Maggie's Farm

I think Mr. Hicks skipped the biggest contradiction of all--that PoMo--in its politics--prescribes both comprehensive license in personal freedom AND an all-powerful state to rule it comprehensively.

the Cure--see ''radical break with postmodernism'' --and the wiki, too.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=EGLC,EGLC:2006-42,EGLC:en&q=performatism

Here's a leading Performatist, Raoul Eshelman, in an anthropoetic, or 'performatist', art critique:

http://www.artmargins.com/content/cineview/eshelman.html

>> I would like to outline the basic features of this new epoch, which I call performatism. Since I've given more thorough descriptions elsewhere, I'll be very brief.

Basically, performatism reacts against the infinite regress, decentrification and subjectlessness peculiar to postmodern discourse by creating narrative, spatial or ethical frames which center and simultaneously constrict simple or "dense" subjects, who are induced to overcome the inhibiting frames around them.

As readers or viewers, we in turn are practically forced to identify with these characters, since a lack of identification forecloses access to the work as a whole. In this sense, the performatist work is a kind of a setup or trap: It forces us, within an aesthetically mediated framework, to experience how characters transcend boundaries in a manner whose premises are patently unbelievable but which move us nonetheless.

In other words, it forces us to believe in spite of our better knowledge. Summing all this up quickly, you could say that performatism's basic mode is theist and monist: It functions in a way similar to that in which a monotheistic God creates a world (a work-frame), places people (characters) in it and leaves them essentially on their own to transcend the confines of that world (the narrative).

yep --it's pretty much Deism, alright. But Deism beats nihiism, as a part of the foundation for a culture, even the most faithful Theist would have to admit.

And if dressing it up in new clothes attracts the university crowd, what's not to like? Maybe the move would be thru Deism to the more mysterious. To be stuck in PoMo is to vibrate oneself to death.

http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0802/movies.htm