62 Art for me is a form of nourishment. I need the land, I need it. I want to understand that state and that energy that I have in me that I also feel in the plants and in the land. The energy in life that is running through, flowing through the landscape. That intangible thing that is here and gone. (Goldsworthy in Riedelsheimer 2004) How might the performance community conceive of and face the current ecological crisis? Are we to simply endorse ‘Al Gore’s fantasy of The World Formerly Known as The Harmonious Universe, thrown out of its proper balance by mankind, the dominator and exploiter, and to be restored by man, its steward’ (Herzogenrath 2008: 2–3)? Or might we consider continuing to develop theories and practices of performance that are informed by an understanding of participation that does not situate agency or cause solely within human bodies? This paper employs an immanentist ontology, particularly the one proposed by Gilles Deleuze and his collaborator Félix Guattari, for the purposes of such a redistributive project: one that can reveal the limited ecological utility and ontological consistency of terms such as ‘environment’ and ‘nature’, but also notions of ‘harm’ and the universalizing ‘we’. Immanentist thought will be shown to provide a means of understanding how contemporary modes of environmental conceptualization and regulation are fueled by systems of representation that do violence to the production of difference, whilst simultaneously perpetuating these systems’ lethal results. Accordingly, a corollary notion of bodies that divests itself of binarist structurations of the ‘human’ and the ‘non- human’ can more readily apprehend potentials for interaction and participation both within and between the various bodies (human and otherwise) that comprise what is commonly called the ‘biosphere’. Here, I will also investigate how performance, as a major mode of interaction between and contributor to the ongoing processual constitution of bodies, marks a conceptual terrain and series of practices that are particularly available to participation. According to immanentist approaches, performance is a non-representational dynamic; that is, it is understood in much the same way as the thinking around the ‘environment’ noted above. For his part, Deleuze’s writing demonstrates a commitment to performative tropes and modes of thinking that allow him to move beyond what he perceives to be a traditional philosophical reliance on mimesis, privileging instead ‘affect’ and ‘becoming’ as key performative processes. 1 This re-conceptualization of both the ‘environment’ and ‘performance’ will be informed by an immanentist reconsideration of participation. Particularly useful for this discussion is Deleuze’s 1969 text Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza in which he demonstrates how Spinoza’s metaphysics reverses Platonic notions of causation by relocating participation within the perspective of the participated itself. The pursuit of these lines of inquiry set the context for my proposal of the notion of geoperformativity, or the performative unfolding Geoperformativity Immanence, performance and the earth DAVID FANC Performance Research 16(4), pp.62-72 © Taylor & Francis Ltd 2011 DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2011.606051 1 See, for example, Boundas and Olkowski (1994); or Puchner (2002).