ABSTRACT

This chapter draws performativity theory that associated with economic analysis to offer a different account of property and its spaces. It re-examines John Norden's The Surveyor's Dialogue as a means of thinking performatively about the modern survey, property, and space. For Norden, the goal of the process is to clarify what belongs to the Lord, and what belongs to the tenants which, when truly found, Norden declares, will preserve amity between the tenants and the Lord. Eschewing appeals to property's ontological reality, it redirects us to an exploration of how property has been more-or-less successfully performed into being, through complex, sustained, citational, and reiterative practices and enrolments, of which the survey is but one manifestation. It also invites people to trace the ways space is produced through such practices, not simply as a disinterested outcome of them, but as an essential performance inherent to them.