Landscapes of Performance: Stalking as Choreography

Abstract

Recent advances in nonrepresentational theory (NRT) encourage us to think of landscape as something which is actualised by, in, and through the performativities and affectivities of seeing. While NRT certainly moves us from a static to a more dynamic account of landscape, and along the way introduces an innovative, theoretical vocabulary for talking about and experiencing landscape, it may inhibit more than (or as much as) it facilitates understanding. In this paper, NRT's contribution to the geographical canon will be critically interrogated; in particular, NRT's focus on performance, and its preference for practices and materiality over imagery and the symbolic, will be questioned. This provides the important groundwork for considering the broader utility of NRT, most especially its resonance with the concerns of cultural criminology and its burgeoning interest in ‘criminologies of space’. Using the phenomenon of stalking as an exemplar of a performative practice in late modernity, the paper sets out an understanding of landscape as an intersection of representations, discourses, sensibilities, and material practices. In this way it offers a synthesising, hybridised account of landscape which draws on Foster's notion of choreography to better capture the interrelationalities of the performativity of lived experience(s) and the structuring relations of sociocultural norms, values, and relations of power. Making use of a number of data sources, which include interview material, Hollywood films, and online discussion boards, the paper examines stalking as a choreographic and choreographed process which, amongst other things, engenders a world of imaginary and transgressive landscapes.