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)