding us that what we understand to be a museum

of ancient life, frozen in time, petrified and beautiful, is not
archive-as-entity, or history itself, but rather a flashing up of
one part of the universes intelligibility on the surface of
another (in its/their intra-active becoming). It is the still, but
not static, performance of Darwins descent, the burgeoning
outward of complexitythe acts of translation, transcription, and interpretation through which a mountain range
makes itself manifest.
These actions of inscription, in which signification
always already indicates mutability and/as the absence of
an originary form, is what Derrida (1974) calls archewriting. This mode of inscriptive doing is not the privileged
domain of human writing or human practices of makingmeaning, but rather suggests that all writing, all acts of
inscription, are elegiac, productive/generative performances
that make manifest the impossibility of arriving at the originary sign itself, the self-referential sign, the sign that refers
to no other sign but itself, pure and self-same. For Derrida,
all repetition/representation is split by the absence that
makes it necessary, where that which is absent is the existence through space and time of an originary form durable
enough to make repetition, iterability, descent, unnecessary.
The existence of such an originary moment/movement/
being would foreclose the possibility of a future that could
be otherwise and exclude difference, curtailing the many
splits and fractures of and within difference toward
increased exuberance, complexity, and open-endedness.
What the concept of arche-writing marks, thus, is both a
spatial differing and a temporal deferring, an always moving dynamism that expresses verisimilitude through a trick
of inscription and interpretation that makes becoming look,
for all the world, like being.
This elemental, or arche-writing is the record of the
effects of glaciation on rock, whose specificity of location
and density, weight and height, agentically contributed to
the formation, ablation, and accumulation of the glacier
itself. Like planar fractures and tectonic movement, the
sediment of matter and organic life (the fragile skeletons of
trilobites, brachiopods, graptolites4) into rock, the pressure
on rock to make mountains, the vibrant ecology of alpine
and sub-alpine terrestrial forests and aquatic eco-zones, the
holding suspended of rock flour in the waters of alpine
lakes, particles that backscatter the blue and green-ended
wavelengths of the visible spectrum, making the water
cyan, cerulean, viridian, azure: blue, limpid, still and beautiful, referring us to the clear tones of the afternoon sky.
What Derridas elaboration of arche-writing usefully explicates is that all writing is always a co-writing, always the
opening up of becoming, represented, inscribed, interpreted
as if it is beingin other words, performancewhich
always points to an originary breach that afflicts everything
one might want to hold sacrosanct: like self-presence, like
knowledge of the world, like being-in/as-itself.

Downloaded from csc.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA IRVINE on July 10, 2016

Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 16(1)

78
This Derridean-inflected engagement with inscriptive
practices and acts of translation and interpretation usefully
decenters/destabilizes the anthropocentric perspective that
agency is the sole property of human subjects who, alone
and as independent agents, inscribe, interpret, repeat, and
re-presentas giventhe materiality of the world. This
instability within the structure of the anthropos holds open
a space of possibility in which one might glean some of the
ways in which the world is made manifest through many
different kinds of agential inscriptive doings, repetitions,
and burgeoning(s) forth non-specific to the human. It is also
to take seriouslyby standing in witness tothe many
wills to power that propel the unfoldings into materiality of
the world, the dynamism and open-endedness of which do/
does not correlate to discrete bounded and propertied entities, things, or objects that exist a priori to their (inter)relations. These arcs/lines of flight of intra-connected becomings
leave traces on the world. They are communicativeparts
of the universe making themselves intelligible to other
partsand indexical of an originary split in the structure of
being that holds the future open to possibility, improvisation, alterity, indeterminacy.
It is in this vein of possibility and the communicative
capacity of inter/intra-related becoming that I turn, with
great delight, to an elaboration of what is for me one of the
most captivating forms of being-with/intimacy to make its
home in Canadas Rocky Mountains. This organism, whose
form of life is a holding in tension the productive capacities,
vulnerabilities, and wills to power of two independent species in a benign parasitic interaction, is highly suggestive of
a more nuanced and relevant ontology, which, I follow
Grosz in suggesting, re-figures ontological accounts of the
real, being, and nature as unchanging, static, and
fixed, composed of universal principles and ideals, indifferent to history, particularity, or change (Grosz, 2004, p.
14), to a conceptualization of their immaterial or extramaterial virtualities or becomings, to the temporal forces of
endless change . . . (Grosz, 2004). The result of this shift
is an understanding of ontology that has real explanatory
power relevant to political struggle, robust and vital enough
to move us to consider seriously what Barad calls the
material conditions and effects of how different differences
matter (Barad, 2012, p. 31).

