Performatism

What is Performatism?

Performatism was a term coined by German-American Slavist Raoul Eshelman in 2000 and refers to one concept of post-postmodernism. It attempts to show that works in a new epoch are constructed to bring about a unified, aesthetically mediated experience of transcendence.

Performatism does this by creating 'closed works of art that force viewers to identify simple, opaque characters and experience beauty, love, belief and transcendence under artificial conditions.'

Eshelman defines performatism as:

"An epoch in which a unified concept of sign and strategies of closure have begun to compete directly with - and displace - the split concept of sign and the strategies of boundary transgression typical of postmodernism."

He applied this model to literature, film, architecture, philosophy and art and suggests four features of performatism:

1. Semiotic mode of performatism requires things to be integrated into the concept of sign.
2. Aesthetic device to performatism is double framing - the fit between the outer frame (work itself) and the inner frame (an ostensive scene).
3. Human performative characters consolidate their position by appearing opaque to the world around them.
4. Theist mode - time and space are framed so that subjects have a chance to orient themselves around them and transcend in some way.

My understanding of the concept is that it moves on from the ideas of post-modernism - which sees 'art' as undermined by narrative or visual devices to create uncertainty about the status of the work and how it is received. Instead, performatism looks at 'art' (in the literal sense as well as buildings, film, literature)from the outside and considers the wider context of its form and position.

Derrida suggests that discussion of 'intrinsic aesthetic value depends on that value being set off from the extraneous context around it.' By this, I think the idea is that the text itself and the wider context come together to determine a response without having pre-determined 'idea' in mind.

Key theorists:

Raoul Eshelman
Jacques Derrida


Reading list:

Derrida: "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (1966)
Eshelman: "Performatism, Or The End of Postmodernism" (2008)
Gans: "Signs of Paradox. Irony, Resentment and Other Mimetic Structures" (1997)
Hutcheon: "A poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction" (1988)
Culler: "On Deconstruction - Theory and Criticism after Structuralism" (1982)
Epstein: "Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture" in Slavic Literature, Culture and Society; Vol. 3 (1999)

I still don’t know what ‘postmodernism’ is

This weeks’ reading – ‘Postmodernism and The Other Side’ by Dick Hebdige – was tough going. Again, I found myself taking relatively few points away from pages and pages of text laced with long words and even longer sentences. And my conclusion – I still don’t really understand ‘postmodernism’.

But that’s ok because neither does Hebdige – and he wrote the thing! What I did manage to siphon from the reading was that the term ‘postmodernism’ is problematic because it is ‘stretched across disciplines.’ People use it to refer to so many aspects of life such as describing the decor of a room, the design of a building or a TV commercial – so it seems very difficult to pin down exactly what it means.

Hebdige questions ‘periodisation’, saying that ‘to talk of ‘post’ is to talk of the past’, and so where exactly ‘postmodernism’ fits in our history is another puzzling debate. In our struggle to work out ‘postmodernism’, it appears we will probably never crack it because ‘modernism’ itself is undefined so how are we supposed to decipher the ‘post’ if we can’t even suss out the ‘modern?’

Three negotiations are highlighted by Hebdige in terms of distinguishing ‘postmodernism’:

• Against Totalisation
• Against Teleology
• Against Utopia
(I really don’t understand the words – they just sound important!)

My final observations of the reading lie in Marxism. It appears that Hebdige refers to many early Marxist thoughts and ideas and his own ideas on ‘postmodernism’ seem to be a continuation of some Marxist lines.

I find myself agreeing with Hebdige (on the points I understood anyway) because my lack of understanding ‘postmodernism’ clearly shows it’s such an ambiguous term and one that is hard to pin down to a simple thought. And I believe that until we can define ‘modernism’ we are unable to work out what ‘postmodernism’ is, who or what it refers to, and when exactly, in time, it took place.

Useful/interesting quotes:

A Marxism of whatever kind could never move back from or go beyond ‘modernity’ in the very terms in which it is defined...

Hegemony is a precarious, ‘moving equilibrium’ (Gramsci) achieved through the orchestration of conflicting and competing forces by more or less unstable, more or less temporary alliances of class fractions.

It becomes more and more difficult...to specify exactly what it is that ‘postmodernism’ is supposed to refer to as the term gets stretched in all directions...