This word causes most people the most problems.

For Jo Carruthers and Angela Piccini this is acute. They are the University of Bristol's RCUK Fellows in Performativity, Place, Space. They are also the principal investigators for the Network.

Within the Network itself various uses of 'performativity' are in play. While we're not interested in producing a totalising definition, there is a need for us individually to be precise.

An obvious reference point is Judith Butler. For her the gendered body 'has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality’ (1999: 173; 1993). There is no a priori, originary 'meaning' of gender. Butler's performative performativity draws on J L Austin's speech act theory. With 'I do' Austin sought to develop his concerns with speech acts as 'performative utterances'. That is, 'I do' does not describe the doing, but is the doing of the Western marriage ceremony. Austin's performatives indicate 'that the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action' (2004: 6). It links the linguistic with acting upon and in the world: language is inextricably bound up with, rather than merely a by-product of, or even preceding, the material relations of existence.

Austin's performatives and the (im)possiblity of 'communication' were taken up and playfully handled by Derrida in Limited Inc (1988). Key to the future resonance of the term was Derrida's argument with Austin (and more specifically, with his successor, John Searle) that despite the freeing up of speech presented by the performative - the way in which 'it does not describe something that exists outside of language and prior to it', the way in which 'it produces or transforms a situation' (Derrida 1988: 13) - what came to be known as Speech Act Theory remained bound up with the notion of an a priori context, the intention of the speaker. Derrida's shift to focus on all utterances transformed Austin's performatives from linguistic theory into an understanding of the workings of 'signature, event, context'.

We find performativity elsewhere, too. A list of informants might include Heidegger's techne; Bourdieu's Language as Symbolic Power; Bergson's surfaces; De Certeau's walks; Deleuze's repetition and difference; Badiou's Being and Event; Tim Ingold's lines; current writings on affect (Bennett, Connolly, Kosofsky Sedgewick, and so on).

For some of us, performativity is not solely about human bodies or language. Performativity is a way of considering material event. Here, we might consider Tim Ingold's critique of the growing use of 'materiality' across the arts and humanities. Christopher Whitmore writes this. For Ingold's and others' most recent discussions, see the current issue of Archaeological Dialogues.

Materiality's imprecision rests in the deceptively simply question: what is not material? If, instead, we are to focus on the practical emergence of specific relationships between clay and hand and being then we have to consider the processes by which objects come into existence as thing-events. As Bruno Latour has written, objects are ‘more interesting, variegated, uncertain, complicated, far reaching, heterogeneous, risky, historical, local, material and networky than the pathetic version offered for too long by philosophers (2005: 11). We might also consider John Law and Vicky Singleton's ‘mutable mobiles’: ‘we can’t understand objects unless we also think of them as sets of present dynamics generated in, and generative of, realities that are necessarily absent’ (2003: 8).

Performativity is neither performance nor artificiality (eg, Flynn, 2002: 50). It is not pretending. It is a making do and making with, a dynamic relationship among human and non-human bodies. Materials exist in the world, yet the condition of existence is one of constant transformation, giving only the appearance of relative stability. As Latour writes, things ‘bind all of us in ways that map out … public space[s]’ (2005: 5).

Performativity resonates within each of our disciplinary areas to greater or lesser extents. Performativity is good to think. For some it is useful in its rhetorical precision. For others, it works as shorthand for agency, dynamism, activity, fluidity, immanence, the affective aspects of material culture. Through our work we try to keep this open as it is through our work that we produce it.