Posthuman Intimacies: Becoming

Lichen
In the highest places I have climbed in the Rocky Mountains,
I have found lichen. It is one of the most prolific forms of
life on the planet, existing in all parts of the world. Because
of the slow rate of growthsome thalli are up to 10,000
years oldlichen is used by scientists to date glacial recession and assess the effects of pollution on fragile ecological
zones (Corbridge & Weber, 1998, p. xii). Erupting in subtle

profusion across the surface of the mountains (on tree

branches and boulders, even thriving at altitude and conditions of arid infecundity) lichens are beautiful and primeval,
echoing in their form the contours of fossils (corals from the
Carboniferous: faberophyllus, ekvasophyllum, canadiphyllum). Chartreuse, vermillion, gray, black, their cell walls are
made of chitin, the same substance that insects use for their
exoskeletons. For lichens to exist as an organism, there
must be a relationship between two entities, an alga and a
fungus, the ongoing dynamics of this intra/interactivity
embodying what we mistakenly perceive to be a homeostatic form of inert/barely animate life, a separate determinately bounded and propertied entity: lichen. The dynamic
and hidden intimacy, which comprises the form we (mis)
recognize as the thing itself, is in actuality a constant negotiation between the fungus (which is the part we see) and the
algal cells (which remain hidden and interior, secreted away
just beneath the surface). If one were to break open a lichen
thallus with a blade and examine the cut under a magnifying
lens, one would see a thin layer of vibrant green held in the
center. This is algae. What this dynamic intimacy means is
that, encysted within the fungus body, the algae can live in
places it otherwise could not, while the fungus, by using the
agal cells as nourishment, can do likewise (Corbridge &
Weber, 1998). Although this might seem like a kind of static
symbiosis, the opportunistic cooperation of two distinct
entities into a composite being, the algal cells are killed in
the process of metabolism by the fungus; without the algal
cells as sustenance, the fungus would quickly perish, and
the entire structure would collapse and die. Because of the
different temporal structures of the twin componentsas
one-celled organisms, algae re-produce at a faster rate than
the fungus destroys themthe delicate balance of the overabundant re-production of algal cells, and what essentially
entails a starvation diet for the fungus, the organism thrives.
Technically not a true symbiosis, this is an efficient parasitism in which the parasite does not entirely destroy the host,
in which it curtails its own appetite for the greater good, its
own and that of the collective entity imbricated to the point
that one cannot be distinguished from the other.
What I find particularly enchanting about the propagation of lichens is that they have no known organizers, unlike
the growing tips of higher order plants. Yet, as lichenologists James N. Corbridge and William A. Weber (1998)
explain, they somehow form
coordinated dichotomous branches, upper and lower surfaces,
special reproductive structures, and special hairs that fasten
them to the substrate. They can dissolve the cement that holds
rock particles together, and they range in life-expectancy from
a few years to centuries. (p. xii)

Furthermore, though lichens have been separated in laboratories into their component parts and grown in sterile environments under controlled conditions, their restitution as

Downloaded from csc.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA IRVINE on July 10, 2016

