Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism

Performatism’s break with postmodernism did not take place cleanly and in one stroke. Performatism–as with every other new epoch–borrows in many instances from the old epoch while breaking with it sharply in other, decisive regards. The main difference vis-à-vis postmodernism asserts itself in this case in the use of a holistic, discrete subject and sign. This is logically and practically incompatible with postmodernism’s notion of subject and sign as unstable side effects of a constantly shifting textual context. At present, however, the use of classical devices of postmodernism to create closed signs and subjects is almost unavoidable: the new epoch is still dependent on the instruments of the old. Critics of performatism will no doubt be quick to claim that works like Buddha’s Little Finger or Run Lola Run are postmodern because they operate with virtual realities. It is important not to forget, though, that the function of virtual reality in such cases is completely different: it serves goals–the absolute reconciliation of the subject with its context in Pelevin, the unconditional preservation of the loving subject in Run Lola Run–which postmodernism dismisses as banal, metaphysical expressions of belief. If one chooses to ignore the annoying pretension of these works to achieving fictional transcendence, then there is no reason not to go on endlessly misreading them as postmodern.

An essayistic example of the gradual transition between postmodernism and performatism is Boris Groys’s recent Unter Verdacht. Eine Phänomenologie der Medien [Under suspicion. A phenomenology of the media] (Groys 2000).(14) Groys, one could say, “rediscovers” the holistic sign, ontology and performance but, in keeping with the pessimistic metaphysics of the postmodern, still continues to conceive of them as evil and threatening. The main goal of Groys’s essay is to explain the way aesthetic value is created in (post-)modern media culture. Groys assumes that aesthetic value arises when a thing is enshrined in a cultural archive, that is, in an authoritative space guaranteeing (at least for a time) the aesthetic object’s effectiveness. Groys argues that the conditions for admission to the archive can be defined neither in terms of content nor material, otherwise such conditions could be predicted and reproduced at will (getting a urinal placed in a museum does not, for example, depend on the archive’s secret preference for toilet fixtures or porcelain). For Groys, the specific conditions for admission to the archive can also not be purely semiotic, for they cannot be determined–as poststructuralism assumes–by the interplay of freely flowing, subject- and objectless signs. Rather, the key to the archive lies for Groys in the hidden, direct, unpredictable relation between the sign and its material substrate. This relation, in turn, can only come about when a subject causes a sign and its substrate to enter into a unified, binding relation vis-à-vis an observer. Consequently, the aesthetic effectiveness of the artistic artifact is for Groys an ontological and not a semiotic or semantic problem. Groys, however, chooses to address this problem in phenomenological rather than ontological terms. The defining feature of artistic success is hence not any specific, as yet unrevealed essence, but rather our suspicion that “someone or other” behind the scenes is manipulating things to get them into the archive. This “ontological suspicion,” which is necessarily directed against an alien, manipulating subject, is not, in Groys’s view, adequately accounted for in deconstructivism’s critique of metaphysics, which sees culture as an endless sea of signs which the observer can bask in safely and comfortably (see 2000, 37). Much more convincing for Groys is way the subject is represented in popular culture (as, for example, in films like Terminator, Alien or Independence Day): there the alien subject appears as a merciless killer destroying everyone who crosses his path (2000, 75). This suspicion of the alien subject’s intrinsically evil nature can, however, be used to help gain entrance to the archive, namely by employing what Groys calls the “sincerity effect” [Effekt der Aufrichtigkeit]. Basically, this amounts to what psychologists call paradoxical intervention: you achieve best results by advocating the opposite of what is normally expected of you. Hence the liberal politician appears most sincere when he favors conservative positions, the conservative politician sincere when he propounds liberal ones (2000, 72). Also, according to Groys, whoever publicly reveals his or her own badness is usually regarded as sincere. This works not because such behavior is revelatory per se , but because it confirms our suspicion that, beneath the surface, the alien subject is always somehow evil (2000, 78-79). In Groys’s view, the only protection against the alien, malicious subject is to be malicious oneself, that is, to appear “sincere” before others in the paradoxical way described above (2000, 79).

