Raoul Eshelman - 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

Raoul Eshelman, Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism. The Davies Group Publishers, 2008.
chapter 1


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.

“(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’.” — Mark Leiderman

  “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

The new notion of performativity serves neither to foreground nor contextualize the subject, but rather to preserve it: the subject is presented (or presents itself) as a holistic, irreducible unit that makes a binding impression on a reader or observer.
-Eshelmen, “Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism”

As a piece of writing, I don’t find Eshelman’s “Performatism” to be very convincing at all. It seems as if Eshelman essentially establishes post-postmodernism by fiat, from which two other main assumptions follow: 1) that postmodern thinking, basically defined as thinkers in the latter half of the twentieth century but prior to, like, 1997 or something, are wrong, or that we no longer think like them, and 2) that postmodern is purely pessimism and nihilism. Therefore, the answer to postmodernism, performatism, must be diametrically opposed to postmodern thinking: optimistic and defined by belief. The logical structure of that argument just bothers me, and in addition to that I find almost none of Eshelman’s readings of films or literature or art to be convincing at all, either in those places where he attempts to articulate the obsolescence of postmodern art, or more often in those places where he tries to describe how his selected artworks are performatist. This could just be because American Beauty seems like a profoundly stupid movie in every way to me, so it’s hard for me to accept it as a paradigm of the new direction in thought.
Particularly egregious in this essay are those moments when he tries to outline a performatist politics, as are his arguments about the reassertion of the phallus. His notion about performatist politics seems to boil down to a replacement of politics with the achievement of personal transcendence and wholesome living. He correctly points out that because of the size and complexity of the most dire political problems we’re faced with (environmental problems, for example, cannot be adequately addressed by a politics of resistance and emancipation, really, and the contemporary economic world creates problems whose solutions very likely cannot resemble the sort of mass revolutionary politics nor the critical acts of localized resistance that early and late modernism tended to envision), new ideas of the political are needed. But the solution offered by performatism borders on the solipsistic: “If we do not become the sort of people–more reflective in our demands, more modest in our needs, more attentive in our actions–who could inhabit a responsible economy, such an economy will not come to us by law or government. Because it will not come without law and government, changing ourselves is all the more important” (6). Essentially, we are invited to performatively change ourselves to good people who believe in love (or just believe in things more generally) which will create a new space that through a kind of osmosis of goodness will draw out a new government and economy. I’m sorry, but this is stupid. His argument about the re-invigorated phallus seems likewise to be incredibly problematic. If he were just arguing for a way that the phallus can now be understood as not necessarily oppressive or dominant, that would be one thing (not unproblematic, but maybe less so, at least), but here he seems to base his sort of call for this reinvigoration on that really simple and old and wrongheaded classic division of masculine/active and feminine/passive, and when that’s your starting point, calling for the reassertive (but friendly! I promise!) phallus as a basis for the new performatist subject doesn’t get the benefit of doubt.
Backing away from those complaints, though, there is something here, in Eshelman’s idea of performatism. The basic idea behind a turn away from the endless ontological undermining of thought (and language and the subject and what-have-you) that characterized the 20th century does seem to bear a certain resonance in the present. For it to happen just as a naive and stupid rejection of all that critical work would, I believe, be likely to lead to the negative side of this possibiliity, and Eshelman’s insistence on treating all his examples as representative of a new transcendent hope for our present seems to lead precisely to those problems (see, as I just mentioned, his solipsistic politics). But the careful deployment of thought toward constructively building new ideas and concepts, of politics toward concrete localized actions of community-building, etc., these do seem to be aspects, and useful aspects, of the present. Within that matrix, a theory of performatism that begins with the holistic treatment of subjects and ideas as non-reducible could potentially carry some weight.
- Marcus Oralis

INTERVIEW WITH RAOUL ESHELMAN, GERMAN THINKER, BY M K HARIKUMAR

Performatist works take
authoriality to an extreme -
says Prof. Dr. Raoul Eshelman

1] In performance level, how performatism differs from magical realism and fantasy