79

Young
lichen remains vexingly difficult. Scientists struggle to replicate the delicate balance that characterizes the starvation
diet that holds the relation between parasite and host from
becoming cannibalistic. Meanwhile, the questions surrounding the origin of this singular relationship, and the
ways in which various lichens have evolved over the trajectory of millions of years, remain largely unanswered
(Corbridge & Weber, 1998).
Lichens parasymbiotic constitution reveals the multilayered configurations of epistemic capture and performativity in two significant ways. First, it suggests the necessity
of a re-figuration of epistemology such that we are able to
account for the dynamism, intra-activity and openendedness at the heart of ontologys most cherished objects:
nature, being, and the real. Only with a more nuanced
account of being that takes into account the virtualities and
temporal forces of endless change (Grosz, 2004, p. 14) that
Grosz urges us to consider, might we begin to talk and write
meaningfully about the forces, constraints, and conditions
that materialize bodies (human and nonhuman). Second, the
intimacy/becoming of lichen advances Barads project of
destabilizing a metaphysics that takes separate determinately bounded and propertied objects to be the primary
epistemological unit. As the example of lichen vividly and
interestingly shows us, first, the misrecognition of temporal
processes and complex tensions and unfoldings as things is
both a nave and anthropocentric rendering of the world.
Furthermore, we must not make the mistake of thinking that
things exist a priori to the phenomena and relationships in
which they participate, and from and within which they are
formed (in which biological structuration is both historical
and open-endedrepetition with a difference), but rather are
bound up, implicated and agential, in the shaping of the phenomena out of which they are shaped. Central to this argument is the claim that nature is performative, that matter is
performative, and that shoring up performativity as the conceptual property proper only to the human is to fall into a
Sisyphean epistemological border war, in which the boundaries of the human must constantly be drawn and redrawn
against the horizon of a future which is far less than certain.
Far more efficient, I contend, to explore, become enchanted
with, the agential boundary-making capacities of matter itself,
interrogating and taking seriously the central metaphors, metonyms, and sets of criteria through which we assess and
express which (kinds of) materializing becomings matter.
In this way, unfurling our notions of performativity
beyond the exclusive domain of the human is certainly generative beyond the impulse to test the tensile strength of a
conceptual object, bending it to see if it will break. Doing so
allows us to account for differential structures of identity and
agency, causality and relationality that are not predicated
upon/fundamentally assume human exceptionalism. This, in
turn, insists that we work through what we might mean
in arguing for, or upon the basis of, a latent or natural

exceptionalisman exceptionalism that just isa cut

which benefits some while excluding others, a cut that has
material effects in the world. At the very least, it is to recognize that the very practices of differentiating the human
from the nonhuman, the animate from the inanimate,
and the cultural from the natural produce crucial materializing effects that are unaccounted for by starting an analysis after these boundaries are in place (Barad, 2012,
p. 31). Re-enchanting the lexicon of performativity, refiguring it beyond the human, I have staged one variation of
the argument that what we call nature is constructed through
and as relationships. I have elaborated some of the ways in
which natures whose dynamism holds at its heart
material(izing) practices that make matter manifest as discrete entities, places, epochs over and over again, the iterative materialization(s) of facticity. In doing so I have
stressed the many acts of translation involved in the making
of meaning, as well as gesturing to some ways in which
these acts of translations are predicated upon stylized repetition of inscription enacted by human and nonhuman bodies. These acts of inscription and interpretation are what
Deleuze might call territorialization; they are the possibilities that condition epistemological capture. This figuration,
predicated heavily upon the virtual, points to the possibility
that the excesses that unfold in overabundance to prevailing
regimes of epistemological capture might point us to futures
yet to be contained within rubrics of knowledge and systems of language, yet to be imagined.