Groys’s thinking, though ironic and cynical in Purdy’s sense, is undoubtedly already performatist. The subject mysteriously engineering the admission of a work of media art into the archive carries out a holistic performance in which a subject, a thing-based sign, and a communicative partner are successfully united. Groys, however, remains obligated to the negative concept of subject prevailing in postmodernism, which insinuates that the subject striving for whole knowledge is either narcissistic (Lacan), reactionary (Foucault) or generally evil (Baudrillard), and he remains obligated to postmodern epistemology, which sees metaphysical fraud in every attempt to link signs with things (Derrida). In contrast to Groys, I believe that in the new epoch it is not the “evil” principle of continued, random border transgression that is dominant, but rather the benevolent principle of drawing borders to create a quasi-sacral space in which an existing state can under certain circumstances be transcended. Groys grasps this situation correctly when he notes that “the phenomenon of sincerity arises . . . in a combination of contextually defined innovation and reduction” (2000, 73). This reduction and innovation, however, takes place in performatism in a way that is much more radical and positive than Groys imagines. Under optimal conditions, the performative subject is reduced so much through its massive denseness that it no longer poses a threat to others.(15) Similarly, the performatist subject’s utter simplicity tends to defuse any suspicion that it is simulating or insincere (even in the case of simulated idiocy in The Idiots none of the “victims” guesses its fraudulent nature; the guiding criterion is not authenticity, but rather the degree to which the performance is assimilated by the observer to form a working whole). In contrast to Groys I would also suggest that it is not evil which determines the post-postmodern condition (even if evil is still active and present as a residual phenomenon), but rather love, for love, as the optimal condition of innovation, enables any subject to be loved–that is, to enter with another, alien subject into a whole, salvational space or frame. This perspective, which is that of a sacralizing metaphysical optimism, means the end of postmodernism and not its continuation by other means.

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Another example of mixed performatism and postmodernism can be found in Les particules élémentaires (1998), Michel Houellebecq’s acid novel of postmodern manners. There, Houellebecq exposes the increasingly virulent dualism of postmodern culture by creating two characters completely incapable of love: one is guided entirely by the mind, the other by sex. Over the course of nearly 340 pages Houellebecq unfolds scenes of psychological indifference and coarseness, mechanical copulation and incredible brutality that are meant to document the utter emptiness of his heroes. It is only in the last ten or so pages that he begins to develop the utopian notion of a genetically engineered, peaceful, and selfless new gender. Houellebecq’s novel is performatistic inasmuch as it fictionally transcends the postmodern image of humankind. At the same time, he remains for the most part obligated to pessimistic postmodern metaphysics, whose only point of orientation is death and its unsavory proxies (at one point a mouthpiece for Houellebecq states: “in the end, life breaks your heart after all. . . . And then nobody laughs. . . . All that’s left is loneliness, cold and silence. All that’s left is death”(16)). Houellebecq is a postmodern revolted by his own postmodernity so much that he seeks salvation through the genetic transformation of the old, evil, masculine subject; the author himself however evidently has problems developing an autonomous story line out of the new, cloned gender.

