The Performance of Improvisation: Traffic Practice and the Production of Space

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss an ethnographic study of traffic in terms of the production of space. Traffic participation, negotiation and collaboration are viewed from a performative perspective in this study. That is, traffic involves multiple ways of creating differences between continuity and interruptions, making order in mundane spaces through a continuous and simultaneous struggle involving non-verbal, non-human, human, textual and other discursive means. Performance not only involves a process of the relational construction of identity; the term is widened to include all sorts of practices that are involved in the human project of creating places and producing spaces in conditions that can be defined as negotiations. Identity is one important aspect in this relational interaction. Empirical findings also suggest, however, that it might also be important to look further into a process called presentational presence. The performance of a presentational presence is here seen as one aspect of practice through which negotiations among traffic participants are constructed in relational ways. Performance in traffic can thus not be reduced to a mimetic practice of temporarily involved actors. Producing spaces and creating places is viewed as an existential project involving the negotiation of order. I argue that there are specific elements in the act of performance by way of presentation that hold a seed to perpetual change at the same time as they reproduce multiple and simultaneous order. This argument will be supported by examples from studies of nonverbal communication in traffic.2 Order is here represented by knowledge of scriptlike maps of pre-given and preconceived, normative and non-normative, clues on how to act in specific situations. Therefore the production of new acts, and thus a different order in traffic is dependent on the knowledge structures in which they take place. It is argued that multiple knowledge structures are used as the starting point for improvisation and negotiations. Practice in general could be said to be a continuously ongoing struggle for change in preconceived order. This continuous and simultaneous struggle can be defined as an on-going-ness. Thus, it is not any stable and given order that makes traffic work. Instead, traffic emerges out of certain practices that aim at reproducing, and at the same time changing an order, ultimately producing more or less safe and effective spaces. Rules represent such knowledge structure that aims at order and which traffic participants use as association for practice and meaning. Knowledge structures, order, improvisation and negotiation are thus intertwined and inseparable. Without order there would be no improvisation, and without improvisation, order would be difficult to define at all.