4.8. Performativity

For the full version and the original text go to Knowledge Transfer Economies by Jara Rocha.

The key to understanding that knowledge is generated “on the go”, in progress, lies in accepting the process-based nature of the constitutive phenomenon of all the agents involved in the process. In identity terms, constitutive processes are the core aspect of performativity: a web of performativity develops around the identity constitutions of the agents involved. Nonetheless, this is all pointless unless there is a detailed understanding of the mechanisms and tools for negotiating these constitutive processes, and their scales of existence/affectation. So then: how do agents perform their transfers? how can this flow be perceived, up close and from afar? And, at the zoom-out scale: what transfer intersections take place, and how are the identity forms of different agents reconstituted?

In regard to the reconstitution of identity, or better still, in regard to the ongoing constitution of identity (the central aspect of performativity), there is no point in imagining clean, conscious flows. We should however consider the degrees to which the intersections are distorted, and the extent and power of promiscuous practices in an economy of based on thinking while doing in/with others.

This brings up the issue of ethics in relation to the economy of “on the go” or performative transfer: how do agents adhere to compliance with a set of gestures that are explicitly or implicitly (ideologically or hegemonically) imposed? Or how are they swept along by their path-dependence in their own thinking-learning performativity? Or, from the other perspective: how do they perpetrate disruptions or turns in this path by means of gestures that are not contemplated, inappropriate, or non-appropriable? How can we then account for compliance with and/or performative perpetration in a processual economy? What is the direction of these gestures in regard to the set of epistemic zones? Do agents voluntarily place themselves in centripetal or centrifugal channels, which move them towards the centre of pre-established ideas, or towards the margins of that which is understood?

And does performative ALWAYS mean processual? Is there room for stillness, or for “negative performativity”? Does it make sense to promote this in certain cases, in a quest for a kind of crystallisation of the system? Is this sustainable? On a scale of intelligibility of minimum objectives, is the non-transfer of new knowledge useful? Would it lead to a state of “continuing to know what we already know”?

At a certain point in the process, is there room for retroactive gestures? What about proactive gestures?