The problem of separating performatism from postmodernism–in this case from Russian conceptualism–is expressly treated by Viktor Pelevin in his short story “Vstroennyi napominatel’” [The built-in warning signal] (1998, 381-384). The story concerns a fictive artistic movement called vibrationalism which assumes that “we live in an oscillating world and ourselves represent a collection of oscillations” (1998, 381). The conceptualist, according to Pelevin’ s “vibrationalist,” makes the mistake of trying to fixate the concept: “the pure fixation of ideas leads us back onto the well-tread path of conceptualism” (1998, 381). Vibrationalism, by contrast, which intensifies the oscillations with artistic means and directs them back at itself, causes “its own boundaries to appear fuzzy and so to speak non-existent. For that reason the task of the vibrationalist artist is to leap between the Scylla of conceptualism and the Charybdis of ex-post-facto theoretizing” (1998, 381). Pelevin’s critique of conceptualism is patently unfair. Conceptualism isn’t static; it oscillates between contexts, or between subject and context, just as “vibrationalism” does. But is “vibrationalism” identical with conceptualism because of that? Crucial to “vibrationalism” as well as to Pelevin’s work in general is that sign and subject overcome the dualism of subject and object, of thing and sign in a reductionistic performance. The successful suspension of this dualism can be achieved in various ways. It can be experienced in a mystical performance; it can be described using paradoxical Buddhist jargon; or it can be performed in a fictional frame that is accessible to everyone and that can always be invested with a certain degree of self-irony (in this case vibrationalism doesn’t work because the artist doesn’t heed his own instructions).(17)   Because precisely this sort of ironic failure plays a major role in Pelevin’s plot lines these are often confused with the ironic devices of postmodernism, whose own dysfunctionality and failure is a foregone conclusion. While a formal identity is undeniable, postmodernism differs from Pelevin by not recognizing that a unified, transcendent perspective can be temporarily instituted or performed within a fictional frame. In performatism the set is always toward transcending irony; in postmodernism it is toward generating irony ad infinitum . The crowning achievement of postmodernism is in any case hardly going to consist in enthroning precisely those things–the subject, belief, transcendence, presence…–which it has up to now relentlessly scattered to the winds.

I can make out five 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.).

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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.

Finally, an excerpt from Ingo Schulze’s Simple Storys (1998, Engl. trans. 2000), in which the massive opacity of his “simple” characters asserts itself with exemplary force:

“Something happened to me once at the movies,” said Edgar. “We came late, the only place to sit was in the front row. The movie started off with a bird’s-eye view, a flight over a jungle. I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t get dizzy. Then off to my right I heard a deep chuckling sound, a wonderful laugh. . . . And somehow it was always in places where nobody else was laughing. She had her legs crossed and was jiggling her right foot up and down, it was like an invitation. I touched her elbow with mine, she didn’t even notice. I thought I’d only have to put my arm around her and she’d lean against me like it was completely natural, like it just had to be. And at the same time I wanted to stroke her calf. I had to really hold myself back, really, we were sitting so close together. . . My God, is she beautiful, I kept thinking all the time. After each chuckle I wanted to kiss her.”

“And–did you?”

“I couldn’t tell who was sitting next to her. A man–yeah, but I couldn’t tell whether or not he was with her.”

“She wasn’t alone?” asked Jenny.

“No,” said Edgar. “She wasn’t alone. She was there with a whole group.” He paused.

“What then?”

Edgar shook his head. “I couldn’t have seen it. She was retarded, the whole group was retarded.”

“Oh shit,” said Jenny.

“I’d fallen in love with an idiot.”

“Unbelievable.”

“Yeah,” he said. “The worst thing was, I wanted her anyway.”

“Huh?”

“I’d fallen in love, it was too late.”

     Schulze 1998, 257-258; my translation

In a way, we are in the same situation as Edgar: we feel the presence of an epoch whose contours are just barely visible and in which we can perceive only simplicity or simple-mindedness.

The main thing, though, is to already be in love with it.

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Literature Cited

Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York.

Bell, Alan. 1999. American Beauty. The Shooting Script. New York.

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Troubles. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York/London.

Foster, Norman and Jenkins, David. 2000. Rebuilding the Reichstag. New York.

Gans, Eric. Chronicles of Love and Resentment https://anthropoetics.org/views

Gans, Eric. 1997. Signs of Paradox. Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures, Stanford.

Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York.

Greenblatt, Stephen. 1988. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley.

Groys, Boris. 2000. Unter Verdacht. Eine Phänomenologie der Medien. Munich.

Houellebecq, Michel. 1998. Les particules élémentaires. Paris.

Houellebecq, Michel 1999. Elementarteilchen. Köln.

Karrer, Leo et al. (eds.). 2000. Gewaltige Opfer. Filmgespräche mit René Girard und Lars von Trier. Köln.

Michaels, Walter Benn. 1995. Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism. Chapel Hill.

Mitchell, W.J.T. 1982. Against Theory. Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism. Chicago.

Pelevin, Viktor. 1998. Zheltaia strela. Moscow.

