Raoul Eshelman (performatism)

These examples suggest that the switch to a radical monist, postmillennial or performatist kind of consciousness is not exactly going to cause writers or other artists to burst out in hosannas to global capitalism. What it does mean, though, is that the thing that Eric Gans calls victimary politics (of which Hotel World is a prime example) is going to grow increasingly outmoded as an aesthetic device. In part, this is due to the ubiquity of victimary argumentation itself. The ironic act of displaying your political impotence on the one hand and flaunting your epistemological superiority on the other has by now become an entirely predictable exercise even for those who agree with its political aims. However, the rise of radical monism also appears to meet a real cultural need to create spatially discrete identities or performances within global capitalism that would enable forms of totalized or holistic resistance to it.

Using the examples I have discussed here as a rough guide, you could speak of a "right," a "left" and a sublime or "terrorist" path to this goal. The "right" method is not uncritical of capitalism. However, it tries to work within it by creating inspirational projections in its inner space (by aspirating what Sloterdijk calls spheres or foams--whole pockets of belief, faith, truth etc.). The "left" strategy corresponds roughly to the attempt to amalgamate variegated otherness into an appealing, tasteful object of cultural identity (a nice hot chutney, so to speak). This strategy seems particularly appropriate to postcolonial writers, as it would allow them to reify attributes from their own cultures that are at the same time universally binding or "necessary" for others to enjoy in the Kantian sense. Finally, the "terrorist" alternative suggests the possibility of a total critique of capitalism that takes place in the mode of "as if." The terrorist aesthete will play va banque with the sublime possibility of a radical monist alternative to capitalism, postmodern society or Western culture per se(16) (although this doesn’t mean that we must now be on the lookout for a novel by Osama bin Laden).

Summing up, the performatist works by Tokarczuk, Roy and Urban can all be subsumed under the broader umbrella of what might be called "anthropological Kantianism." In the new literature, Kantian notions of subjectivity and aesthetic judgment are being applied--sometimes quite consciously--to topical problems relating to the role of individuals and cultures in the era of global capitalism. In the process, these Kantian notions have been modified and adapted to a new, specifically monist mindset that runs counter to Kant’s original (and possibly also misinterpreted) dualism of mind and matter.(17) The innovative crux of this adaptation lies in what I call the performance.(18) The author knows there is a split between mind and matter (or some other basic duality), but nonetheless forces us to identify with the possibility of transcending it per formam--by passing with our mind’s eye and with our bodily emotions through form. The "reward" for engaging in this formally mediated identification or projection is an aesthetic, performatist pleasure which transcends the dualism of cognitive vs. physical; the "punishment" for dismantling that projection is to live in the epistemologically correct but joyless state of knowing that is postmodernism. In performatism, aesthetics trumps epistemology. Art is a privileged place where secular individuals will once again be able to experience transcendence, albeit only under limited, artificial conditions.

There is little doubt that the most appropriate philosophical, psychological, and sociological sources for dealing with this "closed" situation with its specific, positive projections can be found in the Kantian tradition. Reclaiming this long line of Western thought for performatism/postmillennialism is a project that must, however, remain reserved for further studies.

http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1002/transhotel.htm