by Raoul Eshelman, Anthropoetics 6, no. 2 (Fall 2000 / Winter 2001)
Excerpt:
For the subject, postmodernism presents a mighty, seemingly inescapable trap.(1) Any attempt it makes to find itself through a search for meaning is bound to go awry, for every sign promising some sort of originary knowledge is embedded in further contexts whose explication requires the setting of even more signs. Attempting to find itself through meaning, the subject drowns in a flood of ever expanding cross-references. Yet even if the subject clings to form it fares no better. For postmodernism sees in form not an antidote to meaning, but rather a trace leading back to already existing, semantically loaded contexts. Every fixation of meaning is dispersed through cross-connected forms; every use of form links up with already existing meanings; every approach to an origin leads back to an alien sign. Searching for itself, the subject quickly ends where it began: in the endlessly expanding field of the postmodern.
The way out of postmodernism does therefore not lead through the intensified search for meaning, through the introduction of new, surprising forms or through the return to an authentic origin. Instead, it must take place through a mechanism completely impervious to postmodernism’s modes of dispersal, deconstruction and proliferation. This mechanism, which has been making itself felt with increasing strength in the cultural events of the last few years, can be best understood using the notion of performance. Performance in itself is, of course, not a phenomenon new or unknown. In Austin’s speech-act theory it refers to a language act that does what it promises (“I now pronounce you man and wife”). In the sense of an artistic event in the modernist avant-garde, a performance foregrounds or “makes strange” the border between life and art; in the happenings and performance art of postmodernism it integrates the human body or subject into an artistic context. The concept of performance I am suggesting here is, however, a different one. 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. This holistic incarnation of the subject can, however, only succeed when the subject does not offer a semantically differentiated surface that can be absorbed and dispersed in the surrounding context. For this reason the new subject always appears to the observer as reduced and “solid,” as single- or simple-minded and in a certain sense identical with the things it stands for. This closed, simple whole acquires a potency that can almost only be defined in theological terms. For with it is created a refuge in which all those things are brought together that postmodernism and poststructuralism thought definitively dissolved: the telos, the author, belief, love, dogma and much, much more.
The first models of a reduced, holistic subject seem not to have been formulated by writers or artists, but rather by literary critics reacting with antitheoretical or minimalist arguments to poststructuralism. Thus Knapp and Michaels, in their groundbreaking article “Against Theory” (Mitchell 1985, orig. 1982), call for the unity or “fundamental inseparability” (1985, 12) of the three basic conditions of interpretation: authorial intention, text, and reader. To this unity they oppose “theory.” According to Knapp and Michaels, theory privileges the one or the other part of the whole interpretation process while ignoring or playing down the others (the hermeneutical critic plays up authorial intention, the deconstructivist the sign, the relativist the reader, and so on; compare the discussion in Mitchell 1985, 13-24). In Knapp and Michaels’ view “theory” does not refine or improve interpretative practice, but rather represents an unacceptable attempt to take a position outside of it: “[Theory] is the name for all the ways people have tried to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without. Our thesis has been that no one can reach a position outside practice, that theorists should stop trying, and that the theoretical enterprise should therefore come to an end” (1985, 30). This insistence on the absolute unity of author, sign, and reader has indirect, but nonetheless far-reaching consequences for recreating the subject. Interpretation no longer takes place through floating, proliferating semiotic acts continually eluding their progenitors, but rather through the competition between individual, holistic statements made by discrete subjects. The subject expresses itself in holistic performances in which it believes; other, competing subjects question these acts of belief (cf. Mitchell 1985, 28). Antitheoretical subjects are opaque (they have no set qualities), but they are always present; the reader always has practical access to them on the basis of a discrete interpretative performance. In a similar sense Michaels, in a later book (1995), argues against searching for cultural identity in the past, in race or in foreign roots. Cultural identity is given in the way people live their lives at a given time; it is unproductive, and in fact impossible, to establish identity outside of that empirical frame. Both “theory” and the ideology of cultural pluralism work by disarticulating a part from a whole (the signifier from the interpretative act, race from culture) and making that part into a continually receding, unattainable other (cf. 1995, 15-16 and 128-129).