Performatism is about the possibility of experiencing transcendence aesthetically. It does not necessarily involve magical or fantastic themes. When it does, however, these themes are presented using the specific device I call double framing. This works by connecting the total logic of the work (the outer frame) with scenes within the work (inner frames) in such a way that we cannot help but believe something. A classic example is the movie American Beauty. In the outer frame, the dead hero, Lester Burnham, flies over his home town and says that his trivial life is beautiful. He also says that when we, too, are dead, we will come to share his point of view. His unbelievable statement about the beauty of life is however confirmed in several scenes or inner frames in the movie (most notably in the one with the famous plastic bag dancing in the wind). In the end, we have no choice but to believe the hero. The movie has a self-contained logic that we must either accept or reject as a whole.
Traditional works of fantasy and magical realism work differently. These works have a single instead of a double frame. They simply present us with unbelievable things that can easily dismiss as purely imaginary.
Magical realism is a genre typical of postmodernism. It involves overlapping levels of reality that leave us undecided about what is real and what is not. A work like One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez works in this way. At the end of the novel we don’t know what to believe and what not to believe. A performatist work, by contrast, forces us to believe in something, to take a specific attitude of belief in spite of our skepticism.
2] How do you relate the total performance of a [fictional] world
to the reality of life?
A performatist work imposes itself as a whole on the reader or viewer. Its aim is to affect that person in a fundamental, total way. However, because the performatist work does this using force, it also provokes resistance on the part of the recipient. The performatist work intervenes in the reality of a person’s life. However, it has an ambivalent effect because that person is aware that something is being imposed on him or her. The performatist work can inspire, but also provoke resistance because it challenges us to believe. In this regard it is similar to the challenge posed to us by religious belief. The difference is that unlike religion, no binding social obligations are attached to performatist art. Our attitude of belief is an aesthetic, and not a practical, experience. This aesthetic experience can nonetheless still affect our real lives in positive ways.
3] Is life itself like performatism, and if so, why?
When the artistic devices used in performatism come to dominate art and culture almost entirely, then life itself will seem to be like performatism. This is an illusion that occurs in every epoch, though.
The performatist view of life is what philosophers call constructivist. It suggests that we understand reality by creating constructs that for a time may seem to overlap with that reality. In truth, our present constructs can always be replaced by future ones. However, this is not easy to do. The constructs that make up performatism are slowly replacing the ones that make up postmodernism. This process may take many years, and even decades. 
4]How much should a writer/artist deviate from old stereotyped repetitions?
The idea that a radical break with tradition is a virtue in itself is typical of modernism. Modernism took innovation to the most radical extremes, but also exhausted the formal possibilities for creating new styles.
Postmodernism sees innovation ironically, as a mere variant of something old. It tries to confuse the old and the new as much as possible, to make the difference between them undecidable.
Performatism is like postmodernism in the sense that it does not try to create works of art that pretend to be completely new and original. This is why performatism is not a new style. Its innovation consists in making us assume a posture of belief within a double frame.
5} In perfomatism what is the role of the reader or viewer?
Because performatism is imposed on the reader/viewer, it acts upon him or her totally. The reader/viewer has no choice but to accept the work as a whole. However, he or she will as a rule still resist the work’s force. The performatist work motivates the reader/viewer to either believe or not to believe. He or she can either reject or accept the work as a whole. Performatism tries to make the reader take a positive attitude towards wholes of whatever kind. 
.6} In this contemporary technological world, can a cultural product be an authorless thing, without past or future?
In ideal terms, yes. Performatist works of art and literature seek to force themselves on us as wholes and make us believe them. Ideally, we would be affected by the work’s performance and by nothing else. In the real world this can happen only for a very short time. All cultural products eventually become historical. They link up with the past and provide guidance for the future. Their authors appear as the personified agents of history and may even become more important to us than the works themselves.
7] In the present philosophy of literature, does memory have any value?
In performatism memory has a value if it refers back to an originary state that we must believe in. The psychoanalyst C.G. Jung’s theory of archetypes is similar to the performatist attitude towards memory. Jung thinks that we all share a common consciousness of archetypes that each person develops in his or her own way. A performatist work might force us to “recall” and believe in a certain archetype or originary situation. In The Life of Pi, for example, the hero recalls an originary situation, in this case a shipwreck in which he alone survived.