Determining Fictions: Posthuman

Performativity and the Ethics of
Acting As If
Writing on the explanatory and imaginative force of Charles
Darwins accounts of evolution, Gillian Beer (1983) points
to the literary style of Darwins prose, particularly his propensity to analogy and metaphor (p. 73). She notes that in
the plurality and multivocality of his language, Darwin
deconstructs any formulation which interprets the natural
world as commensurate with mans understanding of it (p.
90). For Beer, Darwins theory proved productive in the
force of its narrative qua narrative because it instantiated
the telling of a new story against the grain of language
available to tell it in (p. 90) and yet remained so imaginatively powerful precisely because all its indications do not
point the same way. It is rich in its contradictory elements,
which can serve as a metaphorical basis for more than one
reading of experience (Beer, 1983, p. 6). When a theory
such as Darwins is first advanced, Beer elaborates, it is at
its most fictive, its most enchanting. Calling on evidence
from beyond our senses, such new theories disturb assumed
relationships and overturn the observable world, shifting
what has been substantial into metaphor. As Beer (1983)

Downloaded from csc.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA IRVINE on July 10, 2016

Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 16(1)

80
describes it, The awkwardness of fit between the natural
world as it is currently perceived and as it is hypothetically
imagined holds the theory itself for a time within a provisional scope akin to that of fiction (p. 1). Over time, however, the fictive power become laminated onto the
phenomena they were first elaborated to make strange
signifier and signified collapse into the sign. What this process of normalization makes us forget is that the study of
fact is, at its inception, the study of the fantastic. It is the
melting into air of solid assumptions and the calling forth of
evidence beyond the common sense, beyond the reach of
our senses and understanding. At its inception, it is the
unmooring of fixed causations and correlations, skimming
off the familiar (Beer, 1983, p. 75) and making it enchanted.
Yet, over the processes of normalization/naturalization,
the mythological, fictive force of theories subsides into the
given, the factual, the way things aretheir narrative power
becoming elided with their explanatory power. This phenomenon whereby, what Beer (1983) calls, the arc of
desire (p. 74) transforms the conditional into the actual, the
theory into the fact, bears a striking resemblance to
Butlers description of the performed repetition into fact
of gender norms. There is much more to be said of this connection than the scope of this essay allows. It is vital to
point out, however, that this essay was galvanized by the
hypothesis that performativity as a heuristic fiction, productive in its ability to make strange, or hold in enchantment,
has lost much of its imaginative force, has become conscripted into a epistemological border war that seeks to shore
up the very metaphysical presuppositions it once seemed so
adept at deconstructing. What Beers insightful comments
on the language of Darwins evolutionary theory usefully
bring to light in this context is that the absorption of theory
into givenness is inherent to the arc of the fact, a kind of
dynamism that begins with hypothesis and moves into provisional fiction, then confirmation, and ends in givenness.
The facticity of the fact lies in this givenness. Just as Darwin
advances the notion of ever-burgeoning complexity, to prevent concepts with vital and interesting narrative force from
becoming encysted in lexicon as fact, we need new heuristic fictions. It has, therefore, been my over-arching argument
that extending our notion of performativity beyond a concept predicated on human exceptionalism is an attempt to
advance a new hypothesis from the foundation of the now
taken for granted. It has been to advance a new kind of heuristic fiction, suggesting that in doing so we might attend to
the material, rather than simply the discursive, conditions
and effects of how different differences matter (Barad,
2012, p. 31), with the effect of accounting better and more
ethically for relationality and the forces that we assume passively provide, as given, our own agency and the conditions
of its possibility as exceptional.
Through an animated account of becoming (rather than
being) lichen, and what I have called the intimacies of

