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Raoul
Eshelman,
Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism
There is a widespread
feeling that postmodernism is on its way out. However, up to
now there has been no attempt to define what the epoch after
it would look like. Performatism, or the End of
Postmodernism is the first book to offer a systematic
theory of culture after postmodernism. The book maintains
that we have entered a new, monist epoch in which
aesthetically imposed belief replaces endless irony as the
dominant force in culture. This new cultural dominant, which
the author calls performatism, works by artificially “framing” readers
or viewers in such a way that they have no choice but to
accept the external givens of a work and identify with the
characters within it. In short, they are forcibly made to
believe—if only within an particular aesthetic context.
This basic procedure can be shown to operate not only in
narrative genres like film and literature, but also in
visual ones like art and architecture. This new aesthetic is
documented in well-known films and novels such as
American Beauty, The Celebration, Life of Pi,
Middlesex, and The God of Small Things as
well as in the work of major architects and artists such as
Sir Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Andreas Gursky, Neo Rauch,
and Vanessa Beecroft.
Table of
Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism (American
Beauty)
Chapter Two: Performatism in Literature
Chapter Three: Performatism in the Movies
Chapter Four: Performatism in Architecture
Chapter Five: Performatism in Theory: The New Monism
Chapter Six: Performatism in Art
Index
Reviews
“(Professor) Eshelman, in his
attempt to define an alternative to postmodernism as
aesthetic and philosophical paradigm, manages to deliver his
theoretical vision without mandatory jargon, lucidly and
straightforwardly, yet without oversimplification… Through
the concise, yet insightful analysis of literature, film,
architecture, theory, and visual art, Professor Eshelman
develops a concept of a new monism that overcomes the
postmodernist split within the act of signification by
making ‘viewers or readers believe rather than
convince them with cognitive arguments’.”
Professor Mark Leiderman
University of Colorado
"The first postmodernist may
well have been Marcel Duchamp, the master of “infinite
regress” (David Joselit’s phrase) whose ironic postures—such
as letting three threads fall to the ground from one meter
high in order to send traditional notions of scientific
mensuration, symmetrical gender and ordered semiotic
exchange packing—resolutely preclude identification. Duchamp—and
post-Duchampian postmodernism—insisted that signs such as
his dropped threads are nothing but momentary fixations of a
continuously regressing chain of signifiers whose constant
shifting precludes reliable orientation. In his book
Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism —a carefully
organized, admirably sustained interdisciplinary study that
analytically scans a large number of examples drawn from
literature, film, architecture, art and philosophy—the
German Slavist and Comparatist Raoul Eshelman not only
confirms that the (by now somewhat tired) postmodern irony
... may well be a thing of the past, he is also proposing
that something like post-postmodernism—an arguably coherent,
historical condition that Eshelman terms monism or
performatism—has already come to replace it. Given the
post-historical conceits of postmodernism, such confidence
in history’s continuation may come as a surprise, especially
since the author argues his point largely to the exclusion
of what passes for real events.
Eshelman—steeped in the
tradition of cultural semiotics practiced by the Soviet
Tartu school, but equally conversant with Derridean
deconstruction and post-feminist theory—convincingly reasons
that it would make little sense to declare the end of
postmodernism without having some sense of what its
alternative might look like. This alternative (monism) is a
mode of cultural production that may remind readers of the
eighteenth century rather more than the twentieth, even
though it resolutely abandons the claims to transcendence
that characterize eighteenth-century rationalist monism.
In a panoramic sweep of
analyses that touch on anything from late twentieth-century
Indian novels to architecture in Berlin to Russian film,
Eshelman demonstrates that the descriptive and analytical
instruments of postmodernism no longer suffice to describe a
globalized contemporary culture that has, according to the
author, opted out of post-histoire quite literally by a leap
of faith. Eshelman, who conceives the transition from
postmodernism to monism neither simply as Foucaultian
rupture nor as a dialectical shift under the sign of
progress, proposes that in performatist works of art—which
are neither “open” in the orthodox modernist sense nor
completely “closed”—a subject liberated at least tentatively
from the postmodern “play of the signifier” may opt out of
postmodernism’s infinite regress if only he or she can
muster the faith to do so. Faith—our willingness, in a film,
a book, or a building to accept a dominant subject position
for the sheer power with which it imposes itself upon us,
regardless of how arbitrary or absurd we may find it—is very
much at the center of Eshelman’s theory.
Eshelman’s global
monism—described in admirably casual yet unfailingly precise
prose that takes things in quite literally in its stride—is
remarkably well adapted to a world mired in the Manichean
struggle between (mono-) theism and pluralist, secular
liberalism. Initially skeptical, this reviewer soon found
himself to be in agreement with many of Eshelman’s
surprisingly seamless applications of his theory....
Eshelman’s study is highly recommended, not only for those
who are tired of postmodernism, but also and especially for
those who harbor hope that it may still have life in it—and
of course for those who wonder what post-post postmodernism
might look like."
Sven Spieker (University of
California, Santa Barbara)
Author
Raoul Eshelman is a German-American Slavist who has written
extensively on problems of literary history and
postmodernism. He received his Ph.D. in Slavic literature
from Konstanz University (1988) and his Habilitation
from the University of Hamburg (1995). His most recent book
is Early Soviet Postmodernism (1997). He is presently
Coordinator of the East European Studies Honors Program for
Slavics at the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich.
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