The Exteriorization of Knowledge: Reporting on Knowing as a Distributed Practice.

Abstract

In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard observes that “technological transformations can be expected to have a considerable impact on knowledge,” including “a thorough exteriorization of knowledge with respect to the ‘knower’ at whatever point he or she may occupy in the knowledge process.” Lyotard’s observation anticipates new materialist elaborations on the entanglement of matter and meaning in practices of knowing, particularly Karen Barad’s understanding of knowing as a distributed practice that includes the larger material arrangement. Using Mark Hansen’s media archaeological insights into the role of technology in “expansions of the sensible” beyond the human sensorium, I show how the shift towards the operationality of the system’s performance (its performativity) with regard to the legitimization of knowledge, as observed by Lyotard, and the shift towards performative alternatives to representationalism theorized by Barad are two different aspects of what Jon McKenzie describes as “the becoming performative of knowledge itself.”