I came across Julie Unplugged today in my meanderings around the blogosphere... she has a nice simple way of "unplugging" things from their miasmic academic language... she does a good job on one post-post-modern theory... Performatism (from back in April)...
...performatism moves us from parts to whole. Whereas postmodernism teaches us to stand back from the context, taking apart the pieces, examining them, exercising judgment or exposing the undersides, identifying ironies, missteps, power moves and error as though from a position outside/above/beyond the message (object), performance puts us in contact with a subject who is a complex whole, that is, a person whose meaning and message cannot be teased apart. "The medium is the messenger, and no longer the message: it is the extension of a paradoxical authorial subject pointing out his (or her) own materiality and fallibility."Raoul Eshelman, who coined the term writes in "Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism" (from the wonderfully titled journal "Anthropoetics")...Put another way, a performatist subject is aware of limitations yet acts anyway. A postmodernist may also be aware of limitations, but the approach to life is much more likely to be suspicious and ironic. The performatist is unhindered by those fallibilities (limits of knowledge, lack of appropriate skills or debilitating attributes) because he or she chooses to act because the act itself is identical in meaning with the person acting (the act is no longer a sign that creates or generates meaning - the meaning is in the act).
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.He goes on to describe "Performatism" as...
...a new epoch in which subject, sign, and thing come together in ways that create an aesthetic experience of transcendency
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The more you learn the more you realises how much you didn't know. Freedom to learn on your own is a truer education and transcends ignorance.
Posted by: rob | 16/12/2010 at 16:00