Purdy, Jedediah. 2000. For Common Things. Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today. New York.

Schulze, Ingo. 1998. Simple Storys. Berlin.

Ulitskaia, Liudmila. 1998. Vesëlye pokhorony. Moscow.

Von Trier, Lars “The Man Who Would Give Up Control”. Internet interview with Peter Ovig Knudsen (http://www.dogme95.dk/the_idiots/interview/interview.htm)

Filmography

American Beauty. America/England 1999. Directed by Sam Mendes; screenplay by Alan Ball; director of photography, Conrad L. Hall; edited by Tariq Anwar and Chris Greenbury; music by Thomas Newman. With: Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari, Peter Gallagher, Allison Janney, Scott Bakula, Sam Robards, Chris Cooper.

Idioterne [The Idiots]. Denmark 1998. Written and directed by Lars von Trier; sound by Design Per Streit; edited by Molly Malene Stengaard. With: Bodil Jorgensen, Jens Albinus, Anne Louise Hassing, Troels Lyby, Nikolaj Lie Kaas and others.

Lola rennt. [Released in America as Run Lola Run] Germany 1999. Written and directed by Tom Tykwer; camera, Frank Friebe; edited by Matthilde Bonnefoy; music by Tom Tykwer, Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil. With: Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu, Herbert Knaup, Nina Petri, Armin Rohde and others.

Návrat idiota [Return of the idiot], Czech Republic 1999. Written and directed by Sasa Gedeon; camera, Stepan Kucera; edited by Petr Turyna; music by Vladimír Godár. With: Pavel Liska, Anna Geislerová, Tatiana Vilhelmová, Jirí Langmeier and others.

Ghost Dog. America 2000. Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch; director of photography, Robby Muller; edited by Jay Rabinowitz; music by the RZA; produced by Richard Guay; released by Artisan Entertainment. With: Forest Whitaker (Ghost Dog), John Tormey (Louie), Camille Winbush (Pearline), Cliff Gorman (Sonny Valerio), Frank Minucci (Big Angie), Isaach de Bankole (Raymond), Victor Argo (Vinny) and Damon Whitaker (Young Ghost Dog).

Samotári [Loners], Czech Republic 2000. Directed by David Ondrícek; written by Petr Zelenka; camera, Richard Rericha; music by Jan P. Muchow. With: Jitka Schneiderová, Sasa Raasilov, Labina Mitevská, Ivan Trojan and others.

