“Sixth Avenue is now a memory”: Regimes of spatial inscription and the performative limits of the official city-text

Much has been written in recent years on the politics of place naming, but the subject nevertheless remains marginalized within the field of political geography. In the current study, I examine street naming as a performative practice that produces a contested space of political utterances. The notion of the performative speech act, first espoused by philosopher J. L. Austin, has influenced a range of geographical scholarship, largely through an engagement with the writings of feminist theorist Judith Butler. Extending the work of Butler and others, I contend that Austin's account of performative speech acts limits our understanding of the social struggles over what constitutes a legitimate performative action by naturalizing the authority of social convention. The case of renaming Sixth Avenue as the Avenue of the Americas in post-war New York is considered to illustrate the performative limits of sovereign authority over regimes of spatial inscription as well as the use of street naming as an instrument of foreign policy. I conclude that the legitimacy of a performative act depends, in large part, upon the performances and counter-performances that constitute the “perlocutionary field” of socio-spatial action.