Postmodernism also emphasizes memory, but it treats it ironically, as something that never gets what it seeks to recall from the past. For postmodernism, there is always an unbridgeable gap between the way things were in the past and the way we remember them now. In remembering, we fall into a nostalgia that make it impossible to ever recover the past completely; past and present become hopelessly confused.
8] you said that metaphysical orientation is no longer on death and its proxies, but on fictionally framed states of transcendence… what is the essence of this transcendence or what is the aim of transcendence?
For performatism, transcendence has no particular essence or aim that we could establish beforehand. Or, to put this another way, its essence or aim is aesthetic and not religious. Performatist works allow us to become aware of and/or feel the possibility of transcendence within a work of art or literature. The actual content of this feeling of transcendence can range from an intense, almost religious feeling to a strongly felt experience of change. Performatism may make us feel as if we had a religious experience, but it is not the same as religion or a substitute for religion, because our belief is limited to the artistic performance.
9] Is the author returning?
The author isn’t returning, but authoriality is. The author in humanist thinking is a stable, reliable source of meaning to which we turn to understand a work of narrative fiction. Authoriality is a startling, discomforting effect within the fictional work. It arises when we are confronted by a narrator who imposes himself on us, who seems to know everything, who gives us little or no choice as to how to interpret the story. Performatist works take authoriality to an extreme. They can do this in two ways. They can confront us with first-person narrators who are omniscient or who are always right, or they can present us with simple or stupid characters who have authorial powers, i.e., turn out to be right in the end. Authoriality does not necessarily restore the feeling that there is a stable, reliable author behind the work. Rather, we have the feeling of being manipulated, of having rightness forced on us artificially by an author who is hidden and unknowable. The author (like a god) remains unknowable and may even appear threatening to us.
10]what do you mean by desexualisation in literature?
Postmodern literature and culture emphasize boundary transgression. Applied to sex, this means that sexual excess (obscenity) as well as mixing different kinds of sexual orientation (gender) have the most cultural significance. Performatist works of fiction emphasize the opposite. They place frames around people (of whatever sexual orientation) that tend to restrict their sexuality in some way. Such characters in turn tend to act in a chaste, rather than a promiscuous, way. This kind of chastity has a formal, rather than a moral quality, though. It is the result of a single performance within a double frame and not of following a universal moral code.
11] Are signs, semiotics outdated?
No. But we need to experience signs in terms of their unity with things. Performatism forces us to do this through double framing. The inner frame creates a unity between a thing and a sign. The outer frame confirms this unity again on a higher level. The work in effect becomes a gigantic sign which we must believe in. Our belief however is aesthetic and not practical; it is restricted to the work itself.
12] Is literature a discovery of one man?
If by this is meant that literary creation is first and foremost an individual act, I do not entirely agree. Individual imagination is of the greatest importance to make a work of literature successful and appealing. But individual creation is never entirely original or unique. Even the most brilliant artists and writers share devices, ideas, and styles with others. Concepts like “romanticism,” “postmodernism,” or “performatism” are needed to describe these shared qualities and make sense of them as a whole.
13] You says that language is a massive instrument to service the subject. Is the chain of signifiers an irrelevant distraction?
For performatism, discourse and chains of signifiers are outside distractions that must be shut out as much as possible. Only by cutting itself off from the flow of outside signs can the subject attain a feeling of wholeness and oneness. The problem is that a whole person largely cut off from signs cannot communicate well. Performatist plots are often centered around this paradox. In such a case, the performance would involve communicating successfully with someone else using as few signs and as little discourse as possible. In Life of Pi, for example, the hero invents his own signs to communicate with the tiger to keep from being eaten. At the same time, he also invents the beautiful story about inventing signs for the tiger. His beautiful story is almost certainly not true, but because he experienced these things entirely alone, we have no way of discrediting him completely. Performatism seems to say the attitude of believing is more important than the truth content of discourse itself.
14] In [performatist] writing, is there any relevance to subjectivity?
Performatist writing tries to create a free space in which subjectivity can develop. Because we are saturated with outside influences (discourse, signs etc.) this is very difficult. The subject is always dependent on something else that diminishes its subjectivity and tears it apart. A whole subject is however completely isolated. Performatism tries to create minimal conditions under which subjectivity could develop. However this is very difficult and not always assured of success.

 
R.E. (b. 1956) is presently Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and Director of the East European Honours Programme there. He received his Ph.D. in Slavic Literature from the University of Konstanz in 1988 and his Habilitation from the University of Hamburg in 1995. His most recent book is Performatism,
- mkharikumar.com/interview-with-raoul-eshelman-german-thinker/

Raoul Eshelman: Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism