Performatism, or the end of post-modernism

Performatism, or Post- Postmodernism is a term applied to set developments in culture, art, philosophy that are emerging and reacting to postmodernism. Performatism is heterogeneous and hence impossible to define summarily. It is antithetical to conceptions of postmodernism based on the absence of perspectival view and an ironic coexistence of temporalities. Performative works create their own temporalities and perspectives. They create worlds and ways of seeing performances in and of context.

An appropriated formulation from George Quasha and Chuck Stein: "If traditional representational art is 'figurative,' in the sense that it seeks to capture the 'figure'-the structure and shape-of the object it represents; and if art that moves away from the figurative is 'abstract' (in the precise sense of 'drawn away from'); then later art that allows a non-referential yet identifiable image to form anew can be thought of as con-figurative or re-configurative." Or performative.

Popular readings of Jacques Derrida in comparison to the actual content of his texts provide an interesting analogue for the distinction with "postmodernism". Widely considered to be a figurehead of the version of postmodernism under consideration here, Derrida has been charged with denying and dissolving any standards of evidence and argument, asserting that all texts and all interpretations of texts are on par. A purely negative project. Destruction of all points of view.

His own words and explicit refutations of these accusations suggest a different picture. It would be more appropriate to say that his project undermines a strain of thought present in Western discourse since its inception, one which relies on the illusion of hegemony and the suppression of all alternative forms of thought. Language as vehicle, something external and incidental and used. Referential. Limiting oneself to the words of one sentence when an entire--living, polymorphic--language is available. Entirely different ways of expression and communication. Communication as communion.

The principles developing in this context are not new, but they do run counter to certain entrenched cultural sentiments. This website is intended to focus energies that are otherwise already operative. Promoting community. Noticing overlaps as well as discrepancies. Exploring the question: how do these creative non-referential forms appear?