Another excerpt from the above:
The new, performatist concept of the subject expresses itself most clearly in films like American Beauty, The Idiots, Return of the Idiot and Loners, in which dumb or dumbed-down heroes play a central role. In American Beauty the hero consciously reverts to a state of a puberty; in The Idiots the commune members intentionally act like mentally retarded persons; in Return of the Idiot the simple-minded protagonist owes his naivete to a long stay in a psychiatric institution; in Loners the pothead Jakub is continually forgetting salient details of daily life (for example, how the Czech national anthem sounds, that he’s driving through Prague and not Dubrovnik, and that he has a girlfriend gone off on a two-week visit to her aunt). These subjects present themselves (or are presented) as self-sufficient wholes impervious to the demands or responsibilities emanating from the social context around them. Out of these self-presentations arise new freedoms which in all four cases serve to renew human relationships through love. Lester Burnham, the hero of American Beauty, becomes obsessed with a teenage object of desire but holds back from seducing her precisely when he is in a position to do so; in The Idiots the homely Karen, who professes love for all the commune members, overcomes her own bourgeois background through an atavistic performance (“spassing”); because he loves everyone, Frantisek in Return of the Idiot can act amidst an unhappy four-way relationship as an advisor, confidante, scapegoat and finally as a loved one who breaks through the cycle of false desire. In Pelevin’s programmatic short story with the characteristic title “Ontologiia detstva” [Ontology of childhood], the narrator states: “In general, the life of a grown person is self-sufficient and–how should I put it–doesn’t have empty spaces that could hold experience not directly related to his immediate surroundings” (Pelevin 1998, 222). The “empty spaces,” which can be psychological or ritualistic in nature, create room for a holistic perspective allowing characters to transcend their own immediate situations: compare, for example, the apotheosis of Lester Burnham in American Beauty; Chapaev’s and Anka’s passage to Nirvana in Buddha’s Little Finger; Karen’s break with bourgeois family life in The Idiots; the complete assimilation and application of samurai teachings by the contract killer in Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog.(5) Even in Liudmila Ulitskaia’s realistically narrated short stories one can find this leap from almost total reduction to a dynamic, context-transcending performance. In A Happy Funeral the ecumenical testament of the paralyzed artist Alik is a taped message which is played unexpectedly after his death and admonishes his friends to revel spontaneously in daily life; in “Genele the Purse Lady” the vocabulary of the dying Jewish heroine is reduced after a stroke to the word “purse,” in which a valuable legacy may or may not be hidden (her way of bequeathing value is evidently intended as an allegory of how secular, deritualized Judaism continues to renew itself).
In conclusion, Eshelman sums up the 5 basic features of performatism:
1. No more endless citing and no authenticity, but rather the framing of things already existing in order to transcend or radically renew them; use of ritual, dogma or similarly inhibiting frames in order to transform or transcend existing states of being; return of history in the guise of an empirically framed subject (for example, Greenblatt’s history of self-fashioning, Michaels’ neopragmatism). In narrative, return of authoriality, of a binding authorial frame, marked by different ways of stylizing transcendence: vertically (passage to a higher level); horizontally (sidestepping to a different frame); holistically (getting the right fit between subject and frame).
2. Instead of an order of floating, unstable relations between parts of signs the holistic subject-sign-thing-relation becomes the basis of all communication and all social interaction; the use of a sign is an (involuntary) act of belief instead of a semiotic or semantic blunder. The subject appears to solid or opaque; it can be dumb, naive, dazed, simple-minded, simple, earnest and heroic but not endlessly cynical or ironic.
3. The switch from a mode of endless temporal deferral (différance , process) to the one-time or finite joining of opposites in the present (paradoxical performance, Gans’s ostensivity).
4. Transition from metaphysical pessimism to metaphysical optimism; the metaphysical point of orientation is no longer death and its proxies (emptiness, kenosis, absence, dysfunctionality) but rather psychologically experienced or fictionally framed states of transcendence (resurrection, passage to Nirvana, love, catharsis, fulfillment or plerosis, deification etc.).
5. Return and rehabilitation of the phallus as an active, unifying agent of performativity; simultaneous ironization or retraction of its desire and pretensions to power for the benefit of the feminine; the phallus as positive frame for the vagina and vice versa (male characters act empty or vaginal; female ones act phallic, that is, active and goal-oriented). In general, a tendency towards desexualization; love, or the unifying quality of desire, whether masculine, feminine, hetero- or homosexual, is more important than endlessly playing out one’s otherness.
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