The Politics of the Vice Canon: Performatism or the Background Interference of Postmodernism

The present study uses as a background for analysis the alternative reflexes coming not only from decreeing postmodernism to be finished stage but rather from an enumeration of performatism's reflexes seen as (an)other voluntarily-fabricated position much to its disadvantage. The purpose of the study resides in a re-launching of the vice canon concept as a transitional norm, a rule maintaining the dynamics of post-modern alternatives, with an accent on performatism, establishing the fact that by pursuing the postmodern policy of overtaking at any price (even if one often has to acknowledge mixed forms), the alternatives can only operate as a form of background interference, in the sense of producing parasitical signals with approximately identical wavelengths but cognizant of specific differences (in the case of performatism, the temporary/discreet partaking of the subject/sign in the holistic process itself). The present study's sources of evidence acknowledge the re-launching of political performatism with its nodal Eshelman-ian bookmarks towards: a direction oriented against ironically indifferent attitudes and towards accepting both individual and political responsibility in a post-ideological (post-political) context, political transcendence, the symbolic order of language and diminished-role significance games, etc. The immediate evidence obviously shows that performatism argues its project/program through the ensigns of postmodernism found in the sovereign Lyotard-ian movie, the Hutcheon-ian relationship between ideology and subjectivity or the reflections of post-politics, found at the intersection between Rancière – Badiou – Žižek.The conclusions launch as an absolutely new element the concept of postmodernitarism, through a reassessment of the Rancière-ian perspective on modernitarism seen as a term of identification between the aesthetic status of the arts and the forms of fulfilling a personal task/destiny, and imbuing it with the status of a postmodernist sharing formula.