rock, I have suggested a re-figuration of relationality that

radically redistributes agency from a network of actors and
agents that preexist their inter-relations, into a system congruent with Nietzsches wills to power, or Darwins theory
of the evolution of life toward complexityhis elaboration
of infinite variation within and among species and expressions of life and depiction of evolution as a kind of repetition with a difference (never again, never for the first time,
a becoming that is never complete). This detaches our
mode of engagement with the world from an obsession
with taxonomy and representation(alism)in which the
differences that matter are the differences between degree
and kind, and in which temporality is the partitioning of
moments from other moments through inscriptive practices
that conceal their own genesis, in which acts of interpretation, translation, and inscription are mistaken for acts of
ontological, and interpretive acts of transcription themselves stand in for, produce, come to be, the real. What
this re-figured account of performativity calls for is not the
abandonment of the body/bodies, but rather the acknowledgment of the many modes and becomings of bodies
which, as Butler (1993) points out, tend to indicate a
world beyond themselves (p. x), foregrounding the kind
of dynamism that makes shoring up the boundaries around
notions of human agency, being, or bodies, an untenable
project at best.
Instead, what I call for here is a willingness to recognize
the natural forces that contour bodies, to expand our notion of
agency as an attribute or quality immanent to self-actualized
subject-hood, and to recognize agency as the ongoing materialization of the world. Dynamism is not a product or end
result of agency; dynamism is agency. Such a re-figured
perspective allows us to acknowledge the agency of glacial
mass in its intra/interaction with other phenomena in the
ongoing becoming of the mountain-making-itself-manifest,
in the many writings on stone that indicate just as vibrantly
as human practices of inscription and representation the
fundamental/originary split in being that holds the future
open to possibility, improvisation, and indeterminacy. It is
our next ethical/aesthetic challenge to view this open-endedness not as a site for panic or foreclosure but as a site of
radical agencyan agency we do not own, but instead must
share with the world.
Furthermore, attending seriously to what I have proposed as the fundamental breach in being revivifies ontology, returning the question(s) of ontology to the center of
inquiry, allowing us to shift our focus from the human
and/or nonhuman body, interesting to prevailing currents
in contemporary theory only, as Grosz (2004) has argued,
in its reflection through discourse, its constitution in representation, or its mediation by images (p. 3), to the
body as an open-ended system, a boundary-making doing
that always actively refers to worlds beyond itself, to
worlds it cannot control or fully anticipate. To claim a

Downloaded from csc.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA IRVINE on July 10, 2016

81

Young
performativity beyond the human is to recognize that
there are many millions of life spans and wills to power,
many rhythms and intensities constituting (many) temporality/ies. It is a loosening of our privileged domain of
time as that which demarcates the boundaries of our own
finitude, and a remembering of the debt we owe to the
inter/intra-relations of and between bodies that condition
the possibilities of our being in, and experience of, the
world. Furthermore, it requires the recognition of, and
enchantment with, the nature of biological being/nature
as that which opens itself up to inscription, to the practices of discursivity that allow writings on stone, emergences of species, stylized repetitions, and the
materialization of matter, the transcription of the cultural
and natural signs and sites that comprise our world.
In the contemporary context of struggles over wild
spaces against development, resource extraction, and industry, and immersed as we are in the legacy of moralism and
ethnocentrism that led, for instance, to the historically sedimented acts (ongoing) of marginalization of its First
Peoples, we need to continue to engage with, and generate,
heuristic fictions that allow us to think through and forestall
the moralization and anthropocentric metaphysical presuppositions that shore up, as fact, the facet of nationalism that
relies on logics of exclusion and marginalization drawn
along the axis of human/other. The singularity of the mountain ranges of the Canadian West, the way I have taken it up
in the essay, thus offers an emergence into the realm of the
political, political struggle, and the epistemologies that
underlie them relevant to, and generative for, those invested
in politics of identification and difference. Just as I argue
that the shoring up of the boundaries around the human is
not an epistemological/political border war worth waging,
nor is the staging of political struggle solely on the grounds
of entry into the master signifier (in which the human is
conceptualized as the only term that matters, and thus the
only term conceptualized in positive rather than in/as lack).
My imagining of performativity beyond the human is not an
attempt to jettison the category of the human altogether, but
rather to show the limitations of a metaphysics that bolsters
anthropocentrism and the accompanying kind of moralizing
that allows the partition between human and other to be the
only distinction that matters. It is to understand and take
seriously what Barad (2012) calls, the materializing effects
of particular ways of drawing boundaries between humans
and nonhumans (p. 31), nature and culture, rather
than beginning analysis on the grounds of these categories
as if the boundaries between them were already given. If,
then, there is an ethics to be found in the kind of relationality I propose in this essay, it lies in the claim that what we
call the human is an unstable, contestable fiction. Each
time we utter or inscribe its name, we are already acting as
if there is something solid behind what it signifies; meanwhile, each act of saying something, invoking the human,