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Notes

1. The following article was originally written in German and will probably appear in that language sometime in the year 2001. The translation is my own. (back)
2. Gans’s concept of language was first set forth in The Origin of Language, Berkeley 1981. After that follow: The End of Culture, Berkeley 1985; Science and Faith, Savage, Md. 1990; Originary Thinking, Stanford 1993; Signs of Paradox.Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures, Stanford 1997. My resume follows Signs of Paradox, especially Chapter One, “Mimetic Paradox and the Event of Human Origin,” 13-35.(back)
3. For more on this see Gans’s humorous lament in Chronicle 188, “Adorers of Literature Scared of Criticism,” 20 November 1999 as well as Knapp and Michaels’ critique of E.D. Hirsch in Mitchell 1985, 19-20.(back)
4. For the references to Ulitskaia’s stories I am indebted to Anita Becker of Weimar, Germany.(back)
5. The figure of the simpleton transcending his own lifeworld can incidentally also be found in the mass media. An example of this is Zlatko, a popular participant in the German version of the “Big-Brother” show, which itself can be understood in performatist terms as a closed, holistic frame propagating the growth of subjectivity under conditions of total representation. The show is, of course, cynical and voyeuristic, since it assumes that the artificially induced socialization of the participants will go awry. Zlatko, who was ejected fairly quickly from the communal container dwelling, showed himself to be the real winner of the game. As a true simpleton (among other things, he didn’t know who Shakespeare was!) he remained at least for a time inaccessible to the greedy, voyeuristic gaze of the viewers. (back)
6. This may be contrasted to Derrida’s well-known distrust of representation and visual evidence and Lacan’s attempt in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis to separate the merely mechanical eye of the subject from the omnipotent gaze of the Other. Lacan’s and Derrida’s attitude toward vision and representation are gnostic: they prefer tracing a multitude of arcane, fleeting signs emanating from a dual origin to Christian witnessing, which is based on the ability of a viewer to reproduce a single, exemplary act of self-sacrifice. Ricky’s theology, which is only latently christological, seems to suggest that all death is a form of self-sacrifice and that anyone or anything can act as a divine mediator. The incarnation of this theology is, of course, Lester: he winds up sacrificing himself for the others and becoming divine without really wanting to do so. In general, one could say that the performatism in American Beauty gives the aleatory world of postmodernism a chance at redemption by introducing into it a sacral, sacrificial, vestigially christological moment.(back)
7. Michel, a benign figure in nightgown and sleeping cap, is the German version of Uncle Sam.(back)
8. From an Internet interview “The Man Who Would Give Up Control” with Peter Ovig Knudsen (see bibliography).(back)
9. For theological, Girardian treatments of von Trier’s Dogma films, Tarkovskij’s Offret and other recent movies see Karrer 2000.(back)
10. Readers unfamiliar with the building in situ should refer to the documentation in Foster and Jenkins 2000. (back)
11. These are incidentally what Gans calls ostensive signs, i.e., simple signs referring to an object or situation that is directly present (Fire! Man overboard!). In the case of the Reichstag many of the scribblings are examples of ostensive self-naming, which in this case acts as a kind of self-referential historical performance: “My name is x and I’m here (as a Russian soldier at Hitler’s seat of power)!”(back)
12. This “framing” must not be confused with Derrida’s frame or parergon. Performatist framing serves to relate a lower state to a higher one, to stylize the possibility of transcendence. By contrast, the parergon is a spatially indeterminate line highlighting the endless problem of conditionality and not resulting in any sort of performative change (except, perhaps, further, temporally and spatially deferred reflexion on the nature of conditionality itself). More relevant than the parergon in this regard seems to me to be Gregory Bateson’s concept of framing (Bateson 1972), which emphasizes not just the paradoxical nature of the frame but also its relation to psychological mechanisms prior to the linguistic sign; pertinent is also the sociological frame theory developed by Erving Goffman (1974), which offers, among other things, a typology of of frames as they appear in social reality. (back)

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13. The feminist, poststructuralist notion of gender as subjectless (preferably non-heterosexual, non-phallic) performance is expressed programmatically in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990, 25), where she states that “gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed.” By contrast, performatism implies that what is important is finding a “fit” between fixed biological givens like male and female genitalia and the smorgasbord of psychosocial attributes comprising gender. Although subjectivity in performatism is not preset–there is always an interplay between subject and context–the goal of this interplay is to set an identity frame within the context rather than to flow along with it.(back)
14. The Russian-born Groys (b. 1947) is an art critic, philosopher and essayist; until his emigration to Germany in 1981 he was a leading member of the Moscow conceptualist circle. His Total Art of Stalinism (Princeton 1992, German orig. Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin, 1988) is a seminal analysis of Russian culture from the conceptualist point of view. (back)
15. This aspect of performatism–as with all others–can be presented ironically. For example, in The Idiots the commune’s curvaceous blonde entices several men in a public pool to make a pass at her so that they can be driven away by a grunting, waddling cohort pretending to be her husband. The men are driven away not by a physical threat, but rather, as it would appear, by the shock of competing with an idiot for an erotic object of desire. (back)
16. My translation from the German (Houellebecq 1999, 328). (back)
17. It would be a serious mistake to claim that performatism is postmodernism simply because it contains irony. In performatism, irony results when transcendent ideals are realized imperfectly; in practical terms it is an unavoidable fact of life (the presumably steadfast anti-ironicist Purdy notes this expressly in the Afterword of For Common Things, 2000, 212-214). The intrinsic irony of all human cultural activity is also confirmed by Gans, who sees paradox and irony as an unavoidable and necessary result of having a sign but not complete control over the thing it designates (cf. 1997, Chapter 3, “The Necessity of Paradox,” 37ff.). (back)