is also a doing something. With each reiteration of the

human, we disambiguate its fictive quality, acting as if the
line of exclusion between human and its other(s) is clean,
uncontestable, uncontested, and naturalso natural it
appears always to have been thereand in so doing, bringing it further and further into facticity. It has been my
attempt in this essay to perform the argument that behind
the phenomena (intra/inter-active in its becoming), there is
no thing-in-itself. However, the ways in which we perform
and repeat the concept over time as if there is an ontological thing-in-itself behind it, the human has material
effects in the world. We are persistently and urgently
responsible for those effects.
Acknowledgments
I extend my thanks to Della Pollock, Brian Rusted, and Elizabeth
Grosz for feedback on and insights into the manuscript as it developed. I am additionally grateful to Annelise Riles for spirited conversations on legal fictions, which sparked much of what I take up
here as the epistemological problem of heuristic fictions; my
thanks also to Andrew Jenkins for his careful reading, and to
Dorna Young for suggesting the encounter with mountain-asliving-thing in the first place.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes
1. I want to suggest here that for Canadians, the prefix geo is
always already implicated in the word political, north, as
we are, of empire. See Berland (2009).
2. See Barad (2003).
3. In her account of agential realism, Barad (2003) advances the
term intra-relationality in contrast to what she calls the usual
interaction, which, for her, presumes the prior existence of
independent entities/relata (p. 815). Barad defines relata as
would be antecedent components of relations. According to
metaphysical atomism, individual relata always preexist any
relations that may hold between them (p. 812). The notion of
intra-action, for Barad, challenges a metaphysics that views
relata as the primary, uncuttable epistemological unit (preceding and agentive in the constitution of phenomena). In
Barads agential realist account of things, which flows from
a quantum philosophy of an always-already entangled universe, the primary epistemological unit is phenomena, and
not independent objects with inherent boundaries and properties. See Barad (2003).
4. The word graptolite, incidentally, comes from the Greek
word graptos, which means written, and lithos, meaning
rock, literally translated as, written on stone. Originally
thought by Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, father of modern

Downloaded from csc.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA IRVINE on July 10, 2016

Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 16(1)

82
taxonomy, to be pictures of fossils rather than the fossils
themselvesa beautiful, provocative matter of confusion
which evokes, immediately, Magrittes famous painting and
its defiant prosethe rare and delicate tracings of graptolites on rock ask us to consider what geological remainders
of ancient bodies are: Are they index, icon, sign? In what
manner of (extra)semiotic economy do they traffic? How,
what, and for whom do they (make) mean(ing)? What do
we make of our desire (the desire of Linnaeus standing in,
here, for our own) to locate, finally, the thing itself behind its
representationor at the very least, the acuity to know the
difference.

References
Barad, K. (2012). Natures queer performativity. Kvinder, Kb &
Forskning, 1(2), 25-53.
Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of
Women in Cultural and Society, 28, 801-830.
Beer, G. (1983). Darwins plots: Evolutionary narrative in Darwin,
George Eliot and nineteenth-century fiction. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.

Berland, J. (2009). North of empire: Essays on the cultural technologies of space. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of
sex. New York, NY: Routledge.
Butler, J. (2004). Performative acts and gender constitution: An
essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. In H. Bial (Ed.),
The performance studies reader (pp. 154-166). Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Corbridge, J. N., & Weber, W. A. (1998). A Rocky Mountain
lichen primer. Denver: University of Colorado Press.
Derrida, J. (1974). Of grammatology (G. Spivak, Trans.).
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Grosz, E. (2004). The nick of time: Politics, evolution, and the
untimely. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Author Biography
Bryanne Young is a PhD Candidate at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill working at the intersection of performance
studies, feminist theory, and critical cultural studies. Her work
appears in Canadian Theatre Review, Mosaic: a Journal for the
Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, and Liminalities: a Journal
for Performance Studies.

Downloaded from csc.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA IRVINE on July 10, 2016